Video producer Lucy Zee had her lunch thrown out and was called an "Asian prostitute" as a school kid in Waihi.
She talks about what it was like going back there to there to interview her family and former college principal for the TVNZ video Growing up Chinese in a small town.
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
When Lucy was growing up, the only other Chinese family in Waihi were relatives who owned a fish and chip shop.
She says most of the racist bullying took place at school, where she was criticised for the food she ate and called an 'Asian prostitute'.
"I wasn't wearing the right clothes and I wasn't carrying the right lunch.
"Kids would go into my bag and take my lunch and throw it away. And they'd be like 'You're eating dogs'."
"You'd be in cooking class and they'd be like 'They don't serve dog here'.
"I never got made fun of at primary school in Auckland, but the first day I went to school in Waihi I felt ostracised. People didn't want to be my friend. The teacher had to force a kid to look after me that day - and she chose the brownest kid in the class … it was really odd."
Photo: Lucy Zee / Facebook
When Lucy was first bullied, her dad – who moved to New Zealand from Guangzhou in 1975 when he was 22 – went to school to ask that they please look after her.
This was unusual because masculinity in Chinese culture is "pretty toxic", she says.
"For my dad to let his guard down and go to a stranger – a white person, at that – it was pretty significant, I think."
Lucy says her parents' behaviour on camera came as a surprise.
"I thought my dad would be quiet and stoic and my mother would be more open and chatty but it was the other way around."
Her mother can be very funny – often in a shocking way, she says.
"If she had her own podcast it would go off."
When Lucy told her mother other kids were calling her racist names, she was unsympathetic.
"She was like 'When I was your age I saw people being blown up and their throats slit in front of me. So what, you had to deal with some words.
"Her sympathy level is that of an Asian tiger mum."
Lucy's interview with her former school principal Alistair Cochrane – who is still the Waihi College principal – got him thinking about how he can better cater to his current Asian students, she says.
"I forgot that he is a genuinely kind person who is trying with the resources he has to do the best he can do.
"Some people are racist … but most of the time I like to think that people are ignorant. And it's not my responsibility but if I have the time and patience to take the time and explain we're human beings as well, maybe it'll change a little. It's a very slow process, and I can see it changing but it's slow."
You can watch Growing up Chinese in a small town here.
Check out Lucy Zee's videos for The Wireless.
My NZ: 'If you feel like a Kiwi then you are a Kiwi'
As a Kiwi you're allowed to identify with both your ethnicity and your nationality in a modern, sexy hyphenated way, writes Lucy Zee in RNZ's series My NZ.
