The contents of a Chinese medical manual, left behind in a Central Otago home more than a century ago, is being brought to life at Central Stories.
Wellington-based author and researcher Nicky Won said the book was among a collection of artefacts held in Alexandra and linked to her great-grandparents – Chinese storekeeper Sue Lee Him and his Eurasian wife Mary Jane.
Nicky said translating even part of the text had been complex, requiring help from a contact she had from time spent living and working in Hong Kong.
“That style of writing in the medical manual is actually old-fashioned Chinese as well…it was hard for her to do it,” she said.
The manual is one of several items Nicky has researched ahead of a public talk at the Alexandra museum next week.
Other objects include a rice grinder, a medicinal wine bottle and an English-to-Cantonese dictionary.
She said the dictionary, in particular, hinted at the types of interactions early settlers might have had.
“You kind of wonder…how did they communicate?”
A fifth-generation Chinese New Zealander, Nicky began researching her lineage as a teenager but returned to it more seriously in recent years after stepping back from her legal career.
“I basically burnt out…and (thought), why don’t I finish something that I started?”
Nicky Won has worked with a translator to understand a Chinese medical book – part of a Central Stories collection of artefacts. Images: Supplied
That research became a book tracing her great-grandmother and earlier generations, including ancestors who lived through the gold mining era and the poll tax period.
Her family’s story is now also being used as part of a wider documentary project examining the impact of the poll tax on Chinese New Zealanders.
The documentary makers “needed a story” to anchor the historical facts, and her family has provided that, she said.
She said the lives of European women in her family tree connected to early Chinese settlers, whose stories were often hidden or simplified, captured her imagination.
She discovered Mary Jane returned to China from Central Otago with six children and lived there for more than two decades.
“She stayed there for 24 years…and taught English there,” Nicky said.
“Nobody tells those stories”.
Her work is presented in a book, Finding the Rosenbrock Women.