Zengcheng New Zealanders Book Review

http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3521/artsbooks/9907/immigrant_song.html

You might meet a stranger at a wedding or a funeral and learn they are your “village cousin” without quite knowing what that means. At other family occasions, an ageing grandparent can be coaxed to tell stories from the days before New Zealand. These stories are fragments from another life: summer days spent tending water buffalo, the cloying perfume of lychees ripening on the tree, the sharp odour of saltpetre and the staccato percussion of firecrackers lit to keep bad spirits at bay.