Maori-Chinese Identity in Paula Morris’s Hibiscus Coast

Contemporary Maori novelist Paula Morris actively carves out “a space for Maori-Chinese” within the emerging literary canon of Aotearoa/New Zealand in her critically acclaimed novel Hibiscus Coast. Writing in a country where discussions of cultural politics have, until quite recently, concentrated on the binary of Maori (the colonized) and Pakeha (the colonizer), and aiming at the “regeneration and restoration of [their] self-definition,” Morris describes the “politicized memory” of the Maori-Chinese, the sort of memory that—in the words of theorist Jenny Bol Jun Lee—“guards against popular notions that seek to homogenize ethnic minority groups and position us in static binary oppositions.” Through the use of extensive interview materials, personal histories, and primary-source media documents from over a hundred years of Maori-Chinese history, this paper critically examines the politicized memory of Morris’s Maori-Chinese protagonist, Emma Taupere. It also provides an indepth textual analysis of Emma’s complex presence in the novel, a presence which challenges our attempts to categorize or universalize her character, and explores the ways in which Emma can serve as an indicator of the changing winds in the mixed-blood/indigenous writings coming out of 21st-century New Zealand.