Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

Listening to the radio in the office at 5:30 yesterday... "blah blah blah Winston Peters will be Minister of Foreign Affairs"...yeah yeah, we knew that... "and Race"... What? What?? Minister of Race Relations?? "..ing." Ah, Minister of Racing - small mercies.

So - let the political blog onslaught begin. Personally, I'm not particularly concerned about Peters heading abroad and freaking out the coloured folk. He loves them in their own countries.

Seriously though, let's go on past experience. The only time Peters ever fronted up to the Chinese communities, he's told them that he IS Chinese. As far as I know, he's never fronted up to the Muslim community (and certainly not to the defamed Iraqis who turned up to Parliament seeking an apology), but if he's sent to the Emirates, I wouldn't be surprised to see him swapping Allah uh-Akbars for a few good rounds of the cocktail circuit. And let's not forget his desire to work in a Chinese restaurant when he's done with this term.

Peters only seems to know how to insult and slander people when they aren't right in front of him, buying him drinks. A stroke of genius then perhaps, to launch him directly into their midst. I'm perversely looking forward to it.

Here's a question: Has Labour's maneouvring put Winston and I on the same page at last? With trade and immigration struck from Peters' Ministerial menu, will his usual smogasbord of oppositional rhetoric to dealing with China be boiled away to - gasp! - a human rights approach?

Yes, let's see then, if he really does love us in our own countries.

Yellow Peril presents the preliminary results of a small Sunday night text-survey of young Chinese people, regarding an idea recently floated by Paul Spoonley. Question: "do you want the City to build you a Chinatown?"

Sample: Chinese, aged 21-34, ranging from 4th Generation to ex-International Student. Two in Wellington, the rest Auckland. Includes myself.

Responses:

CC: Who the fuck is this? Is this a joke? [maybe it wasn't CC after all]
KT: No
RC: No
RL: Um.. Yes but there are already little ones everywhere!
DT: Wouldn't that make it a beta country. :-)
THW: Yes [NB: poor THW lives in Wellington, no wonder she wants one.]
XTL: Can I say I don't care?
ML: No
DS: If they did I could start a nice extortion racket... In short. No.
HHC: No way man. Congregation. Segregation. Why don't they build a maori town or arabic town?
TC: Nah.. just places where u can buy stuf from h[o]m[e] is enuf 4 me : ) anyhow, NZ & d chinese community isnt ready 4 a chinatown & its consequences I reckon :)
AK: No, cos I believe Auckland should move towards being an intercultural city :)
DC: I'm an objective reporter and therefore devoid of potentially polarising opinions, which translates roughly as ... dunno
KN: [another starving Wellingtonian] Nah, but it'd be nice if they built a nice noodlebar or hong kong style cafe. Damn that japanese noodlebar next to Britomart is nice.
SC: lol...No.
KBC: Fuck yea, actually a project in the making. Choice Pagoda takes centre stage. With fortress and summer palace at the harbour. I am serious, gimme quality congee!
TMM: Only if it has cool robots.

Maybe if I'd asked ""Do you want Paul Spoonley to build you a Chinatown?" or "Do you want Tze Ming to build you a sci-fi Chinatown that has cool robots?" or "Is Auckland turning into one giant Chinatown?" (as KBC seems to have interpreted the question), they might have responded more positively across the board.

The Spooner (can I call him the Spooner?) is generally on target, and what he was really talking about in context was ensuring strong regional and city council support for the regional migrant settlement strategies. Right On. So on one hand let's not get too excited.

On the other hand ...WTF?? "The result is a multicultural muddle," says Spoonley of the years of civic inattention to planned ethnic precincts. Come on man. I love my organic "multicultural muddle." It works a lot better with cultural flow than it does with traffic.

Auckland is too far gone for discrete 'ethnic precinct' projects. Re-imagining the city entire as architecturally Asia-Pacifican is well underway, be it George Chang's Parallel Skyways at the recent InvAsian show, or the ongoing student-driven Cultural Signals project of the (seriously Asianised) Architecture School of Auckland University. The expansive visions coming from this generation has left the old community ghetto-style approach in the dust.

You could say that everywhere we go, we always take the Chinatown with us. Auckland is a city of mini-Chinatowns. Downtown is Chinatown. Balmoral is Chinatown. Mt Albert is Chinatown. Howick is Chinatown. Northcote is Chinatown. Avondale is Chinatown.

So really, where would you even put another Chinatown? I vote Roskill. Dammit, something needs to go in Three Kings Mall...

Maori Party-Nats-UF-Act-NZF? Speaking of surreal coalitions, what were Graham Henry and Ahmed Zaoui doing watching Graham Brazier declare himself a narcotics user in front of a huge packed churchful of community scions on Saturday? And what was I doing there? Hallucinating?

'Who's Graham Henry?' I asked Mike Treen.

The funeral/memorial service was taking on epic dreamlike proportions, and it wasn't even an allegory for post-election coalition-negotiations.

So. Farewell
then
David Wakim.

"My homeland
isn't a
suitcase"

Darwish said,
but God packed
you well,

as an
elaborate joke
on The Man:

a dozen Epsom
dadsworth, five days
of 'drug dealers'

three golfers
a man of rugby,
cricket,

faith, and
questions,
an Aussie,

a Kiwi, a
real live
Arab

and an
army
of revolutionary

shit-kickers
in one
David; the catch

burst the lot
all over
St Benedicts.

The Funeral Directors' Association just put out a handy book on dealing with death in different cultures. The bloody thing isn't on the internet though, so I have no actual information to impart.

As it happens, a friend of mine who works on a *coughmedicalsoapoperacough* was asked not long ago by the scriptwriters about Mainland Chinese traditions around death and funerals for *splutterplotpurposesahem*. How the hell is she supposed to know? She only plays a Mainland Chinese on TV - she's NZ-born Southeast Asian Chinese, she don't know jack. So she asked me, and I was like 'dude, I'm NZ-born Southeast Asian Chinese too, I don't know jack either.' We both guessed that the answer was something along the lines of: Pretend nothing happened, laugh in painful embarrassment a lot, lock yourself in your office and work extremely hard for a few weeks, not even pausing to blog.

I can't make the Ethnic Communities and the Media forum this Wednesday, but all you real media people should turn up and say: 'yeah, I know what ethnic people want from the media, I read Yellow Peril - it's all about more hot Asian guys, right?'

I dare you.

Anyhow, real media people, if you don't go my Embedded Asian Underground and Rice-Roots spies will tell me.

Ethnic Communities and the Media forum: a belonging initiative
Wednesday 12 October, 9 am - 4 pm
Council Chambers, Auckland Town Hall

Featuring such luminaries as Paul Spoonley (natch), Jeremy Rees - for 'the media' - and Lincoln Tan - for 'the community'. Or maybe for 'the media'. He hasn't decided yet. I would have had the same problem if I'd been able to attend.

See, so if you should be there but don't turn up, you'll either be on the front page of the Herald, or an ethnic street-march will turn up at your door.

There will also be some wicked demographic whizz-bangery at the beginning, for all you burgeoning ethno-geeks who really want to prove dat you down wid'it.

Preliminary bouquet to the Herald for sending their Head of News. Preliminary brickbat to Radio NZ for only sending their ethnic-media-ghetto-slot person who already knows how to engage with ethnic communities. If they haven't been listening to her up til now, I don't know what a forum's gonna do.

Honestly, MSM-types please do go along, if only to meet ethnic minority people who aren't me, giving you someone else to call when you want to find out what the so-called 'community' thinks. Talking to people is not so hard.

Some preliminary reading if you're going: Engaging Asian Communities from the Asia:NZ foundation. Although the news coverage when it was released the other month was entertainingly absurd ('Newsflash! Asians experience racism!') the key focus of this report was largely missed - how to include migrant communities into host societies in practical ways.

It's 4 pm Wednesday, with Victoria University in agreement to release their 6000 newsprint hostages... and suddenly they 'can't find them'. They'd never make the grade in the Iraqi insurgency.

Where could they have 'lost' an entire print run of Salient? Up their litigious asses? I mean let me get this straight. They stole the Salients because the Salients, like bombs, like weapons of mass distraction, were too dangerous to unleash upon the world. They needed to be stored away under lock and key in a secret bat-cavern where no-one could find them. Which is why they now they can't find them.

Now if the VUW administration were in fact a bunch of drinking-horning, desk-pissing, crashing-through-quad-skylighting, student-mag-abducting student politicians (see my previous post), I wouldn't be batting an eyelid.

But they are meant to be responsible adults, and this is just utter bullshit. I'm incredulous. Kudos to the Salient team for taking on the role of grownups here.

After Keith washes the blood off his hands, he'll probably be ready to take donations.

Further running updates throughout the afternoon...
on NRT, fightingtalk, and finally and comprehensively on the Nip, including the text of the settlement and the original story.

Lyndon Hood notes:

This lapse of collective memory on Vic's part was apparently cured about 5:15 by the application of two TV crews and a Dom Post cameraman.

Matt Nippert opines:

Terri Schiavo died with more dignity.

Hard to argue.

Yeah okay, why is this on Yellow Peril?
a) Keith is Chinese (sshhh, it's a secret)
b) I am as pissed off about this as I am about any race relations issue (tenuous at best)
c) This 'ex-student media blog mafia' thing Russell referred to kind of puts me in mind of a friendly neighbourhood triad gang (yeah, nice try)
c) I'm supposed to be on a blog-holiday so have no need to be thematically relevant (that'll do).