Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

As the NZ First man took the floor at the WTV-organised Chinese media meet-the-parties seminar on Sunday, not a single person clapped him on. When he finished, not a single person clapped him off - we're not as polite as everyone thinks, I guess.

From my friend's reports, the crowd was old, and pro tax-cut. The parties were pitching what they'd characterise as their Chinese spin - taxes, law and order, family values. And according to the new issue of iBall (complete with supersensationalist front page that seems to associate transvestism with death), Asians are less worried about tax cuts than the moral decline of New Zealand society represented by Civil Unions, drugs and legal prostitution.

Well, what a load of crap.

To be fair iBall was talking about Christchurch, and what do I know about Christchurch?

But overall, the Asian population is actually younger than the rest of New Zealand. And here in Auckland young Asians, like other young people, are on the whole not socially conservative, boring new-right reactionaries, neither are they rich and tax-bribable. The young Asian people I do know, across the range of NZ-born, 1.5ers and student-generation, East to Southeast to South Asian, seem to be an either/or mix of queers, stoners, hip-hoppers, actors, vandals, designers, trippers, multimedia artists, skaters and... um... journalists. They don't go to political party show & tells (except for the journalists), and like other young people, don't vote as much as they could (again, except for the journalists). And so the stereotype of the conservative, right-wing, money-hungry yellow voter continues, and that stereotype's face is that of a older-middle-aged man. These younger, sketchier associates of mine may not have economic power, and may not exercise their electoral power, but they have cultural power. They are the ones who are remaking the streets, sights and sounds of Aotearoa, whether their parents like it or not, or whether or not their parents even know.

So: though it's great to see Asian media more active in the election than in previous rounds, they're doing us a disservice if they keep pigeonholing Asian political opinion in this way.

By contrast, at the 1.5 generation-focused mini-conference on voting, Bananaworks had managed to round up a fairly high density of 18-24 year olds. A spontaneous National Party stump-speech from a greying one-man Pansy Wong cheerleading brigade in the audience, had limited crowd-penetration. As their parents' generation clapped, the 1.5ers looked embarrassed or bemused.

I don't know if they'll turn out for the general election (if it is ever called), but young Asian people showed yesterday that they will turn out for the movie Election (if that's what it is really called). Because it's about Triads - awesome! In fact, the Chinese name of the film is 黑社会 - 'Triads' - double awesome! Go Johnny To To To, for making the first Hong Kong Triad film that claims to accurately represent the ritual handover of power from one Boss to another, and the first that I know of, to describe the origins of Triads as an anti-Qing dynasty secret society formed from defeated remnants of a Shaolin resistance. And the first that I've seen with no guns. It could all just be the usual mythology, but at least it shows that elections have been held in HK for over three hundred years. A strangely socialist gloss to this 社会: you can't elect the government, but at least you can elect your Boss.

We all hate that talk, don't we, the litany of our ancestors' and parents' hardships, and how lucky we are to live in a democratic country with free and fair elections? My parents never give me that talk (bless'em), so I've had to tally it up myself. Here's what my family has fled across borders from, since the 40s, just to get me here.

wars: 2
revolutions: 1
ethnic persecution/race rioting: 2
repressive one-party states: 3
annoying parents: 4

That's quite a lot of fleedom to freedom in just two generations. It seems an insult to my family for me not to vote, such a waste of all that fleeing energy. The same rationale probably also holds true for not getting married and having children, but that's another story, and voting is way easier than living up to your parents' other expectations.

I should have said this to the 1.5 generation voting-conference, but it somehow slipped my mind. Instead, I talked about Keith Ng and Tessie Chen's 1.5 take on things, and how political participation is a way of working out how much we want to be here. Maybe I should have also suggested that it's a way of working out how grown-up we want to be.

Keith's 'uncomfortable de facto relationship' national identity analogy is really catching on, even with multimedia artists. Kah Bee Chow, a Malaysian 1.5er from Roskill (represent!) spent Christmas with her parents in Penang. As previously mentioned, I took her to a movie the other week (which she'd seen already, of course, on pirate DVD). A snippet of the foyer chat:

TM: "This is gonna be good, isn't it."
Kah Bee: "Yeah - last time I saw Kung Fu Hustle, the Tsunami hit."

I have some more pictures of Kah Bee's show at Anna Miles Gallery here, and also linked throughout what she has to say about uncomfortable relationships, nationalism, and love for New Zealand First.

“It is a flood, it is a flood in our context, in our history, given how far away we are away from the world. We are an island nation. It is a flood.” – Winston Peters

There are ways of dealing with such a threat; some might consider constructing a heavy fortress to protect from the impending disaster, some might generate a movement of resistance against the tide, issue warning alerts. And then, there is also the option of adopting an abrasive immigration policy. The most enduring fortress of all time, the 2000-year-old Great Wall of China, was constructed to “shield the ancient empire from barbarians” by isolating itself from the outside world. “A long poem in brick and stone…”, it marks the grand if endless attempts China made for centuries “to find where its true boundaries lie”. Guy Debord proposed another kind of fortress; producing a book bound with sandpaper - a book intended to destroy all other books coming into contact with its abrasive exterior. It acts as a sort of preemptive assault on any neighboring books shelved on its either side - before they even dare to intrude upon its self-imposed isolation.

It recalls a line from F.Scott Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, Tender Is The Night, “The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing… Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.” And then I am reminded of another from F.Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘real-life’ with Zelda, his wife. “We don’t go in for self preservation. When we married, we made up our minds never to be afraid.”

It is a brave promise and it is a promise I admire. But I also wonder if it is a promise that eventually deteriorated into a tragic com-promise.

Frances Stark writes: "I also think of a compromise as simply a settling of differences – for instance, something a couple must do to stay a couple."

Perhaps Zelda puts it best: “All I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible.”

...This either-or equation has that familiarity of well-worn fiction, reality is a bit too mixed up to distill into such well-defined formulas. This is how I might sympathize with Winston, yes it is a flood, unstoppable, irrevocable, and powerful – like Love, the best kind of natural disaster: disastrous and unavoidable. A scary situation I understand, much like happiness but oh… c’est la vie, Winston, c’est la vie."

Not content with attacking Sikh temples, the UK's confused London bombing backlash is spreading to another beseiged non-Muslim minority: the Irish. With red-headed, white-skinned, green-eyed Syrian Mustafa Nasar on the run, Catholic Church roof-beams are being 'raised'[sic, presumably], and gingas brutally teased at primary school.

Well. That's as funny as it gets. And it's still not that funny.

That the London bombers were local-born Asian boys is the worst news imaginable for the UK Asian communities. 'It wouldn't make sense' UK Asians were saying earlier, for local fanatics to blow up Asian and Arab-infused Tube-stations in London, or to put the safety of millions of Muslims and Asians in the UK at risk of the blowback that is to come. Those choices would be made by international redheads.

The perceived 'normality' or mainstream characteristics of the two Leeds boys identified will be terrifying for UK Asians, because any Asian identifying with those very 'mainstream' elements of secular dress, a British accent, and love of cricket, all now fall within the qualifying criteria for being a terrorist. Maybe some things protected you before; they won't now.

The first anti-Muslim retaliation murder has already occurred in Nottingham.

With suicide-bombings, you only have a broad idea of who or where the victims will be - the unpredictability is part of the terror. For the 'payback' you do know, right down to the neighbourhood, even the shop, even the house. The predictability of it is another, special kind, of terror.

There's something new though, in the post-terrorism security planning and noise-making of the UK authorities. Two wars into the new world order, they seem to know now that backlash hate crimes are the inextricable other half of terrorist attacks, meaning that protection of those scapegoated communities has to be on the same footing, and have the same value, as the terrorism investigation itself. That's what it seems like - I hope the words fit the deeds.

As for Auckland, the rally date has been called by the New Zealand Council for Christians and Muslims, and heeded by the secular liberals. My friends who passed the message on to me from Bruce Keeley are, I believe, rather secular Lebanese-Christians, and are well aware that I am a heathen. So those of any or no faith, mark Sunday 24th in the book, or The Book.

Dear friends,

Plans are underway for a rally in Aotea Square, Queen Street on Sunday 24 July @ 2.30pm where Christian and Muslim people can publicly demonstrate their solidarity in the wake of events in London and the mosque attacks in Auckland.

It may be that marches from the Ponsonby Mosque & various city churches will converge on the Square for 2.30.

Please could you take responsibility for alerting your denominational and/or ecumenical networks about this.
Additional details will be publicised as they evolve.

Yours in peace,

Bruce Keeley (for the NZ Council of Christians and Muslims)

Another eye-catcher in the paper today was my friend Kah Bee Chow whose new joint show Chow Browne is showing at Anna Miles Gallery. It reminded me of the uncomfortable love affair people have with their countries that I mentioned towards the end of the last post, after too much thinking and talking about nationalism and unease.

One of Kah Bee's works currently at Anna Miles is a book that I made an insultingly low offer on (I may have made up for this insult by taking her to Kung Fu Hustle) filled with the mythology of the marriage of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, with, as the Herald says:

a sandpaper cover, a reference to Memoires by situationist Guy Debord, which was bound that way so it would destroy other books it came in contact with.

You hold and leaf through this book wearing white gloves - the sandpaper reaches through the gloves and pricks your skin, snagging the cloth and sticking your hands to the cover - so you can't let it go. So you don't let it go. Unless you can't afford it.

So it begins. 'R.I.P. London' spraypainted onto Masjid Umar in Mt Roskill, windows smashed. People in London have died suddenly and horribly, but I didn't realise London itself was dead. Sure, Mt Roskill is pretty dead, but London?

I can say that about Roskill - I was born there. Abdimalik though, also a Roskill native, disagreed with me last week. A teenage mate of my actor friend Mohamed 'Somali Superstar' Osman, Abdimalik assured me after the closing show of the superlative play Migrant Nation, that the best parties were in the old Roskill stomping-grounds. What can I say - it's been a while since the days of wasting time throwing beer bottles onto cars off the side of the mountain, that's for sure. Not that I ever did that. I was at home, reading.

The person behind the hits on the Ponsonby, Roskill, Blockhouse Bay, West and South Auckland mosques, was someone who knew exactly how to get to all of them quickly, and who was just waiting for an excuse. Common sense, and the instant wave of public political condemnation, would say that these hits are not a broad-based socially representative reaction.

So you try to shrug off these petty acts, because this is just New Zealand - but they still haunt you. At the very least, they make my feet itch. At worst, people are trapped in the house. Remember last time, 2001? A bearded Bengali friend of mine (from Hillsborough - a fancy name for part of Mt Roskill) was punched in the street that day. Drivers with too deep a tan were being pulled over by the police, in case they were riding car-bombs to take out Three Kings Mall. Remember the time before that? Roskill 1996 and the anti-Somali election-year attacks? 1000 people marched in Mt Roskill against hate-crimes that year. It looks like a repeat is in the works, a Roskill rally in support of the Mosques, in solidarity with New Zealand's Muslim communities, and upholding the actual multicultural ethos of London which doesn't quite seem dead yet. If you'd like to help, contact RAM (Residents Action Movement) or GPJA (Global Peace and Justice Auckland) for more information. If you reply to this post, I can pass on contact details.

The Muslim leadership in the UK and New Zealand are currently showing tremendous forbearance in the face of this misdirected and building backlash. But I don't have any religion to moderate my tolerance levels, my disgust. Whenever loyalty is unjustly questioned, I start to question the value in proving loyalty, and the value of loyalty itself.

New Zealand is not the 'Motherland' or 'Fatherland' to me. Who thinks of their country as their parent? China is definitely some kind of 'Motherland'. Authoritarian, scoldy, infinitely metaphorical, a bit old-fashioned. I always thought of Singapore as something like an 'Annoying Auntyland'. And maybe New Zealand as a 'little-brotherland'. But little brothers can't disappoint you as much as your country can. So how do we relate? I chatted to Keith Ng tonight, who characterised New Zealand as the 'defactopartnerland,' which seemed to fit well. (Yes, I have been forced to actively seek out an identity-politics conversation because I was asked to speak on a panel organised by the Electoral Enrolment Office targeting Asian 1.5ers, even though, unlike Keith, I am not one.) Keith talked of a

lingering questioning over loyalty to this country, and the loyalty of this country to me... I feel discomfort, but I'm committed. Kind of like an unhappy marriage.

At this point, Keith asked for a second to think about why exactly he cares about maintaining this relationship with New Zealand. While he pondered, I provided a break from identity-politics talk with some light ent. chatter, which you can use to track the passing of time. (By the way, my screen-name in this conversation translates as Falungong Freedom Whore)

(Keith) says:
give me a sec.
法轮功自由婊子 says:
Ok. [pop culture interlude] I saw Kung Fu Hustle on the Big Screen Friday. I love it when the qi is so strong that Stephen Chow's shirt flies off.
法轮功自由婊子 says:
[pop culture interlude continues] Then I saw Ghost in the Shell:2 last night, the dialogue of which was entirely comprised of quotes from Descartes, Dante, the Bible, probably Spinoza and St Augustine, and other religious/political philosophers and classical Japanese poets.
法轮功自由婊子 says:
[and some more] I love how the background was intensely realistic, either through a decade of painstaking paint, or CGI, but the people stayed flat and 2-d. Humans have to stay abstractable. It's very important.
法轮功自由婊子 says:
[further pop culture notes] and it looked so cool that I took screenshots with my digital camera, and my Teocheow-ghetto tagger friend Drasnor was like "man, you are so Asian."
(Keith) says:
Okay, I give up. I don't know why.
[...]

(Keith) says:
To refine the marriage analogy, it's not so much a marriage, but we're living together. I do want to continue living together, but I'm just not sure about the future - partly because I'm still young. And it's not like I don't want to be here in the future, but I just don't want to get married yet, because I don't even know what it means, and if I did, I'm not sure if we know each other well enough to get into it. And there's not necessarily a happy ending to this story. We might decide to split up later - which is why I think we should take it slow, and not rush into any commitments that the other party can't keep... I might wind up being a life-long bachelor. New Zealand might end up having one-night stands for the rest of its life.

As we know from movies such as the Wedding Banquet and Saving Face, it doesn't matter how much shame deviant Chinese youth bring upon their parents, as long as a baby gets popped out by the time the credits roll.

But what if the movie itself is the shameful part? 面子就哪里去? Here's my review of Roseanne Liang's documentary Banana in a Nutshell in the Lumière Reader. BiaN is where the Battle is, if that's what you're after. Roam around the Lumière site and you can win tickets to BiaN, and other movies (or 'fillums' as they like to be called) showing at the Festival.

Christ. It took me longer to review Roseanne's one-hour DIY doco than that 800-page biography of Mao. It's the kind of documentary that is liable to tip you, if you are of a particular demographic, into a slather of addictive, time-wasting navel-gazing.

This post too has fallen victim to avoidant behaviour. It's all Roseanne's fault, from both angles. Rather than decide what to leave in and what to leave out about our strangely dialectical, parallel lives, I've instead mucked around making this addition - The Chinese Identity Problem Test - to the Emergency Invasion Kit Test Scores. It's based on an email entitled '10 succinct reasons why I have never had Chinese identity problems' which I sent to Roseanne over a week ago in lieu of finishing the review. She liked it rather a lot, and wanted a stack of the 'cards'. Chinese Identity Problems certainly are good for something - procrastination.

So: what to say? What not to say?

Roseanne Liang and I first met as babies. Our medical parents migrated here in the seventies, and the Liangs and Moks were introduced very early on, nodding at each other from different rungs of the Auckland Hospital heirarchy. Roseanne and I are exactly the same age. In an iconic Chinese diaspora moment (see page 74), on one of our families’ early playdates, my brother introduced Richard Clayderman to the Liang household. We both attended exclusive, private, dully religious single-sex high-schools in Epsom, were made to play the piano for seven years or more, and were seriously geeky academic overachievers. Her documentary is brave on many levels, but one of the most impressive aspects is her uncensored retrospective of her extraordinary teenage geekhood.

Our families didn't socialise much beyond that early Clayderman-based encounter - the Liangs were Hong Kong conservatives. They probably thought my parents were hippy Nanyang freaks whose children ran wild. And yet, mere blocks away from each other, we geeked along in perfect tandem, each oblivious of the other. (A coffee-table book titled 'Through a Glass Dorkily: The Great New Zealand Chinese Geek-Off' is somewhere in the works...) The first signal of our developmental divergence was, it seems, the aforementioned grunge years. Roseanne never got to go grunge. But missing out on grunge was not so much a life-changing opportunity lost, than an expression of the limited possibilities of her family life. She’s never been able to move out of home either. And she’s twenty-seven.

We met up again early this year, and shortly afterwards she started making BiaN.

More startling comparisons:

Roseanne has never been forgiven by her parents for dropping out of medical school to become a penniless artist.

I was told by my parents that medicine was a thankless grind, and that I should probably do something else that I’d like more. Like a BA maybe.

Roseanne's mother will not acknowledge the existence of her white fiancé.

Sample response from Dr Rosie Mok, upon her daughter mentioning a ‘cute Chinese boy’ in passing: “Oh Ming! Is he boring? Do you have anything in common? Why do you want to go out with Chinese boys? Chinese boys are so wimpy! So pathetic! Oooh, aiyah! So wimpy! Why are you hanging around with all these Chinese people all the time? Are you having some sort of identity crisis? Is this something to do with that …what’s it called …bloggy thing?”

Roseanne, in BiaN, talks of her desperate need to hear her parents tell her they love her. It's not a Chinese thing you see. You communicate emotion through acts of mundane devotion. Like cooking.

The one time my mother made any reference whatsoever to anything along those lines, it was kind of an accident. I was as embarrassed as she was, and sincerely hoped she would never say anything like that ever again. And stick to cooking.

I don't know what the fallout for Roseanne is going to be, but it's going to hit soon (22 and 23 July to be precise). I just want to make sure she's eating properly, and hope she'll let me bring a little pile of identity cards to hand out drunk and dancing at her wedding, to stop me from saying too much.

Taking a Film Festival break: See you at Kung Fu Hustle, Ghost in the Shell, 3-Iron, 2046, Election, The World and The Wayward Cloud.... Oh, and some non-Asian ones too of course.

I belong to a group in this country that is fast becoming culturally ascendant. In the birth of our identity, 'mainstream' was and still should be, the lamest thing you could ever call anyone. You know who I'm talking about: The Grunge Generation.

I've seen those 90s retro-parties break out aaaall over town. It's our time, baby.

It seems redundant for me to comment on this 'excluded-from-the-mainstream' outrage issue when the demographic status of most people in this country renders Brash’s comments absurd. All I want to ask is this: When the hell did people start being so proud of being mainstream?

I don’t seem to be able to find a photograph of myself between 1992 and 1994 in which I am not wearing a Badmotorfinger t-shirt. I tried to go Goth, but wasn't pale enough. Remember 89X? When I was in form three, that station was like, so alternative. This meant it was a good thing. It wasn't really a very alternative radio station, it was actually totally mainstream. Which means it was lame. Remember ‘alternative’? Before we were old enough to realise we should be saying ‘indie’ or even just 'bFM'? When women were grrls and no-one had to worry about tailoring? It was a great time to be a young teenager with no wardrobe allowance.

Mainstream was for suckers, Rock Stars were for Killing. Kurt Cobain shot himself on my sixteenth birthday. Probably just as well. You can never go mainstream if Kurt Cobain shoots himself on your sixteenth birthday.

Recalling my simplistic grunge revisionist music history now... the baby boomers rejected The Mainstream Establishment, punk reacted against the smug complacency of boomer hippies (who everyone knew would sell out), and grunge was a reincarnation of punk, reacting against the now fully sold-out Mainstream ex-hippy baby-boomer Establishment. Oh yes, that's right. Now I remember. Baby-boomers have mainstreamed themselves, but are guilty about it. But I think Don Brash totally missed the 60s.

You could take this all as an allusion to being an ethnic minority. Substitute mainstreamed boomers for the post-Cold-War liberal-internationalist consensus, Grunge for the Western-raised children of the postcolonial coloured diaspora, and Kurt Cobain shooting himself in the head for the the 1996 general election, and you have the makings of a truly hideous and fascinating extended metaphor. Would Rushdie's 'Imaginary Homelands' be The Trip Volume 1?

OR you could think about my next question: Was anyone else quite surprised at the utter repulsiveness of (blogger) David Farrar on the Tax Debate TV thing? Kind of freaked out by that one intense spurt of bitterness and vitriol against people getting better tax breaks than him through Working For Families “just because they choose [as one would pick out a package holiday] to have children”? At the air of total disgust for human reproduction? You really, really wouldn’t want to let him near your child. I can see it now. “You’ve devoured my tax break! I will devour YOU, filthy woman-spawn! AAARHGHERERRGH!!!” Still, the silver lining was immediately apparent – Mr Farrar obviously isn’t choosing to reproduce anytime soon. It was kind of the lacklustre equivalent of the ‘Great Race Debate’ “bloody Maoris eating people” moment, which shows how much less exciting tax is than race.

There will be plenty of other comment about the show from more qualified people I expect. But aside from the pall of pointlessness that lay over the set, given the Opposition Finance spokesperson being totally unwilling to talk about any details of his policy, it also seemed Simon Dallow was having real problems controlling the debate (maybe Margaret Wilson would have been a better choice). The only person he seemed able to cut off was the only person who was prepared to politely outline a party tax policy that we didn’t already know, but could certainly have benefited from hearing: Professor Whatarangi Winiata of the Maori Party. He was just too much of a gentleman. The only (no, wait, there was one other) woman present, from the NZIER, was also very polite, self-effacing and knowledgeable, and wasn’t into shouting over anybody either. So we didn’t hear much from her. Looks like the Maori and the Woman just weren’t mainstream enough for that.

Increasingly, it seems mainstream must mean loud and rude. This, shockingly, is where my Grunge vs Mainstream analysis really does break down. Grunge is loud and rude, and ALL about the shouting. Crap, it looks like grunge is more mainstream than I ever wanted to admit. Help us Kurt, what are we to do?