Pork and Poll Taxes

A school assessment that would not let go

Talia Pua found the subject of her first play as a teenager, researching a high school drama assessment. Where classmates picked established theatre practitioners, she went looking at Chinese history in Aotearoa and landed on the poll tax levied on Chinese migrants. What she made of it then was, by her own description, very Brechtian — a five-minute monologue with no story, just ideas and critiques.

The material stayed with her after school. In 2019 she developed it into Pork and Poll Taxes through a mentorship with Proudly Asian Theatre, working with producer Marianne Infante and director Chye-Ling Huang. Pua's parents emigrated from Malaysia, and she has described her own Chinese ancestry as belonging to a different strand of the diaspora from the goldfields families the play is about — a distance she has been open about rather than smoothing over.

Proudly Asian Theatre itself began in 2013, founded by actors Huang and James Roque as Pretty Asian Theatre and renamed in 2016 after its first original production. The company exists to get Asian artists making original work in New Zealand, and Pork and Poll Taxes is the kind of first play its mentoring arm was built to produce. The co-producer is Hand Pulled Collective; funding has come from Creative New Zealand, Auckland Live, Auckland Unlimited and the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust.

The history underneath it

The Chinese Immigrants Act 1881 imposed a £10 poll tax on Chinese people arriving in New Zealand — roughly $1,770 in current money — and capped arrivals by ship tonnage. The charge was later raised to £100, a figure put at about $20,000 today, which is the sum that shapes the world of the play: a debt that could take years of market gardening or gold-sluicing to clear, and that kept wives, mothers and daughters in China while the men went ahead.

Chinese labourers had been invited to work the goldfields in the first place. The hostility came afterwards, organised through bodies such as the Anti-Chinese League and the White New Zealand League. The tax stood for four decades before being lifted in 1944, and the Crown did not apologise for it until 2002, under Helen Clark.

Pua's characters are invented; the frame around them is not. Her stated aim was to put the women who stayed behind at the centre, against a body of poll-tax storytelling that has tended to follow the men who left.

The 2021 premiere

Pork and Poll Taxes 人頭猪税 ran at the Herald Theatre in the Aotea Centre from 10 to 14 August 2021, written and directed by Pua — her debut at both. It was eighty minutes without an interval, rated 15 and up, played by an all-Chinese cast covering every role including the Pākehā ones, mostly in English with Cantonese threaded through. The season sold out a fortnight before opening.

The story followed Jiu Choy, who pays the poll tax to bring his son Kam Loi to New Gold Mountain, while his mother, wife and daughter wait out the separation in a China of its own upheavals. The father's intentions are not what his son believes them to be, and the play turns on that gap.

Reviews were strong. Theatre Scenes called it a moving tribute to those affected by the poll tax and by divisive, racist immigration policy, and a resounding success. Theatreview's notice was written from the position of a descendant, grateful to ancestors whose stories could not be told better. The script went on to be a finalist for the Adam NZ Play Award in 2021 and won Playmarket's b4 25 Play Award in 2022.

The rewrite, and a change of director

The 2026 season is not a revival of the 2021 staging. Pua went back into the research and pulled parliamentary debate from the late nineteenth century — members of the House discussing what they called the Chinese problem — into the script itself, so the argument that produced the tax is heard in the words its architects used.

The other structural change is that Pua has handed over the direction. Chye-Ling Huang, her mentor on the original development, directs; Pua is in the cast, playing Jiu Choy's daughter. Darren Young plays Jiu Choy and Nikita Tu-Bryant his wife Shui Ching, with Dennis Zhang and Xiao Hu completing a company of five.

Speaking before the season, Huang framed the play as the story of something repeated again and again. Young described characters seeking a better life overseas and meeting racism and prejudice for it. Pua put it more broadly: the poll tax, in her account, becomes a symbol for every kind of injustice a migrant has had to face. The company has also been blunt that the material reads as current rather than settled.

Where it stands now

The second season opened at the Herald Theatre on 16 September 2026 and runs to 19 September — four performances, presented by Proudly Asian Theatre and Hand Pulled Collective with Auckland Live. Tickets are listed between $30.59 and $76.46. The show is recommended for ages 13 and over, with warnings for violence, racism, coarse language, haze and loud sound, and under-14s need an accompanying adult. A post-show question-and-answer session with the production team followed the Friday 18 September performance, and Auckland Live has published a virtual accessibility tour of the venue.

The first notice of the new version arrived on 18 September 2026, when Sam Brooks reviewed it for Dramatic Pause. His verdict was that this is a lot of play, meant as the largest compliment he could pay it, and that the through-line is people acting out of love in ways that cause harm.

What the staging actually does

Two design decisions carry the production. Pākehā characters are played in masks, which Brooks found viscerally uncomfortable in the right way, and a stand of poplar trees doubles as metaphor and as a surface for projection. He called both proper theatre.

The performances that land hardest are the women's. Xiao Hu, as the matriarch, delivers what Brooks rated among the best monologues he has seen on a New Zealand stage; Tu-Bryant draws reams of subtext out of Shui Ching; Pua acts as well as she writes. The men fare less well in his account — Young and Zhang are credible but read as mates rather than father and son.

The criticisms are worth stating plainly, because the run is short and they are fixable in part. At two or three pivotal moments the sound design, lighting and movement collide and the actors end up close to inaudible and badly underlit. A five-hander covering this many relationships leans on doubling, which blunts the investment in some of them, and a couple of the storytelling devices arrive late enough to muddy a structure that already jumps in time. Brooks still came down on the side of the play: it will resonate, and it will hurt.