Chinese-Australian author racially abused at Chinese restaurant in Auckland

Chinese-Australian writer Louisa Lim, a guest at the Auckland Writers Festival, says she was racially abused while eating at a Chinese restaurant in central Auckland.

While dining alone on Saturday night, two men entered the restaurant speaking loudly and saying a ‘good Asian’ is a contradiction in terms, Lim said. One of them said that they’d come to the Auckland Writers Festival to hear “a good New Zealand writer”.

When she confronted the men, she was told it was just a joke, was questioned why she was offended and then told to go home by another diner, she said.

Lim who is a former correspondent for the BBC and NPR, was invited to the Auckland Writers Festival to speak about her book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, and speak on two panels, ‘The books that made me’ and ‘Seeing Yellow’.

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The morning following, Lim shared her experience to the audience of Seeing Yellow, a panel about anti-Asian racism.

The panel also included the Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon, sociopolitical commentator Tze Ming Mok, and essayist Rose Lu.

“We’re at a Writers Festival all day talking and thinking about the power of words to uplift and educate and do all these incredible things. And then suddenly I’m just feeling this full, ugly power of words that I hadn’t been expecting at all,” Lim said.

“I think I might have said, ‘I’m sorry, excuse me, but do you realise that was incredibly offensive?’” Lim said. “I guess the fact that I don’t look that Chinese often allows people to unleash their inner racist.

“But this was a Chinese restaurant surrounded by Chinese people, and it was shocking.”

Lim said another table of diners started shouting at her when she confronted the men.

“There was a woman who was quite drunk with her husband, and they started shouting at me, ‘where are you from?’” Lim told Stuff.

Lim said she was told by the woman to “f… off” and go home.

The restaurant owners didn’t do anything and there were other Asian people in the restaurant, Lim said. She wasn’t sure if the owners knew what was happening, she said. They have been approached for comment by Stuff.

“In that moment, I was like five years old, in the playground in London, hearing kids shouting at me ‘Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees’.

“That’s when you realise that there are spaces that you didn’t know that were not yours to enter. And they’re everywhere, even in Chinese restaurants.”

She said she returned to her hotel and cried. “It’s been decades since that has happened to me”, Lim told the panel.

Co-panelist, Mok “was so shocked” that people would come to central Auckland, which is nearly a third Asian, walk into a Chinese restaurant and start being abusive about Asians.”

Foon said “we need allies to support the minorities in our country, and to be upstanders”.

Chris Tse, the New Zealand poet laureate who curated the series for the Auckland Writers Festival featuring Asian writers, was “fuming” when he heard about it.

“I was in two minds about programmes to think about racism because I feel like it’s been done before, but it’s a conversation we still need to have.”

“It just reinforces that we still have a long way to go.”