History of Con and Chuns

AUNTIE CON EULOGY 1 JULY 2008

CON AND HER FAMILY

Connie didn’t like a fuss, or to put people out, or to be the centre of attention. She liked informality and to follow her own agenda. But I think this is one occasion where – sorry Con – we will make a fuss and add a little bit of formality – not too much – and on this occasion Connie is inevitably the centre of attention. And Con, you haven’t put anyone out – we all want to be here today . . .

Who was Connie Chun?

Connie Chun was born Constance Patricia Chun on 25 September 1938 at St Helen’s Hospital Wellington. She was the 16^th of eighteen children of Chun Yee Hop and his wife Wun Chu Lin. Her Chinese name was Chun Mei Yeung which means ‘that’s enough’. Her parents had so many children that they hoped by naming Connie ‘Mei yeung’ that that would stop the children coming. It didn’t, because younger brother Ray and younger sister June were born soon after.

I used to think she had been named after Connie Francis, but I checked on the internet and actually Connie Francis was born after Con, so Con can’t have been named after her. Anyway her Dad gave her her Chinese name and the hospital midwives gave her her English name, and Connie was a popular name at the time.

After she was born Con’s father, Chun Yee Hop, came home from the hospital and said to the other children ‘oh, the new baby is so beautiful’. Father didn’t say things like that so this was a notable and memorable event. After that Connie was known as the pretty one.

Con’s father Chun Yee Hop was 68 at the time of her birth and her Mum, Wun Choy Lin, was 41. Both were reasonably traditional Chinese parents. This is not surprising given they were both born in China. Chun Yee Hop was born in Bark Shek village, Jung Seng county in Guangdong province China, the son of a farmer. His was one of three children. He was originally born Wong Yee Hop but was adopted in his late teens by a Mr Chan, a well-off man from the neighbouring Sai Joe village. Mr Chan had no sons so he adopted Yee Hop. This was a reasonably common event in China in those days.

In 1895 Chun Yee Hop decided to migrate to New Zealand. China at this time was suffering great poverty and social disorder and many young men from Cantonese villages moved to Canada, the US, Australia and NZ to help make money for their families at home. Chun Yee Hop was one of them. He was originally going to go to Canada but at the last minute he joined a group of 12 other village men who had decided to come to NZ, so Chun Yee Hop went with them. This last-minute decision meant that Connie was to become a NZer. She could just as easily have been a Canadian.

When Chun Yee Hop arrived in NZ in 1895 he had to pay the £10 poll tax. The poll tax was an entry tax that had been imposed on Chinese in 1881 to try and stop Chinese immigration, and was an expression of the strong White NZ and anti-Chinese sentiments of white NZers at the time. It was lucky Chun Yee Hop arrived when he did. The following year the poll tax was increased from £10 to £100! Anti-Chinese feeling in NZ was very strong when Chun Yee Hop arrived in NZ and continued for much of the time he lived here. What he felt about this we don’t know, like most Chinese men at that time he never shared such thoughts with his children.

Also like most Chinese men at that time he did not intend to stay in NZ. The idea was that he and the family would eventually return to China to live. This of course never happened.

After arriving in Wellington Chun Yee Hop started work in a fruit shop in Lambton Quay with some other Jung Seng men. Eventually he started his own shop. This took years of work to achieve but was the standard way Chinese men got established here.

In 1904 Yee Hop was 34 and he decided it was time to get married. He returned to his village and in time-honoured fashion arranged to find a wife - a Bark Shek girl named Lei Yim Yung, who he duly married. They tried to have children but sadly Yim Yung was unable able to. There was also no way for Yee Hop to make a living back in his village so he had to return to NZ. However Yim Yung refused to go with him. As she said, she didn’t want to live in NZ. It was full of barbarians and they only ate potatoes. She didn’t want to live somewhere where they only ate potatoes and not rice. So Yee Hop returned to NZ alone.

By 1915 Yee Hop was 45. He had a wife and an adopted son but they were in China. He was getting on and he must have been thinking about his future and what was going to happen to him in NZ without a wife and family. So he decided to return to China and find a second wife, and this was Con’s Mum, 17 year old Wun Choy Lin from Sun Tong village. She was very pretty, an only child and 28 years younger than her husband. Her parents weren’t that keen to have their only child leave them and go to a faraway place like NZ, but Yee Hop agreed to pay them a lump sum and send them regular remittances every month, so they agreed. There was no problem in Yee Hop having two wives, in China that was considered normal at the time.

The only problem was that Yee Hop had to pay the £100 poll tax to get his new young wife into NZ. That was a heap of money which he really didn’t want to pay so he decided to borrow the naturalisation papers of his friend Ah Young. The wives of naturalised Chinese NZers didn’t have to pay the poll tax. Yee Hop couldn’t get naturalised though because the govt had stopped naturalisation for Chinese in 1908. Borrowing the naturalisation papers of someone else was the only answer. Yee Hop and Choy lin were married in the English way in Sydney and arrived in Wellington on 2 August 1895 as Mr and Mrs Ah Young. Because Ah Young was naturalised there was no poll tax to be paid on Mrs Ah Young aka Wun Choy Lin. Yee Hop had saved himself £100, or so he thought. Somehow the Customs Department found out about the deception and Yee Hop was convicted of evading the poll tax. This was a serious business as theoretically his new wife could be deported for this. Despite having minimal English he managed to hire one of the best lawyers in town – P J O’Regan (grandfather of Sir Tipene O’Regan) who took the case to the Supreme Court. The original conviction of evading poll tax was upheld and Yee Hop had to pay the poll tax, but Choy Lin was not deported, which was a victory in itself and ensured that Yee Hop and Choy Lin could stay in NZ and that the Chun family would become NZers.

Within a year of her arrival in NZ Choy Lin had given birth to her first child, a daughter (Mavis). She was to go on to have 18 children, all of them single births, the first 13 born at home. When the Labour Govt made hospital birth compulsory in 1936 and the mother had to stay in hospital for two weeks after the birth Choy Lin was ecstatic – it was the only holiday she ever got! And Yee Hop finally had the family that he had always wanted. As we now know Connie was born in 1938, the 16^th of Choy Lin’s 18 children.

Connie’s early years were therefore part of a large Chinese family making a living from a small fruit shop – the Hing Lee shop at 243 Riddiford Street, the third of Yee Hop’s fruit shops. The family had moved there in 1936 from Willis Street.

The family was not well off and everyone was expected to contribute by working. Time off, fun, holidays and weekend sports, movies and play were practically unknown. Like other Chinese families the Chuns lived above the shop. Con shared a room with four siblings and a bed with two others. When she was growing up there were about 11 brothers and sisters living at 243 Riddiford St, including her parents. This number was increased for a time in the 1940s when Con’s older sisters Rona and Rosie returned from China because of the Japanese War.

The war had other impacts. In 1941 and 1942, fearing an invasion by the Japanese, Yee Hop sent most of the family up to Carterton. Ironically the family were closer to the Japanese in Carterton then if they’d stayed in Wellington – there was a Japanese prisoner of war camp just a few miles away from where they were staying!

Connie’s parents died when she was very young. Her Mum died of cancer in 1946 at the tragically young age of 49. Her Dad died less than two years later of heart failure in 1948, aged 78. Some say he died of a broken heart following the death of his wife. Con was 10 years old when her Mum died, and 12 when her Dad died. This left a family of some 10 living at the fruit shop with no parents. The oldest child was 32 and the youngest 6.

Because there were no parents there was a possibility that the family might have been broken up by social services. But oldest sister Mavis was determined this would not happen and took over the role of care-giver, running the shop and household with firm discipline; ensuring school, work and home were run like a tight military unit.

Con, like all the other kids, was to work in the shop, do chores and go to school with no argument. These years of hard work and material hardship had their effect on Con. She later didn’t like to talk about or to be reminded of those years. As far as I know she never returned to Newtown once the family sold the fruitshop and moved to 30 Homewood Avenue Karori.

Con attended school at Beresford school Auckland, Newtown School Wellington, South Wellington Intermediate and finally Wellington Tech, which she left at the end of the fifth form in 1954, aged 16. She went straight from Tech to work in the family’s new shop – the Zenith Fruit Supply in Manners Street – which the Chuns had taken over once they had sold the Newtown shop in 1952.

Con’s life was work and work was her life. She worked in the family shop from 1954 when she was 16 to 1986 when Zenith’s closed. After that she worked at Chong’s fruitshop in Karori until that shop closed in the mid nineties. She then worked at Karori Write Price and then finally at Sprott House in Karori. Con worked at Sprott House until just a few months ago, continuing to walk from Homewood Ave to Sprott House and back despite her illness. This shows her indomitable and determined personality. A little thing like cancer wasn’t going to stop her from carrying on as normal!

But life was not all work, especially in the 1950s 60s and 70s. There were parties and sports. Stan said Con loved to dress up to attend dances and social occasions and was very popular. There were also parties at Homewood where the stiletto heels of the women have left a permanent reminder on the wooden floors!

Life at Homewood was busy and full of life: most of the family from Newtown moved en masse to Homewood – about 10 people. As they married or did other things they one by one moved out. Connie, however, never married, and continued to live at Homewood for the rest of her life.

By the 1990s older sister Mavis had returned from 25 years in HK where she’d gone once all the kids were sorted out, and Con, June and Mavis kept the Homewood fires burning for the rest of the family.

Maybe because of her insecure early life Con was very focussed on routine and was somewhat change-resistant. For example she bought a Ford Cortina in the 1970s and kept it in immaculate condition until this year. The idea of buying a new car was ridiculous when the Cortina was perfectly fine.

She was also very keen on the stock market. I remember her telling me I should get into the market pre 1987, saying ‘Nigel, it’s money for old rope!’ The market of course has its ups and downs and Con and younger brother Ray would talk at family dinners about how their shares were going.

Con loved animals and she had many over the years. There was a green budgie called Dickie Bird who could talk. He came from Newtown and was transported up to Karori. There was Friskie – Helen’s dog, but it became the family dog, and Con really loved her. The dog would go down to the fruitshop with Aunty Con and Uncle Ray / Al in the truck in an apple box on top of the other stuff. And then the apple box was put by the door so Frisky could be part of things but not too obviously (because you can’t have a dog in the shop). Then there was Sooty the cat who lived until she was 17. Then came Gray, who was a stray and became the outside cat. And there was Daffy, a favourite cat who was born under the shop. She was a good mouser, and when the shop closed Daffy was brought home by Con and lived in her room for the rest of her life (the cat’s life I mean).

Connie was Chinese, of course. But even though her parents were Chinese and she was made to attend Chinese church and Chinese school I always got the feeling that for Connie being Chinese was of little relevance to who she was as a person.

My sense of Connie was that she was self contained, no-nonsense and hard working.

Her sense of identity was ‘Connie’

a Chun

a Wellingtonian

and a NZer

But that being Chinese was of little importance to her. It was just something that she was.

Con always enjoyed good health. Stan says he can only remember her having one day off sick at Zenith in all the 32 years she worked there. Last November she visited a doctor, a rare and unique event. It’s no surprise that the one time she consulted a doctor it turned out she was really sick. She had cancer. As always this made little difference to her, she continued with her routine as always, seeing the cancer as a mere nuisance that could be beaten by sheer force of will. But as we know some things cannot be beaten by force of will, and Con lost the battle with her illness last Wednesday 25 June . . . something that she would have found most annoying and inconvenient. . .

Con died peacefully, quietly and without fuss – just as she had lived her life - and cheerful and cheeky to the last. A true Chun . . .

Written by Nigel Murphy and delivered at Connie Chun’s funeral service 1 July 2008