Posts by Chris Waugh
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The Empire Strikes Back, says the ODT.
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I think I found the husk of some ancient crocopig...
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I’m quite enjoying being back in the right hemisphere. Three shots from this morning’s trip to Staglands.
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Umm, I'm not sure anybody really wants this, but Psy has a new song out, Daddy (and it kinda seems to have weirdly Confucian undertones, and not just the appearance of the character 孝 (xiao4 = filial piety) in the background):
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Capture: A Place to Stand, in reply to Hebe,
Thanks. We're getting there, but it takes time. The wee one is loving it, though, she's having a great time, and has already planned out precisely what she's going to do when she starts school in a few months.
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Here’s where we are.
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...and my wife was born and raised in a village her family has lived in since the early Ming Dynasty. The family legend is that the ancestor put his two sons in a bucket each, hung the two buckets from either end of a carrying pole, said goodbye (like many thousands at the time) to Home outside the government office organising the mass migrations he was part of, which office sat under the Great Scholar Tree in Hongtong County, Linfen City, Shanxi, that many Chinese now "trace their ancestry to" (i.e. their family legends involve an ancestor who was also part of these migrations and set off from Home from under that very same tree), then trudged through the mountains to settle in the village my wife's family now call Home. My wife's generation isn't quite abandoning that village, but they do tend to now be scattered across the Greater Beijing area. Some of the next generation, in classic Chinese style, are being raised by their grandparents in that village, while the older kids tend to be with their parents. And now here's my wife in my "hometown", putting down roots of a kind in Wellington's northern suburbs, but Home is still that village in which her roots go back to the early Ming Dynasty.
And my mother in law kept telling my daughter that she's a New Zealander, so that long before she'd ever seen New Zealand, my daughter thought of New Zealand as Home, so much as somebody who's never seen a place can call that place home, so much as a 3-year old can understand the concept of home. She was a month shy of her 4th birthday when she finally saw this mysterious New Zealand place that was her home, but she's still very much convinced that New Zealand is Home.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to George Darroch,
Even home can feel strange sometimes.
Yep.
We've been back in Wellington 8 months. I lived in Beijing longer than I lived in any particular place in NZ. Now I'm back in my hometown, my wife and I in our various versions of culture shock, our daughter happy and settled. There are many ways it is good to be back "home", and yet, if we didn't have a wee one to raise...
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Why anybody thought you could let some of the world's biggest protectionists in and still call it a free trade agreement I do not understand.
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http://www.chinafile.com/conversation/future-autonomy-hong-kong
Good for thought on Hong Kong's future
