Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

Wow, I knew they'd put 'boobs' somewhere in my SST headline last week, but never expected the full headline to be totally unrelated to the actual column - sorry to anyone who expected an actual rehash of Lincoln Tan's 'Asian Men Like Boobs' article and found themselves reading about politics instead.

And now, after that first paragraph, there's nothing more about boobs.

In attempted restitution for being too slack or busy or isolated to blog properly from overseas, here's a link to the current stuff.co.nz index of my columns, the last two which I filed from Thailand. You can kind of tell, from the fact that they don't make sense, which headlines I didn't write.

I'm in the picturesque historical town of Yogyakarta in Indonesia, and have to work on about four articles today, including one for the Jakarta Post, before heading back to Jakarta tomorrow morning. Then off the beach house of Southeast Asian journalism legend John McBeth (not the TVNZ sports commentator), originally from Taranaki, who seems to have turned up just in time for regime change in every country in the region for the last thirty years, and has only lost one leg for his pains. I should send him to China.

I'm in Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border, but I assume Bob Clarkson's cartoon-blimp articulation of the contradictions and nonsenses within the National Party 'bedrock values' feint seems as amusing from inside the country as it does from out here.

It's understandable when people appreciate 'plain talking' about 'non-PC' issues, because bastions of blokedom need acknowledgement that newness and change makes them feel uncomfortable. But even those blokes would surely be so embarrassed by the moronic wittering of Bob Clarkson, that it seems almost unfair to pick on him. I mean, the man thinks 'Islam' is a country. Presumably he used the phrase "Islam religion-type people" because he couldn't remember the word 'Muslim'. He's into the idea of religious tolerance but doesn't like people dressing funny. No wonder Javed Khan's confused. He's not 'rubbishing' gays because he's at least aware that it's not actually a 'lifestyle choice', but they make him feel weird. Left there, it's just kind of sad, but perhaps understandable for a man of his generation. But simply being publicly exposed to even the idea of "that gay parade" makes him worry "in my mind, they're trying to make out that we should be the same as them," although presumably he hasn't been subjected to any recruitment attempts. Beseiged straight white not-even-that-Christian old moustachioed pot-bellied testicle-grabbing conservative white men of New Zealand who profess to Kiwi values of liberal tolerance and good humour! If it's 'plain talking' you're looking for rather than gibberish, you need a better figurehead, trust me. I mean, if you have one that's more attractive to gay men, at least you'd have a real anecdote about being actually beseiged.

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Speaking of being beseiged, unlike Keith, I have an uncanny knack of missing riots and demonstrations, and headed out of Bangkok just as the steam started building over an incident of seemingly police-coordinated brutality against an anti-Thaksin demonstrator last week. Consequently, a large anti-Thaksin demo on Friday outside Police HQ was 'conveniently' overshadowed by what most of Bangkok considers a fake-out carbomb assassination plot, which Thaksin has blamed on elements of the military who he wants to purge.

Meanwhile, I am near the Burmese border, hanging out with a house full of dissidents and revolutionaries. When they come to town from their camps across the border, their primary activity is to watch English premier league football for days on end. Because they are soldiers, they can stay awake for 48 hour stretches. It's probably a kind of training technique.

I'll be in Jakarta on Wednesday if anyone wants to get in touch.

An auspicious and inauspicious date yesterday. Fun stuff to start with: the 08-08 launch of Sunshine Beyond the Rain （晴天有雨）: our first drama series made by, for and about Chinese international students, and New Zealand's first - correct me if I'm wrong - internet-only weekly soap.

Backed by Skykiwi and produced by the SODE team, the first episode is downloadable here in RMV - it's about 33meg. SODE stands for 'Sails of Dream Entertainment', a slightly clunky translation of 梦帆, but that's keepin' it real for ya.

The pilot episode is cute and gentle. It's a little slow in its introductory sketching, but then the writer/director Benny Li did tell me his favourite director was Wong Kar-Wai - always a safe answer. （Very) pretty girls are torn between study, daydreams of popstardom, and the awkward white boy next door; (extremely) hot boys are torn between numerous pretty girls, and suffer from either extreme lethargy or Wong Kar-Waiesque existential ennui. This is due to the late nights with pretty girls, and also their inability to adequately feed themselves by cooking real food. I found the meandering hungover trawl through the Korean dairy pretty funny in the broader context. For non-Mandarin speakers - there aren't subtitles yet, but I think they'll be added in future episodes.

So the preview launch was last week, and I asked an arch question about Shortland Street, which seems to have prompted some equally arch editorialising from the Skykiwi reporter here. The actual answer to the Shortland St question from Aaron Huang was a little more diplomatic - he said that with regard to Li-Mei Chen, Shortland St seemed to be cramming every stereotype and issue to do with Chinese students into one character, which was kind of schizophrenic. He and Benny noted that 'Sunshine' has the benefit of having about seven characters, so the contextual realities of what have now become stereotypical tropes, can find a more digestible expression across a spread of personalities.

Geek point: I talked with a few of the SODE people and Ally from Skykiwi about the prevalence of internet-based television drama in Hong Kong and China, compared with the lack of it here, and we agreed that it probably comes down to our crappy broadband options. Skykiwi is marketing the soap primarily to China, where like in Hong Kong, the popularity of a series on the net tends to be used as a way of selling it for television broadcast.

The most promising thing about 'Sunshine' is that it is real 'voice of a generation' stuff - produced by a community that is essentially voiceless in our mainstream media. The SODE team are all former international students, having graduated and become 'ordinary' residents now. But they still maintain the identity of having been international students. Those experiences of having become adults here as part of a marginal community, are what drives them to live that Film Commission dream of (cough) 'telling our stories' (without any funding from the actual Film Commission of course).

Producer Sylvia Yang is particularly eloquent on this identity point, and she'll be on the 'Reel Asians' panel at the Going Bananas Conference this Saturday. I'm chairing the 'Creative New Zealand Chinese' panel in the afternoon which includes Oldschool Ant Sang and his latest Shaolin-inspired project, Vikki Cheng from The Rice Girls with some Newskool pastiches of E-street hi-jinks, and Ted Chen from Cultural Signals. There are a slew of 'Going Bananas'-related stories in the Herald online today. Here's one by OG Tim Wong on getting to grips with identity via discovering Chinese film, plus more 'Going Bananas' stories linked down the side.

Down to the bad eights: Yesterday was the anniversary of 8-8-88, the massacre that ended the Burmese democratic uprising. I hope you caught Tinmama Oo (greatest name ever) campus president of Burma Support and former teen refugee, declaring on bFM that she'd like to be Prime Minister of Burma one day. Not only would democracy in Burma be awesome, it would also be awesome to have a Prime Minister of any Southeast Asian country who uses Kiwi-girl uprising inflections and says 'like' a lot. If you didn't catch their film night, there will always be more Burma support film nights - until the revolution comes!

On that note: Thanks to the Asia:NZ Foundation, I'm going abroad for about a month next week to various places in Thailand and Indonesia, including the Thai-Burmese border. Blogging will be sporadic.

[Addendum]

I thought I'd keep it pretty light and audiovisual for the blogging the Banana conference, although a couple of things just caught my eye from the Herald Banana story list.

The first one was this piece by Jenny Lee, Maori-Chinese academic. Oh the hilarious bipolarity of stereotypes! Does she have no rhythm or does she have a mean Maori strum? Is she a math geek or a league star? Or er... does she have iron Shaolin discipline or a (for fuck's sake) genetic predisposition to violence? Another was this earnest and reasonable piece by Asiaphile Imogen Neale about being 'boxed in by bi-culturalism', which prompted me to write in with this rather hard-ass letter.

Imogen Neale's comments about being 'boxed in by biculturalism' are strangely positioned. It's certainly the case that both Pakeha and Maori New Zealand are only barely getting to grips with the implications of the 'Asian' population here, and that non-Maori 'people of colour' must negotiate our position here either with, around, or even against official bicultural ideologies. However, Neale's basis for dismissing the 'bicultural lense' as inadequate seems to actually presume that Pakeha have in fact already embraced Maori as equals in society, culture and the economy, that we are ready to move on to the next stage, and that somehow 'biculturalism' is to blame for New Zealand's provincial mindset. However, given all available evidence, one would have to conclude that the people outside the only socio-cultural box that matters a damn, are all New Zealanders who are not Pakeha. If Neale feels 'boxed in' because she is interested in things Asian rather than things Maori, although she is neither (as far as I know), then that is her privilege. Lucky her.

Sure, that's probably not what she means. But writing an editorial saying boo to biculturalism without actually once using the word 'Maori', is always going to come off a bit odd. Perhaps she actually meant 'boxed in by monoculturalism' - that I'd understand.

At the right price, scientists and top-level military from any country can be bought for the manufacture and procurement of WMDs. So the WMD proliferation ‘mystery list’ of 21 countries being targeted by the Immigration Profiling Unit should include countries with WMDs already.

At the risk of committing treason (this blog is hosted on a US server after all) one could speculate that this secret list should therefore include the permanent members of the Security Council – the UK, France, the US, China, Russia – and India and Pakistan. It should also include those with the obvious capacity to make them: Germany, Israel, Japan. The ones prancing around pretending like they can make them might make the list, like North Korea and Iran, but they might have to work harder. Ones like Iraq that might have had some biological weapons but then turned out not to have them after all, despite a fairly exhaustive invasion, might just end up getting struck off the list completely. Try-hards.

Still, about half of the world’s population is on that list. That’s quite a lot of people to not take trained scientists from, during a skill shortage of (according to the Immigration Service) chemists and microbiologists.

A more useful approach would be to take all of these dubious scientists, like the US did with former Nazi scientists after World War II, throw them in prison, and force them to make us our own WMDs. Maybe just mustard gas or something, because we don’t have any uranium or cool nuclear technology (which begs the question of why WMD proliferators would want to come here at all, unless they were retiring). Then everyone would bloody well have to listen to us at the WTO, Security Council, and the International Whaling Commission.

Well hey, I agree with Don Brash. New Zealand's most important quality is that its people believe liberty, equality and fraternity are the basic foundations of society and the state. Of course 'I agree with Don Brash' also means 'I disagree with Don Brash' because he totally contradicts himself at the end.

It feels like a rehash of the election - I guess now he's fighting to maintain his position as party leader: a lot of the arguments going on, on both sides, are old territory and I'm a bit bored. Can't we just use semaphore? It'd save a lot of time.

Left arm straight: 'You're targeting Muslims/Maori/Asians/whoever we are this time, my mosque/marae/large ugly house was just vandalised again, and your speech feels like a dogwhistle racist attack.'
Right arm straight: 'No it's not, my wife's Singaporean, I'm promoting New Zealand values.'
Left arm right angle at elbow: 'democratic values aren't the exclusive intellectual and political domain of the West, nor of New Zealand'
Right arm ditto: 'Yes, but they're the ones we like, and we don't want people who won't subscribe to those values to be New Zealanders; in fact, by definition, they aren't real New Zealanders if they don't.'
Left arm straight out waved in circle: 'You mean any person who doesn't subscribe to those values isn't a real New Zealander, like the budding neo-nazi kids who just vandalised my mosque/marae/large ugly house - or just non-white immigrants?'
Right arm waving goodbye: 'They're the only ones we can pick out in a crowd.'

It's a distraction from the main problem I have with the speech, but it has to be pointed out that the illiberal, conservative and fundamentalist elements of New Zealand are being most meaningfully reinforced not by immigration, but by locally grown Christian fundamentalists. I haven't noticed any massive local Muslim campaigns against gay rights or mosques putting out instruction manuals on how to beat Satan out of your children. In parliament, opposition to the Civil Unions Bill had a far higher New Zealand Christian head-count than an immigrant one, that's for sure. Ashraf Choudry may have felt internally conflicted, but he didn't go on a hunger-strike and week long prayer session like that guy from - what was it - United Future? New Zealand First?

Moreover, in the national press it is Pakeha pundits (need I name names?) who launch inexplicable tirades against the homosexual menace and 'the Sisterhood' in government - and they are lauded as being bravely anti-PC. Imagine the reaction from the same Pakeha pundits if a 'Muslim commentator' did the same.

You can see why it's so bloody confusing when people suddenly start standing up for Enlightenment values when any mention of the 'F' word these days (Feminism, not Fatwa) raises such a sneer from those courageous anti-PC warriors.

So yes, hypocritical dog-whistling etcetera. But the freakiest part of the Brash speech is absolutely not his anodyne commitment to liberal democracy as being fundamental to New Zealand; but his concluding comments denying the moral authority to claim citizenship, to anyone who is exercising their most fundamental liberal democratic right to criticise the government. And the people he targets to have their rights removed, are specifically Muslim.

These polar opposite viewpoints are bridged by a tricky question. If he doesn't want people who don't believe in bedrock democratic values, and there are so many of them flooding in (even if they can't even organise a community pamphlet on how to beat the devil out of your children or your wife) how will he able to screen them out? If you read the speech, it's quite clear that he actually doesn't know, other than bring in more white Australians, and hold people to an 'implied contract.'

It's important to recognise that there's an implied contract between New Zealand and would-be citizens: New Zealand offers you citizenship with all the rights and privileges of being in every respect a Kiwi, but in return you owe New Zealand your loyalty and commitment. You can't be a New Zealander and seek to undermine New Zealand. You can't be a New Zealander and claim that some other law takes precedence over the law of the New Zealand Parliament. You can't be a New Zealander and write to foreign newspapers urging a boycott of New Zealand exports, as one would-be citizen did recently in reaction to the publication by two newspapers of some cartoons satirizing Mohammed.

Yes you fucking well can. That's the whole point of those 'bedrock values'. What he is suggesting - no, explictly saying, is that immigrants must simultaneously embrace democratic values without having the right to actually exercise them. In his veiled (yeah yeah) swipe at shariah law, following his logic, even New Zealand Permanent Residents should not have the right to criticise the government for not complying with international human rights conventions if the government passes laws that conflict with those conventions. For example, any non-citizen who submitted a critical opinion in this vein on the Immigration Act review, supporting human rights and due process, would be endangering their moral authority if not actual applications to remain in this country. Meanwhile Pakeha have the right to say what they want to whoever they want, and mediabash any minority they like in whatever 14th century religious terms they prefer, without their loyalty or status being challenged. (EDIT: As long as even they didn't somehow act against New Zealand's economic interests internationally, because that, according to Brash, would be treason.)

Of course, this would make New Zealand one of those countries that isn't worth migrating to. Problem solved.