1 'NEIGHBOURHOOD' THEME RELAXING MUSIC Mellons Bay and Cockle Bay are seaside neighbours, adjacent to each other on Auckland's Waitemata Harbour. They're quiet, established communities that work with families. My parents were born in Jamaica, but I had a very English upbringing in Hertfordshire. My wife and I came to NZ nine years ago. I was travelling a lot for work and she was doing her degree. But we wanted to be more hands-on in raising our children. We wanted balance in our lives. Mellons Bay has given us just that. It's a peaceful place where you always get a welcoming smile when you pass someone on the street, no matter what creed or colour. Let's meet some of the locals. In this episode of Neighbourhood ` we'll sample the Portuguese influence on the food of Goa. As a chef, I always wanted to offer soul food to people ` food which looks pretty, but it also touches your soul, and it gives you happiness just like food cooked by your mum. A Chinese artist brings his culture alive. When I paint people, it's not just painting people. And I'm also doing observation about that person, because the person's life experience and their stories will show on their face. A Cockle Bay resident shares her love of the Welsh language. # Calon onest, calon lan. # The thing that's special about Calon Lan is that it basically describes the Welsh love of singing. It's about how Welsh people don't need riches or pearls or gold. All they need is a pure heart, or 'calon lan', um, to sing all day and all night is the translation. And a local teacher explains why he's living his dream. We have a Chinese saying. (SPEAKS CHINESE) Be a person first, learn to be a person first, then only you gain knowledge. My name is Graham Vincent, and this is my neighbourhood. 'NEIGHBOURHOOD' THEME CALM MUSIC FUNKY MUSIC I grew up in Hitchin, a beautiful market town in Hertfordshire. And although my parents tried very hard to assimilate out in the wider white community, at home, our household was ultra-Caribbean from the food to the music. Nowadays I'm into jazz music. (PLAYS JAZZ TUNE) But when I was growing up, reggae was massive in our house. Every Saturday we used to listen to a show called Reggae Time while we cleaned the house. And my dad was a bass player in a reggae band and made it on to TV. Since then, music has continued to thread its way through our lives, from my brother's international hit song, Dirty Cash, to my son, who's in his final year of a music degree. But we're certainly not the only culture that has plenty to celebrate about its musical heritage. (SINGS IN WELSH) The wonderful thing about the Welsh language is that it's just the perfect language to sing in. You can really hear the Welsh landscape and the Welsh love of music come through in the language, you know. Undulation of` of the Welsh tongue just perfectly mirrors, to me, Wales itself. (CONTINUES SINGING) My name's Sarah Harris. I grew up in a small village just outside the town of Wrexham in north Wales, uh, just on the border, um, of Snowdonia National Park. We have music, uh, throughout all of our ancestry, and I'm, sort of, the latest in a line of musicians. This is a photo of my great-great-great-uncle, who was Caradog Roberts, a famous Welsh hymnist, composer and organist. We're very proud of him. He, sort of, started the singing tradition and the music tradition in my family. Some of his hymn tunes are still widely used today, so an exciting thing for me, when I first came over, was that I was part of Cymanfa Ganu which is a Welsh hymn singing festival put on by the Auckland Welsh Society. And I didn't know but one of the hymns that they were singing was Rachie, which was written by Caradog Roberts, my ancestor, which was a really exciting thing for me. You know, I didn't realise how, um` how well-known or how influential he was until, really, I came to NZ. LAUGHTER I think... Calon Lan... Or 'clown'. Lan` Lan. Clown. It's not like 'cl'. It's 'th'. Th... > Yeah, that's it. I express my love of the Welsh language in NZ through singing it. So I do a lot of, uh, choral singing. # Nid wy'n gofyn bywyd moethus. I sing with a eight-voice vocal ensemble called Cappella. The Welsh song that we're rehearsing at the moment is Calon Lan. # Aur y byd na'i berlau man. It's a very famous Welsh hymn, and it's close to the hearts of all Welsh people. # Calon lan yn llawn daioni, MEN HUM ACCOMPANIMENT # Tecach yw na'r lili dlos. The thing that's special about Calon Lan is that, uh, it basically describes the Welsh love of singing. Um, so it's about how, um, you know, Welsh people don't need riches or, um, you know, pearls or gold. All they need is a pure heart, or 'calon lan', um, to sing all day and all night is the translation. Our next concert is up in Ascension Winery in Warkworth. # Calon lan yn llawn daioni, MEN HUM ACCOMPANIMENT # tecach yw na'r lili dlos. # Dim ond calon lan all ganu # Canu'r dydd a chanu'r nos. # I think, uh, NZers are fascinated by the Welsh language because it's not something they generally ever hear. There are certain place names around NZ that are Welsh, like the Brynderwyn hills near here. Um, but I don't think they necessarily make that connection. Um, so hearing Welsh in NZ, um, particularly for expats who've come over, it's a really profound experience for them, hearing their native tongue in song because, uh, you know, they're 12,000 miles away from home. Hiraeth is a word that's not directly translatable into English but, uh, loosely speaking, it means a deep longing or love of home. And that's the word that Welsh people use to describe Wales, the longing for it and the nostalgia that people feel when thinking of Wales when they're away from home. I mean, I feel an incredible sense of hiraeth when I'm singing Calon Lan. Um, you know, it just` it's more than the music to me, and I think to most Welsh people. The music takes them somewhere. It makes them feel an emotion that links them with Wales. And, you know, that's why it's so special to me to sing it. In five or 10 years I'm hoping that we're all still singing together and, yeah, just keep knocking off the big concerts and getting out there and getting more well-known. And part of that is taking different cultures musically to people. And, uh, you know, personally speaking, it's important to me that one of those cultures is the Welsh culture. FUNKY MUSIC This is my parents on their wedding day. We weren't rich in financial terms, but my parents worked very hard and were proud of their achievements and position in our community. As kids, we were very confident and held our own at school. Well, there were seven of us boys, so I guess we were always going to be a force to be reckoned with, regardless. All of my brothers still live in England, roughly about 20 miles of where I was born. And whilst technology does a great job of bridging the gap between us, my recent visit home highlighted how much I miss my family. So whenever we cook at home, we always bring a slice of the Caribbean into the mix. Whether it be curry goat or rice and peas, it always brings me closer to home. As a chef, I always wanted to offer soul food to people ` food which looks pretty, but it also touches your soul, and it gives you happiness just like, um, food cooked by your mum. My mother used to work. And I was a teenager, I used to be alone, and I always used to miss her cooking. I was thinking, 'Oh, let's start, you know, experimenting.' And I've started cooking. And I was thinking` I'm thinking, 'I'm not bad either. I mean, I can cook good food.' I was 17 when I joined culinary school in India. And I always wanted to travel around the world, but my mother said that you need to get more education, and then I decided to do my Level 5 in NZ. My husband is from Mumbai, but I met him in NZ. We've been running Xacuti for the past one and a half year. It's been a wonderful experience and, um, we are doing, um, modern cuisine with a lot of influences from Goa and Portuguese. So the sauces have that kick from Goa, but all the meat and all the cooking method is very European. Portuguese came to Goa in 1648, and they ruled for almost 450 years. At that point, that area then had chilli, so they got their own ingredients. And that's how, you know` The beautiful marriage of two cultures and two cuisines met there, and it created its own new cuisine. I'm cooking my favourite dish, which is snapper stuffed with crab meat, and it's marinated in green chutney with, uh, fresh coriander, mint, ginger. And then I'm gonna make a batter out of rice flour, semolina. It will be really good. It's my favourite dish. Fried fish is my mother's speciality, and I have added my take on it by putting crab meat in it. When I was a kid, my mother actually never used to allow me in the kitchen cos, you know, I'll break something, or... But I could smell and I could say, 'Ahh, today's lunch going to be awesome.' (CHUCKLES) Where I have made this pocket here, I'm gonna stuff the crab meat in it. Goa is situated on the west coast of India, very close to Mumbai. Its coastal side, it's called Konkani cuisine. Definitely you will get more seafood, uh, more use of, uh, coconut in it. That cuisine is absolutely different than other parts of India. If you go to a northern part of India, you get a lot of use of dry spices. But when you come to coastal side, you get a lot of use of fresh ingredients like fresh garlic, ginger, coriander, coconut and chillies. And my mother has a lot of influence of that cuisine in her cooking. It's always good to use your hands to make a batter. The granny used to say that, you know, when you use your hands to mix your batter, make your food or eat your food, you get the` get the vibration of that person and you put his love and, you know, you know, his kind of piece of soul in there. And that's why the food tastes so good. And also in kitchen we say that it's God's spatula. And you also can feel the consistency ` if it's right. My dad was a very busy man, so there was only one day we used to have meals together. That was Sunday and I used to look forward for it. And Sunday used to be a grand feast. Me and my father used to go to a local fish market. We used to buy fresh fish. And then Dad used to get it and he used to clean it, and then Mum will come in the kitchen, and she'll start preparing all the masalas and marinating the fish. And it was a whole process, watching Mum cook. So it was a very beautiful time. Hello. Hi. My friends are coming over for dinner tonight. How are you? I'm good, thank you. Good, good. Wow. This looks amazing. (LAUGHS) All right. Bon appetit. I met really important people in my life in NZ ` my partner, my friends. I'm definitely gonna travel around the world, but I think I will definitely come back to NZ. So NZ is our home now. REFLECTIVE MUSIC My parents separated when I was 13. And at 15, my younger brother and I were sent to California to live with our mother. We weren't enrolled in school, and we lived in a small gated community, so we didn't really get to meet very many people. We were so homesick that we ended up returning back to the UK after just four months. Now I'm a parent myself and I have migrated, I realise how tough it must have been for my mother to move to another country alone, send for her children, only for them to return back to the UK four months later. Moving to another country almost always means leaving someone you love behind. No wonder so many migrants dream of reuniting with their families. LIGHT-HEARTED MUSIC In Malaysia we have three main races ` the Malay, the Chinese and the Indians. And I was third generation of Chinese Malaysian. If you look at some Chinese books, you would see they've got different virtues on a list. Top of the rank of the list of virtues in Chinese culture is filial piety. It means respect and love towards your parents unconditionally. When we were young, my parents did push us hard because my parents were not very educated themselves. My parents were basically a typical middle class family, so they work very hard, you know, for all their lives. So they would like to see us do better than them. I remember there was one incident that I am not very proud of. I'd made a mistake at school. Being 14 at that time, we were joking around with friends, and we had a saying ` 'baichi'. You know, baichi in Chinese means 'moron'. So, we just say it to each other with friends, with classmates. And in the classroom, I was goofing around at the back. My friend told me, 'Hey, the teacher has been calling you.' I thought, 'Ugh, moron.' You know, just like a sigh. 'Moron.' And the teacher actually heard me and thought that I actually said that to him. I think a week later, I received a letter to my parents. But my parents were always busy. They were not home sometimes. So we get to take the mail from the mailbox. And I intercepted that letter. I knew it was coming because I had already been, uh, disciplined at school. So I` I opened the letter, and I read it. And my heart sank. This is in Chinese, OK, so... (READS IN MANDARIN) So, it's basically a notice from school urging the parents to discipline their children a bit more strictly. I was taught to be filial, to` to be respectful, uh, to my parents. I thought, 'No, they would probably slap me or they might keep me grounded or cane me.' But that was nothing compared to me knowing that I've hurt their feelings, I've lost trust with them. So I did hide it, uh, in my bedroom for, I think, about a month before I finally plucked up enough courage to tell them the truth and show them the letter. When I showed them the letter, my mum and dad, they were shocked. They couldn't believe what I'd done. But at the same time, my mum asked me, 'What happened?' And they let me explain myself. And, of course, they said, 'Oh, you were being silly, and that's not acceptable. You let yourself down. 'You let yourself into this situation, 'so you could have avoided the situation but you didn't. 'And you were being silly, so that was bad enough. So you deserve it. Don't you do this again.' So this letter, it is something that I keep to remind myself I have to be responsible for my actions. And something that now I would like to teach my sons and my students. Becoming a teacher to me is like a destiny. Right, I'm gonna read you some text in Chinese, and then I'm going to read to you the English translation. (SPEAKS MANDARIN) means students... I try to bring as much of my culture as I can into my classroom when I teach, to share with them a lot of the Chinese virtues in the Confucius kind of thinking. I see value as very important ` a critical part of learning. And I always enforce in, uh, treating their mind and their hearts first before you gain knowledge. And we have a Chinese saying ` (SPEAKS MANDARIN) Be a person first` Learn to be a person first, then only you gain knowledge. SCHOOL BELL RINGS I always tell my class it's not a matter of how you fall, it's more a matter of how you get back up. It's one big watermelon, remember that. ALL EXHALE ALL: One big watermelon. Cut in half. One side for you. And one side for me. Well, he's really fun, and he makes everything more fun and, like, more of an activity rather than work. He's very passionate about things, and he's got a really cheerful personality. Mr Chong is inspiring to us students cos he just teaches just in a brilliant way, and he involves his culture in learning. It does make me smile when I look back and see how naughty I was, you know, all the mistakes I made, when I can see it in the children. And sometimes I feel like that actually makes me real. And that makes it easier for me to relate to them. And I do think that how I have gone through my past has helped me how to deal with the children these days. CALM ELECTRONIC MUSIC Finding consistent work as an actor is never easy. But I think that finding work as an actor of colour is even harder, which is why I'm building a career as a personal trainer too. I look at the different cultures that exist in NZ's largest cities, compare that to the colour of the faces seen on the locally made TV, there's a lot more diversity out there than what we see on the screen. It's a shame, really, because I think the arts can play a major part in bridging the cultural divide. PEACEFUL MUSIC Art is part of my life. I do drawings every day. I paint. Every moment when I'm driving or walking on the street, I'm still thinking what I should do for my new project. My name is Alvin Xiong. I was born in Guangzhou, China. I immigrated here with my parents in 2001. What I'm drawing, it's architecture of Uxbridge, the old one and a new one, because in this community we have a new art centre. I think, um, Uxbridge is very good for the local people. People don't need to go to the city to attend art exhibitions. We also have many very good artists living around Mellons Bay or Howick area. And Uxbridge gives us an opportunity. We can meet each other and we can share our ideas. And we can have exhibitions together. It's very good for the local community. I started to learn how to draw when I was 7 years old. And at that time I also learned piano, but the Chinese education system, you have so many homeworks to do, so I had to drop one off. So I kept doing my art. I came into NZ to study my Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts. When I do my oil painting, first of all I start a draft to think of my idea, what I want to achieve in the oil painting. And then I will look for a model, and then I take some photos of the model. I will just base on the model and create my work. Portraits of people is the hardest subject to paint. Different people have different character. When I paint people, it's not just painting people. And I'm also doing observation about that person because the person's life experience and their stories will show on their face. When I'm doing my art, I always don't want to do, you know, the normal thing. So when I do portraits, I don't want to just draw a face or draw, you know` draw a body. I want to add some interesting thing inside. I will get some inspiration from surrealism. I learned, um, all my oil painting techniques in China at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Because the academy, their education system was influenced by Russia, we don't practise Chinese painting. We don't use ink or the rice paper. When we practise, it's fully concentrated on Western theory. We learn the technique from the old masters such as Rembrandt and van Gogh and da Vinci. NZ fine art education definitely changed my thinking and my art practice because, I think, at Elam School of Fine Arts, they teach me how to think and how to develop my idea deeper. And it opens my mind how to be a contemporary artist. When I studied in China, I used oil painting as my major medium. But here, I think I want to change another medium. So I think light is a quite interesting medium and new technology. My work at a gallery at the moment is, um, part of my Elam graduation works. The work, um` I put a motion sensor there. Which means when there's no audience there, what you can see is just a white canvas on a wall. I use the artist's gesture and the audience body movement to complete the work. I think light is a very special medium. It's hard to work with because we can't touch it, and we can't manipulate. We need to use it in a creative way, and then we can use the power of light to enhance the work. I want people to see the work from a far perspective and they see just a white canvas, and they are curious. 'What's happening there? Why is there a white canvas on the wall?' And when they walk in, the work is just on. I want to be a professional artist in the future, making works and exhibitions and curating shows for NZ artists and Chinese artists. And I also think that as a contemporary artist, you need to open your mind to learn different cultures, and` which I think will give you more ideas, or more material, more inspiration when you create your work. UPBEAT MUSIC I visited Jamaica several times, most recently when my dad had cancer some years back. It's really funny how even though I'm black and I have Jamaican parents, they'd always see me as English. They literally used to call my dad, 'Hey, English!' even though he'd returned to Jamaica more than 30 years ago. Jamaica is a beautiful country but has its problems. It never really felt like home to me, but this place does. Whenever I return from my travels, I always feel like I belong as soon as I see the beach or hear the people on the street greeting me. Mellons Bay is home for me. Captions by Madison Batten. Edited by Tracey Dawson. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016