Description

In 1902 the S.S. Ventnor, an English steamer chartered to take 499 Chinese bodies from New Zealand back to their ancestral home, sank off the coast of Hokianga. The coffins were washed ashore and took in by two local iwis. This tragic event remained buried in New Zealand history until a century later, when Kiwi-Chinese began to recover and retell the story. The story triggered a decade-long journey for Kiwi-Chinese poet Renee Liang, who wrote The Bone Feeder in 2007, a play that went through several versions and was subsequently adapted into an opera in 2017.

In this presentation, Dr. Luo Hui approaches The Bone Feeder as a Chinese ghost tale in contemporary New Zealand setting. The Chinese ghost tale tradition could be understood as an attempt, on the part of the literati elite, to accommodate and come to terms with ghosts, or what Arthur Wolf aptly called, ‘other people’s ancestors’. Dr. Hui adopts the term ‘translaboration’ to describe a similar process of cultural accommodation in The Bone Feeder, whereby the ghosts are cared for and a sense of intercultural belonging may be first imagined and then achieved. By examining the roles of Chinese, Maori and Pakeha agents in this translaboration, Dr. Hui seeks to uncover aspects of intercultural relations, and possibilities, that are not often addressed in current discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism.