Every year, I hear or read a news report along these lines here:
Itās Chinese, or the lunar, New Year today, and Asian communities all over New Zealand are coming together with their families to celebrate. Itās the Year of the Rat, which means it will be a lucky and prosperous year.
Sometimes theyāll append the last statement with āsays [insert prominent Chinese New Zealander]ā or āsays [insert name], president of the New Zealand Chinese Association.ā
I know this because one year I was the name inserted, but you need the context, and thereās never any room for it since itās usually the last story in the news.
Hereās how the interview tends to unfold.
āItās the Year of the Rat next year. Whatās that going to bring?ā
āWell, it really depends. Every year has its own energy, and it applies differently to every person depending on their bazi and the trend of their year. Itās like western astrology: different strokes for different folks.ā
āBut do you reckon for some itās going to be lucky and prosperous?ā
āYes, for some it will be.ā
Bingo. Thereās your closing sentence. āItās the Year of the Rat, which means it will be a lucky and prosperous year, says local Chinese man Jack Yan.ā And that’s why every year, the news report is a cookie-cutter item about an ethnic community really into luck and money.
I mean, if you lived in Wuhan right now, youāll probably be saying itās going to be a shit year because your New Yearās practically been cancelled and you canāt see your whÄnau while your cityās in lockdown. I think the closest equivalent would be, for an American, Thanksgiving being cancelled, and for many, Christmas being cancelled.
Incidentally, I’m not sure why the WHO held back on declaring the corona virus outbreak an international matter. Did they not know the New Year is the greatest migration of humans on this planet? Repatriating Brits after Thomas Cook collapsed is child’s play. And now we have the people suspected of having the virus arriving in certain other countries.
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.
As an expat, Iāve been asked a few times about what I think of the Hong Kong protests. Thereās no straight answer to this. Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order.
The British never gave us universal suffrage, so the notion that it was all roses before 1997 is BS. The best the Brits managed was half of LegCo toward the end, but before that it was pitiful. And the express reasons they didnāt give it to us, certainly in the mid-20th century, were racist.
Having said that, Iād love to see half of LegCo up for grabs, if not more.
The extradition bill is, in the grand scheme, pretty minor. If the PRC really wants to grab you, they will.
However, I totally get that codifying it into law gives them greater authority, or is perceived to give them that.
It wouldnāt be the first time the US State Department and others meddled in our affairs, and I donāt believe this is an exception.
Expecting the British to help out is a hiding to nothing. The Shadow Cabinet was critical of John Majorās Conservatives in the 1990s over Hong Kong, and when in office, months before the handover, was arguably even less effective. Thereāll be the occasional op-ed from Chris Patten. Not much else. The UK is too mired in its own issues anyway, looking more and more like the sort of failed state that it professes to āhelpā right now.
It hasnāt helped that HK Chinese feel that our culture is under threat, including our language, and there hasnāt been any indication from the PRC of alleviating this (the old playbook again). Observers inside China may see HKersā embrace of its internationalist culture as colonial and subservient to foreigners; HKers see it as a direct contrast to the lack of openness within the PRC between 1949 and the early 1980s and as a āfreerā expression of Chineseness. Arguments could be made either way on the merits of both positions. That resentment has been stoked for some time, and HKers will only need to point to the Uighurs as an indication of their fears.
Withdrawal of the bill, even temporarily, would have been wiser, as itās not a time for the PRC to get hard-line over this. This shouldnāt be a case of us v. them. This is, however, a perfect opportunity to have dialogue over reinterpreting āone country, two systemsā, and persuade the ROC of its meritāthe Chinese commonwealth idea that has been in my thoughts for a long time. However, Xi is one of the old-school tough guys, and this mightnāt be on his agenda. China hasnāt exactly gone to young people to ask them what they thinkāwe never have, whether youāre talking about the imperial times, the period between 1911 and 1949, or afterwards.
This might be my romantic notions of Hong Kong coloured by childhood memories, but the place thrived when the young could express themselves freely through music and other arts. They felt they had a voice and an identity.
Right now thereās a huge uncertainty about who we are. I think weāre proudly Chinese in terms of our ethnicity and heritage, and we might even think our ideas of what this means are superior to othersā. Rose-coloured glasses are dangerous to don because they donāt tell us the truth. But we might be nostalgic for pre-1997 because the expression of our identity was so much clearer when the ruling power was nothing like us. Who cares if they thought we were a bunch of piccaninnies if they just let us get on with our shit? Now thereās a battle between āour Chinesenessā versus ātheir Chinesenessā in the eyes of some HKers. Thanks to certain forces stoking the tensions, and probably using the resentment HK Chinese feel, there isnāt a comfortable, foreseeable way out any time soon.
I see Googleās going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing?
First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since theyāre open-source. Secondly, if they donāt get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own experience, Chinese cellphone developers make stuff that just works, and Iām inclined to trust them more these days.
Thirdly, no one needs all that Google crap anyway: I always said that if it disappeared overnight, weād all find replacements within a week. Now Huawei has toāin fact, it already has them.
Anyone who owns a Chinese phone made for the Chinese market already knows that they have their own app stores. Why do you actually need YouTube through an app when you can browse to the website? Maybe Huawei will do a tiny YouTube app that only surfs to their site for those keen on getting into the Google snooping network. Is a Gmail app really a must if you can set up your phone really easily as an email client to pull from Gmail? As to maps, Iāve been using Here Maps since Iāve had my Meizu M2 Note in 2016, and while it isnāt perfect, itās more than adequate. Recently I found they had maps of the Chatham Islands when the carsā sat-nav didnāt.
All Huawei really needs to do is roll out its own app store to its western phones with decent enough translations, and make sure itās updated with the APKs.
I have a better Meizu weather app on my phone than anything Iāve ever found on Google, and Iām sure Huawei has its version. I owned a Huawei phone many years ago, although it was from my telco and I never had it rooted. It came with a suite of battery-draining Google junk, including services that you could switch off only to have them restart; but when I was able to get a Google-free phone, Iāve never looked back. When that phone was replaced, I made sure the next one was Google-free as well.
Whatās going to happen is that Google and the US will lose out as Huawei might find itself zooming ahead with a superior app store, and its own developments may outpace the Americansā.
Corporate America may be patting itself on the back, and their president may think he was doing their bidding, but I think theyāll find themselves weakened.
It’s been nearly one week with the new Meizu M6 Note.
It’s the “international” model, which means it’s not Chinese-spec, and there was no way to turn it into a Chinese one.
One observation is that the international one is far buggier than the Chinese one. Either that, or Android 7 is far buggier than Android 5.
For instance, if I leave my old phone as a USB media device, it would stay on that mode. The new one will always change by itself to ‘charge only’, meaning each time I plug it into USB, I now have to waste time doing an extra step.
Secondly, there’s no drive assistant on the new phone, which may have been a Chinese-only feature. I guess they don’t know we have cars outside China.
I’ve mentioned the app shortcomings in an earlier post.
But here’s one that I doubt is related to the Chineseness of my phone: Instagram simply performs better on the old phone than on the new. A Meizu M2 Note on an old Flyme (on top of Android 5) running a version of Instagram that dates back seven or eight months uploads smoother videos than a Meizu M6 Note on the latest Flyme (atop Android 7) running the latest Instagram.
The issue then is: is it the phone, the OS, or the app that’s to blame?
My first clue was my attempts at uploading a haka performed at my primary school. It took nine attempts before Instagram made one publicly visible, a bug going back some time.
When it did upload, I noticed it was clunky as it advanced.
I uploaded it again today on the old phone and there were no issues. It worked first time.
Now, the two are on different aspect ratios so you might think you’re not comparing apples with apples. How about these two videos? Again, Android 7 required repeated attempts before Instagram would make the video public. Things worked fine with the older phone.
Anyone know why it’s far, far worse as the technology gets newer? Like servers, which are much harder to manage now, or banks, where cheques take five to seven times longer to clear than in the 1970s, technology seems to be going backwards at the moment.
Above: If phones were sentient beings, it probably is a bit mean to have the old phone take a photo of its successor.
After a drop to the ground (and by that I mean the hard floor at the local Pak ānā Save) produced lines on the screen of my old Meizu M2 Note, I decided to upgrade to the M6 Note. The familiarity of the Flyme interface was one big reason, though it’s only now, after 12 hours of fiddling, that I’m only slightly happy with how it all went.
The experience was quite unlike the previous purchase, which went incredibly smoothly. The trouble seems to stem from Meizu offering a New Zealand-specific version of the M6 Note, model M721L.
Why didn’t I buy it from a Chinese vendor like last time (when there were no New Zealand retailers)? It seems that all the Ebay vendors were selling global editions of the phone, too, so for the sake of a few dollars, I wanted the support of a local vendor. If there wasn’t much difference between a global phone and a Kiwi one, should it matter? After all, this phone is on Flyme 6Ā·1Ā·4Ā·1G (G for global), and according to one page on the Meizu forums, all I needed to do was download a Chinese Flyme OS patch and it should upgrade and change accordingly.
Problem no. 1: it doesn’t work. It might have worked for one user, but every patch I tried (and they take nearly two hours to download from Meizu’s website) ended with a ‘Firmware corrupt’ (if you were lucky to even get an error message) despite the ZIP files all verifying correctly.
Resigned with the fact I could not turn the M6 Note into a Chinese one, I had to root it to remove the Google bollocks.
Problem no. 2: Meizu has taken away the easy access to rooting the phone. This method does not work, either, at least not this model. After about six hours, I stumbled on the solution: you can follow the above method but switch your phone to Easy Mode first.
Once rooted, I began removing anything Google, for reasons followers of this blog know well.
After downloading the familiar apps, I did encounter some issues. First, the Chinese app store and the global one have different software. Weibo is an international version, for instance. The default music and video apps are much crappier for export, missing the Chinese content (which sometimes included international TV series), and going straight to the local directories.
We do live in an age where the Chinese versions of software can be better than the western ones. Indeed, it was during my experimenting with my previous Meizu phone that I discovered that Chinese designers were creating more visually pleasing and user-friendly apps than their occidental counterparts, at least among the programs I needed.
While there’s obviously a jump up in terms of speed (I bought the 64 Gbyte version) images seem to render duller on the screen.
Then there were the usual problems of photo and music directories from the transferred SD card not appearing in order, which isn’t uncommon.
While I’ve yet to give the phone the acid test (daily use, taking photos and videos), I haven’t really been wowed by the experience of setting up. It was far easier in 2016, with better results. It’s going to be a useful phone, and I thank Charlotte at PB Technologies Wellington for her advice, but if I had the time, I would have waited till a friend went to China and asked them to bring a Google-free one back.
PS., December 4: Solution to getting the Chinese version of Weibo: since my old phone wasn’t completely dead (and will remain in service as long as the screen holds up), I went to its App Store, which is Chinese, got the URL for Weibo there (through sharing it), visited it on a browser on my new phone, and installed from there.
Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I donāt think this was meant as a compliment.
Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an attempt to take down his party leader. Except it was so much more condensed than the machinations of Francis Urquhart, and, if you were Chinese, Indian or Filipino, in the words of Taika Waititi, it was āracist AFā.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnāt happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenāt racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesā phone call, where the former stated that two Chinese MPs were worth more than two Indian ones, drew plenty of thoughts from both communities, where we felt we were treated as numbers, or a political funding source, with none of us actually getting into a National Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) since Pansy Wong was ousted last decadeāmaking you feel that had other Cabinet ministers been held to the same standard, they would have been gone as well. Here was my first Tweet on the subject:
In a bid to win National Party clients, Iām changing my business slogan to āWorth more than my mate Krishna.ā
Thereās the inevitable look back through the history of Chinese New Zealanders, who have largely been humiliated since the gold-mining days by earlier generations, and the Poll Tax, for which an apology came decades after during the previous Labour government.
And the scandal also inspired Tze Ming Mok to write an excellent op-ed for The New Zealand Herald, which I highly recommend here. Itās one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheās absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleās Republic of China donāt like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weāre part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Her research showed that roughly half of Chinese New Zealanders were born on the mainland, and that the group itself is incredibly diverse. My fatherās family fled in 1949 and I was raised in a fairly staunch anti-communist household, images of Sun Yat Sen and the ROC flag emblazoned on my paternal grandfatherās drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnāt have an awful lot of positive things to say about her experiences there, eventually making her way out to her birthplace during her tertiary studies.
Tze Ming writes:
This chilling effect is harming Chinese people in New Zealand. Many people cannot differentiate Chinese people from the actions of the CCP (I mean hey, many people canāt tell a Chinese from a Korean), but this is made worse when hardly any authorities on the topic will address the issue openly. Concerns can only erupt as xenophobia against the Chinese and āAsianā population ā¦
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingās Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
āAt leastā is right. My father was born in the mainland where åå ± was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iām willing to bet thereās an entire, older Chinese-born generation that thinks the same.
She continues:
It’s endlessly irritating and insulting that both Labour and National have lazily assigned Chinese communities as the fiefdoms of politicians openly backed by the Chinese government.
Thatās true, too. In 2014 I was approached by the National Party asking how best to target the Chinese community. My response was to treat us the same as any other New Zealanders. Iām not sure whether the advice was taken on board, as within months I was invited to a Chinese restaurant for a $100-a-head dinner to be in the presence of the Rt Hon John Key, a fund-raiser that was aimed at ethnic Chinese people resident here. It certainly didnāt feel that I was being treated like my white or brown neighbours.
The other point Tze Ming touches on, and one which I have written about myself, is the use of the term Asian in New Zealand.
Let me sum it up from my time here, beginning in 1976, and how I saw the terms being used by others:
1970s: āChineseā meant those people running the groceries and takeaways. Hard working. Good at maths. Not good at politics or being noticed, and Petone borough mayor George Gee was just an anomaly.
1990s: āAsianā became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston āTwo Wongs donāt make a whiteā Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itās not a term we claimed at the time, and while some have since tried to reclaim it for themselves to represent the oriental communities (and some, like super-lawyer Mai Chen, have claimed it and rightly extended it to all of Asia), itās used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itās why āMy best friend is Asianā is racist in more than one way.
2010s: āChineseā means not just the United Front and the Confucius Institute (which has little to do with Confucius, incidentally), but that all Chinese New Zealanders are part of a diaspora with ties to the PRC. And weāre moneyed, apparently, so much that weāve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of āChinese-sounding namesā by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iāve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youāre born in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, you were British (well, in a post-Windrush apartheid sense anyway), and unlikely to have any connections behind the Bamboo Curtain, but youāve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donāt want to put a dampener on any Chinese New Zealander who does have ties back to the mainland and the CCP. We share a history and a heritage, and since I wasnāt the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donāt have any deep-seated hatred festering away. My father visited the old country in 2003 and put all that behind him, too. A republic is better than the imperial families that had been in charge before, and if I’ve any historical power to dislike, I’d be better off focusing on them. So in some respects, there is āunityā insofar as Iāll stick up for someone of my own race if theyāre the subject of a racist attack. Iāll write about Chinese people and businesses without the derision that others do (e.g. here’s an article on the MG GS SUV that doesn’t go down the Yellow Peril route). But weāre not automatons doing Beijingās bidding.
Iāll lazily take Tze Mingās conclusion in the Herald:
We deserve better than to be trapped between knee-jerk racists and Xi Jinping Thought. Abandoning us to this fate is racism too.
I havenāt even begun to address the blatant sexual harassment that has since emerged as a result of the scandal, but others are far better placed to speak on that.
As my final post on Google Plus, I posted