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East Timor: don't worry, the journalists don't know what's going on either | May 29, 2006 11:38
I've lost count now of the blow by blow conflict reports coming out of the New Zealand media that have utterly failed to explain to me why this is happening, and who the people involved even are: this morning the Herald has showed that it too has no idea - it has openly confused one side with the other.
Greg Ansley's story this morning attributed the killing of nine unarmed policemen to the gangs currently roaming the streets:
Volatile men whose readiness to kill was brutally demonstrated in last week's slaughter of nine unarmed policemen are to be feared.
Actually, that's totally wrong. The seige of the police headquarters and killing of the cops was done by the East Timorese Army, which suspected that the police intended to defect to the rebels. This has been reported accurately on Radio New Zealand and widely in the international media.
The attribution of these killings to the anti-government elements was inaccurate and irresponsible but somehow not surprising. Amid all the dramatic reporting of admittedly very dramatic details of East Timor's unrest in both NZ print and television media, I've found it bloody impossible to find out what the hell is actually going on. Are these gangs all defected army troops? If not, why have they formed? Are they a mix of defected army and generic riot-ready young men? Who is directing them? And what is their allegiance if they are chanting, as Ansley reports, 'Xanana! Xanana!' even as Xanana tries to quell the unrest? Will they accede to international and Presidential authority, but just not to the parliament and the army? Is it really the case, as Ansley reports in the most awful emotive terms, that the gang boys "reached in and shook our hands, smiling, weapons of war at their sides and murder in their hearts"? Or were they perhaps welcoming the New Zealand troops because they see themselves as freedom fighters, and thought that the New Zealand troops were coming to protect them again from an oppressive government and army that does things like massacre unarmed policemen?
Come on you goddam on-the-spot journalists, fucking well tell me.
[addendum: sigh with relief - some actual information is available here from the Guardian, a newspaper based in country very very far away from East Timor and which has no troops and probably no journalists on the ground there either.]
(see post below for usual 'Asian' pop-culture stuff)
Another 48 hours with Mao (Chairman, not Samoan insurgency) | May 28, 2006 20:59
Okay so my SST column on the Mao/'Chinese threat' jokes didn't actually say what I thought of Mao. That's because it's not important what I say about Mao to an English language newspaper audience; I said it to Mao instead.
Portia Mao, of the Chinese Herald.
You can pick up the latest copy, which features an article presenting a variety of Chinese people's views on the Mao-head-on-Cosmo-girl's-body controversy (see last post). Though you'll have to be able to read Chinese.
Also in my Mao back catalogue is this Jung Chang interview I did last year.
So come and get me, angry Mainland kids! I'll quote old Commie lore at you until your eyes roll back in your head and you beg to be allowed to return to the pool hall!
TM: "Mao is Jesus to you? Religion is the opiate of the masses!"
Angry mainland kid: "Uuhhggnngnnhhh... Marxism... making eyes bleed..."
TM: "What, so you think women aren't good enough to hold up Mao's head, even though 'women hold up half the sky?' What are you, some reactionary sexist oppressor?"
Angry mainland kid: "Nooo! She's actually quoting Mao!!!" [flees]
New Asian-American media site TripmasterMonkey has just asked me to write something for the 30th anniversary of Mao's death this year. Yep, it's been nearly 30 years already since ...that man... finally left us. Was the Chaff episode enough for you? Come September, expect extensive relitigation.
Meanwhile I've been on 48-hour film challenge team 'Cut & Run' headed by my buddy Steve 'Chairman' Chow, and our screening heat is Monday night 9:30 at the Civic. I wrote dialogue, provided various forms of cultural advice, the cast was Chinese and Maori, and it's in three languages. But... er... it's, shall we say, the literal opposite (or... inverse?) of a PC lovefest. Better to leave the genre a surprise. Keith Ng makes a disembodied guest-appearance, Eastside Renegade chews scenery, there is metal, there is mess. Come along, and I'll post up my favourite script cuts later.
Bonus for guerrilla filmsters: the Bus Uncle saga, now a worldwide phenomenon. Ongoing Youtube mashup tributes, and the original version of the middle-aged Hong Kong angryman reaming out a kid on the bus, with handy double-subtitling.
Chinese media villanelle | May 24, 2006 11:28
It goes like this:
Race and Demographics Reporter Julie Middleton and Lincoln Tan write Chinese student prostitution feature for Herald.
Cousin Derek Cheng writes Herald story on Salient Top Five joke about 'The Chinese'.
CHAFF puts Mao's head on a woman.
Keith writes Public Address blog defending Salient, and writes letters to newspaper editors also showing concern for international students.
Therefore Tze Ming takes week off Yellow Peril.
Tze Ming writes SST column about Lincoln, iBall, Chinese student prostitutes, and 'ethnic' media being hammered by community detractors.
Keith has blog translated into Chinese and put on Skykiwi.
Keith hammered by teenage nationalist wingnuts on Skykiwi thread.
Julie Middleton leaves the Herald for more temperate climes, and is greatly mourned by people subject to Race and Demographics.
Herald immediately runs article in which guardians of international students not excessively using a perfectly legal avenue of immigration policy, are labelled 'scammers' perpetrating 'fraud'.
Keith defends himself in Chinese on Skykiwi thread.
Lincoln writesHerald column about iBall, Chinese student prostitutes, and 'ethnic' media being hammered by community detractors, particularly teenage nationalist wingnuts on Skykiwi threads.
Tze Ming defends Keith in Chinese on Skykiwi thread.
CHAFF defends itself in Chinese on Skykiwi.
Skykiwi detractors on balance prefer Chaff to Salient (probably because the translator took out all the wanky postmodern phraseology).
Someone quotes Mao ironically on CHAFF Skykiwi thread.
Tze Ming writes piece on Immigration Act Review for iBall, and puts out a publication featuring topless chicks-with-dicks on the cover.
Lincoln establishes regular column in the Herald.
Tze Ming writes blog in third person featuring pointless John Yau reference, especially as this is really more like a pantoum.
Tze Ming starts writing SST column about Skykiwi.
Choose three other issues, repeat cycle. Try to make it rhyme this time.
End of an era | May 11, 2006 10:16
Noooo!!! Mofe Fashion, little Hong Kong boutique and icon of Mid City arcade, is closing down! Christine the owner is packing up and going back to Hong Kong. I made my contribution to the Back to the Homeland movement by going nuts at the closing down sale (still on).
I also chatted with Christine about why she's leaving New Zealand. Answers reserved for the column rather than the blog, but here are some things you can't get in the paper:
I've added a Mofe tribute to my 'Asian Invasion: birth of a movement' flickr set to commemorate its role at the heart of the Mid City/E-Street late 90s revolution.
And, I have finally discovered after eight years that 'Mofe' was simply the clothing brand name of a range she used to sell in the shop – Christine doesn't actually know what the hell it means either.
Prison got no broadband, Singapore got no democracy | May 09, 2006 09:27
Frustratingly, I didn't manage to blog about the Singaporean election in the period when actual Singaporeans were banned from doing so - ie the entire campaign - during which the big names of the S'pore blogosphere rolled over ironically twitching beneath the slogan 'Remember, prison got no broadband.'
Yes, The Other Mr Brown even started a movement of technorati-tagging non-political Singaporean blogging during the election as 'singaporeelection', which was great as performative ironic resistance unmasking the fascism behind this cleansing of the public transcript - but also made it a bit more difficult to find actual blogging about the Singapore election. Yet another step in Mr Brown cementing his borderline role in Singaporean politics: hmm... fool of the state? ... or tool of the state? His series of 'explicitly non-political podcasts' during the election were sensationally popular. Did people hope they would have some kind of satirical political content? They didn't exactly - apart from the conceptual gag of their pointedly non-political content, which ran pretty thin. If Singaporeans are living in the Orwellian endzone where, if 'truth' means 'lies' and 'peace' means 'war', then 'nonpolitical' can in fact be coded as 'political' to some degree of satisfaction, like finding beauty in the ongoing evidence of vandalism when regarding Auckland City Council patchwork paintovers of city graffiti, or locating the core of black humour in which representing yourself and your people as politically castrated zombies is a political victory in itself. You can hear some Singaporeans genuinely not talking about politics at the hawker centre here. Truly, ostentatious obedience is the new resistance.
At least Rockson just didn't give a shit. Because the government doesn't know his real name. Thank god for Rockson.
The election has been a pumped up version of the usual story - the persecuted Opposition wins two seats despite receiving 33% of the popular vote. The PAP's 66.6% is its worst election result ever, down from 75% at the previous ballot which was at that time, also the worst result ever. In the last few years the PAP has been dogged by scandal and mocked by the politically intelligent fans of democracy that many Singaporeans actually do seem to be. As Rockson puts it:
And Ang Mo Kio [electorate] is the best! ...Six no-experience young punk fight the Small Dragon [Lee 'Hsiao' Loong, Prime Minister, son of Lee Kuan Yew] and can win until 33% of the vote there! Lim Boon Heng got say 85% win for Small Lee right? Hahahahahaha!!!! Where is your 85% now? 70 fucking percent also dun have! Still can say got mandate and got new young voter support. Just kena fuck backside by six virgin, support ki lan ah! AMK the 66.13% cannot even beat the average Singapore 66.6% score.
Let's keep rolling with Rockson, because we love him so, and also because Singabloodypore has exceeded his bandwidth with all his election podcasting exertions on behalf of the Singapore Democratic Party. Here's one of Rockson's illegal election-period blogs which quotes PM Lee Hsien-Loong outlining his objection to the existence of a democratic opposition.
Mr Lee says: "What is the opposition's job? It's not to help the PAP do a better job ... because if they help the PAP do a better job, you're going to vote for me again and they're going to be out of a job for a long time. So their job is to make life miserable for me.
"Right now we have Low Thia Khiang, Chiam See Tong, Steve Chia. We can deal with them. Suppose you had 10, 15, 20 opposition members in Parliament. Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I'm going to spend all my time thinking what's the right way to fix them, to buy my supporters votes, how can I solve this week's problem and forget about next year's challenges?"
I like Small Lee, actually. He very honest say this kind of thing! This is what politic is what! FIX your enemy and BUY your supporter!
Nice one, Small Lee. I guess you are a bastard like your old man after all. Needless to say, the election was fought as dirty as it usually is, with the same old intimidation tactics employed, the press giving zero coverage to the massive rallies being held by the Workers' Party, and there are already reports of post-election intimidation of opposition candidates. But even these tactics aren't working quite as well as they used to. In a democracy like ours, zero increase on the two electoral seats held despite a 10% increase in the popular vote to an entire third of the overall electorate, would not seem much to gloat about. But this is Singapore we're talking about. 66% is about 20 points down on what those fuckers are used to - it's a massive bloody nose, and me, my dad, and Rockson sure are gloating.
Lincoln Tan's probably smiling too. Here's his latest piece in the Herald on how he convinced his wife to stay in Auckland and not go back to Singapore. He took her to the zoo and said - look at the animals in the cages. That could be us.
Identity crisis! | May 03, 2006 12:27
Forget the National Front; I'm being stalked by David Cohen of the NBR. According to his perusal of 'the records' only one Mokling was born in New Zealand between 1975 and 1985 - a girl fortunate enough to be called 'Lena Mok'. According to David and subsequently a weekly gossip column, this was me.
So much for kidnapping as the pre-eminent Asian Crime. Identity fraud is where it's at. None of this is a very big deal, but hey, what's blogging for if not playing around with digital cameras and making trivial notes on ephemera? I don't know how it came to this, but I ended up emailing David a photo of my original birth-certificate.
Poor Lena Mok, where-ever she may be. I've googled her: she's either Dutch, a Hong Kong doctor, or a 41st percentile result-holder in the Canadian Mathematics Competition 2005. Other people I have been accused of being over the years: half-Balinese artist Sriwhana Spong, OG Chinese artist/animator Pippa Fay, Shortland Street actor Li-Ming Hu, television journalist Kim Webby, television journalist Bernadine Lim, and some girl called 'Ming' from the North Shore who once did theatresports. They are all nice people with no enemies; conversely I hate to think people are descending on innocent Lena Moks accusing them of being me.
And people can be really adamant about these things. I had this conversation sometime in the year 2000.
'You're Pippa, Pippa Fay.'
'No I'm not. I know her though, we have the same hairstyle right now.'
'No, you are Pippa.'
'No. I'm not.'
'Yes you are.'
'Um... do you want to see my student ID?'
Sort of like my exchange with David Cohen really.
When I was about six or seven I asked my mother why she hadn't given me or my brother an English name, not even an English middle-name. She shrugged: "Because you're not English?" She realised that I didn't have the vocabulary at that point to absorb a discourse on postcolonialism, but, being increasingly stabbed by the guilt of having burdened me with not only an unpronounceable but unspellable name, told me in a kind of pissed off way to choose an English name if I really wanted one. "But everyone already knows I'm Tze Ming!" I said, "I can't change it now!" She said that apparently, I could, people did it all the time. I had a think and quickly realised that like Anne of Green Gables who wanted to be called Cordelia one minute and Dorothea the next, I had a hyperactive imagination and would never be able to decide on one name if I had all the choice in the world. "It doesn't work like that, you have to give me the name," I said to my mother, "that's how people get names." She refused. Thanks mum. She knew she'd probably come up with something dorky, like 'Lena'.
There are several permutations of the non-English person/English name game. Something white people seem interested in, is the one of people rejecting the English name they were born with, and/or adopting a previously hidden (or entirely new) 'ethnic' or non-English name, whether they be Chinese, Maori, Samoan, Indian, African-American etc. Some of these people are making political identity statements, some are simply following culturally appropriate practice by which we adopt more formal names when careers advance into the public domain, some may be pitching their appeal to a specific market, and there are combinations of all those things. Certain white people project a level of snideness about this practice, as if they actually know something about ethnic authenticity - although really, if anyone has a right to be snide about this, they sure as hell don't.
There are also some Chinese people with English names only on their birth certificate, and whose Chinese names aren't documented in any official paperwork. In some cases this extends to their actual family name, which has been obscured by historical English-language bureaucratic systems, meaning that their entire Chinese name bears zero relation to their officially recorded name. This doesn't make their Chinese name any less their name. It's just 'secret'. Which both myself and Secret Asian Man think is pretty cool.
Then there is the newly adopted English name phenomenon, which comes in many categories. Here are just a few of them:
- your parents gave you the name on the plane over from Hong Kong. This can work out okay, right 'Keith'?
- you picked the name yourself on the plane over from Hong Kong. Lookin' at you, Candy Ho. People really shouldn't let eight-year olds choose their own names; although they do have a unique charm.
- you've adopted an English name for work purposes in your adult life because you're scared that no-one will look at your CV when you apply for jobs.
- you picked the name while taking part in your first English-language class back in China, because it was compulsory. Lookin' at you, 'Mirror', 'Black', 'Rainbow' and 'Starry'. These are my favourite kind, and I have one of my own.
In 2002 I taught one English class in China, where the school required all students AND teachers to adopt English names. The managers were puzzled that I didn't already have one, and were worried that the students' parents wouldn't believe that I was a 'real foreigner'. So for approximately four hours a week for three months, I adopted the name 'Zhora', after the Combat-model/exotic dancer Nexus 6 Replicant in Bladerunner. Ironically, my first time living long term in a country where everyone was able to say my name correctly, I was made to adopt an English name which my students couldn't actually pronounce.
Apparently, I will not get fired for this. | May 01, 2006 11:17
In my initial contract discussions with Sarah Stuart, then of the SST, now of the Herald on Sunday, we discussed the meaning of 'no bagging the SST on my blog'. She said there was a difference between 'bagging' and 'respectfully disagreeing', which would be fine of course.
Right then - herewith, some respectful disagreement with the content and framing of the Sunday Star-Times article on the 'foreign criminal explosion'. Oh look, and Russell weighed in while I was off checking my legal situation.
65% increase? A predictable news-use of statistics. Here's another view: the percentage of 'foreigners' or non-citizens in prisons and on remand has increased by just over two and a half percentage points, from about 5.7% of the earlier, lower prison population, to about 8.3% of the new, higher overall prison population. Almost as if I'm a journalist for a major weekly newspaper, I don't know what the non-citizen population of the country is, and have not managed to find out in the last five minutes of googling. However, I do know that the percentage of people in New Zealand born overseas was 19.5% at the 2001 Census and is sure to have topped 20% by now. The percentage of non-citizens is undoubtedly less, but the point is that from this information we have no way of knowing whether 'non-citizens' (eg permanent residents, students, work permit holders) are being detained disproportionately to their population size.
We know about 'Asians' though. Ironically, this article came hard on the heels of Jessica Phuang - our emblematic Auckland Chinese Cop - noting on Campbell Live on Friday, that 'Asians' made up 30% of the population of Central Auckland, and 6% of its crime figures.
You can play spot the difference between the Sunday Star-Times article and the New Zealand Herald story based on the SST's, taken from NZPA.
While both the original SST story and the edited Herald version suffer from the seemingly illogical position of being about immigrants or non-citizens, but not getting any opinions from immigrants or non-citizens, the Herald managed to cut out the most ...respectfully disagreed-with parts of the SST article: Namely, the contorted attempt to angle it on some kind of Chinese crime explosion. The Star-Times managed to make its story seem rather absurd by giving para 3 prominence to this line, after noting the entire population of sentenced and remand prisoners to be standing at 7500:
"The number of Chinese prisoners almost doubled," (bloody hell!) "...from 35 to 64." (my emphasis). You had to laugh at the accumulative attempts of the next sentence. "This includes three young Chinese men charged with the kidnapping and murder of student Wan Biao."
64 out of 7500 non-citizen detainees. Making Chinese nationals 0.85% of our prison and remand population. This odd focus was compounded by the SST journalist asking Peter Chan, random Old Generation dude who is not even a Chinese Association leader at this time, what he thought about the whole thing. I guess the journalist just couldn't find any actual Chinese immigrants - or anyone who knew anything about Chinese crime (even after Jessica Phuang's star turn).
Interestingly, both articles noted that the British were at the top of the list of 'foreigners' accelerating through the crime figures. But no-one has asked British Community Advocates (sounds silly doesn't it?) why their community is the source of such problems. It seems rather unfair to smear the Brits like this but not actually ask them what they think. Journalists are probably worried they won't be able to communicate through the accent barrier.
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