YOU ARE YOUR OWN HOMELAND

Scattered musings on the pursuit for connection, community and identity through the world of music…

一

Mrs Taukamo taught us how to play open chords at lunchtime. The guitar was an extension of her being, a satellite through which she could channel the magic of waiata into our space.

Tiny fingers stretched wide across the fretboard – open chords emerged slowly like hatchlings stretching into the light. Bracelets jangling,  I remember how she stamped her foot on the downstrum, how her face lit up when she counted in the beat - tahi, rua, toru, wha.

二

Wellington was a vibe growing up in the 2000s. From the suburbs to Te Aro, the city was alive with record shops, venues, cinemas, cafés, and cheap eats – where music, art and oddities were not just a hobby, but a way of life.

Every week, we made the pilgrimage from Mount Vic to Cuba Street in our bulky school shoes to score expired posters for our bedroom walls. Everything was physical — flyers, magazines, tickets, loyalty cards — tangible objects that gave credence to our obsessions.

Back at school, CDs were traded among the initiated. I devoured albums by Hendrix, Sonic Youth and The Cure alongside Mum’s LPs – Bowie, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Dad’s 45s – George Benson, Marvin Gaye, Motown, glued to the music video countdowns on C4, and becoming so obsessed with music that it became the only thing I wanted to do.

When I was 16, I asked my sister to sell me her 18+ card so I could get into gigs. Back then, it was easy to get past the bouncers with an Asian face and ID, which proved more challenging for my blonde friend Harriet, who relied on the likeness of any ID procured from the Year 13 common room. While the hot girls were going out on Courtenay Place, we were sneaking into gigs on Upper Cuba and fangirling over bands like Shaky Hands, So So Modern and The Phoenix Foundation.

I’ll never forget the time we got into The Mint Chicks at San Francisco Bathhouse, where the crowd was gassed with plumes of burning white smoke. Confusion and panic ensued, when guitar feedback suddenly pierced through all the coughing and spluttering and the band launched into their first song. The crowd lost their shit. I jumped up on stage (an old party trick) and crashed into a bewildered Kody Nielsen, who asked me to sing the next track: Opium of the People. I was stunned, and threw myself on top of the crowd in response. Years later, I met Reuban Nielson backstage at an UMO gig in Beijing. He laughed and said it was a fire extinguisher. Still one of the best gigs of my life.

Addicted to the chaos, we started going to all kinds of gigs around town — squished and sweaty shows at Mighty Mighty, Happy (later Puppies), Hole in the Wall (now Valhalla), and the Fredrick Street Light and Sound Society (now Pyramid Club) – meeting kindred spirits and dancing like mad at the front of every moshpit. Within these spaces, I found my tribe.

On the weekends, I busked down Cuba Street. Armed with an acoustic guitar, I jammed with musicians floating through the city — a Japanese taiko drummer, an Argentinian folk singer, an Aro Valley jazz student – playing frantic, funk-driven riffs with no beginning or end. I’m not sure what drew me to it more – the adrenaline of public performance, the companionship, or the realisation that music was a catalyst for connection that gave us misfits all somewhere to belong.

三

Throughout all this, I was struggling to come to terms with my sexuality. Music became an escape through which I could evade uncomfortable lunchtime conversations about boys by hanging out with the weirdos in the music room instead. Obsessions with bands were deemed far more acceptable than crushes on girls. I lent in.

In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, I was elected as Head Prefect in Year 13. Despite my outgoing personality, I was gripped by anxiety and convinced that being gay would bring too much shame on my school and my family. In a way, I think my extroversion developed as a way to conceal the parts of myself I wasn’t willing to confront, and I continued to hide for years to come.

When my music teacher Mrs Jones lent me a Tascam 4-track, I had an outlet to articulate those feelings. Layers of detuned guitar meshed with vocal samples from my idols about love and heartache, reversed and pitched down beyond recognition. Thankfully, in those times of anguish, I could still find solace in making music.

四

After studying Chinese for three years at university, I still couldn’t understand shit when I moved to Beijing. Everyday communication was a minefield, and I considered every interaction that wasn’t meant with an incredulous “啊??” to be a success. In my head, I  spent a long time trying to “pass” as “Chinese,” seeking to embody an identity that was both innate and imagined.

When I moved to Chengdu, music spaces helped fill the gaps where language escaped me. I became a regular at Morning Bar, a grungy DIY venue off the First Ring Road that hosted random parties and discordant, beer-fuelled jam sessions, home to a motley crew of stoners, musicians, hairdressers and slackers. Meanwhile, techno became part of my weekly diet at .TAG and Here We Go, underground dance clubs on the top floor of a downtown highrise, inhabited by a woozy assortment of queers, students, artists, wasters, hipsters, locals and laowai. Like those formative years in Wellington, I felt a familiar sense of belonging.

No words were required on the dancefloor.

五

When China closed its borders during the pandemic, the club scene became a terrarium for local talent. When lockdown was lifted in spring, the club reawakened with local DJs as the headliners to packed, thirsty dancefloors. With international bookings shelved indefinitely, focus shifted to within. In a way, Homeland was a product of that shift.

From the Homeland liner notes:

During a period of reflection and uncertainty, the first rough sketches for Homeland emerged from bedroom jam sessions in Kaishandao’s adopted hometown of Chengdu. With no way in or out of China, she uprooted from a long-term apartment to a small vacant room at Steam Hostel, where she lived out of a suitcase for six months — inviting detuned chords, nomadic drum sequences and foraged vocal samples to occupy her memory banks...

I love the rush of live music, the energetic feedback loop that flows between the performer and crowd. Whether rehearsed or spontaneous, live music creates a space for possibility, drama and levity to unfold in real-time. Prior to Homeland, Kaishandao had existed primarily as a live project. When I released Homeland, I knew I wanted to tour it through China and eventually back to Aotearoa. It was just a matter of when.

Over the next five months, I played my live set in 20 cities at clubs, livehouses, dives, and even a remote yurt campsite in Inner Mongolia. The experience was exhilarating as it was exhausting – with all the peaks and troughs of gigs and post-gig partying, lugging gear from airport to venue to hotel on a few groggy blats of half-sleep, all while navigating past legions of dàbái 大白 (health workers in white hazmat suits) during Zero Covid. The slog was worth it, a cosmic (or delusional) journey to play music for people and places unknown.

By late 2021, strict lockdowns had taken over China and a new vocabulary embedded itself into everyday life: “核酸” hésuān, (PCP test), “健康码” jiànkāng mǎ, (health code), and in Beijing, the dreaded “弹窗” tànchuāng, a pop-up that disabled your WeChat and relegated you to home quarantine, or worse, a two-week stint at the “方舱” fāngcāng, large makeshift holding facilities fitted with emergency beds and putrid toilets, where the lights never went out. I was homesick for Wellington.

In November 2022, following months of widespread public outrage, Zero Covid was lifted almost overnight. Sickness spread like wildfire. As testing stations were dismantled, pharmacies sold out of medicine, and crematoriums were overwhelmed. While processing this discordant mix of grief and relief, I awaited the day I could return to Aotearoa. Little did I know, it would be over a year.

六

Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, a taniwha-carved harbour of aquamarine infinities. Sunset drives around the bays, glistening shores and dappled, punga-shaded rooftops. The soft staccato of the crossing gone green, the amp fuzz of Cuba, the queens of Vivian.

Wellington is graceful in her grunge — she is songful tūī, cute pudgy bird murals, and manky, roti-filled pigeon. She is megaphones and multicultural manifestos, backyard barbecues and bush-walks; caffeinated arvos bookended by Gujarati eyebrow threading and musty op-shop meanderings. Pōneke is Mother, her spirit immortalised in her reigning coffee dynasties — she is People’s, and she is Supreme.

No matter how long I study Chinese — no words hit quite as hard as our Antipodean Reo. Shot, mean, chur bro, hard, hundy, mad, buzzy, crack up! – the slang seismically shifts back into place like a buckle into a seatbelt, clicking with a warm, satisfying tone. The e’s and i’s return, shedding the subconscious adjustments that have been woven into international speech. Chakras align when I can speak freely in Kiwi, like a Scooby Doo villain ripping off her mask to reveal her true identity.

Wellington on a Good Day:

Blue skies, light breeze. The sands of Oriental warm around your feet. A mate texts to meet for a coldie at Rogue and Vagabond.

“Chur, walking from O Bay now.”

Stroll through the rollerbladers of Oriental Parade and zig-zag past Te Papa onto Taranaki Street. Jaywalk over Manners and reminisce upon 2000s town lore. Nip into Arty Bees for a squizz in the NZ Lit section, scoff a page of Lawrence & Gibson before bumping into the Richard Meros a.k.a. Murdoch Stephens next to the Bucket Fountain.

Listen to a tree play the saxophone, clock an upcoming gig poster, and high-five King Home Boy on the corner of Ghuznee, before arriving at your destination to find your mates sprawled out on the grass with pints of Garage Project beer perched atop a refurbished car tyre, catching the last of the sun.

七

Last year, Uncle Allen emailed the family an archival photograph of my great-grandfather Ng Soon Wah with the subject line: Centenary of Grandfather’s Arrival in New Zealand.

On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 5:32 PM Allen Ng wrote:
 
Hi everyone,

On June 23rd 1924, Granddad Ng Soon Wah arrived in Wellington from China (via Sydney) on the ship Tahiti… In Wellington, like other Chinese migrants he had to pay a Poll Tax of 100 Pounds ($200 NZD), about $17,000 today. Not many Chinese had that kind of money, so they had to borrow and pay it off during their time in New Zealand.

Granddad spent most of his time in the South Island working in market gardens around Ashburton and Timaru. Dad told me that he first met his father in a market garden at Salt Water Creek, just south of Timaru.

Life would have been tough - foreign country, limited English, very cold winters, Chinese not always welcomed by the locals, etc. Granddad worked with many other men from Taishan and especially the Ng clan. He never went back to China.

Dapper in his best suit, skin smooth as porcelain — Great-Granddad Ng Soon Wah had the guts to leave and never return. As a peak millennial from the Eastern suburbs, my laptop brain can only imagine what gruelling labour he endured to bring his family to New Zealand.

In 1948, Great-Granddad moved to Wellington and opened The Shanghai Cafe on Courtenay Place with Joe Lai Choy, a savvy businessman known as the King of Haining Street. Famous for its Ching dynasty decor and a menu “nearly as long as the Great Wall,” The Shanghai became the “first Chinese restaurant in Wellington to cater for non-Chinese members of the community,” serving wholesome Cantonese dishes alongside steak, chips and tea.

With a classic Edwardian Baroque façade similar to the nearby St James, The Shanghai became a Wellington institution — its modern, east-meets-west flavour bringing Chinese faces, families and backroom mahjong into the heart of the capital.

In 1952, after the abolition of the Poll Tax, Great-Grandma Ng Fong Shee emigrated from Guangdong to Wellington, reuniting with her husband after 28 years. Uncle Allen says they were doting grandparents and lived a happy life in Wellington.

My Granddad Thomas Carr Yam Ng eventually took over The Shanghai with Grandma Josephine Hon King Joe, raising my Dad and his siblings in the humble living quarters upstairs. Great-Grandma stayed on in the kitchen until she passed away in 1966.

I wonder if they ever wished to return. I wonder what their community was like, how much English they could speak. I wonder what vegetables they grew, if the earth was fertile like their villages. I wonder if they ever felt truly at home in Wellington, as I do now.

Then again, perhaps this was their purpose, to plant seeds for the next generation.

八

The Homeland Aotearoa Tour concluded at Newtown Festival, nearly a century after Great-Granddad first landed on the shores of Wellington. Did my tīpuna endure decades of backbreaking toil so their great-granddaughter could blast people with a homespun mash-up of electronic beats and bloops?

Probably not.

But on that scorching day at the Gordon Place Stage, with my whānau, friends, and beloved Welly faces dancing in the sun as one — I like to think I made them proud.

九

Homeland has affirmed a long-held belief. Music is more than just a performance — it's about living your art and having the courage to step into the light.

As artists, we work to create portals of enlightenment and entertainment for our fellow humans suffering on this mortal coil. At any level, to play music is to be in dialogue with the universe, to elevate ourselves above the mundanity of everyday life.

As participants in this ritual, we are united in a sacred bond from stage to dancefloor, from performer, to listener, to those who meticulously plug and unplug, wipe, drape, push, email, stock, sweep and inhale the daytime stench of night spaces in the unflattering light before doors. This is a borderless, lost-and-found community, linked through slog, understanding, and an undying love for the music that moves us.

Kaishandao was born as an outlet for expression. It’s built from an ownership of otherness, as much as a love of dance and creation. If playing music can help others find a home in it like I have, then perhaps my purpose has been fulfilled.

<3

Kris,

Written from 2021- 2025

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Made with the support of Creative New Zealand