Field Notes: Gina Wong

Gina Wong lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara with her husband Koryn. She’s a Community Innovation Worker and an Elder at Lifepoint Church—she’s also a first-class sourdough baker. Here, she talks to John about her life and journey with God, and how she came to be involved in work focussed on food, cultivation, and flourishing communities—Ed.

Tell me about your your family and your early life.

I’m second-generation Malaysian Chinese. My maternal grandparents came from the southeast of China, Suzhou. They settled in northern Malaysia, and that’s where my mum was born. My dad’s side. We don’t know very much of his side of the story at all, because my dad had very little ties to his parents, and he was brought up by his uncle. So as far as I know our heritage goes back to the south-east of mainland China. I was born in Malaysia. I have a brother, Ron, who’s nearly two years older than me. We grew up all over Malaysia, because my dad was in the police force, stationed around West Malaysia. So, every few years we would be in a different city; we were pretty mobile, I guess, in that sense. My mum was a nurse. My memory is of changing schools a lot, changing cities. My constant companions were animals and books. Later in life, there was still a sense that every few years I needed to move somewhere—a different city or a different flat or something—there was that sense of restlessness there.

Interestingly, my dad was actually a peacebuilder. He was in the Special Forces. Malaysia came into independence, and at that time communism was pretty much pushed into the jungles. One of the places we lived was literally at the foot of the jungle. My dad was in a police force where they had to go into the jungles and engage. His approach, I think, was more of a peace approach. He built such a good relationship with some of the people. They got deeper and deeper into the jungle (he was gone for days on end), and sometimes he’d come back with cabbages, or some jungle fruit—gifts that the people gave them. One day he came back with two gibbons! So, we had two pet gibbons—it was the koha from the people in there. Because it was such a short-lived stint, we didn’t see what happened with this community that my dad was working with.

Why did you come your family come to New Zealand?

My brother had just finished high school in Malaysia, and the question came up in terms of what his future education would look like; I was still in high school then. So, my parents decided: Let’s look at opportunities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand to see if it opens up an educational future for us. They scouted, and mum was offered a job in both Canada and in New Zealand, and they decided that it will be New Zealand because it’s closer to Malaysia.

How did you come to know about Jesus? What’s been your journey into faith?

It was a slow burn, a very, very slow burn! My parents did not bring us up in a Christian environment; they were non-believers. There were Baptist ministers on my mum’s side of the family: two of her sisters were married to Baptist ministers. When we visited my cousins on holiday there was always church exposure there somewhere: Christmas, Christmas stories and carols. But yeah, we were not brought up in a faith environment or church environment.

My brother went to semi-private school, a Methodist boys’ school (I went to a girls’ school, but it was a public school, so Christianity was not allowed at all there). So, it was actually through my brother that I came to know more about Christianity. His group of friends were people who grew up in the church—in the Pentecostal church, actually—and he was really good friends with them. From the friendship that he had with them, as well as the gospel campaigns that they were allowed to have at his school, my brother was first exposed to Christianity. He would talk to me about God, Jesus, Christian music: “That’s what they do at church and youth group. Would you be keen to come and check it out?” Yeah, so I went to one of the youth groups. The way school runs in Malaysia is that on Friday school finishes earlier because it’s a day of prayer. So, the youth group at the church ran on a Friday afternoon, and we went straight from school to there. My parents were happy with that, because it didn’t interfere with our schoolwork! So, going to the youth group, being exposed to stories of Jesus, the passion of our friends for God and Jesus: that was my exposure to Christianity. Being in that church environment was great. But it was a slow burn in terms of me going, “Yeah, I want to be fully committed to Christianity.” That didn’t happen until university, actually. 

When I was exposed to Christianity at the church in Malaysia, I loved it, but I don’t think I fully understood how to engage with the Bible, or to talk about who Jesus is on the level that I could own it for myself. Coming to New Zealand and going to university, I started going to the Overseas Christian Fellowship. In OCF I made a great bunch of friends who came from different Christian backgrounds, from different denominations, and so their expression of Christianity was so different from what I knew. And we would talk about it: “What do you understand about this?” It was through that that I started taking ownership to understand what I was reading in the Bible. Yeah. Slow to learn, slow to burn—slow! Everything is slow. That seems to be a theme of a lot of how I stumble into things. It’s slow. It’s a slow movement.

What happened to you after uni?

My background is in social science and psychology. When I came back to Wellington, I worked as a junior psychologist for a little while, and really was very unsure about going down that track at that point. So I basically did administrative work, just to have some breathing space. And during that time, an opportunity came up to manage a student hostel.

This was after working at a hospital and at the same time being the primary caregiver of a very good friend, a flatmate who went into severe depression. But I got quite tired, and had several people say to me, “Gina, would you consider going for a retreat?” I went, “That sounds really good!” That was my first taste of what it meant to retreat from the things that I been holding with my own energy. It was all pre-arranged for me. I was a shell of a person, so I just kind of turned up there. All I can remember is this cabin and this beautiful lake in the garden, and I literally just sat in front of this place in the middle of winter, with a blanket, all day long, and just inhaled and exhaled. The spiritual director said: “If you want somebody to talk to I’m here”—I was there for three days, and I didn’t talk to her until the last day, just one hour. I don’t think I prayed with words at all that retreat. Yeah, I just stayed in silence the whole time, on my own. I didn’t feel like the time was passing slowly either. By the time I got to the end of the three days, it felt as though God’s grace was wrapping around me like a warm blanket. That time of silence gave me space, I suppose, to feel like there is hope in God. I came out of the retreat with a different sense of hope: that things are out of my control, but it’s in the hands of God and all my hope is in that. I don’t think I would have gotten to that point if I hadn’t moved away from the situation that I was in. Yeah, so that was my first experience of a solo retreat. It was quite formational for me

When I came back to Wellington, I decided: Yes, I will take up this position as a manager of a hostel for international students, with 13 students. I did that for four years. It was a very enriching process throughout that time—I’d never done anything like that before. After that, I was invited to join the staff of TSCF [Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship] here in Wellington, and I did that for another seven years. My dad fell sick in 2011 and four and a half months later, he passed away. So, in the seventh year, I came to a sense of a season change. I needed just to spend time with God. I went away on another three-day retreat. At the end of it, after lots of walking and praying, on day three, the word “food” came to mind. I wondered, What’s that all about? What is “food”? I love hospitality, have practiced hospitality, but I’m not interested in culinary arts. What does that mean? So, I parked that and let it rest. The following year, I took a whole year sabbatical. And six months of that was spent at Regent College in Vancouver.

What led you to Regent College?

I knew I wanted to take a sabbatical year, but I didn’t know what the shape of that looked like. I had a craving for enrichment, and I didn’t know what that looked like either. I’d done one course at Carey College and loved it. A former colleague at TSCF who had studied there said, “Why don’t you try Regent? I’ve been there. I loved it. I can recommend you.” I thought, “Maybe I do really need time away. I’ve heard of Regent. I’ve read books by various people who have taught at Regent. So yeah, why don’t I go and just spend six months.”

And so, I started applying for scholarships just to see whether there was a possibility; I managed to get enough to cover my entire tuition. It was these open doors that allowed me to go. I wasn’t pursuing any particular qualifications. I just wanted to dive deep. I went for the summer school and the fall semester, and squeezed in seven courses, I think, in total. I was exhausted, but I think if I’d collapsed, I would have done so with a smile on my face—I loved it so much, just the whole experience, the nourishment.

While I was there, I had the sense: “food” is still there. But what does that mean? And at some point during my time at Regent, two additional words came: “cultivate” and “flourish”. Okay: now I had a slightly more thematic thing going on. So, the next half of my Sabbath time was pretty much researching and figuring out how to retrain myself in this area. I did a bit of nutrition training through an institute in New York over the next two years. In the middle of that two years, a job at Wesley Community Action opened up. A really good friend of mine said: “Gina, I was just looking on SEEK and I noticed this job. It ticks all the boxes for the area that you want to go into. Why don’t you apply for it?” I looked at the description of it. Yep, it ticked all the reasons I would want to go into a job like this. But it did not tick a single box of what I was qualified for! The job was working with a team in community development all around food sovereignty and access to good food in Porirua.

Porirua East is fascinating. It’s predominantly Maori-Pasifika, with a high population of refugee migrants settling there over the years. There used to be significant industry in the area, with a huge Todd Motors (later Mitsubishi) factory and other manufacturing there. Lots of people settled there because of the job opportunities. That industry has been moved out of Porirua, but the population remains. There’s a lot of systemic poverty-related hunger in the area. Porirua East is interesting. It’s almost split into two. The not-so-affluent area had about 8000 people: there were no supermarkets there. The affluent area had 800 people: there was a supermarket there. Otago University School of Nutrition Masters research that came out in 2008 looking at food in Porirua East identified the area as both a food desert and a food swamp in terms of access to good food. It’s swamped with all the food that you don’t really want, right? And it’s a desert, partly because the closest supermarket is seven kilometres away. I can see eight takeaways from my office; schools are right around that block as well. When you look at the infrastructure of the area, you can see the access is not good food access. So, yeah. But it’s a beautiful community. People are incredibly generous. It blows my mind.

What does your work look like day to day?

We’re working with a community-led approach. So while I work for Wesley Community Action, I’m more specifically working with its arm. It’s called Te Hiko Center for Community Innovation—that’s where all the mahi kai comes out from. It’s evolved so much, from the first year I started up until now—but it’s also very slow work. Day to day, I’m in the food space. There is the emergency food pantry for people who need that extra support (even with the best efforts, you will see more of that). There’s also the fruit and veggie co-ops: access to high-quality fruit and veggies (not the fruit and veggies that are past their best that are then distributed the community). We want a community to be able to access affordable food from places they can walk to as well. So that’s why the co-op has popped up. It’s not yet locally grown food—that’s our long game. We access the food from Market Growers who basically sell the food to the co-op, and we distribute to the community, bypassing the middle person. We are trying to shorten the food distribution chain as much as we can, so the growers are likely to be in the Horowhenua or Wairarapa areas, with some of the fruit as far as Gisborne, but as much as we can, we try to source as close as possible. We would love to strengthen our regional local producers a lot more, and in that sense, if we can work through some of the Food Act exemptions, then there is the opportunity for local growers to grow and sell, and that becomes a source of income for them as well.

For my part, that’s where the production and the propagation of high quality, strong seedlings and composting come in. We identified that if we can get those two right, the living compost and the strong seedlings, then we get the whole thing coming into play: the regeneration of the soil right through to engagement around growing good kai and eating nutrient-dense food, and training the community to be the producers to sell through the co-op. Good compost, good for your puku, good for the earth, good for your pocket. Yeah, so we’re working through all that system to have a more robust local economy through food. If we can work with that on the local scale, then the local food system can be stronger. We have seen in the past four years what the fractured nature of the food system has done. We knew it was always broken, but it’s really been highlighted in the last four years, and access to good and affordable food is increasingly difficult for people.

Would you describe this as a matter of justice?

Yes, absolutely, matter of human flourishing. Mm. You want to see people thriving. But they are stuck in a broken system: that’s the area that we want to agitate. That’s where the justice, the peacebuilding comes in. I’m doing it one seed at a time. The seedlings part of my work is mostly veggies, some edible flowers. It’s not just about seedlings for the garden; it’s also education and training for the community as well. They can do this. I don’t have to be doing this, you know, if I can train others to do it in a high-quality way, then they don’t need to buy seedlings. You can learn to produce your own seedlings, grow your own veggies, learn to harvest them, saving the seeds, and keep the cycle going.

I’ve learned a lot from the families I’m working with. You know, I didn’t grow up eating or growing pūhā. And so community members who know a lot about pūhā are teaching me how to grow it—we’ve got pūhā patches. It’s that passing down of knowledge. On one level, it’s not just about the food; it’s about their own foods, their own practices and growing, teaching me how to harvest and how to cook it. I think that’s rich for some of the community members to recall that knowledge and to reproduce it.

God wants to see the flourishing of his creation, his humans, the land, the people. In essence, God is love. We are invited to the table. All people are invited to the table. And when you see the fracturedness of the land, the people, and God, and the fractures between people and people, people and land, then I see that there’s a call to that mission. It’s quite vocational. I suppose it’s a strong pull to want to cultivate, to see people thrive and be abundant in all walks of life, right? And in this case, it’s the area of food—the area of community wealth—wanting to see people live the way they should be living.

It would be great to talk more about prayer. We’ll circle back around to prayer and work, because I’m interested in that. But how have you learned to pray?

My first exposure to prayer back in Malaysia was a very high octane one, with very passionate Christians from a Pentecostal church. These were teenagers who were very much into praying, and I didn’t really know how to. I didn’t know how to use my words to pray. It was very foreign to me. When going through OCF, it became more conversational. As the years progressed, I think it became conversational, and then became very quiet, and then became very silent, and then at times conversational again.

The Daily Office, that’s where I’m sitting at now, and have been for several years. My first exposure to that was using a book with my flat. We used to have nine o’clock evening prayers, and we used a tiny little book that went from Monday to Sunday on repeat. That was my first taste of reading something on repeat. There was a lot of lament in it! I think for the first few months, I had nothing to pray. I was just quiet. I was just listening to how the rest of the flat expressed, their prayers, their lament, their joys, their thanks. Yeah. And then when I went to Regent, one of the courses I did was on history and spiritual theology with Bruce Hindmarsh. Through the course I picked up this book, Celtic Daily Prayer, and just found it so freeing, absolutely freeing, to pray from there. Some of the prayers were ancient prayers: St Patrick’s Breastplate, prayers taken from the Psalms; the night prayer has got the whole process of Examen in it. For me, that worked really well, because I find it nourishing, like having my breakfast, lunch and dinner. If I remember midday prayer—I don’t always remember, you know—I’ll stop at work. I’ll just pray, have a midday prayer. It’s like my mealtime, so to speak.

And what’s your journey of prayer been like in this work of food, cultivation and flourishing?

It’s very slow work. The biggest change takes a long time to happen. At the same time, I work with very passionate, strong activists, kind of “power to the people” people. They’re so creative in the way they work. But they want things to move fast, whereas I want things to move slow, because there’s a long game that we’re playing here. So, prayer comes into play in terms of weighing up how to put certain parts of the work to death. In prayer, I’m confiding in a God who is close to me and my situation. “Will you help me know what you are breathing life into instead, God?” The Covid season did a lot of that for me. I just had to stop a lot of things that I did and went on a very deep dive into: What’s the way forward? I had to pray about that for two years, actually—two years—to figure out how, as a food team, we move forward. And those two years were incredibly wobbly for me, and I relied so much on prayer. “Lord, feed me, feed us; feed me, feed us; feed me.” It was quite a repeated prayer. In my head I had a piece of a plan. But through the prayer of that long season, I think God definitely had a part to play. We literally moved our work into two prongs, and we still are working by those two prongs; every development we go into has followed that trajectory. You know, if I recall a mind-map of my thoughts, it looked like I’d sneezed something onto paper: it was all over the show. For God to direct me and the team to just two prongs—and very strong ones as well—that we kept to, and kept moving, I think, yeah, I think God had a wonderful plan there.

What difference do you think it makes working like this—working prayerfully?

I’m working in a way that I believe in, caring about the things that God cares for. It’s not justice for the sake of justice, or peace for the sake of peace. The overarching story of God is to bring redemption, to bring reconciliation in all things, in all matters, be that work or land or the people or what we have at a table, or who we have at the table. I think it changes my passion. I am not driven by anger at the injustice, so to speak (sometimes I am; I’m generally angry about the things that I feel are so wrong); but if I bring my cares and concerns and anger to God, then I do feel a shift. Things start getting geared to love, or more, to “What’s the hope here? What’s the hope for this family that I’m working with?” Prayer repeatedly aligns my heart’s compass towards God’s.