Tze Ming Mok
Writer

Biography

Tze Ming Mok - Writer

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery... I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed."

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.

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 appeared at the PEN International festival 'Free the Word' in London April 2008, as backup singer for poet Yang Lian.

She was one of the contributors to Lost in Translation: New Zealand Stories edited by Marco Sonzogni published at the beginning of 2010 by Random House. This collection of entertaining stories reflects New Zealand society in "provocative, humane and intriguing ways".

Tze Ming currently lives in London.

"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 pigeon hole 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.