I know what you're waiting for: What was Deborah Coddington's comeback to the Press Council 'Asian Angst' complaints? Was the complaint ghostwritten by Russell Brown and David Haywood using fake unspellable Chinese names? And where can you find the only genuine Southwest Chinese Style sesame noodles in the Central City?
All this and more... sometime. Maybe.
Okay, okay, I feel bad for guarding secrets now that I'm leaving the country. It's Hot Woks in the huge SkyCityCinema's megacentre foodcourt on Queen St. Ignore absolutely everything they're selling except for the obscure noodles that you've never heard of, down the bottom of the photo-menu wall.
And that other thing? The Press Council is expected to rule in April. As I'll be overseas by then, Manying Ip has taken over complaint coordination duties, becoming the New Manying Ip as the New Tze Ming Mok as the New Manying Ip. I think this means I'm Old.
The complaint was sent off on the day Keith Ng left the country. I wrote it, with the support of dozens of prominent 'Asian' academics, journalists, business figures, artists, community leaders, and a few fellow-travellers, Pakeha and Maori. Keith and I hi-fived outside the K' Road Post Shop after I sent the chunky envelope down the chute, then we weirdly capitulated to the magazine's call to send some of us back by driving to the airport and sending some of us back.
When the Press Council does rule, whatever the result, I'll make the complaint papers available on the media issues bit of my dorky-looking Frontpage website, along with a link roundup of the blogs, columns and features generated by the Embedded Asian Underground over the issue at the time.
But I'm going away for a while guys, from next Friday. The Public Address Asian Invasion of 2005 has been successfully reversed; like Keith, I am being sent back [to the] home[land, briefly]. Looks like Debs has won on that front at least.
Here's my itinerary if any of you are in any of these places, and want to have a drink or (in Europe) offer me a couch:
Shanghai International Literary Festival, then Beijing (3 months), Hong Kong, Rome, Venice, Barcelona, Paris, Den Hague, London, New York (all in summer, bad idea, but them's the breaks), then Quito, Ecuador (6 months or so) and Brazil (Carnival '08!).
Except for the first bit of that route, there's precious little relevance to what you might have come to expect from a New Zealand Politics & Society blog called Yellow Peril, and I'm loathe to bore you by turning this into a travel blog or a cat blog. So there will be the odd dispatch from China, but after that, a hiatus from mid-year until 2008. A real hiatus, not like that hiatus I called for a fortnight in 2005 when I ended up blogging three times a week.
Until then, you can still browse my archive of Sunday Star-Times columns and other political resources.
If you're interested in the other kinds of writing I do, you can come to my Auckland Triennial reading with Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Alison Wong, 1 pm Saturday at the Gus Fisher Gallery, or if you're in Shanghai on Sunday the 25th of March, I think my Festival session is at 2 pm at M on the Bund. Also, here's something I wrote for the Listener on the No Chinatown Triennial project that I've been a bit involved with. If you've seen the pretty pretty Triennial catalogue, I wrote Kah Bee Chow's artist profile.
So I have been kind of busy with my other life, but I really should apologise for not blogging more about, well, anything lately. Sorry.
It's tough to keep your mind on the job when you're being deported.
If I don't' see you at the Hustle for Russell, as we say in Mandarin: Bai-bai.