Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Islander,
That's pretty much what I meant by my comment on giving the brits a hell of a lot of trouble.
And that's the funny thing about the brits. As they went about building their empire, they seemed to have learnt as much from those they colonised as they tried to teach. It sometimes seems to me that in the process of trying to "civilise" the world they wound up civilising themselves.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Islander,
I read her a book in English every morning, and I encourage my wife to read to her in Chinese (my wife is not much in the habit of reading, I suspect at least in part because of her parents' lack of education due to... certain unfortunate events in China's modern history) and now after I read to her I give her the book and she flips through the pages feeling (and sometimes even kissing or tasting) the pages, pictures and words. That photo above, I put her in the middle of the bed so I could hang out some washing (not as irresponsible as it may sound, Chinese apartments not being large I was never more than a couple of metres away) and she grabbed the book and started flipping through it. I'm taking this new habit of hers as a Very Good Sign.
Spiral staircases are overrated in my experience. And from what I've read of (not much, and some time ago) of some of those old pa sites, some of them could be built virtually overnight and abandoned just as quickly as circumstances required, and they had pretty ingenious fortifications (like pallisades raised above the ground so that muskets could be fired from underneath) that gave the brits a hell of a lot of trouble. So they may be the equivalent of castles, but I rate them as being far cooler.
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I must be doing something right. I've got a 9 month old bookworm on my hands. Pity she's got the book upside down, but she's only just started learning, there's plenty of time to teach her yet.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I think all of NZs castles are a bit of a misnomer, really. A proper castle has been sitting there guarding places for centuries.
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Well, Algies' castle does look a little stumpy by castle standards, but it does look a lot more like a mediaeval fortress than it's southern cousins. Cargill's and Larnach's always struck me as being much more like palaces than castles.
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Don't forget Cargill's Castle - NZ also has a real live ruined castle. But I'm surprised to read in that article that there are four castles in NZ. I'd never heard of the other two.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I find that aspect of China expat society extremely frustrating, but yes, there are a lot who still behave as if they were in the International Settlements (and it wasn't just Shanghai - Tianjin (birthplace of Eric Liddell) was another famous one, Qingdao is still marked by its German architecture, and many other Chinese cities hosted them). But even in the days of the International Settlements, there were those (e.g. Rewi Alley) who went out of their way to actually get involved in Chinese society. The expats I find it easier to deal with here are those who make sure they don't get caught in the China Expat Cone of Arrogant Ignorance, and for all my whingeing, there's actually quite a few of them these days. It also seems to me that the Chinese themselves are finally deciding that enough is enough and are demanding a bit more basic respect from the expats they host.
And I'm a big fan of Tintin and I've even managed to collect a few of his books in Chinese translation, some in a format very close to the original Franco-Belgian bande dessiné format, but most in a traditional Chinese format which I wish I had access to when I was a kid, because the Chinese format is just the right size for a young lad to slip into his pocket, and slip back out again when school gets boring.
Wow, seems I've pulled off a pretty big threadjack. Since it's Capture, I'll add a photo. Tintin in Chinese.
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Joe and Sofie, I'm trying to think why I reacted so strongly to that picture. My best guess is that I do have to deal with the reality of the kind of attitude it portrays. On rare occasions it's a Chinese person objecting to seeing this white guy with a Chinese woman - once the woman in question was only a colleague, which is even more ridiculous. Far more often, unfortunately, it's one of my foreign colleagues talking about our students as if they're all evil, subhuman monsters, or just spouting racist nonsense about the Chinese in general (and no, they haven't yet pushed me to the point of telling them if they hate the Chinese so much they should just fuck off to whatever shithole it is they crawled out of, but I have been tempted). Basically, the dehumanising of some Other I saw in that picture is something I have to deal with regularly that I really, really hate.
But yes, it's art, and perhaps even good art in that it very vividly and powerfully conveys its message, and it does portray something that is still a very real problem in this world, which is one of many things we need art to do. But it did inspire a very violent reaction in me.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Ugh, I find the painting in that link really quite abhorrent.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Islander,
That reminds me of one of my French lecturers at Otago showing us a video in class one day, then pausing and saying, "See that uniform? That's the CRS, which means Compagnie Républicaine pour la Sécurité, stay well away from anybody wearing that uniform". I then seem to remember him saying something vague about seeing something happening at the end of the street, going to check it out, and not appreciating the smell of teargas, but I may be conflating two stories here. Dr Dineen certainly had stories to tell. In any case, he certainly sounded like he'd learned the hard way when he told us to steer clear of the CRS.
