Posts by Tze Ming Mok
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I can vouch for that site by the way, (www.givetoburma.org). It was set up by a young dissident friend of mine, Susu.
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29 and the Beauty and the Beast reference missed me. Shame on my name.
My brother and I called him Buylose Onebad, in a display of mad English skillz.
Nice work on the forum Russell, and good on Asia:NZ as usual for putting it together, despite the ol' 'missing in action' syndrome from certain journalists... Now that sure brings back memories: I'm sure this isn't the first time Mark Jennings has been expected at an 'ethnicky' type thing and didn't show. Well, no-one likes to feel provincial.
Peppermint Gomez, signing off.
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Murder, coming to a street near Xue. Sorry, I couldn't resist a Jackie Chan moment.
Hmmm, maybe you better see someone about that.
That's not even how you say it. It's like 'Shwear'. I'll save the rest of my opinion on that 'joke' for my ulcer.
So, another fatality through domestic violence, happy Suffrage day. If it weren't for the unbearable cuteness and the international intrigue of abandoned mystery children and flights from justice, I wonder if this would have been just another statistic? One woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every five weeks. Half of all murders of women in New Zealand are by partners or ex-partners. If anyone thinks these facts are just some Women's Refuge conspiracy to 'guilt trip' men, then we are in trouble.
At the same time, the initially international and hence 'nationalistic solidarity' nature of the case may have also prevented any 'weird kung fu crime in secretive community' angle. Small mercies.
And all just round the corner from the Roskill shops ('Three Kings' my ass). It makes me so sad. I'm just hoping something good can come from this. This, for example, is horrible, but it's important.
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小千寻 is just a cutesy name for little lost girl
Wait a minute, it's actually the kid's name - little Qian Xun. Duh. I plead the '4:00 am blogging' defense.
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Oh, and the idiom's not really an idiom, 小千寻 is just a cutesy name for little lost girl.
Oh, 千 as in qian jing? I'll post you dumplings when you've abandoned your long-suffering parents again.
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i get fed up with the racism my kids & myself face for not being "indian" enuf.
Okay, back to the subject then will you! To me, the fundamental strategic error of the attempt to reclaim 'banana' is that: although Liu Shueng says it was a label that 'other people' called us, it was only a label that *other Chinese people* called us. So that's not really 'other people' is it? And weren't our annoying aunties in the home country the least of our problems anyway? Although 'more Chinese than thou' types can be annoying (I'm probably one of them at times) as can 'more Indian than thou' types, are they the primary source of racism experienced by those groups in the West? Reclaiming actual slurs like 'Chink' or 'Invader' would be a much closer parallel to 'Queer', 'N:(gger', 'hori', 'bitch' etc, but I guess that would be a less safe name for a conference.
I can only cope with the 'Bananas' in the conference name as an overtly ironic title, sort of like calling a conference for String Theorists within a Physics Department: "The Conference for those people in our department who are actually not Physicists, just dope-smoking Philosophers, and we don't like them either. So a good thing they're off on their own."
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Who knows if I am officially qualified to comment, considering I am now 'European' (see change of address). But I always thought the name of the first conference was crappy.
To me, 'Banana' is still pejorative, because I actually have more mainlanders in my social network than a lot of NZ-borns do, and within our cultural language, it's pejorative - obviously so, as it's linguistically specific as 'bounty-bar'.
If people want to 'reclaim' the term, well, each to their own, but as we can see on the Skykiwi thread, it (the word, not the conference) hasn't actually helped bridge any gaps between Western born/'integrated' Chinese and new migrants/international students. The literal indication is that these Banana Conference people are 'white on the inside' and proud of it. So you can see why the mainland kids might take it as a statement of these 'Kiwi' Chinese being proud of having abandoned their heritage culture and turned white, rather than it being a positive statement about NZ-Chinese identity.
That's not the Banana-boosters' intention, but too bad. Identity is self-defined; but language doesn't exist in a vacuum... And if you want to actually acknowledge the importance or even existence of specific communities of concern to NZ-born Chinese identity, mainland Chinese migrants and students are the obvious place to start. It seems that 'Banana' starts off on the wrong foot, by dividing rather than uniting, if unintentionally.
So yeah, I still think it's a lame-o term to describe integrated or NZ-born Chinese. Except for the ones who really are bananas.
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Oh hell dude, I just had no idea how to use or alter the personal profile page to display less information rather than more! Jetlagged in London.
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It's not so classy to gloat. I can imagine she's feeling pretty sad being pushed out after more than two decades.
I agree with Russell. My schadenfreude has run out by now, personally. I hear it was on the cards for a long time - but it's possible that the Press Council decision gave them a useful timing opportunity for lowering the axe. Hmm, ugly mixed metaphors, oh well.
I actually take more pleasure in seeing someone with one of the most obvious Chinese-guy partial pseudonyms ever (hello Kenneth.Y!) posting for the first time on PA.
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Firstly, great to see Eleanor holding her corner so nicely.
Stephen said:
acupuncture and homeopathy sharing the same bioenergetic basis? Give me a break. What is this bio-energy?
I wasn't referring to the basis of how homeopathy is meant to work on symptoms (don't ask me to explain or justify that whole memory of water thing... fuck, who knows?), but the method by which practioners make diagnoses - which in the homeopaths/doctors I've seen, is the same as the method that traditional Chinese practioners use (ring test, body meridians) to diagnose for acupuncture treatments and other traditional 'qi' based or herbal treatments. Maybe it's not common for them to do that? Not sure - it's just been prevalent practice in the practitioners I've seen. So broadly, when I refer to 'bio-energetic' I mean 'qi' related stuff - it's a term that the doctor I referred to used - the one who was registered by the Medical Council as a specialist after his many years of practice and training of that stuff as a GP, because his reputation was just too good (and you know, the Council kept paying him to train acupuncturists and that). Seems a good enough term as any, although I could just refer to 'qi/meridian related stuff' - such as kung fu, tai chi, qi gong, Chinese massage/acupressure, reflexology, etc. Someone above scoffed at the ability of tai chi 'fighters' to actually beat people in fights - probably because tai chi is not taught as a fighting style much, even though it is originally a fighting form - but it turned into a qi gong style. I wouldn't back a Tai Chi practitioner against a boxer either. The ones I see most often are the 80 yr old Chinese grannies doing gentle circular motions in the carpark of the Mt Roskill cricket club. They are lacking a little in the speed and muscle tone department. Kung fu though, is part of the same qi business - but rather faster. Jet Li might dispute the 'Western boxing always beats Chinese boxing' claim...
In terms of the diagnosis method, I've seen it done by various people to accurately and immediately diagnose numerous allergies and other chronic ailments which have been confirmed in the 'usual' way but not disclosed or hinted at in the least to the homeopath/doctor. A study I'd definitely like to see is a clinical trial of the accuracy of those *diagnosis* methods, rather than just treatments (which shouldn't be divorced from individual diagnoses really). Is there any information on that?
Homeopathy doesn't have any demonstrated mechanism at all, and I suspect that the basis for acupuncture will turn out to have more to do with hypnosis and suggestion.
Well, other than my own subjective experiences acupuncturing myself, I do have a certain amount of trust in the ('western') clinical trials that were run on acupuncture effectiveness for certain conditions, which of course did have control populations. So - well - I'm not sure how hypnosis and suggestion would have impacted on those trials. Not that I have anything against doobies ('herbal', 'natural' etc etc...)