The new and spectacular atlas We Are Here is page after page of haunting, hella beautiful visual data, each chapter introduced with an essay. This one, Lost in the Forest, opens the section on people. At some point in the 1990s, one of the creators of this book tried to impress me by talking about … Read more
A nightmarish and near-fatal high-speed pursuit of a New Zealand Chinese family concluded with a judge rejecting the prosecution’s request for hate crime sentencing. Tze Ming Mok discusses why New Zealand’s approach to hate crime is utterly useless. I don’t like horror movies. I could only watch Get Out while on a plane, on a … Read more
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, New Zealand Chinese writer Tze Ming Mok writes a beautiful, bitter letter to an old friend in Xinjiang, grappling with matters of conscience, community survival, and Anne-Marie Brady’s ‘Magic Weapons’ paper. Originally published in the new collection Life on Volcanoes: Contemporary Essays But where were we? You … Read more
After the minister suspended its profiling pilot, Immigration NZ has released a spreadsheet and a briefing note. Tze Ming Mok is deeply, deeply unimpressed. An RNZ producer contacted me last night to share a PDF of Immigration NZ’s profiling spreadsheet and briefing note that they had released to the media. She had been contacting a … Read more
Racial profiling by Immigration NZ is a tale as old as time (Dawn Raids anyone?), but if the ‘harm team’ has its way they’ll be workshopping it into our very own dystopian scifi blockbuster, writes Tze Ming Mok. Immigration NZ has apparently caught its own minister off guard by talking openly about plans for a … Read more
A conversation on the byelection result, politics and Asian communities, and whether Michael Wood’s big win points to a Labour resurgence, with two longtime Mt Roskill residents who happen also to be Tze Ming Mok’s parents Tze Ming Mok was born and raised in Mt Roskill by immigrant parents from Malaysia and Singapore. Her parents, … Read more
Registers of foreign workers and attacks on human rights lawyers show the poison of Trump seeping into the Conservative government’s new, cynical strategy, laments London-based New Zealander Tze Ming Mok This time last year Theresa May, not yet the prime minister of the UK, dominated the Conservative Party conference. To my outsider ears, her message … Read more