Mixed Heritage: Finding Wholeness Between Chinese and Kiwi Worlds | A Conversation with Rose Li

Growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand with a Chinese father and a Pākehā mother, Rose Li did not initially think of herself as living between cultures. Her family was simply her family: her grandmother preserving the history of their English ancestors, her father speaking Mandarin and teaching Tai Chi, and her mother embracing the values and language that came with marrying into a Chinese family.

It was only as Rose grew older that she began to recognise how deeply these different worlds had shaped her—and that she did not need to divide herself into halves to belong to either one.

In this conversation on the Authentic Leadership Podcast, Rose reflects on language, family, food, identity and the quiet moments that helped her understand who she is. At its heart, her story is about learning to bring every part of herself forward and weave those pieces into something whole.

A home connected by language

Rose’s father came to New Zealand from Shanghai in 1995. Her mother’s family had arrived from England much earlier, in 1842, and her grandmother made sure Rose understood that history. She took the family to Nelson, showed them where their ancestors had landed and preserved those stories for the generations that followed.

Inside Rose’s childhood home, English and Mandarin existed side by side. Her father spoke very little English, while almost everyone else in the household spoke English first. For a time, her grandmother worried that Rose and her sister might not learn Mandarin and would be unable to communicate with their father.

Then one day, she heard the children coming upstairs, speaking fluently with him in Mandarin. The language had arrived naturally through their relationship.

Mandarin became more than a skill for Rose. It became the language of her bond with her father and a doorway into a different way of seeing the world. When she speaks Mandarin, she notices that Chinese customs, assumptions and values emerge with it. Culture is not something she consciously performs; it lives within the language itself.

Her parents’ relationship also crossed language and culture. Rose’s mother met her father through Tai Chi and taught herself Mandarin from books in the 1990s, eventually becoming fluent enough to live in China. Their wedding was simple—they signed the papers without the romantic ceremony Rose imagined—but behind that simplicity was a love strong enough to learn another language and enter another world.

Culture hidden in ordinary moments

For much of her childhood, Rose thought of herself as simply Kiwi. The cultural differences within her family appeared mostly through ordinary habits that seemed completely normal to her.

At her Western-style birthday parties, there were friends, dress-ups, sweets and familiar party food. But her parents had one firm rule: she could not open presents while the guests were still there. Her friends found this strange, and one even worried that Rose might never receive the gifts. Rose, however, had never imagined doing it any other way.

Food carried similar assumptions. In her family, dishes were placed in the middle and shared. Ordering separate meals without sharing could feel surprising. Breakfast might be rice porridge with vegetables and meat rather than cereal, while her school lunch could be a carefully prepared sandwich. These small details revealed that Rose was already moving between cultures long before she had the language to describe it.

As she explains, culture can sometimes be mistaken for personality. A habit may look like friendliness, modesty or generosity when it is also expressing a deeper cultural worldview. These ways of seeing are often so foundational that we do not recognise them until we encounter someone who assumes something different.

Permission to belong

Rose’s first family visit to Shanghai in 2012 changed how she understood herself. She met her Chinese relatives for the first time and experienced a world in which her connection to China was not questioned.

When Rose described herself as only “a little bit Chinese,” her uncle corrected her: she was Chinese. The moment moved her deeply. It felt like permission to belong to a world she had never been certain she could claim.

The trip also transformed how she saw her father. Growing up, Rose had heard his stories about being a respected Tai Chi master—fighting, winning and being carried through streets lined with people. She placed those stories alongside the imaginative tales her grandmother told at bedtime and assumed they were fiction.

In China, she discovered they were true.

People gathered in the park to meet him, brought him gifts and invited him to the best restaurants. The quiet father she knew in New Zealand became visible within the cultural world that knew his history. Rose saw not only what he had achieved, but what migration had placed out of sight.

She also saw him fully at home. His smile and even his eyes seemed different. That image stayed with her: a reserved man returning to the place where his language, relationships and identity required no explanation.

As Rose grew older, this awakening created a sense of urgency. She realised how easily the Chinese parts of her identity could disappear if she did not actively preserve and strengthen them.

Forgetting—and reclaiming—her name

That urgency became personal when Rose tried to write her Chinese name, Zhēn Hóng, and discovered that she could no longer remember it properly. She searched through the possible tones but could not recognise which one belonged to her.

She had forgotten her own name.

When she asked her father to teach her again, his reaction revealed the weight of that loss. He looked stricken, as though he had failed to pass on something essential, and told her to remember it this time.

As a child, Rose had disliked the name. She understood it through a literal translation that sounded to her like “really red,” which seemed especially embarrassing alongside the English name Rose and her tendency to blush. When classmates asked about her middle name, she denied having one.

Later, studying Māori health and encountering a worldview that placed culture, ancestry and identity at the centre helped Rose turn back towards her own heritage. She began to understand that a name cannot always be reduced to a direct English translation. Zhēn and Hóng carry layers of cultural meaning, including ideas of truth, celebration, good fortune and the symbolism of red.

The name she once concealed became something she could carry with pride.

There is a powerful insight in the path that led her there: learning about another culture helped Rose recognise that she also had a culture. Māori perspectives gave her a way to see the Chinese worldview already present within her—and to appreciate what her ancestors and parents had carried forward.

Not divided, but added together

Rose reflects on how people of mixed heritage are often described through fractions: half of one identity and half of another. That language can create the feeling that a person has only partial belonging and limited authority to speak from either side.

For a long time, Rose “rounded down.” Because she was not fully one thing or the other in other people’s eyes, she sometimes felt entitled to claim neither.

But her experience in China suggested another possibility. Identity did not have to be subtractive. Her different inheritances could be additive: Chinese and Pākehā, Mandarin and English, Kiwi experiences and family traditions, all existing together without diminishing one another.

Culture, she says, colours the lenses through which we see the world. It shapes how we understand respect, family, success, food, emotion and belonging—often before we are conscious of it. Recognising those lenses does not divide us further. It helps us understand the many pieces from which we are already made.

When asked what she would tell her younger self, Rose offered the essence of her journey:

Take your time. It is going to come together. Bring all the pieces and weave them together in the most beautiful way.

At the end of the conversation, Rose turned the question back on host Ivan Yeo. What would he tell his younger self?

His answer was simple: trust yourself. Everything is going to be fine. However hard the journey becomes, you are going to be okay.

It was a fitting conclusion to a conversation about identity. Wholeness does not always arrive through finding one final label. Sometimes it emerges slowly, as we reclaim the language, names, relationships and histories that have always belonged to us—and learn to trust that every piece has a place.

Watch the full conversation: Mixed Heritage: Finding Wholeness Between Chinese and Kiwi Worlds | A Conversation with Rose Li