I have to agree with Yang Jian, managing editor of Automotive News China, that Baojun’s new models âobviouslyâ failed to reverse the brandâs salesâ decline.
It is obvious given that the vehicles are priced considerably above the previous ones, and despite its next-gen tech, thereâs no real alignment with what Baojun stands for.
There might be a new logo (dĂŠbuted January 2019) but GM expects that this, the new premium products, and (I would expect) other retail updates would undo nearly nine years of brand equity.
The associations of Baojun as an entry-level brand run deeply, and the new models are like, if youâll pardon the analogy and the use of another car group, taking the next Audis and sticking a Ĺ koda badge on them. Except even stylistically, the new Baojuns bear little resemblance to the old onesâtheyâre that radical a departure.
I wonder if it would be wiser to keep Baojun exactly where it was, and let it decline, while launching the new models under a more upscale GM brand, even one perceived as ‘foreign’ or ‘joint venture’ by Chinese consumers.
DaimlerChrysler made the mistake of killing Plymouth when it was surplus to requirements, then found itself without a budget brand when the late 2000sâ recession hit. Chrysler, once the upper-middle marque, had to fill the void.
Thereâs a reason companies like GM and Volkswagen have brands spanning the market: they feed buyers into the corporation, and thereâs something for everyone.
And while itâs possible to move brands upscale, creating four lines where the base model prices exceed the highest price you have ever charged for your other base models is just too sudden a shift.
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. âSee, those are the sorts of houses New Zealanders live in,â 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 donât remember a summer of â76ââ77, just as no one here remembers a summer of â16ââ17. 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 grandmotherâthe person closest to me at that point and whom I would desperately miss for the next 18 monthsâgave 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 fatherâit wasnât usually his roleâhe 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 weâd wind up in Aotearoa. Mum had appliedâI went with her to the New Zealand High Commission in Connaught Tower in Hong Kong to get the formsâbut we had green cards to head to Tennessee. But, my mother, ever careful, didnât 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 homeâand then out to usâthat 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 oneâs only task was to pack?
Itâs hard not to reminisce on this anniversary, and consider this family with their lives ahead of them.
Iâve 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 canât complain. And I couldnât 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 donât 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 Alzheimerâs 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 thingâand it was the right decision given the care Dad neededâit was very tough.
A friend asked me how I felt, and I said I felt like âthe meanest c*** on earth,â 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 âus versus the worldâ. When Racist â80s Man tells you to go back to where you came from, itâs not an experience you can easily share with others who arenât immigrants and people of colour. So as our numbers diminishedâmy grandmother in 1990 and my mother in 1994âit 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, 1976âand how impossibly hard it would have been to foresee how things would turn out.
Heâs since changed homes twice and found himself in excellent care at Te Hopai, though he now needs to be fed and doesnât detect as much to his right. The lights are going out.
Itâs 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, Iâve been asked a few times about what I think of the Hong Kong protests. Thereâs 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 didnât give it to us, certainly in the mid-20th century, were racist.
Having said that, Iâd 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 wouldnât be the first time the US State Department and others meddled in our affairs, and I donât believe this is an exception.
Expecting the British to help out is a hiding to nothing. The Shadow Cabinet was critical of John Majorâs Conservatives in the 1990s over Hong Kong, and when in office, months before the handover, was arguably even less effective. Thereâll 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 âhelpâ right now.
It hasnât helped that HK Chinese feel that our culture is under threat, including our language, and there hasnât been any indication from the PRC of alleviating this (the old playbook again). Observers inside China may see HKersâ 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 âfreerâ 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 itâs not a time for the PRC to get hard-line over this. This shouldnât be a case of us v. them. This is, however, a perfect opportunity to have dialogue over reinterpreting âone country, two systemsâ, and persuade the ROC of its meritâthe 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 mightnât be on his agenda. China hasnât exactly gone to young people to ask them what they thinkâwe never have, whether youâre 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 thereâs a huge uncertainty about who we are. I think weâre proudly Chinese in terms of our ethnicity and heritage, and we might even think our ideas of what this means are superior to othersâ. Rose-coloured glasses are dangerous to don because they donât 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 thereâs a battle between âour Chinesenessâ versus âtheir Chinesenessâ in the eyes of some HKers. Thanks to certain forces stoking the tensions, and probably using the resentment HK Chinese feel, there isnât a comfortable, foreseeable way out any time soon.
I see Googleâs 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 theyâre open-source. Secondly, if they donât 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 Iâm inclined to trust them more these days.
Thirdly, no one needs all that Google crap anyway: I always said that if it disappeared overnight, weâd all find replacements within a week. Now Huawei has toâin 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, Iâve been using Here Maps since Iâve had my Meizu M2 Note in 2016, and while it isnât perfect, itâs more than adequate. Recently I found they had maps of the Chatham Islands when the carsâ sat-nav didnât.
All Huawei really needs to do is roll out its own app store to its western phones with decent enough translations, and make sure itâs updated with the APKs.
I have a better Meizu weather app on my phone than anything Iâve ever found on Google, and Iâm 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, Iâve never looked back. When that phone was replaced, I made sure the next one was Google-free as well.
Whatâs 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 Americansâ.
Corporate America may be patting itself on the back, and their president may think he was doing their bidding, but I think theyâll 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 ânâ 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 6¡1¡4¡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 donât 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 âracist AFâ.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnât happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenât racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesâ 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 decadeâmaking 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, Iâm changing my business slogan to âWorth more than my mate Krishna.â
Thereâs 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. Itâs one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheâs absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleâs Republic of China donât like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weâre 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 fatherâs 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 grandfatherâs drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnât 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 canât 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 âAsianâ population âŚ
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingâs Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
âAt leastâ is right. My father was born in the mainland where ĺĺ ą was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iâm willing to bet thereâs 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.
Thatâs 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. Iâm 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 didnât 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: âChineseâ 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: âAsianâ became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston âTwo Wongs donât make a whiteâ Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itâs 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), itâs used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itâs why âMy best friend is Asianâ is racist in more than one way.
2010s: âChineseâ 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 weâre moneyed, apparently, so much that weâve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of âChinese-sounding namesâ by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iâve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youâre 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 youâve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donât 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 wasnât the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donât 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 âunityâ insofar as Iâll stick up for someone of my own race if theyâre the subject of a racist attack. Iâll 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 weâre not automatons doing Beijingâs bidding.
Iâll lazily take Tze Mingâs 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 havenât 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 Twitter (and other social media) descend, whatâs been interesting is seeing how many of us Kiwis arenât being terribly original. No, I donât exactly mean Dr Don Brash thinking that he can import US-style division into New Zealand wholesale without understanding the underlying forces that helped Donald Trump secure their presidency (in which case such attempts here will fail), but I do mean how later Tweeters hunt for keywords and arguments to defend institutionalized racism, sexism, and other unsavoury -isms, then use imported techniques because they saw on television that they worked overseas.
I recall one not long ago who was evidently looking out for white male privilege, with some pretty standard Tweets prepared and an odd refusal to address fundamental questionsâthat sort of thing. Thereâs little point getting into a debate with nobodies who troll, and itâs all too obvious how they emerge on your radar.
Once upon a time social media didnât have these types, but then once upon a time, email didnât have spammers. Itâs the natural development of technology that humans tend to mess up pretty decent inventions. But, like spam, we find ways of dealing with it.
Race was one that came up over the weekend. Now, if youâre against racism, it would stand to reason that busting false stereotypes would be something that youâd savour. Ditto if youâre battling sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
Iâve mentioned some of these before, e.g. âAsian driversâ somehow being terrors on our roads, something that statistics donât bear out. (Or, for that matter, the total lack of truth about âwomen driversâ, who are statistically safer than men.) Among tourists, weâve established Australians and Germans are the two most dangerous groups. Food has been one thatâs been on our minds lately, since my other half managed to find herself ill from eating at two occidental restaurants, and given the amount of research sheâs done into the area, Iâll defer to her on the subject. Again itâs an area where I hear myths about Chinese food repeated ad nauseam.
The thing is that busting stereotypes gives racists less to go on, less of a feeling of superiority, so theyâll begin countering. Women know full well when sexists attack, and racists follow the same pattern.
A very funny chap sent two swear word-filled Tweets whichâand this is the only interesting thing about themâwere extracted fully right out of the racistsâ playbook. I was only surprised that this was still going on in 2018, hence this blog post, since I thought these signs were so clear by now that no one would be daft enough to try them on.
Their overriding message: dissing a western stereotype makes you a racist.
Akin to the âIâm not the Nazi, youâre the Naziâ Tweets and comments seen overseas, there was a suggestion that my lot was just as racist. Now, I donât deny that any majority race in any country can be racist. Itâs how I met one gentleman in Hong Kong who pointed out racism in a schoolbook that had a Filipina caricatureâI reached out offering to help. Or calling out the treatment of Malays and Indians by certain business people among my own lot in Malaysia. When youâve been the minority for most of your life, you can spot it, and you find it particularly tasteless when itâs perpetrated by your own race. (Thanks to #MeToo, it appears some men are getting better at calling out âlocker-room talkâ, too.)
But this is a diversion meant to cloud the issues. The intent is to criticize the person (by their race) in order to devalue the argument they make, and not deal with the argument itself. They miss the irony of this and it actually validates your original point. If you canât answer something civilly, then you havenât answered it at all.
In Tweet no. 2 (I wish I had taken a screen shot, as it has been deletedâI didnât expect the cowardice) was a variation on âMy best friend is Asian.â This one was about his partner and stepchildren being Asian, and his own son, who is half-Asian, and how he considers himself Asian. Um, no, youâre not, not from the exhibited conduct, but itâs a feeble attempt to scramble to give his own position a status above yours. Again itâs not about addressing the argument (a classic move in social media), but about debasing the opposition. Another one to look out for.
Now, if you really were to address this, wouldnât your best friend being Asian, or having a child with Asian heritage, mean you have a stake in busting myths that could harm that person? Thatâs not something they really care about, even if it harms those supposedly closest to them. (And those of us in New Zealand have a negative history with the term âAsianâ, so I doubt youâd actually use it in referencing your âbest friendâ. Youâd actually know their heritage, whether it was Iraqi, Asiatic Russian, Japanese, Kazakh, or whatever.)
Then there are the emotive overreactions, the falsely placed righteous moral indignation that this group is particularly good at. Itâs to make you think (unconvincingly) that your statements have potentially offended not just the racist, but, shock, horror, all right-thinking people.
Think about how a normal person would have reacted, and you have to conclude that no one jumps to uncontrollable shaking anger, the keyboarding equivalent of firing a gun as a result of road rage.
Thereâll be aspects of one or more of these in social media, and those who are combatting prejudice would do well to spot the signs.
To me, these are signs of unstable characters, akin to an adult having a tantrum. Or they specifically fish for things to make them angry. Now, I donât know how they dealt with their powerlessness ten years ago, but now they surf among us, hoping in vain to drag you to their level.
So given they are still around, the local body elections next year are going to be interesting, because you donât need the Dirty Politics crowd to coordinate it now: itâs a lot easier to provoke this dying group with fake news and let them run riot. On the other hand, itâs also a lot easier to spot them and see the conceit behind them.
Weâre a small enough country for most of us to know this by now anyway. Or so I hope.
Above: Dementia Wellington’s support has been invaluable.
Today my father turned 83.
Itâs a tough life that began during the SinoâJapanese War, with his father being away in the army, and his mother and grandmother were left to raise the family on their land in Taishan, China.
In 1949, the Communists seized the property and the family had to start again, as refugees, in Hong Kong.
Ever the entrepreneur, during the Vietnam War, Dad and his business partner, an US Army doctor by the name of Capt Dr Lawson McClung, set up a mail-order business for deployed troops. As I recall it, Lawson said that he would be able to secure jobs for my parentsâmy late mother was a nurseâat his stepfatherâs hospitals in Tennessee. We either had a US green card, or one was merely procedural.
My mother realized we had family in Aotearoa and I remember going with her to Connaught Tower, to the New Zealand High Commission. I didnât know what it was for, but filling in the gaps it must have been to secure forms for immigration. As Plan Bs go, it was a pretty good one.
In 1976 came another move as we headed to New Zealand, originally on holiday, given that my grandfather had taken ill whilst here. As we flew in to Wellington, Dad pointed at the houses below. âThose are the sorts of houses New Zealanders live in.â I thought it was fascinating, that they didnât live in apartment blocks.
That first night here, on September 16, 1976, it was Dad who tucked me in, which at this point wasnât typical: it was usually my grandmother who did this. He asked if I wanted to see the two Corgi toy cars that my grandmother had bought me prior to the trip, which I could have if I behaved myself on the flights. I did. He took them out of the luggage and I had a brief look at them. This was an unfamiliar place but it was just a holiday and things would be back to normal soon.
It was during this holiday that word came that our immigration application had come through. My parents regarded our presence here as serendipitous. They neglected to tell their four-year-old son that plans had changed.
For the first 18 years of my life, I regarded âthe familyâ as being my parents and my widowed maternal grandmother, who lived with us ever since I could rememberâand I remember an awfully long time. We even had a photo taken around 1975â6 of the four of us, that I just remember represented everyone dearest to me.
As âthe familyâ lost one member to a stroke brought on by Parkinsonâs disease and complications from diabetes, and another to cancer, by 1994 it was just Dad and me.
At the beginning of the 2010s, Dad had a bout of shingles. By 2014 he was forgetting individual words, and I insisted he get checked out for dementia. Around the time of his 80th birthday, in 2015, the diagnosis from the psychogeriatrician was formal, although he could still speak with some stuttering and one or two words unreachable by his brain. The CT scans showed a deterioration of the left side of his brain, his speech centre. Within half a year there would only be one or two words per sentence that were intelligible.
The forms for an enduring power of attorney were drawn up as 2016 commenced. He was still managing, and he had his routines, but in mid-2018 we decided he should get some respite care.
He wasnât happy about this, and it took four hours of persuading, as well as a useful and staunch aunt, who got Dad to put on his shoes and head up with us to Ultimate Care Maupuia.
We had thought the second visit in late July would be easier but it took 19 hours over two days, an experience which we do not want to repeat.
Dad had lost the ability to empathize with us and was anxious and agitiated. While he insisted he could look after himself while home alone, there were signs over the last year that indicated he could not. He fell while having the âflu in mid-2017 and Amanda and I came to a house with all its lights off. We had no idea how long he had been down. By 2018 he would cry if left home alone. Even at his most insistent that he could look after himself, we returned after the first day of trying to coax him to Maupuia to find that he had not eaten.
The second day was when I called everyone I could think of to find a way to get to respite, since we werenât going to be around to look after him.
You name it, I called it, Age Concern aside. Dementia Wellington, the police, the rest home, Wellington Free Ambulance, Driving Miss Daisy, Care Coordination, Te Haika, and so on. I spoke to 11 people that day.
Te Haika said that the issue wasnât mental, but legal, which was about as useful as telling an American Democrat that Donald Trump was the Messiah.
Driving Miss Daisy said that I wasnât in their area but a colleague was, not that I ever heard back from that colleague.
Dementia Wellington, the police, and Free Ambulance were brilliant, as was my lawyer, Richard Brandon of Brandons. Our GPs at Kilbirnie Medical Centre were also excellent.
The up shot was that Free Ambulance could take Dad if the enduring power of attorney was enacted, and that would take a declaration of mental incapacity by the GP, which was duly written. He was also good enough to prescribe some medication to calm Dad down.
However, because it wasnât an emergency situation, there was no telling when Free Ambulance could come by.
It did make me glad that they were one of the charities I gave to this year.
However, you donât ever imagine a situation where you effectively drug your Dad to be able to put his jacket on and take him to a rest home for respite care. I felt like part of the Mission: Impossible team, except the person being drugged wasnât a Ruritanian dictator, but someone on the same side. When I say Mission: Impossible, I donât mean that series of films with Tom Cruise, either.
On September 16, 1976, you didnât think that in 42 yearsâ time your Dad would have dementia and youâd need to break a promise you made years ago that you would never put him in a home.
You also feel that that photo of âthe familyâ has been decimated, that youâre all alone because the last adult in there isnât around any more for you to bounce ideas off and to have a decent conversation with.
I realize I hadnât been able to do any of that with Dad for years but it feels that much more painful knowing he canât live in a place he calls home presently.
And you also realize that as a virtually full-time caregiver who has cooked for him for yearsâand now you know why I didnât reenter politics in 2016âthat his condition really just crept up on you to a point where what you thought was normal was, in fact, not normal at all.
You also realize that the only other time he was compelled to leave his home without his full volition was 1949, by a régime he had very little time for through most of his lifetime. You donât expect to be the next person to have to do that to him, and thereâs a tremendous amount of guilt that comes with that.
Earlier this week, our GP reissued his letter in âForm 5â (prescribed under the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988), which I drafted, since these procedures arenât altogether clear. It makes you wonder how people without law degrees might cope. Tomorrow I will meet with Care Coordination and see if Dad can be reassessed based on his current condition. He was only very recently assessed as not needing long-term care so it will be interesting to see if they accept that he has deteriorated to this extent. Iâm not a Mystic Meg who can make a prediction on this.
The rapidity of Dadâs changeâone which he himself noticed, as years ago he would complain that his âbrain felt different today compared to yesterdayââhas been a surprise to us, although mostly he is happy at Maupuia and interacts positively with the staff. Itâs not all smooth sailing and there are days he wonders when he can come home.
And I find some solace in that his father, and his mother-in-law, wound up in care for less. My grandfather had PTSD from the war and was unable to cook for himself, though even at the end he was bilingual (being educated in the US) and had successfully quit smoking after 70 years. My grandmother needed care because of her insulin injections but was also mentally fit.
But part of me expected that Iâd see it through with Dad to the end, that these rest homes were some western thing that separated families, and here is part of that immigrant experience.
The reason you didnât see as many Chinese New Zealanders on welfare wasnât down to some massive savingsâ account, but a certain pride and stoïcism in being to keep it to yourself. Youâre in a strange land where thereâs prejudice, and thatâs often enough for families to say, âF*** everyone else, weâre getting on with it and doing it ourselves.â
And thatâs what we did as âthe familyâ. We fought our own battles. Dad was once a helluva correspondent whose letters used words like proffer and the trinity of ult., prox. and inst., and plenty of officials got the sharp end of his writing. When Mum got cancer we brought in our own natural medication because westerners couldnât fathom that the same stuff cleared my grandfatherâs liver cancer in 1976 and healed several other members in the whānau. Dad sacrificed everything to try to save Mum and that was the closest example I had of what youâd do for someone you love.
When youâre deep in the situation, rationality goes out the window and youâre on autopilotâand often it takes serious situations, like two daysâ angst and stress of trying to get someone into respite care, to make you think that staying at home isnât the best for someone who did, even though he wonât admit it, thrive under rest home care.
We know that if we left it even later, it would be even tougher to get Dad into care and he would resist his new surroundings more.
Todayâs lunch at Maupuia was curried beef on rice in recognition of Indian Independence Day, a much nicer meal than what I might have made for Dad.
He has staff to hug and laugh with even if I have no idea where heâs putting his dirty undies.
And while aphasia means he hasnât made any new friends yet, I have faith that heâll do well given the circumstances.
Itâs those circumstances that mean the situation we find ourselves in, with Dad at the home, is one which weâll roll with, because, like 1949 and 1976, forces outside our control are at play.
Iâd love to make his Alzheimerâs go away given that I already lost one parent prematurely.
My mind goes to a close friend who recently lost her mother, and her father was killed in a car crash around the time my Mum died. Basically: not all of us are lucky enough to have both our parents peacefully go in their sleep. Many of us are put through a trial. And thereâs a real reason some of us have been hashtagging #FuckAlzheimers on Twitter, if out of sheer frustration.
For those who have made it this far, here are the points I want you to take away.
⢠Immediately upon finding out your parent has dementia, get your enduring power of attorney sorted out, for both property and personal care.
⢠Dementia Wellington is an excellent organization so get yourself along to the carer support groups, second Monday of every month. Dementia New Zealand canât help at this level.
⢠Care Coordination has been very helpful and their referral to Dementia Wellington proved more effective than phoningâhowever, I should note that the organization changed for the better between Dadâs original diagnosis in 2015 and how they are today.
⢠You do need âForm 5â from your GP or someone in a position to assess your parentâs mental capacity to kick off the enduring power of attorney.
⢠Itâs OK to cry, feel emotionally drained and ask your friends for support. Itâs your parent. You expected to look after them and sometimes you need to let others do this for everyoneâs good. It doesnât mean you love your parent any less. It also doesnât mean you are placing yourself or your partner above him. It just means you are finding the best solution all round.
Dad is still “there”, and he recognizes us, even if he doesnât really know what day it is, canât really cook for himself, and doesnât fully understand consequences any more. Iâm glad I spend parts of every day with him while Iâm in Wellington. And while this wasnât the 83rd birthday I foresaw at the beginning of the year, he is in a safe, caring environment. I hope the best decision is made for him and for all of us.
As my final post on Google Plus, I posted 
