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Tze Ming Mok
2006 New Generation artist
Writer
Born in 1978, Tze Ming has, according to her previous online bookmark library “del.icio.us”, the following top six interests in order of link entry frequency: politics, literature, evil, language, tools and humanity.
Her poetry, fiction, reviews, features and opinions have been published in Landfall, JAAM, Sport, Trout, Meanjin, the Listener, the Sunday Star Times, and the Public Address weblog Yellow Peril. She says of her writing, "there are too many different bits of it now for me to describe it coherently, and nothing I said about it before applies anymore. If the same thing is happening to the country, I might have a chance of blending in."
Tze Ming guest-edited the May 2006 issue, Landfall, Borderline, which "roll[ed] in the cultural muddle of contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand." Her short story Daily Special appears in The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 2, edited by Fiona Kidman. Her poem An Arabic Poetry Lesson in Jakarta was selected as one of the Best New Zealand Poems in 2004. In that same year her essay Race You There won the Landfall Essay Competition, an honour she shared with Martin Edmond. In 2007 she took up the Creative New Zealand Red Gate residency in Beijing, before moving to live in Geneva.
Under the classification standards of the People's Republic of China, Tze Ming has “the reading level of a half-literate peasant”. She holds an MA in Political Studies from the University of Auckland. She is first-generation New Zealand-born Chinese, and her family is from a bewildering array of East and Southeast Asian countries.
Most recently Tze Ming has a piece published in Grant Smithie's book Soundtrack by Craig Potton Publishing and her short story Tunnel of Love appeared in issue #69 of the Kyoto Journal. She will be appearing at the PEN International festival 'Free the Word' in London April 2008, as backup singer for poet Yang Lian.
"Orwell's blessing in Why I Write has always given me comfort, helping make sense of my fears that, on one hand, my political writing is didactic, and on the other, that my fiction and poetry are self-indulgence. Both of these are doubtless true. I'll never be one of those political writers who says: 'I'm not a political writer, don't pigeonhole me', because it's far too late for that - and anyway, being marked as 'political' rather than 'Asian' or 'multicultural' or 'young' or 'hip' is really the least of my concerns." Tze Ming Mok.
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Landfall 207
Tze Ming Mok
Photo by Gareth Shute
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