Helene Wong. Photo/Akura Makea-Pardington
Going in short order from lampooning Prime Minister Robert Muldoon to working for him may well have been one of the strangest moments in Helene Wong's interesting life.
"No one could have predicted it," the actress and writer laughs. "I was part of a Victoria University revue - although we'd all actually left university - with people like John Clarke, Roger Hall and Cathy Downes and we were endlessly satirising Piggy. He was a wonderful target and we loved taking him on."
So when she was approached to join his office as an adviser on social policy her initial reaction was disbelief. "I didn't like him or his politics," Wong says. "It seemed unthinkable."
But in 1978 she became Muldoon's first female social policy adviser, recognising that only a few people are invited to work for a prime minister "and as a sociologist it was a field I was interested in".
But by the mid-1980s Wong had heeded the siren call of the silver screen and left politics to work as an actor, script consultant and director, although always with a hankering to do more of her own writing.
"And it was then that The Listener asked me to write a weekly movie review. I can't tell you how many days I spent on that first review, it was terrifying."
She spent 20 years writing for the magazine, retiring last year, and only ever walking out of one movie. "I tended to grit my teeth and stay the course," Wong says of the duds. "But I have no shame in saying I walked out of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 after 10 minutes."
Born in Taihape and raised in Wellington, Wong says difficulty finding acting roles turned her to writing and directing documentaries. "But I'm getting more auditions now than I ever have and I think it's because of the number of migrants - there's an increased Asian market."
The oldest of three sisters, Wong is the daughter of New Zealand-born Dolly and Willie, who came to New Zealand aged 8 accompanied by his father. After delivering the boy to his uncle, Willie's father returned to China. Dolly, sent to China in her teens for a Confucian education after her Kiwi schooling, had her marriage arranged in China.
"It hadn't even crossed my mind that she might have had an arranged marriage," Wong says, "but my mother wanted to tell us about it.
"Their fathers knew one another and were from neighbouring villages. They brought in a matchmaker to make sure they weren't blood relatives and my mother was told that if she wasn't married by 18 she'd be left on the shelf. In that generation, you were loyal to the family and didn't challenge decisions made on your behalf."
The easiest way to deal with the racism she experienced as a child was to deny her Chinese-ness, Wong says. "Like good Chinese children we kept our heads down and didn't respond. We found the best way was to be invisible and immerse ourselves in Kiwi culture so people wouldn't notice you."
She first visited China in 1980, going with her parents to her father's ancestral village, and says it was a life-changing experience where she felt the first "faint impulse" to write her story and for the first time embraced her heritage and culture.
"I had an incredible - and unexpected - emotional reaction that left me with a lot of questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What's being Chinese got to do with it? I knew I would have to express it in some way."
Eventually she focused on how the experience impacted her identity as a person of Chinese descent living in New Zealand - the result was Being Chinese, the title inspired by her friend Michael King's 1985 classic Being Pakeha. Published last year, the memoir, Wong says, has received the biggest response from New Zealand-born Chinese.
"There's still a level of racism here that young people are well aware of, but what they don't understand is how long it's been going on - every so often in New Zealand being Chinese becomes a problem for other people."