New Zealand Writers

MOK, Tze Ming

A writer concerned with displaced lives.

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MOK, Tze Ming (1978- ) is a poet, fiction writer and essayist.

A New Zealand Chinese of migrant parents, Tze Ming Mok was born in Auckland, and educated at the University of Auckland. After university Mok travelled and lived in Chengdu in the People’s Republic of China and Cairo before returning to live in New Zealand.

Tze Ming Mok’s poems and stories have been published in literary journals including Landfall, Sport, Poetry NZ, Meanjin, JAAM and The Listener. As a writer Mok is concerned with what she calls, ‘tricks of language, and fractures in translated lives.’ When Mok describes her aim as a writer, she says she ‘try[s] to produce work that, like me, is always out of place. I’d characterise my work as not so much ‘magical realist’, but as ‘futurist surrealism’, historical re-visioning, myth, or downright lies - all aiming to answer the question: ‘can you imagine a way out of this mess?’.

In 2004 Mok’s poem ‘An Arabic Poetry Lesson in Jakarta’ was selected as one of the Best New Zealand Poems 2004. In that same year, Mok’s essay ‘Race You There’ won the Landfall Essay Competition, which she shared with Martin Edmond. As in much of her work, ‘Race You There’ is an examination of what it means to be Asian in New Zealand, and why Asian communities need to address the Treaty of Waitangi.

Mok is often described as a new critical voice from the New Zealand Chinese communities. In 2004 she led an anti-racist march to Parliament in response to hate crimes in Wellington. She has in the past worked as a refugee status officer and refugee legal advisor. Today she is working for the Human Rights Commission.

Tze Ming Mok lives in Auckland.

LK

Updated Information

'Race You There' also appears in Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves, edited by Russell Brown (Activity Press, 2005).

Mok's short story 'Daily Special' appears in The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 2, edited by Fiona Kidman (Random House NZ, 2005).