Encounter: A Side of Wellington

Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin

How much do you know about Wellington? Living memory is the concept of the accumulated memories of what happened within the longest current, ongoing lifespan. For example, the human living memory would span from right now, as you read this, back until the birth of the oldest living person today. An oral history is all that can be verbally recalled and remembered from person to person, and history as a whole is what is written and recorded on paper or device. The Wellington that we know today has had a few different coats of paint over the years, and with each wash over the seaside city we lose details of that which is painted over. The Chinese immigrant story is not unlike other immigrant stories you may have heard, but how familiar are you with Wellington’s historical relationship with Chinese immigrants?

Encounter is an app-lead 60-minute walking tour of some of Wellington's central streets hosted on the PickPath app. It gives directions and then prompts audio files and transcripts at important destinations. It was created for Sharon Wang’s Masters of Fine Arts project and is a part of the Six Degrees Festival at BATS Theatre. It is a sunny day in Poneke when I begin the journey by the sea near Waitangi Park. My first impressions, and my overall response to the experience, are informed retrospectively in an interview afterwards at BATS Theatre with some of the lead creatives on the team. 

It is refreshingly cool in the BATS studio space, after our walk in the sun, when writer Cadence Chung, co-creator and co-director Jamie Yee and co-director and sound designer Kassandra Wang sit down with me to discuss the show. We lounge in the front row of the seating block as the sun beams through the window and the two air conditioning units hum intermittently. Answers to my questions are frequently begun by one person and concluded by another; the team passes the buck jovially and aren’t too nervous to jump onto what a collaborator is contributing. A sense of humble pride emanates from the creatives, each doing their part to recreate for others a story so near and dear to their own or their families.

The piece is accessed on the streets, outside, instead of within a malleable theatre black box that begets many other masters projects in the Six Degrees festival. This means that Wang must work with the local elements, the sights at specific spots, the smells, the weather, the urban noise (or lack thereof), to create a piece of art that works to the team's desired ends. This is, in itself, powerfully emblematic of the Chinese immigrant experience that the show wishes to depict.

To begin the tour we must choose our protagonist, in a sense; our person whose story we will follow. I was invited on a test walk, before the season began proper, and was instructed to choose Roy’s story. Roy is played by Dennis Zhang and other voices are supplied by co-star Shervonne Grierson. By the water we can see the roiling waves, the smell of the sea and fish and birds, when the baritone hoot of a barge coming to shore plays through the earphones, and the voice of Roy lays out his plan: one hundred pounds in five years, then he can return home. Talking to Wang, creating a Pickpath story is all about trial and error. There are blessings: olfactory elements, that aren’t usually incorporated into theatre spaces locally but are inherent to many outdoor locations, give life to moments without much work from the team. 

However, one of the challenges, Wang explains, was constantly being responsive and unforgiving to her own darlings when new incorporations had disagreements with the world around the listener. Traditional instruments had to be rethought because of how similar they sounded to car horns. Balance needed to be struck with tones and volume, in order to supplement, and not distract the listener from, the busy streets of Pōneke. Not to be deterred, Wang says “The main thing that really draws me in is being able to integrate the kind of external sounds of the world with this very different and foreign- not in a sense of geographically, but temporally foreign, landscape.”

​During my time sauntering through town with a new lease on local buildings, the app guides me strategically. I end up placed so that the image of translator William Lip Guey standing in front of Dick Lee's famous herb shop aligns with the facade across the street if I hold up my phone just right. A dilapidated basic brick and wood building, held together with strops, has letters worn away from ‘Chinese Mission Hall’ that was once confidently emblazoned above its large double doors. There is a hole in the front door that offers us a peek into a building declared unsafe to enter. There’s rubble and trash and a wheelchair. Later, in the interview after the tour, Yee will make a joke alongside his collaborators that “[The Mission Hall] is almost like a metaphor for the whole of Wellington Chinatown.” 

Every shopfront and facade has life and colour leaping out of the black and white images chosen to represent the locations on Pickpath, yet right now, on the street, it’s as if there was never much life here at all. Perhaps the most heartbreaking contrast, for me, seems to be the difference in urban noise, in both colour and sound. Encounter gives me the impression that life was loud and lit and spilling out onto the roads. The piece creates an energetic nostalgia for the dream so sought in a bright, young land: to make a good life for oneself and one's family.

Ending my walk I find the cast and crew huddled together in the sun chatting, laughing, stressing, typing. They are making fixes on the pedantic app. Chilling there, together, gives me a sense of how strong the relationships are within this team. In our post walk interview Chung comments on how connected the whole team is to the concept behind Encounter, and how each of them cover a range of relationships to the Chinese immigrant experience. Some first, some second, some third generation immigrants, each proud to have contributed to the depth and heartfelt nature of the tour. She comments “We have this blend of really different backgrounds and for me and Jamie [Encounter] is really similar to our family stories, and for Sharon and Kass, [their] families haven’t been around as long ago as ours. So it’s interesting having all these different facets of Chinese New Zealand culture, and how different it actually all is, but we can all still relate to a lot of the same things at the same time.”

I can’t help but draw a connection between the Encounter team's close relationships and the magnetic nature of the Chinese immigrant community over a hundred years ago as depicted in Encounter. 

I am informed that the Pōneke Chinatown grew because the community was so tight knit, as you could expect from a culture finding a home in a foreign land. If you’re going to try and make a life somewhere new it would be smart to be near others, lawyers, dentists, traders, who all spoke your language and understood you. In turn, many worked together, and were generous with each other, because they each understood the dream they all shared. The difficult task each had set out to do in an opportunistic, yet difficult and racist land. To compound on the emblematic nature of Encounter, the team embodies elements of what they had set out to communicate through their tour.

Early on into our sit down Yee shares that one of the most energising parts of Encounter, for him, is this: “I live in town, I walk around town all the time, I’ve lived in Wellington nearly five years, and there are so many places I just walk past and go ‘oh yeah, whatever’”. He finds the research done for the show enlightening, sending a searchlight against the grey buildings of downtown in order to see the memories so intimately related to his own background.

Encounter is an informative, emotional walking tour that will have you seeing parts of this town differently. It’s on at BATS Theatre as part of the Six Degrees Festival until the 14th December 2024, more info here.