Chinatown Girl Book / Publication / Landmark Writing

Chinatown Girl is a children’s historical fiction book set in 1942 during World War Two in Auckland’s Greys Avenue, then known as the city’s Chinatown. The story is told through the diary entries of Silvey Chan, a 12-year-old Chinese girl living on Greys Avenue.

In 2002, Scholastic invited Ng to submit a work for the New Zealand ‘My Story’ series of historical fiction for adults. She was briefed to write it in diary form in whatever location and time, so long as it was historically accurate.

The year’s worth of diary entries centre Silvey’s reflections on a school family history project where she learns about the life in China that she feels lucky to have avoided and how Chinese people have historically been unwelcome in New Zealand.

Woven throughout are vignettes from her classes at Beresford Street School and Chinese School, an opium den visit, befriending three Chinese-American soldiers, and her interactions with a boy who keeps asking her out. Silvey recounts everyday details such as drying fish, learning how to kill chickens, air raid rehearsals at school, and the impact of wartime rationing.

While the story and its protagonist are fictional, some events and characters are based on actual historical events and real people. The book includes historical notes and archival images. Ng wrote in the acknowledgements, “some generously shared their experiences of living and growing up in Greys Avenue’s Chinatown or arranged meetings with those who could.” In the foreword of the second addition, she added:

Although I had lived in Auckland in my youth – not Greys Avenue, though I knew of its colourful reputation – I still had to search archives for photos and history of the area. At the library I looked through all the 1942 newspapers for details, such as what films were screened and when and in which picture theatre, the times of tides and what the weather was like and so on.

Author Vanessa Hatley-Owen described the book as:

historically accurate and full of everyday details. Chinatown Girl offers an insight to the realities of life during WWII with rationing and schools merging, as well as the prejudice faced by the Chinese community in the very early days of New Zealand, with Silvey’s grandfather telling her about the Poll Tax that only Chinese immigrants had to pay.

Published as part of Scholastic’s My New Zealand Story series, Chinatown Girl has been used as a teaching resource for school-aged children to learn about Chinese culture in New Zealand during World War II. Writer and history teacher Trevor Agnew described the book as “the best account of NZBC (New Zealand-born Chinese) children adjusting to life within their two cultures.” In 2006, it was shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Awards and was recognised as a Storylines Notable Book.