Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

oops, my computer illiteracy just showed... but i can count!!!

hey tze ming & kumanan, great job. hope you can persuade north & south to run a piece like this.

by the way, i'm also interested in being involved in any moves you have afoot - let me know if i can help...

cheers
anjum

Wow, Keith looks absurdly worried. Perhaps he's concerned about his black t shirt tipping off Customs?

Very nice article, by the way, it almost makes me sorry I don't shell out for the HoS anymore.

...not every journalist is a good journalist...

Burn! Love it.

Tze Ming, every time I read your blog, I learn something that makes the exciting-knowledge part of my brain tingle. Thank you for sharing your smarts and helping me broaden my horizons.

...not every journalist is a good journalist...

Kumanan's line!

every time I read your blog, I learn something that makes the exciting-knowledge part of my brain tingle.

...er ...that Deborah Coddington is not a good journalist? That Keith tucks his t-shirts into his pants? In any case, happy to help.

Thanks for sharing the HoS article. It is very satisfying to read an intelligent answer to a misleading opinion-piece - and even more so when the misleading started with a cover story.

It is shameful that North and South and the Herald actually printed the original articles without any fact-checking. Readers who thought they were looking at opinion 'inspired by' facts were actually reading fiction.

Keith's "making shit up" line from last week is right on the money. Pity he couldn't use it.

Well this is the thing. Obviously the "Asian" community are owed an apology (scare quotes there to indicate the silliness of lumping all those disparate ethnicities together), but so are all the other readers whose minds have been polluted with a bunch of stuff that isn't really reall true.

I'd just like to say that I had lunch today with Jonathan Ah Kit, who is, if anything (and apart from being a lovely chap) even geekier than Keith. Phew - New Zealand Chinese geekdom is safe in Keith's absence ...

Just got around to listening to the NatRad interview... like the somment that identity is context, is very much the way many Maori see identity, for example how we mihi (i.e. formally acknowledge our ancestry and kinship net) can change depending on what marae we are speaking on. However, the idea generally is to establish and emphasise your connection to that place, rather than your separateness.

Also, DC's article was astonishingly retro, but should we not take heart that the response was not? I don't remember the circa '96 media beat up on the imaginary asian invasion allowing intelligent and comprehensive rebuttal from the erstwhile 'invaders', at least certainly not in the MSM.

Hmm, not sure, was a long time ago and I was probaby more concerned with perfecting my lip synch to Bone Thugs N Harmony's 'Tha Crossroads'.

I was probaby more concerned with perfecting my lip synch to Bone Thugs N Harmony's 'Tha Crossroads'.

Shite, did I say that out loud!? Shame on my *ndies!

DC's article was astonishingly retro, but should we not take heart that the response was not?

Absolutely - 'The Movement' has come a long way since 1993, and most of the media has come along for the ride. It helps that the Invaders have infiltrated the MSM with our many octopoid tentacles, and receive strategic coordinated instructions from a centralised hive mind disguised as the Yifans DDR machine.

that identity is context, is very much the way many Maori see identity, for example how we mihi (i.e. formally acknowledge our ancestry and kinship net) can change depending on what marae we are speaking on. However, the idea generally is to establish and emphasise your connection to that place, rather than your separateness.

Interesting comparison - I think that in most public informal 'identify-yourself' circumstances, whether in the ancestral country that perceives them as 'whitened' or at 'home' in the diaspora 'white' country, diaspora non-whites tend to be asked in different ways 'what kind of Other are you?' rather than 'how are you like Us?' Displacement is - well - displacing...

big ups for tackling the stupid in a reasoned and considered fashion. You guys are my heroes.

Personally I'd get great satisfaction if Aotearoan "Asians" would also cultivate a few "scary Malcolm X" types. I find that the comfily-complicit mainstream listens a little harder if there is a more radical voice on the frightening side (you know, like Umkhonto we Sizwe/SACP vs. the ANC).

I'd offer my services but it since I am now an expatriate, it would probably not be all that pono/tika.

Keep up the good work.

By the way, I also loved your dissection of Don Brash's latest foray into Brainiac territory.