Lee Suckling: Why my DNA test left me more than a little shocked

Should the results of a DNA test change anything about you? Photo / Getty Images

A spit-and-send DNA test is an odd Christmas gift to receive, I'll admit. After more than two months of waiting for my results, I finally have my ethnic makeup drilled down by percentages. Yet rather than feeling a sense of security of who I am, all this did – at least initially – was confuse me.

My family has always been reasonably assured of our heritage. My father's side is as Pākehā as possible; they came to New Zealand on the First Four Ships and there's a recreation of the original family business shopfront (a cobbler) in the "old Christchurch street" at Canterbury Museum.

On my mother's side, alongside Pākehā, we're Chinese and Māori from the Otago region. The Chinese side of my heritage is something we take a lot of pride in: those ancestors have been here since the late 1800s and owned fruit and vegetable stores and tearooms in the lower South Island.

My mum raised us on respective of Kiwi-Chinese culture, food, and expectations, yet this is something I've always struggled to convey to others because their default is to squint as they look at my eyes and say, "I don't see it?" Our Māori heritage was also recognised culturally in the home through community participation and use of te reo.

A few weeks ago when my DNA results came in they confirmed my Chinese ancestry, albeit only 14 per cent (which was less than I'd been led to believe my entire life). Eighty-five per cent of my blood is British.

If you do the math, that only leaves 1 per cent to form my Maori blood (the DNA service I used broadly categorised this as Polynesian). This was perhaps the biggest shock of all.

I'm registered with my iwi, Ngāi Tahu. I've been ticking Māori (alongside New Zealand European and Chinese) in official forms and surveys that ask for my ethnic groups for 33 years. One of my brothers, a former professional rugby player, has been a member of Māori teams.

To learn that I was 1 per cent Māori made me feel like a fraud. As if I should no longer have the right to call myself as such. I've had to contend with having a majority-Caucasian appearance my whole life and now when someone asks the cringe-worthy question, "How Māori are you really? 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64...?", I actually have the scientific answer.

This is something many urukehu – fair-headed, fair-skinned Māori – regularly deal with. We are forced to defend our bloodlines and are questioned as to why they don't line up with our facial traits and skin colour. I don't think anybody means any offence when asking said questions; it's purely because society thinks of ethnicity only as something you can "see", rather than what you can "feel".

And herein lies my internal difficulty. Do I still have the right to "feel" as Māori (and as Chinese) as I always have? Despite learning that scientific testing has confirmed I have fewer of the genetic alleles of these groups than I've always believed?

When I found out I was 85 per cent white and only 15 per cent a person of colour, I felt lost; as if all the pundits who have expressed doubt about my ethnic makeup were correct all along. My brother, the former Māori rugby team player, even said to me: "Do you think Ngāi Tahu would have a problem if they found out we only have 1 per cent Māori whakapapa?"

It has taken discussions with other people of colour to bring back my feelings of authenticity about who I am. The "legitimacy" I thought was required is rooted in the misguided idea there are gatekeepers who can decide who's in, and who's out.

In reality, race is much more than others' perceptions of you and your appearance. It's about the sense of belonging you have to your heritage, no matter how "much" or how "little" of the genetically-correlating DNA you possess.

I have a shared understanding of the world and a connection with other people who are both Chinese and Māori. I don't need anybody else to qualify my existence or my experience. I know now, after a bit of soul searching, how I feel from within is the only validation I need. There's an undefined "New Zealander" ethnicity on the census for a reason. Kiwis' identities transcend when our families arrived here, and what blood runs through our veins.