Looking back over the years
And whatever else that appears,
I remember I cried when my mother died
Never wishing to hide the tears.
And at fifty-nine years old,
My father, God rest his soul,
Couldnāt understand why the only lass
He had ever loved had been taken,
Leaving him to start
With a heart so badly broken
Despite encouragement from me,
No words were ever spoken.
And when he passed away,
I cried and cried all day.
Alone again, naturally.
Considering Gilbert OāSullivan was 21 when he wrote āAlone Againā, itās a remarkably mature lyric, particularly as he didnāt know his father well, and his mother was alive when the song was penned.
But it is my current earworm and with a slight change in the words, it reflects my mood.
Of course Iām not āaloneā: I have a partner and a network of friends, but there is an element of loneliness as part of the immigrant experience that hardly anyone talks about.
When you emigrate to parts unknown with your parents, and you donāt have a say in it, you arguably have a different perspective on your new home country than someone who perhaps chose to go there, and you certainly have a different perspective to someone born and bred there.
Iāve never blogged the full story though most of my friends know it.
There is a photo somewhere of my family as I knew it at age two or so: my parents, my maternal grandmother, and me. At that age, I knew there were other family membersāpaternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousinsābut this was my immediate definition of family, and I held on to that for a long time. Certainly it was my definition during my formative years.
I came with my parents and not my grandmother, landing here three days shy of my fourth birthday.
When my grandmother arrived in March 1978 under the family reunion policy, my mother and I being her only living descendants, I felt āthe familyā was complete again.
Immigrants will probably tell you, more so if they are not of the majority race, that they have a sense that they need to face life in this new country together. That most of the people around you wonāt be able to share the experience youāre having, because youāre making sense of it through a different lens. We spoke Cantonese at home, and we will have talked about the odd customs of the people here, from the stupidity of the colloquialism bring a plate to my parents needing to fight for the Wellington Hospital Board to give my mother her correct pay (something which ultimately required the intervention of former mayor Frank Kitts). Most of your peers wouldnāt know what it was like for a white person to tell your Mum and yourself to go back to where you came from. Or to be denied service at what is now Countdown on account of your race.
Repeated experiences like that give you a sense of āthe family versus the worldā. Happy ones naturally outnumber negative onesāby and large, New Zealanders are a tolerant, embracing peopleābut itās probably natural for humans to build up some sort of defence, a thicker skin to cope with a few of the added complications that the majority donāt have to think twice about. Itās why some of us will jump to āracismā as an explanation for an injustice even when the motives may not be that at all. Itās only come from experience and reinforcement, certainly at a time when overt racism was more commonplace in Aotearoa, and more subtle forms were at play (as they still are with decreasing frequency; hello, Dominion Post).
As the familyās numbers dwindled, it impacts you. It certainly impacted my father in 1994, in the way OāSullivanās song says, and as āthe last man standingā there is a sense of being alone. Never mind that my father had aphasia in his last years and couldnāt respond intelligibly when I spoke to him: the fact he could hear me and acknowledge me was of great comfort. He understood the context. And frankly, precious few others do.
Other than aunts, uncles and cousins, the only time I really get to use Cantonese now is at shops where Cantonese speakers serve me. The notion of an āAsianā invasion where youāre walking the streets not knowing whatās being spoken (Iām looking at you, Winston) is rot. You feel the loss of identity as well as your family because identity is relative: while you have a soul, a deeper purpose, that is arguably more absolute, you answer who you are in relation to those around you. I am proud of my heritage, my culture, my whakapapa. They identify me to the rest of you. Each of you holds a different impression, part of the full picture, just as in branding. The last person who understood part of my identity, the one relative to my immediate family who came with me to this new land, is now gone, and that cannot be reclaimed.
Therefore, this isnāt solely about the passing of an elderly man and the natural cycle of life. This is about how a little bit of you goes as well. Wisdom tells you that you form another part of your identityāsay how I relate to my partner, for instanceāand in time you rebuild who you are and how you face the world. However, that takes time, and OāSullivan might be an earworm for a little while longer.
The Chinese-market Buick Enclave became Autocadeās 4,000th model today. It wasnāt planned: in fact, I had readied a photograph of the Hyundai Tiburon (RD), expecting that would be the 4,000th. But, as happens with this site, you spot something, and you want that clarified. I havenāt been methodical about Autocade, everāit has always been about what took my fancy and whether my reference books on the topic were around. (After the move, a few still arenāt, so fans of smog-era US cars may have some waiting before they see those increase in numbers again.)
Just as I do with each millionth page view, I thought Iād see how the entry numbers had progressed:
December 2009: 1,000 models (21 months to first 1,000)
December 2012: 2,000 models (three years to second 1,000)
December 2014: 3,000 models (two years to third 1,000)
January 2020: 4,000 models (six years and one month to fourth 1,000)
In other words, these last 1,000 took ages, and I suspect itās a mixture of busy-ness on other ventures and the fact that a lot of modern cars that get entered arenāt that inspiring.
When many entries of new models into Autocade are of SUVs, especially Chinese ones that have little to distinguish themselves, then itās not as fun as adding those models that youāve had some connection with from your youth. The first 1,000 were easy: I remembered many of the details (cubic capacities and prices, for instanceāI am that much of an anorak when it came to stuff from my childhood) and while I still checked with books, they didnāt take that long to write. But how many of us care about the difference between the Honda Pilot and Passport, or the links between the Beijing X3, Changhe Q35, BAIC X35 and Senova Zhixing anyway?
I imagine that thereās more editing that goes on today, too. When a current model gets entered, you just put the start of production and āto dateā. But thereās no guarantee weāll revisit that page when the car ends production; and often thereās no announcement of the cessation anyway. Naturally with more pages on the database, the more time youāll spend editing and correcting existing content than creating brand-new stuff. Chinaās massive boom in the late 2000s and most of the 2010s meant a plethora of models got entered, and with the market the way it is there, cannibalization of your own model lines hasnāt struck some car makers as an issue yet.
Thereās also the issue of translation: you want to go to a Chinese resource when writing about Chinese cars, and my literacy hasnāt really kept up with my age.
A middle-aged man uses, in part, nostalgia to make sense of the car worldāI buy Octane and Classic and Sportscar more than Autocar and Car these daysāand while itās easy to understand Kas, Fiestas, Focuses and Mondeos, itās not as second-nature to utter EcoSport, Puma, Escape and Mustang Mach-E. It is no surprise to see Mercedes-Benz stick with its A, B, C, E and S pecking order, even for its SUVs (prepend GL). The next generation of motorhead will have no such issue: theyāre used to these big line-ups and where everything sits.
Iāll keep building, and there is plenty of exotica that hasnāt been entered. Perhaps between those and the Chinese crossovers, it can remain interesting.
Forty-three years ago (September 16, 1976), we arrived in this country.
As we flew from Sydney and into Wellington, my Dad pointed out the houses below to me. āSee, those are the sorts of houses New Zealanders live in,ā he said. I thought it was odd they lived in two-storey homes and not apartment blocks. I was three at the time, so I had no clue about the population density of Aotearoa.
I frequently point out just how cloudy and grey that day was. I donāt remember a summer of ā76āā77, just as no one here remembers a summer of ā16āā17. Only one other car, a Holden station wagon, went along Calabar Road in the opposite direction as we left Wellington Airport.
Before we departed Hong Kong days earlier, my maternal grandmotherāthe person closest to me at that point and whom I would desperately miss for the next 18 monthsāgave me two very special Corgi models at the airport, large 1:36 scale Mercedes-Benz 240Ds. I said goodbye to her expecting to see her in weeks.
As I was put to bed that night by my fatherāit wasnāt usually his roleāhe asked if I wanted to see the cars, since I had been so good on the flights. He got them out and showed me, and I was allowed to have a quick look before they were put back into his carry-on bag.
None of us knew this was the trip where weād wind up in Aotearoa. Mum had appliedāI went with her to the New Zealand High Commission in Connaught Tower in Hong Kong to get the formsābut we had green cards to head to Tennessee. But, my mother, ever careful, didnāt want to put all her eggs into one basket. And like a lot of Hong Kongers at the time, they had no desire to hang around till 1997 and find themselves under communist rule.
It was a decision that would change our lives.
Whilst here, word got back homeāand then out to usāthat New Zealand immigration had approved our application. In the days when air travel cost a fortune, my parents considered our presence here serendipitous and decided to stay. What point was there to fly back if oneās only task was to pack?
Itās hard not to reminisce on this anniversary, and consider this family with their lives ahead of them.
Iāve had it good. Mum never wanted me to suffer as she had during the famine behind the Bamboo Curtain, and to many in the mid-1970s, getting to the Anglosphere was a dead cert to having a better life.
I had a great education, built a career and a reputation, and met my partner here, so I canāt complain. And I couldnāt have asked for more love and support than I had from my immediate family.
My grandmother eventually joined us under the family reunion policy in 1978. My mother and I were her only living descendants.
Despite the happiness, you donāt think, on that night in 1976, that in 18 years my mother would die from cancer and that my widowed father, at 80, would develop Alzheimerās disease, something of which there is no record in the family.
Despite both parents having to make the decision to send a parent to a rest home, when it came time for me to do the same thingāand it was the right decision given the care Dad neededāit was very tough.
A friend asked me how I felt, and I said I felt like āthe meanest c*** on earth,ā even though I knew I would have made the same decision regardless of other factors as his disease progressed.
Immigrant families stick together because we often have the sense of āus versus the worldā. When Racist ā80s Man tells you to go back to where you came from, itās not an experience you can easily share with others who arenāt immigrants and people of colour. So as our numbers diminishedāmy grandmother in 1990 and my mother in 1994āit was Dad and me versus the world, and that was how we saw things for the decades that followed.
That first night he went to live in a home was the same night I flashed back to the evening of September 16, 1976āand how impossibly hard it would have been to foresee how things would turn out.
Heās since changed homes twice and found himself in excellent care at Te Hopai, though he now needs to be fed and doesnāt detect as much to his right. The lights are going out.
Itās a far cry from being the strong one looking after your three-year-old son and making sure he could fall asleep in this new country, where things were in such a state of flux.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonāt name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iāll keep their communications in confidence.
Now, the first thing to do is to get a time machine and ask me the same question 18 months earlier.
But I can only provide tips for coming third in Wellington:
ā¢ have forward-thinking policies;
ā¢ appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
ā¢ frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canāt advise how to win since I didnāt. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
ā¢ Use rose-coloured glasses;
ā¢ appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
ā¢ suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnāt do all these things. But they make for a couple of fun Tweets.
I repeat the call to administer the Voigt-Kampff test to all candidates.
I had a call from a nice gentleman working for Google called Shabhaz today. No, he wasnāt about to tell me that I wasnāt on the āfirst page of Googleā: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iāve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnāt work anyway. I canāt remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: āWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.ā You come to expect it from US Big Tech.
I suppose if you ignore it for enough years, the Big G phones you.
I proceeded to tell Shabhaz all the reasons I hated (actually, thatās not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, āIām not angry at you, only at your employer.ā And words to the effect of, āA man has to make a living, so I donāt have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.ā
He did say, āIf I had that experience, Iād hate them, too,ā and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: āItās not just about my experienceāitās all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneās.ā
Nevertheless, you canāt stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesā incompetence, greed, avarice and tax avoidance, and is only trying to collect a pay cheque, so I agreed to help him out.
Of course, it didnāt work as planned, as updating the address leads to this:
The house has only been there since 1972, and Google Earth has it, but then we all know that Google Earth operates in some kind of parallel universeāparallel to even Google My Business, it seems. One day, I suspect Google will catch up with houses built in the 1970s.
But seriously, with three businesses all linked to my email address (Heaven knows how) I wonder if anyone has ever got any business through Google My Business.
Iāve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iāve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iāve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iām tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donāt want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donāt want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereās a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatās the prognosis out there? Since I actually donāt use the site except as a last resort, and have little desire to, your experience far outweighs mine.
On a related note, this also made me wonder about competence.
Iāve never given my permission to be in the Yellow Pages. And the fact that Lucire does screen printing is news to me. Who makes up this bullshit and tries to pass it off as authoritative?
A Tweet to them is so far unanswered, so I may get in touch with them to have this listing removed. This one I can answer: since Iāve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iāve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyāll never send me anything relevant anyway.
In summary, today’s thought about Google:
With any other business that screws people over this badly and this often, weād avoid it as much as we could. Instead, most go to Google, pull their trousers down, and bend over.
Is it just me, or are companies getting more stupid by the day?
July 25, 2019
Marshall Freeman Collections (NZ) Ltd.
PO Box 302-218
NHPC
Auckland
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am in receipt of your letter dated the 19th inst.
If you are indeed an extension of Plumbquickās credit control department, you should check with them about their procedures.
You may wish to ask the following.
(a) When booking the job, did your client take down my credit card number?
(b) Did your client advise me that if the invoice was not paid that they would charge that credit card?
(c) Did I offer your clientās plumbers payment on completion of the job on the day but they said it would be sorted out with their accountsā department, especially if they already had my credit card on file?
(d) Did your client send out their invoice dated May 21, 2019 with a due date of May 21, 2019, which would result in my reasonably expecting that (b) would take place?
Now, since I am not in possession of a time machine, and considering I received the invoice on May 25, 2019, all four questions above should be answered in the affirmative.
Your client needs to be advised to, first, contact the customer themselves (well before July 19, incidentally), secondly, follow their own procedures, and thirdly, not provide a credit controller with a fiction about a late payment. I have no desire to affect excellent credit that I have spent decades building because of another partyās negligence.
I trust this clears this matter up.
Yours faithfully,
In case you’re wondering, my credit card has been charged.
I also highly recommend Bernie and Pipe Dream Plumbing in Tawa.
An email sent by me on March 27 to the head office of Lumino (the dentists). Link added for readers’ reference. I’ll let you make up your own minds.
Hi Josephine:
How are you?
I hate to bother you once more, as you had done everything you could to resolve the privacy issues I had with Goody’s subcontractor, Global Payments, last year. I was very happy with your professionalism and your actions. I am pleased to see Lumino has since gone with another provider for its loyalty programme.
I regret having to lean on you again.
As you know, I found it very uneasy that I allowed Lumino to have my private cellphone number and last year I made repeated requests to the Terrace branch to not contact me through it any more. I was given assurances that it would not happen again.
I had a hygienist appointment on November 16, which I cancelled via email due to the ‘flu. I was advised that there would be an opening in March 2019, but by this point I already had in mind I would switch dentists, as each Lumino dentist I was assigned to wound up leaving the practice. Therefore, I never replied.
On November 29, I was sent a reminder that I could book in if I clicked a link in the email. I never did.
Imagine my surprise when this week I received an SMS from Lumino accusing me of missing an appointment (that I had never made) and that there I could be charged for it.
This was the first I had ever heard of a March appointment. Back in November, Lumino would send email reminders (for the real appointments) so I really doubt there was anything booked.
It was rudely worded, in my opinion, presuming the customer to be wrong.
Call me intolerant, overly sensitive, or out of touch with modern communication techniques, but it seems the Terrace branch is incapable of following a basic request and now, it has concocted a missed appointment out of thin air.
Besides, I was not even in Wellington on the date concerned, so there was no way I would have made an appointment for it.
After hours spent on the 2018 privacy breach, fielding those scam calls that came [redacted as it’s something I believe to be true but cannot fully back it up without a few affidavits], receiving cellphone calls from Lumino waking me after four hours’ sleep, and getting tired of making the same request at branch level, I have to draw my relationship with Lumino to a close.
Going to the dentist or the hygienist shouldn’t be this hard, but with Lumino on the Terrace, it’s continually stressful.
I wonder if you could arrange to have my records transferred to Real Dentistry, 62 Rongotai Road, Kilbirnie, Wellington, then delete my details from your database. I have asked Real Dentistry to request my records from Lumino on the Terrace.
Thank you,
Yours truly,
Jack
I never got a reply this time, but I think we know what Lumino thinks of all of this as of today. Note: I contacted Josephine from a different email address, so they do have that to counter me with. Still, I thought I was pretty clear above.
I’ve also not received a reply from Heineken. Might have to get the Privacy Commissioner involved in this one, too.
I know most of you won’t care, since people haven’t abandoned Facebook en masse, and Google remains the most frequented site on the web. But I honestly thought New Zealand firms were better than this.
The new metric system: I’m following the car in front at the correct distance. Cf. the drivers in the other lanes.
Now that I live in the northern suburbs, I have to go on the motorway far more frequently. Itās become apparent that New Zealand has had a complete change of measurement system and I was unaware of it.
I thought we were on the metric system but apparently, there is a new metric system at play these days.
When the āsmartā motorway speed limit signs display 60 km/h, a handful of drivers, like me, go at the old 60 km/h. But there is evidently a new 60 km/h, which we oldies called ā80 km/hā. If the other drivers are not breaking the law, the majority of cars in this country appear to have had speedometers newly calibrated to the new metric system. When the sign says 80 km/h, they will travel at between 90 and 100 km/h. It doesnāt quite explain why, when the sign says 100 km/h, so many drive at 90 km/h, but thatās the incredible nature of the new metric system: unlike the old, itās not proportional.
Iām not entirely sure how the system converts metres or seconds, as I seem to do double the following distance of the majority of drivers. From memory, itās 40 m at 100 km/h, or, if you want to adopt the 1970s slogan from the UK, or the one uttered by the late Peter Brock, āOnly a fool breaks the two-second rule.ā The new metric system at play in New Zealand means that the new 40 m is the same as what we old-timers called 20 m. Or, if theyāre going by the clock, two seconds is what we used to call one second. I assume this new metric system also applies to penis length for men, so they arenāt too disappointed when their 7Ā½ cm is now called 15 cm. Sounds so much bigger, doesnāt it, lads?
Now, I could be wrong about there being a new metric system in this country. Itās simply that many people donāt understand speed and distance, or how road signs work. If you are male and think that 20 m really is 40 m, then maybe you have a small dick and have been convincing yourself otherwise, and the problem is multiplied on the roads. Sadly, however, this lack of awareness of time and distance isnāt exclusively a male thing.
As a nation, weāve been so busy for such a long time blaming āAsian driversā that our standards have dropped like stones. It wasnāt that long ago when we Wellingtonians mocked Aucklanders for their āMerge like a zipā signs in the mid-2000sāyet it seems an increasing number of us in the capital are now just as clueless on how traffic merges into a single lane.
All this makes you wonder if Greg Murphy was right when he suggested we should re-sit our driving test every 10 years.
For reasons unknown to me, May seems to be a quiet month for my blogging. I looked back to 2010 and usually, this is the month I blog less. Maybe itās the change in seasons, or I find other things to occupy my time.
This year, itās been far more eventful, as on the 10th inst., we moved. Thirty-six years at the same address, and Iām now in the northern suburbs of Wellington. The postal code has changed from a 6 to a 5 at the beginning, which gives you an idea of just how far north we went.
As a middle-aged man I donāt need to be that close to town any more, and since Iāve always worked from home, all I really need is a stable and reliable internet connection. We need space for team members who work for me on-site, which we now have far more of. The internet connection is the one thing that really needs work in terms of my daily routine, since we are on multiple levels, and D-Linkās Powerline āmains modemsā have not been that good here, while Vodafoneās Ultrahub also loses too much in terms of bandwidth in different parts of the property.
Above: There’s too great a loss of bandwidth through the D-link Powerline units. The top screen shot is a device plugged into the Vodafone Ultrahub near the Chorus ONT.
Itās goodbye Evans Bay views (which have never been the same since the Indoor Sport Stadium was erected at great additional unnecessary expense to ratepayers; a clear reminder not to trust certain establishment politicians) and hello to rolling hills and native bush.
It hasnāt all sunk in yet, as Iāve been working while the move has taken place, and havenāt had the time to enjoy the process. Rationally, I know we made the right decision, otherwise weād never have done it, but other than the last half-hour at the old place, letting the memories of each room flood in as I walked through for the last time, I havenāt been particularly emotional. In fact, when the buyers of my old home signed, I was actually happier for them than I was for myself, since they had been searching for a while, and I felt they got a good deal. Here they were, third time lucky in this street, and getting the largest house on the largest section, and, with the greatest respect to my former neighbours, a more solid one, too. (Yes, Iāve knocked on your timber inside over the years.) They have a view which they never would have had in the other places.
They additionally have a connection to a former resident on the street, which I wonāt go into publicly; and one partyās father actually came from the street we moved into. Also in one of those āvery New Zealandā coincidences, one dear friend who helped me move headed to Åtaki that evening, and told a woman there that he had been helping us. It turns out that she was the sister of one half of the couple that previously owned our new home. These seem to be very āharmoniousā events that appeal to my heritage, the sort of signs that to others might signal that āitās all meant to beā if you were seeking something beyond the rational.
In one year, in a street of 14 homes, four properties have changed hands; if you count the place on the corner of the street (which technically isnāt part of it), itās five properties. If anyone were to write its history (not that anyone would), 2018ā19 was the period of a sea change in terms of the people there.
Weāre still living among boxes, and there are still two storage unitsā worth of stuff that we need to empty out, but weāll just have to take things one step at a time. We filled a skip full of old stuff, and probably could have filled a second, once you added the miscellaneous trips our friends and I made to the tip. But on this end there are still a few things that need to go.
For the last two years, the Mary Potter Hospice has been the principal beneficiary of the nicer items, which included new things that my parents and grandmother acquired but never used.
One remarkable thing is how well the old furniture fits with the new place, and, interestingly, how comparatively poorly it fitted with the old. Itās as though my family bought for this house. When you look back over four decades, you get a sense of how things do intersect and come together, if youāre lucky, and we certainly regard ourselves as very lucky indeed. It makes me happy that things have worked out on many fronts, save for my Dadās Alzheimerās disease. Perhaps for him, too, there is a silver lining: we have wound up closer to him, so a drive north only takes 16 minutes (on a good day) rather than close to an hour.
Yesterday, we visited the old street to collect the last bits and pieces out of the garage, and said hi to one of our former neighbours. Weāll visit others we didnāt have a chance to farewell, since the move out took longer than planned, and we had to dash off to get to the new place that day. That neighbour had been there for 60 years, and had seen everything from one couple having an argument where the woman chased the man with a shotgun round the grounds of Rongotai College, to the residents that had come and gone over the years. Interestingly, she didnāt remember a case of arson (to an old Humber car) in the 1980s, to which the fire brigade was called; but other tales remained as clear as day.
I wonāt go into the nitty-gritty as there are many tales to tell, and Kiwi motorway behaviour is pitiful in so many cases as we drive up north. And for privacy reasons, I wonāt blog too much just yet about how weāre finding the new place, as weāre still adjusting to it ourselves. I will say the former owners were meticulous, filling up and painting over walls where things were once mounted (unless they used those 3M strips), and we are ever so grateful to them.
