How Mr. and Mrs. Gock Saved the Kumara

I wrote this during the two years I lived in New Zealand. Since I wrote this in 2016, Fay Gock passed away in December 2018, aged 85. The film is even more precious now. Watch it. You won’t regret it.

I stumbled across a short film last week about an inspiring Chinese couple who immigrated to New Zealand in the 1940s as refugees from the Japanese occupation of China. Mr. Gock, being a bit of an inventor and experimenter, found amazing ways to give back to their new country. I love the film not just for the story and the Gocks themselves, but because it was made to celebrate the contributions that immigrants have made to New Zealand. The film is called How Mr. and Mrs. Gock Saved the Kumara.

The couple are hilarious and obviously very happy together, and the story is about one of the most popular and common foods in New Zealand — the kumara. A kumara is what would be called a sweet potato in other countries. I thought it was really interesting that the Quechua name for sweet potato in Peru is kumar — awfully similar to kumara, which is the Polynesian name for it. There’s a whole write-up on it in Wikipedia.

Kumara is everywhere in New Zealand. You will find it in just about every kind of restaurant you can imagine — kumara chips, kumara mash, kumara pizza, kumara crisps, kumara in soups and salads. There are three varieties: red, orange, and gold, with the red being most common.

When Black Rot threatened to wipe out the kumara industry in the 1950s, the Gocks developed a disease-resistant strain and gave it to New Zealand’s growers — and refused to be paid for it. Joe also invented a way to store kumara year-round so that it didn’t go bad, reducing crop loss from as much as 50% to less than 1%. They did it, as Joe said, to express their gratitude for being Kiwis. For their contributions, Joe was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal and in 2013 the Prime Minister presented the Gocks with the Bledisloe Cup — the highest honour in New Zealand horticulture.

But what I love most about the film is the couple themselves. At 83 and 87 years old they didn’t miss a beat — and were still up for a party at the end of the shoot. NZ On Screen They came to New Zealand as children — Joe was 12 and Fay was about the same age — and they laugh like Kiwis, talk like Kiwis, and have big hearts and awesome senses of humor just like most of the Kiwis I know. They really embody everything I love about this country.

The main picture today is from the botanic gardens in Hamilton, where they have a Māori storage house with kumara planted around it in little mounds called puke — the mounds help with drainage and give the potato deep soil to grow in.

Watch the film here: How Mr. and Mrs. Gock Saved the Kumara

It’s three minutes long and it will make your day.