A Yum Cha feast for Aotearoa history

While we were all busy learning to make sourdough in lockdown or finally caving in and downloading TikTok, Bev Moon was busy knitting yum cha.

“In late 2021, when Auckland had the lockdown that kept going, I just had this idea I wanted to start knitting dim sum, to make a yum cha-like table spread, like my mum used to do, she told Culture 101’s Perlina Lau.

“I used to make dumplings with her as a kid and so I knew sort of how to fold them and everything but I wanted to knit them mainly because I already had lots of wool around the place and it was really hard to get any other materials because we were locked down.”

“I’ve always loved knitting and it's something that my mother and my grandmother used to do a lot and they taught me and taught me how to knit when I was quite young.”

What started out as a few dim sim became an ever-growing colourful tapestry of a feast, complete with pork buns, dumplings, wontons and custard tarts.

“I started knitting this feast, and it became bigger and bigger as I tried different dishes,” Moon said.

“I realised it was kind of a tribute to my mother and my grandmother, because knitting and cooking were two skills that they really excelled at, especially cooking but also knitting.”

Sourcing the right kind of wool was tricky – Moon wanted to use the wool that would mimic the translucent texture of steamed dumplings – as was figuring out the technical needs of each kind of yum char delicacy.

“I didn't want to follow a pattern anyway, because it was also about my grandmother. In China, the girls in the village didn't go to school and so she couldn't read or write Chinese or English, but she used to knit amazing jerseys for us kids and just used to know what size to make them.”

Eventually, the feast grew into Fortune (a knitted yum cha for my mother’s 90th birthday), an exhibition that’s currently on show at Dunedin’s Hocken Collections.

While the exhibition is outwardly appealing and visually joyful, Moon says the story behind it is “serious by stealth”. It not only pays homage to her family, but aims to educate people about the Chinese poll tax.

In 1881, under the Chinese Immigrants Act, a poll tax of £10 (equivalent to $1770 today) was imposed on each Chinese immigrant and only one passenger was permitted for every 10 tons of cargo. In 1896, the tax increased to £100 and one passenger for every 200 tons. It was abolished in 1944.

Moon said her relatives borrowed money from family to make the journey from the villages of Guangdong to New Zealand. Her two great-grandfathers were just young teenagers when they arrived in Otago.

When they were old enough, and had saved enough money from working in goldfields and laundries, these young men returned to China to get married and conceive children before returning to New Zealand to keep working.

“They had to earn money to pay back what they'd borrowed. And of course, they couldn't bring the women or the children out because they would have had to pay the poll tax. My great grandmothers on both sides never got to come to New Zealand. People were separated for decades.”

In 1937, the Japanese invasion of China and the subsequent onset of World War II, meant that the New Zealand government brought in temporary refugee status for two years between 1939 and 1941. This allowed 500 Chinese women and children who were connected to the men already here, to come to New Zealand.

“They had to pay a bond and everything and it was only supposed to be temporary. But that's how my mother and my grandmother came out.”

Calling the exhibition Fortune refers to both the wealth and cost required to emigrate to New Zealand, but also the aspect of luck involved, Moon said.

"They had the fortune to come here, and it cost my granddad a fortune for them to bring them over."

Moon has worked around art her whole life and is currently the manager of human history collections at Auckland Museum. Creating Fortune has been especially personally rewarding, she said. She’d always dreamed of going to art school, but that kind of career path was an anathema to her parents.

“My parents were from a different generation and a different time and they had really hard lives. My mum remembers hiding in the rice fields when bombs were being dropped in China.

"I really wanted to go to art school, and that was just something that my parents were not interested in... it was about survival. It was about making, making money. You've got to get ahead, why don't you study accountancy? Why don't you become a doctor? And it just wasn't me.

"I'm sure they were kind of disappointed, but I did manage to eke my way into a job in galleries and museums, and I basically have worked there my whole adult life. It was a way for me to be around stories and history and other people creating stuff, even though I didn't have the courage to do it.

“I never really thought I’d end up doing it. So it’s kind of a dream come true.”

Fortune is at the Hocken until 21 October.