Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

I've lost count now of the blow by blow conflict reports coming out of the New Zealand media that have utterly failed to explain to me why this is happening, and who the people involved even are: this morning the Herald has showed that it too has no idea - it has openly confused one side with the other.

Greg Ansley's story this morning attributed the killing of nine unarmed policemen to the gangs currently roaming the streets:

Volatile men whose readiness to kill was brutally demonstrated in last week's slaughter of nine unarmed policemen are to be feared.

Actually, that's totally wrong. The seige of the police headquarters and killing of the cops was done by the East Timorese Army, which suspected that the police intended to defect to the rebels. This has been reported accurately on Radio New Zealand and widely in the international media.

The attribution of these killings to the anti-government elements was inaccurate and irresponsible but somehow not surprising. Amid all the dramatic reporting of admittedly very dramatic details of East Timor's unrest in both NZ print and television media, I've found it bloody impossible to find out what the hell is actually going on. Are these gangs all defected army troops? If not, why have they formed? Are they a mix of defected army and generic riot-ready young men? Who is directing them? And what is their allegiance if they are chanting, as Ansley reports, 'Xanana! Xanana!' even as Xanana tries to quell the unrest? Will they accede to international and Presidential authority, but just not to the parliament and the army? Is it really the case, as Ansley reports in the most awful emotive terms, that the gang boys "reached in and shook our hands, smiling, weapons of war at their sides and murder in their hearts"? Or were they perhaps welcoming the New Zealand troops because they see themselves as freedom fighters, and thought that the New Zealand troops were coming to protect them again from an oppressive government and army that does things like massacre unarmed policemen?

Come on you goddam on-the-spot journalists, fucking well tell me.

[addendum: sigh with relief - some actual information is available here from the Guardian, a newspaper based in country very very far away from East Timor and which has no troops and probably no journalists on the ground there either.]

(see post below for usual 'Asian' pop-culture stuff)

Okay so my SST column on the Mao/'Chinese threat' jokes didn't actually say what I thought of Mao. That's because it's not important what I say about Mao to an English language newspaper audience; I said it to Mao instead.

Portia Mao, of the Chinese Herald.

You can pick up the latest copy, which features an article presenting a variety of Chinese people's views on the Mao-head-on-Cosmo-girl's-body controversy (see last post). Though you'll have to be able to read Chinese.

Also in my Mao back catalogue is this Jung Chang interview I did last year.

So come and get me, angry Mainland kids! I'll quote old Commie lore at you until your eyes roll back in your head and you beg to be allowed to return to the pool hall!

TM: "Mao is Jesus to you? Religion is the opiate of the masses!"
Angry mainland kid: "Uuhhggnngnnhhh... Marxism... making eyes bleed..."
TM: "What, so you think women aren't good enough to hold up Mao's head, even though 'women hold up half the sky?' What are you, some reactionary sexist oppressor?"
Angry mainland kid: "Nooo! She's actually quoting Mao!!!" [flees]

New Asian-American media site TripmasterMonkey has just asked me to write something for the 30th anniversary of Mao's death this year. Yep, it's been nearly 30 years already since ...that man... finally left us. Was the Chaff episode enough for you? Come September, expect extensive relitigation.

Meanwhile I've been on 48-hour film challenge team 'Cut & Run' headed by my buddy Steve 'Chairman' Chow, and our screening heat is Monday night 9:30 at the Civic. I wrote dialogue, provided various forms of cultural advice, the cast was Chinese and Maori, and it's in three languages. But... er... it's, shall we say, the literal opposite (or... inverse?) of a PC lovefest. Better to leave the genre a surprise. Keith Ng makes a disembodied guest-appearance, Eastside Renegade chews scenery, there is metal, there is mess. Come along, and I'll post up my favourite script cuts later.

Bonus for guerrilla filmsters: the Bus Uncle saga, now a worldwide phenomenon. Ongoing Youtube mashup tributes, and the original version of the middle-aged Hong Kong angryman reaming out a kid on the bus, with handy double-subtitling.

It goes like this:

Race and Demographics Reporter Julie Middleton and Lincoln Tan write Chinese student prostitution feature for Herald.
Cousin Derek Cheng writes Herald story on Salient Top Five joke about 'The Chinese'.
CHAFF puts Mao's head on a woman.
Keith writes Public Address blog defending Salient, and writes letters to newspaper editors also showing concern for international students.
Therefore Tze Ming takes week off Yellow Peril.
Tze Ming writes SST column about Lincoln, iBall, Chinese student prostitutes, and 'ethnic' media being hammered by community detractors.
Keith has blog translated into Chinese and put on Skykiwi.
Keith hammered by teenage nationalist wingnuts on Skykiwi thread.
Julie Middleton leaves the Herald for more temperate climes, and is greatly mourned by people subject to Race and Demographics.
Herald immediately runs article in which guardians of international students not excessively using a perfectly legal avenue of immigration policy, are labelled 'scammers' perpetrating 'fraud'.
Keith defends himself in Chinese on Skykiwi thread.
Lincoln writesHerald column about iBall, Chinese student prostitutes, and 'ethnic' media being hammered by community detractors, particularly teenage nationalist wingnuts on Skykiwi threads.
Tze Ming defends Keith in Chinese on Skykiwi thread.
CHAFF defends itself in Chinese on Skykiwi.
Skykiwi detractors on balance prefer Chaff to Salient (probably because the translator took out all the wanky postmodern phraseology).
Someone quotes Mao ironically on CHAFF Skykiwi thread.
Tze Ming writes piece on Immigration Act Review for iBall, and puts out a publication featuring topless chicks-with-dicks on the cover.
Lincoln establishes regular column in the Herald.
Tze Ming writes blog in third person featuring pointless John Yau reference, especially as this is really more like a pantoum.
Tze Ming starts writing SST column about Skykiwi.

Choose three other issues, repeat cycle. Try to make it rhyme this time.

Noooo!!! Mofe Fashion, little Hong Kong boutique and icon of Mid City arcade, is closing down! Christine the owner is packing up and going back to Hong Kong. I made my contribution to the Back to the Homeland movement by going nuts at the closing down sale (still on).

I also chatted with Christine about why she's leaving New Zealand. Answers reserved for the column rather than the blog, but here are some things you can't get in the paper:

I've added a Mofe tribute to my 'Asian Invasion: birth of a movement' flickr set to commemorate its role at the heart of the Mid City/E-Street late 90s revolution.

And, I have finally discovered after eight years that 'Mofe' was simply the clothing brand name of a range she used to sell in the shop – Christine doesn’t actually know what the hell it means either.

Frustratingly, I didn't manage to blog about the Singaporean election in the period when actual Singaporeans were banned from doing so - ie the entire campaign - during which the big names of the S'pore blogosphere rolled over ironically twitching beneath the slogan 'Remember, prison got no broadband.'

Yes, The Other Mr Brown even started a movement of technorati-tagging non-political Singaporean blogging during the election as 'singaporeelection', which was great as performative ironic resistance unmasking the fascism behind this cleansing of the public transcript - but also made it a bit more difficult to find actual blogging about the Singapore election. Yet another step in Mr Brown cementing his borderline role in Singaporean politics: hmm... fool of the state? ... or tool of the state? His series of 'explicitly non-political podcasts' during the election were sensationally popular. Did people hope they would have some kind of satirical political content? They didn't exactly - apart from the conceptual gag of their pointedly non-political content, which ran pretty thin. If Singaporeans are living in the Orwellian endzone where, if 'truth' means 'lies' and 'peace' means 'war', then 'nonpolitical' can in fact be coded as 'political' to some degree of satisfaction, like finding beauty in the ongoing evidence of vandalism when regarding Auckland City Council patchwork paintovers of city graffiti, or locating the core of black humour in which representing yourself and your people as politically castrated zombies is a political victory in itself. You can hear some Singaporeans genuinely not talking about politics at the hawker centre here. Truly, ostentatious obedience is the new resistance.

At least Rockson just didn't give a shit. Because the government doesn't know his real name. Thank god for Rockson.

The election has been a pumped up version of the usual story - the persecuted Opposition wins two seats despite receiving 33% of the popular vote. The PAP's 66.6% is its worst election result ever, down from 75% at the previous ballot which was at that time, also the worst result ever. In the last few years the PAP has been dogged by scandal and mocked by the politically intelligent fans of democracy that many Singaporeans actually do seem to be. As Rockson puts it:

And Ang Mo Kio [electorate] is the best! ...Six no-experience young punk fight the Small Dragon [Lee 'Hsiao' Loong, Prime Minister, son of Lee Kuan Yew] and can win until 33% of the vote there! Lim Boon Heng got say 85% win for Small Lee right? Hahahahahaha!!!! Where is your 85% now? 70 fucking percent also dun have! Still can say got mandate and got new young voter support. Just kena fuck backside by six virgin, support ki lan ah! AMK the 66.13% cannot even beat the average Singapore 66.6% score.

Let's keep rolling with Rockson, because we love him so, and also because Singabloodypore has exceeded his bandwidth with all his election podcasting exertions on behalf of the Singapore Democratic Party. Here's one of Rockson's illegal election-period blogs which quotes PM Lee Hsien-Loong outlining his objection to the existence of a democratic opposition.

Mr Lee says: "What is the opposition's job? It's not to help the PAP do a better job ... because if they help the PAP do a better job, you're going to vote for me again and they're going to be out of a job for a long time. So their job is to make life miserable for me.

"Right now we have Low Thia Khiang, Chiam See Tong, Steve Chia. We can deal with them. Suppose you had 10, 15, 20 opposition members in Parliament. Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I'm going to spend all my time thinking what's the right way to fix them, to buy my supporters votes, how can I solve this week's problem and forget about next year's challenges?"

I like Small Lee, actually. He very honest say this kind of thing! This is what politic is what! FIX your enemy and BUY your supporter!

Nice one, Small Lee. I guess you are a bastard like your old man after all. Needless to say, the election was fought as dirty as it usually is, with the same old intimidation tactics employed, the press giving zero coverage to the massive rallies being held by the Workers' Party, and there are already reports of post-election intimidation of opposition candidates. But even these tactics aren't working quite as well as they used to. In a democracy like ours, zero increase on the two electoral seats held despite a 10% increase in the popular vote to an entire third of the overall electorate, would not seem much to gloat about. But this is Singapore we're talking about. 66% is about 20 points down on what those fuckers are used to - it's a massive bloody nose, and me, my dad, and Rockson sure are gloating.

Lincoln Tan's probably smiling too. Here's his latest piece in the Herald on how he convinced his wife to stay in Auckland and not go back to Singapore. He took her to the zoo and said - look at the animals in the cages. That could be us.