A SUMMARY OF THE SISTERS CHUN.
There were eleven sisters in the Chun Family , a few too many to write in depth on them as I did with the brothers.
But here is a brief summary as I saw them.
MAVIS:
The matriarch.
Proud and strong.
Great sense of family responsibility which as kids we could not understand the iron hand required, but do now.
A strong belief in Chinese herbals and it took me 60 years to realize she was right.
She has a tremendous balance of both East and West and this she utilizes in word and will.
A straight backed martinet who was also very attractive in her younger days.
Emphasized cleanliness to the nth degree and shoved a ton of halibut oil capsules down our throats to maintain our health.
Her belief in health and herbals has taken her today to over 90 plus years.
A pretty rare person.
DORIS :
Extremely proud of her Chinese race and heritage.
Seems to get more attractive as she ages and now at 90 she could well pass for 50.
Doris is a ‘Don’t bother anyone ‘ person.
Super independent she will still walk or catch a bus rather than put anyone out driving a car.
Another of the Chun’s with the super healthy genes she has a heart attack one day then shrugs it off and it is back to the chores the next.
A lot of history has been attached to Doris especially since her husband Chung Ying Gor was an officer in the Chinese Chi Gung Tong the Chinese political movement of the old days.
Doris has also a lot of talent that she is very humble about.Her Chinese brush paintings are terrific works of art.
2.
She can also be quite opinionated about many things and her hidden strength shows with these opinions.
She is a great example of a proud, learned and yet humble Chun.
I don’t think her family realizes she is something really special..!!
INA:
Ina I do not know a great deal about except for the fact that she used to be worried about her ailments when she was young.
I do recall her sporting this ‘marble’ growing on her wrist which I take now to be called a cyst and is generally harmless.
However, she solved her health problems by marrying a handsome Chinese herbalist Mr H C Wong whom he told us to call him Percy.
Percy was a great guy, quiet of voice and when he laughed I saw this great wide smile that was genuine.
Ina spent some time at the fruit shop in Kilbirnie but later when the White Knight named Percy came along she was carried off to Queen Street in Auckland and there she helped with his herbal and gift shop.
I always thought that she had a total dependency on Percy but she is still quite independent now years after he has passed away.
Ina is sometimes known as Anna after the famous Chinese movie star Anna May Wong.
RONA:
Rona is the quietly attractive sister that you hardly knew was in the room.
I remember that she was always good to David and myself and made us these great dishes at Kilbirnie every Thursday. She called them her ‘Thursday Special’and to us they really were or I would have forgotten them by now.
Rona was introduced to roller skating by brother Alan who used to patronize a rink in Wakefield Street.
Little did he know that here romance would blossom in the form of a tall slender and good looking guy in a tailored brown suit by the name of Tom Young.
Tom also frequented the rink and instead of skating with Alan,Rona was whisked away by this handsome tailor by trade.
3.
The next thing we knew they were married and lived in Cottleville Terrace in Thorndon.
Tom must have realized that tailoring was a hard business so ventured off to Puni Road in Pukekohe where he commenced his market gardening years.
And so he swapped the scissors for a tractor and I am sure many hard years would be ahead for Rona.
How Rona found spare time to take up ikebana I do not know but every year she sends me down a photo of her latest work of art.
I guess it is the Chun trait of bringing out talents that are just under the surface.
Tom and Rona are now retired and spend a lot of their time in traveling the world.
Good on them.
It is really deserved..!!
ENA:
Ena worked at Sang Lee for a spell and then was spotted by one Ian Yee who courted and married her.
These girls of ours were going fast and I still recall the huge weddings of around 500 people held at the Trades Hall in Vivian Street.
Ian was a handsome and dapper young man in those days who unfortunately came down with a lung infection called Pleurisy. I recall he stayed at our house at 243 Riddiford Street and although down was still able to pick race horses and also hand make rattan cane baskets which we sold for him in the fruit shop.
I have to say he did a really fine job with these baskets and they sold well. In today’s world that is anti plastic bag maybe it is time for Ian to make a comeback.
At any rate Ian got over his affliction and later started a fruit shop two doors away from us called the Ideal Fruit Shop and this is where Ena would spend many years and raised her children there. There was Phillip [ whom I called Ishubiba because that is how he sounded trying to pronounce his name when small, Victor [ whom I christened Beany as Ena gave him a name that sounded something like that] then later there was Elizabeth and Margaret whom it appears were named after royalty.
4.
And there was another lad named Victor.
At this time we were having nephews and nieces by the dozen and it seemed we were everyone’s uncle or aunty.
Ena or Enid as she liked to be called after Enid Blyton the children’s story writer ,served her customers well and was very polite to them then after a stint in the shop it was out back to cook for the family.
She would always be dressed in this billowing flowery dress and it seemed the fruit shop was going to be her destiny.
However, Elizabeth proved she was smarter than most and made an exodus for Sydney and set up a great vocation there and was later joined by her mum.
Ena loved Sydney with all the things you could buy there and the places to go to so I am happy she was happy for many years before she passed away.
ROSIE:
Rosie was picture post card pretty in her youth.
Tying an apron around her could not hide those big brown eyes or high cheekbones.
She was sought out by the handsome and dapper Peter Young of Levin and they looked a terrific couple.
But for Rosie it was swapping one fruit shop in Kilbirnie for another in Levin at G C Young and Co.
My memory of Rosie in Wellington is vague but I do remember her with the apron wrapped around her at their fruit shop in Oxford Street, Levin.
She appeared happy with her lot and raised good looking children.There was Paul, Michael, Dorothy, Kevin and Katrina.
I would spend some time with Kevin as he was interested in the martial arts so much so that he shot off to Australia to seek masters there.
Peter was a nice guy who was the gentleman fruiterer.
He was always dressed in a black pinstriped suit with a matching waistcoat and he smoked a pipe rather than cigarettes.
Start a conversation with Peter at your peril as the moment he tipped that pipe up to clean out the old tobacco then relight it and you would be standing in discourse with him for hours.
But as a couple Rosie and Peter were just that. It was not like one to be without the other.
5.
PHYLLIS :
I cannot remember Phyllis being in either Sang Lee or Hing Lee.
I have an idea that we could have been overstaffed at the time and they went out and worked at other fruit shops.
Ina I think worked for Uneeda Fruit in Carterton so it is well that Phyllis could have worked out somewhere too.
Her husband was to be another handsome guy and that is something all our brothers in law seemed to be and that was handsome.
Tall with jet black hair , his eyes slightly squinted from probably years in the sun Jimmy Yee swept our Phyllis off her feet. The image of the two of them exchanging drinks on stage at the wedding reception is still strong in my mind.
Phyllis’ home was to be on a market garden at Te Ore Ore Road in Masterton.
We would stay with them practically every year in the school holidays and it was a chance to make some extra money working in the fields.
Phyllis was quite open about her being a market gardener’s wife. It was simply damned hard work.
She was the cook for the whole family of father in law, Jimmy, Ivan and I think David plus others who worked the farm.
It was up early in the morning and resting late at night.
Phyllis was tough stuff and bore these chores and also four great kids. Trevor, Beverly, Richard and Pam.
We spent many hours ,while these kids were kids,at the farm.
Jimmy unfortunately passed away and the children later left the mother’s nest which was now in another part of Masterton.[Coradine Street..??]
We would often drive over the Rimutakas to where Phyllis lived on her own and she would always make us very welcome.
How would I summarize her…??
A hard working woman that was full of spirit and a great love for her kids.
A very matter of fact and likeable person.
6.
SHIRLEY:
Shirley when young was the most outgoing of all the sisters.
She was active in sports with the Chinese Progress Club and these included basketball, table tennis, tennis and whatever else was going at the time.
She attended Wellington Tech as the boys did and I think that here was the big break between the older sisters and the more modern.
She not only exemplified this in thought but also in action and if there was a dance on she was there.
Our house at Homewood Avenue would rock to the latest hit songs as she organized one party after the other.
The quietly good looking and sporting George Ng would win her hand and she was off to the Quality Fruit Shop on the corner of Dixon and Willis Street in Wellington.
This did not dampen her enthusiasm to throw parties she simply had big dinners at their Constable Street home then bigger ones when they moved to Karori.
I think it is safe to summarize Shirley as outgoing, a party loving people person.
I don’t think the years have ever changed this fact.
HELEN :
On the opposite side of the spectrum we had Helen who in her younger years was rather quiet and withdrawn.
However, I believe this to have been some kind of shell that was broken when Shirley got married and Helen was her bridesmaid.
Helen spent a few years at Tech then did her stint at the Zenith in Manners Street.
Then one day a slender, quiet dapper guy with a table tennis bat in his hand won her over.His name was Bing She Chung.
They both spent some time at the Zenith where hard work was the theme under brother Stan, then sensibly departed to Auckland to start their own lives anew in their own fruit shop.
Helen and Bing sired three great kids Caroline, Christina and Stephen.
We would visit them frequently when I had the will to drive to Auckland and stayed in the room where slept the daughter of great light and brilliance Christina,when she was not working for the Microsoft boss Bill Gates.
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I was hoping some brilliance would rub onto me but no, nothing seemed to happen but then maybe the boys who also bunked there picked up the smarts.
Helen seems to be quite happy living in Auckland and hating the heat but the good bit is having a supermarket within walking distance of where you live.
CONNIE:
[Good God it is now 3.35am and I am still struggling through all these sisters. I knew I should not have started..!!
Anyway push on Chun….nothing is achieved without some adversity and if you ain’t gonna do this then no one will..!!]
Connie was the really pretty young girl who quietly attended Tech like the rest of us.
She was never a great one for talk but when she did it was well thought out.
She left Tech and gravitated to the Zenith like most of the others and there she spent many years working like a well oiled machine until we closed.
Connie bore her responsibilities with great credit.
She was a mainstay of the shop and would have been one impossible to replace.
Work it seems is her life and to this day she spends hour upon hour working.
She has tremendous resilience and only once can I recall her being sick and that is when a flu bug wiped out half the city.
Connie also showed me the fundamentals of pan frying vegetables at the shop. She is an excellent cook.
She is definitely a person of her own distinct habits.
JUNE :
[Hurrah…the last one at 3.45 am]
June was the last of the Chun’s to attend the hallowed halls of Wellington Tech. She was a prefect there so she did better than me in that respect.
In fact she graduated to go to University the only Chun to achieve this status.
Thank God someone did it and saved our name…!!
June was to study something like diet stutter…stutter..dietetics… which I take to be the study of foods.
I could have done with some of that info as it just might have averted my heart event.
8.
Come to think of it I never checked out with her all the food and sweets I bought for Kirsten,her daughter ,to see if I was feeding her the right stuff.
But then surely a starving kid after school must do well on an inch thick porterhouse steak, pan fried green beans, all covered with chunky deep fried potatoes and followed by a half pint of ice cream for dessert.
Then of course there was the side trip to the dairy on the way home…!!
So June was the academic in the family and later on worked at the hospital only to give it up then later on work at an old folks home only to give that up too when the work got so tough that her legs turned to jelly.
Well if life in the kitchen was like the ‘F Word’I don’t blame her for leaving.There is more to life than working ourselves to death and now in her retirement years June spends hours in the garden which I think was always her dream.
Now as I look back at the fact that May looked after us and June in the early years the care giving has gone full cycle with June the family’s youngest looking to Mavis, the family’s oldest .
I think this will be June’s legacy.
Right so that’s it folks.
I did what I did not think I could do so I hope you like it.
Regards,
Stan
9th December, 2008.
4.00am
Amended 9/12/08 6.25pm
Amended 9/12/08 11.30pm
