Eva Wong-Ng

Eva Wong-Ng (née Hing) is an author and historian, best known for collecting and retelling Chinese New Zealand history. A prominent Chinese New Zealand oral historian, she has completed over 100 oral histories on Chinese New Zealand.

Ng was born at home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland on 17 November 1934 to immigrant parents from the Canton (Guangdong) province in China, William Hing (aka Wong Gum Jook) and Doris Leong (aka Leong Yee Jun). Eva and her family’s surname Hing came about when Eva’s grandfather, Wong Wah Hing’s given name was presumed to be his family name, due to a misunderstanding about Chinese name order.

Ng’s father had arrived earlier in Aotearoa from Fiji, where he had attended high school and learnt English in 1919, paying the Chinese poll tax. He returned to Zhongshan, China, in 1926 to marry Doris and returned with her to Auckland in 1927. They ran fruit shops on Broadway in Newmarket, including the Sing Lee & Co Fruit Shop, which was open until 1969.

Ng was the eldest of three sisters: Ehlin, Wailin, and Meilin. After their mother passed away giving birth to Meilin, their father married Chiu Su Ha, and the sisters gained two half-siblings.

Eva attended Epsom Girls Grammar School. When not helping in the fruit shop after school, she would spend her free time at Auckland Museum, the park, or playing tennis with Wailin and Ehlin. They would go to Chinese lessons with a Chinese church minister, and Eva had violin lessons.

Eva attended Auckland University until she was accepted as a pharmacy apprentice with Arthur Kemp in Panmure. Four years later, she became a registered pharmacist, making her one of the first in New Zealand of Chinese descent. It was uncommon for a Chinese woman to go into a profession at that time. After meeting Dr James Ng from Hakatere Ashburton, a medical resident at Rotorua Hospital, they married in 1960 and moved to Ōtepoti Dunedin, where they raised three children, Denise, Stephen and Jeffrey, and lived for the next six decades.

It wasn’t until her children were older that she began writing. In the author’s foreword to the 2nd edition of Chinatown Girl, Ng said:

[Jade Snow Wong’s] Fifth Chinese Daughter was the book that changed my life when I read it as a teenager. It opened my eyes to the life of another overseas-raised Chinese child whose early experiences paralleled mine. It was so reassuring to read that there was someone else who had also experienced the dilemma of coping in two different worlds, that of a traditional Chinese home-life and a Western school education.

Ng said that this book inspired her to try writing something to help other overseas-raised Chinese children cope with living with a dual background of home and school. Ng’s experience growing up in a Chinese community in a European society in New Zealand, during and after the war years, is echoed in her writing. Historical details are woven into her stories, seen from her view, living in those times.

Shadow Man (1999) was written about her upbringing in Auckland in the 1940s and 1950s. She wrote in her preface: “This was a time when prejudice against Chinese still existed, though less intensely than that suffered by earlier generations. Consequently, we children were brought up to be as unobtrusive as possible and keep a low profile.”

Ng wrote for school resources, such as the New Zealand School Journals, about New Zealand's Chinese history. Her best-known work is Chinatown Girl (2005), a children’s historical fiction set in 1942 during World War II in Auckland’s Greys Avenue, then known as Auckland’s Chinatown. Her short story Kwong Tao Uncle, from her book Shadow Man (1999), is included in Nanjing City’s Read for Future anthology in the UNESCO Creative Cities of Literature network. Ng is poised to publish a third book in 2025. Titled ‘Daughter of Two Cultures’, it will be a hybrid memoir collection of short stories, essays and poems.

Since 1959, she and her husband Jim have gathered primary material relating to Chinese New Zealanders, consisting of notebooks, research notes, papers, letters and photographic negatives from the first arrival of Chinese in New Zealand in 1865 well into the 1900s. In December 2017, they founded the New Zealand Chinese Heritage Research Charitable Trust to collect, preserve, and make available New Zealand Chinese history.

The collection, known as the Ng New Zealand Chinese Heritage Collection, is recognised by UNESCO on the Aotearoa New Zealand Memory of the World Register as a collection of national importance. The pair also supported and advised Toitū Settlers Museum on their representation of Otago Chinese history.

Eva and Jim also bought the Lawrence Chinese Camp land in Lawrence in Tuapeka, Otago, in 2004, the earliest and largest gold-mining era Chinese settlement in New Zealand, to preserve the historical site. It is now a category 1 New Zealand Heritage Historic Place, managed by a charitable trust.

2005 — Chinatown Girl: The Diary of Silvey Chan, Auckland, 1942, Scholastic New Zealand Limited

1999 — Shadow Man, Driving Creek Press

1992 — Amongst Ghosts: memories and thoughts of a New Zealand-Chinese family, Learning Media, Ministry of Education

2006 — NZ Post Children’s Book Awards, Finalist

2006 — Storylines Notable Book, Chinatown Girl