The new bilingual documentary Meng follows race relations commissioner Meng Foon over a year. For the film’s co-director and co-producer, tracing his story inspired her to reflect on her own experience as a Chinese learner of te reo Māori.

Meng Foon ​​is probably one of the most well-known and visible examples of someone tauiwi/non-Māori who can confidently kōrero Māori.

When Steven Chow, who would become my co-producer/co-director, first mentioned his idea of doing a documentary on Meng as a high-profile Chinese New Zealander, I was immediately interested as someone who is also Chinese and who has also been learning Māori for the last decade or so.

It is rare to find older tauiwi who are vocal about being tangata Tiriti. Many other Chinese people of Meng’s generation have grown up with a monocultural lens of Aotearoa, and a view of Māori that has been shaped over many generations by a Pākehā perspective – one that, I don’t think it would be untrue to say, was often racist. That is something that we see in the documentary too. In one scene at a Tiriti workshop for Chinese New Zealanders (particularly older NZ-born Chinese), a participant expresses some colonised whakaaro that Meng has to gently navigate. It’s difficult to unpack decades of learnt bias in one sitting but Foon gives it a go anyway. He doesn’t tend to shy away from difficult things. As he loves to say, “Just do it, man.”

In some ways, looking back, the documentary portrays a very rosy view of Foon, and it was hard to dive deeper into nuance with an observational documentary made in and around the Covid lockdowns. As a character, Meng is impatient, cheeky with an East Coast boomer sense of humour, and at times hypocritical and inconsistent with what he says.

But for all his potential imperfections and shortcomings, Meng Foon is a rarity among his generation, and the fact that he doesn’t shy away from being vocal about colonisation and calling for land back for Māori means hopefully more people of his generation will be ready to listen.

I can see how Foon symbolises the potential for tauiwi of the future – to grow up with te reo Māori and te ao Māori as a normalised part of their upbringing. He is someone who embraces his own Chinese heritage, who doesn’t try to be Māori, but simply makes connections within his local rohe, learns the local waiata and mōteatea, and picks up what he calls “te reo o Ngāti Porou” as well the mannerisms that accompany it.

I remember the first time I heard Foon speak on the pae one year at Waitangi and I couldn’t believe the ease and flow of his reo, how Māori it sounded even to my learner’s ears. I remember thinking wow, I would love to be as fluent as him one day.

When people ask me about my reo Māori journey I often think back to my Sāmoan intermediate teacher Mrs Va’a, who had us do an opening and closing karakia every single day in class. She normalised te reo Māori for us even though she herself wasn’t Māori, and made sure it was an everyday part of our school life. This is one of my earliest memories of appreciating te reo Māori and wanting to learn more. I remember choosing te reo Māori as my language option in my first year of high school while most of my friends took German or Japanese. Then in my first year of university I took Māori 101 with Margaret Mutu and that impacted me so much it led me to do a diploma of language in te reo Māori.

The more I learnt the language, the more I understood how much language and culture are intertwined, how te reo Māori helps give you an insight into te ao Māori. It also helped me unpack my internalised racism about my own Chinese identity.

Around the same time, I started learning more about the history of this whenua and the ongoing legacy of colonisation that has resulted in the massive inequality that we have now. Learning te reo Māori can’t happen in isolation, and it necessitates an understanding of the context of how that language was lost in the first place.

But, like a lot of non-Māori who start learning te reo, I initially started learning the language simply because I was interested in the language, which I can appreciate now was a very privileged place to start from.

As many Māori have articulated far better than I can, the journey of learning te reo is a very different experience for Māori and non-Māori. Having a vital part of your culture systemically taken from you over generations is something non-Māori can only understand at arm’s length. I know many well-meaning tauiwi who want to work towards a journey of decolonisation for themselves and their communities. They see te reo as an important part of that journey, due in part to the immense amount of work by reo champions over many decades to bring te reo Māori to the stage it is now, where reo Māori flows fluidly through RNZ broadcasts and TV weather updates, not just during Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, but every week of the year.

But as tauiwi we also need to step back sometimes and reflect on how much space and resource we can take up in these arenas when te reo Māori classes are full and Māori are turned away or put on waitlists, when tauiwi voices dominate class discussions, or when Māori feel like they don’t belong in their own spaces. It feels hypocritical for me to say now because I’m sure I have contributed to this in the past. This was an aspect that we had wanted to explore through the documentary, to see if Foon had similar whakaaro over his own privileged position in being able to learn Māori, but I don’t think we were ever able to dig deep enough into it with Foon.

But I hope tauiwi consider the intention and impact of their reo journeys and remain humble all the way. That’s not to say there’s no place for tauiwi to learn, it’s just that we need to recognise how to centre the needs of tangata whenua first.

I love that reo Māori is becoming more and more a normalised part of Aotearoa. It feels like a tangible sign that the country is becoming more progressive. I used to get a lot of comments about learning Māori but it’s become less of a novelty to see tauiwi embracing reo Māori. I hope the changes we are seeing become more commonplace so that in the future non-Māori like Meng aren’t automatically celebrated for being able to kōrero Māori. I do think tauiwi often get a lot more praise and attention for learning or speaking te reo than Māori second language learners do. It feels deeply unfair and probably adds to the whakamā that many Māori feel about learning their mother tongue. I feel like I understand that on a different level as I am still very whakamā speaking Mandarin too.

It can be a tricky space to navigate. I still have doubts about how much kupu Māori or reo Māori I should use in certain contexts – whether it is beneficial for that space, or if I am still contributing to the whakamā of others, or if it feels like a showing off, or a tokenised use of the language. There is no one right answer or way to be, but if we can stay open to criticisms from Māori of where we may be falling short, and be ready to listen and change, I think that is the path for tangata Tiriti.

Tauiwi need to be aware of our own place and role here in Aotearoa and our complicity as settlers living on stolen land where sovereignty was never ceded. Te reo is only one facet on the journey of decolonisation for Aotearoa. Sometimes it can be a shortcut for us to make connections with Māori but I think whakawhanaungatanga or relationship building can take place in many ways. What most tauiwi long for is a sense of belonging to this whenua and learning te reo requires a learning of whakapapa, which in turn gives tauiwi a stronger place to stand from, in knowing who you are.

Making a bilingual documentary about Meng Foon felt like a good way to show that bilingual storytelling, or storytelling led through reo Māori can be the default mode of storytelling in Aotearoa. Whether we are Māori or tauiwi, this can be the future lens that all stories are told from in Aotearoa.

People who watch the documentary will see the potential that comes with learning te reo Māori; the relationships and opportunities that Meng has had because he is a reo speaker are huge. As someone who grew up among ngā iwi o te Tairāwhiti, who never formally learnt reo, Foon offers almost a vision of a future where reo Māori is so normalised that no one needs to formally seek out opportunities to learn, but where all tamariki are immersed and brought up with it.

Meng premieres Monday 12 September, 8:30pm on Whakaata Māori and MĀORI+.

 

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