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,
Couldnât 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 OâSullivan was 21 when he wrote âAlone Againâ, itâs a remarkably mature lyric, particularly as he didnât 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 Iâm not âaloneâ: 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 donât 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.
Iâve 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 membersâpaternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousinsâbut 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 âthe familyâ 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 wonât be able to share the experience youâre having, because youâre 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 wouldnât 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 âthe family versus the worldâ. Happy ones naturally outnumber negative onesâby and large, New Zealanders are a tolerant, embracing peopleâbut itâs 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 donât have to think twice about. Itâs why some of us will jump to âracismâ as an explanation for an injustice even when the motives may not be that at all. Itâs 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 familyâs numbers dwindled, it impacts you. It certainly impacted my father in 1994, in the way OâSullivanâs song says, and as âthe last man standingâ there is a sense of being alone. Never mind that my father had aphasia in his last years and couldnât 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 âAsianâ invasion where youâre walking the streets not knowing whatâs being spoken (Iâm 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 isnât 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 identityâsay how I relate to my partner, for instanceâand in time you rebuild who you are and how you face the world. However, that takes time, and OâSullivan might be an earworm for a little while longer.
When I first wrote a satirical look back at the decade, which ran on this blog in December 2009 (on the old Blogger service, as I was helping a friend fight a six-month battle with Google to restore his blog), it was pretty easy to make up little fictions based on reality. This one, covering the decade just gone, was a different matter. No matter how you did it, often the reality would be stranger than the satire.
2010 The Australian establishment, especially large portions of its media, are shocked a woman could become prime minister. They spend her entire term telling the Australian public that this is morally wrong.
Americans decide that they needed less honesty from television, so Simon Cowell leaves the US version of Pop Idol, American Idol.
Donald Trump-hosted show The Apprentice gets its lowest ratings ever. He begins planning another show and brainstorms with his countrymen on Twitter.
Long-running shows Ashes to Ashesand Lost end with exactly the same conclusion. Frustrated at years of investment in the two shows, the Anglosphere is so turned off television that they would rather form silos on social media websites to make their owners rich. Two guys in San Francisco spot the opportunity and invent Instagram.
Jay Leno unquits The Tonight Show after discovering the $30 million per annum he made prior to leaving just couldnât sustain his car collecting hobby.
Kate loves Willy, so they get engaged.
2011 Itâs revealed that Arnold Schwarzenegger does films, politics, and the family maid.
Following the example of HH the Dalai Lama, Charlie Sheen decides to impart his wisdom to the masses, gaining an extra million Twitter followers as a result. Cheryl Cole starts on the US X Factor amid much buzz, then vanishes from the show. Only her dimples remain.
Proving Apple is either a cult or a religion, Steve Jobs shrines appear all over the world after his passing. How I Met Your Mother concludes as we find out River Song is Amy Pondâs daughter.
Kate loves Willy, so they get married.
Reality is stranger
Facebook launches Timeline, but it actually doesnât work on the 1st of each month as no one there has worked out there are time zones other than US Pacific. Still no one thinks theyâre stupid. Google gets busted over its advertising preferencesâ manager, which actually doesnât stop gathering your preferences after youâve opted out from having them gather your preferences. None of the other NAI members seem to have a problem with their opt-outs. As far as I can tell, Google has been lying about its opt-out for two years, affecting millions.
2012 President Obama finally figures out that same-sex marriage would not bring about disasterâthat could safely be left to Big Tech, as it enjoys monopolies. As a result, Facebook has its IPO.
Forget 2011âs Steve Jobs shrines, Jesus got a new look in Zaragoza, thanks to a repair job. Not everyone is enamoured with the updated Jesus, but it saves the town and numerous businesses.
Prince Harry parties and brings a new meaning to ‘Las Vegas strip’. Got to have something to mark his grandmotherâs 60th Jubilee. The Hunger Games makes stars of Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth, although people over a certain age thought it was The Unger Games, a remake of The Odd Couple.
Kate loves Willy, so they expect a kid.
In the real world Malala Yousafzai kicks ass and a bullet to the head doesnât stop her. If anything, it makes her stronger and grows her reputation.
E. L. James gathers up her Twilight fan fic and puts it all into a book, called 50 Shades of Grey. Remember, this is where Boris Johnson is mayor: the London Olympics use the Kazakh national anthem from Borat. High five! Google gets busted over bypassing the âDo not trackâ setting on Iphone Safari browsers by The Wall Street Journal. Despite trying to look innocent, it stops this the same day. Several US statesâ attorneys-general decide this was such a gross violation of privacy that they fine Google a few hoursâ earnings.
2013 Jennifer Lawrence brings publicity to her new film, Silver Linings Playbook, by falling at the Oscars.
Miley Cyrus mainstreams twerking, which showed how far society had already descended. Her Dadâs âAchy Breaky Heartâ release in 1992 wasnât considered a cultural high-point at the time: the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Edward Snowden exposes mass surveillance on US citizens and even US allies. There is mass panic over the collection of data and the private sector pushes back, ensuring encryption of usersâ private information ⌠actually, nothing happened, and the NSA continued with its data collection while the Obama administration charged Snowden with a crime and tried to extradite him from Russia, where he had more freedom of speech.
HM Queen Elizabeth II evens things up with Helen Mirren by winning a BAFTA for playing HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Kate loves Willy, so they have a kid.
In the real world RIP Nelson Mandela.
2014
Ellen Degeneres broke Twitter with a selfie, but since everyone knew why, no one recalls if the fail whale went up.
The world got a reminder not to upload private stuff to the cloudâas celebrities found out the hard way when their intimate pics were leaked. En masse, the world stopped uploading images to the cloud and to social media while they waited for Big Tech to fix things with their privacy ⌠actually, nothing happened, and people uploaded more photos, in the hope that hackers would find them and release them.
Scotland decides to stay part of the Unionâfor now. Of course they could trust London not to do something silly like leave the European Union.
Bill Cosby makes Mel Gibson look respectable.
Jay Leno decides heâs made enough for his car collecting hobby and leaves The Tonight Show, though he might still unquit. Watch your back, Jimmy.
Kate loves Willy, so they expect another kid.
In the real world Youâve heard of the website You Park Like a C***? An American exchange student in Tübingen wanted to be featured on Youâre Stuck in a C***. RIP Robin Williams, one of the funniest actors on Earth.
2015 Volkswagen, trying to outdo its links to Nazism and allegations of labour relationsâ corruption, recalls tens of millions of diesel vehicles to see how far its brand would stretch. The US plans to fine VW way more than Ford or GM when they cheated on emissions, because, foreign.
Donald Trump hits on an idea for a new reality show where he runs for president. Casting begins.
Steve Harvey named the wrong winner at the Miss Universe pageant. At this point, being âHarveyedâ is a fairly innocent term.
Jon Snow is very much alive and continues fronting the news on Channel 4.
Kate loves Willy, so they have another kid.
2016 The Chicago Cubs win the World Series, as detailed in Greyâs Sports Almanac. In November, the unthinkable happens: Wellington has a massive rainstorm, followed by an earthquake that triggers a tsunami warning, followed by flooding and extreme fog that leave the city cut off from the rest of the country. Summer would be called off while citizens figured out what to do. The UFO invasion does not take place, though with local body elections, certain candidates were replaced by replicants.
Kate loves Willyâand Harry loves Meghan. Not a bad way to mark HM the Queenâs 90th birthday.
In the real world The UK votes to leave the European Union: Nigel Farage is overjoyed, but Boris Johnson and Michael Goveâs body language and facial expression reveal their dismay, and their words donât match. I discover first-hand that Facebook is forcing downloads on people with the guise of âanti-malwareâ, even though this claim is dubious, and Facebook admits data are transferred back to the mother ship. I spend two years finding a journalist with the guts to write about it. Potentially millions have already been affected stretching to the beginning of the decade.
RIP David Bowie.
2017 With the approval of the US audience, a massive, multi-channel series débuts, starring Donald J. Trump. It shows a dystopian America that elects a game show host its president, and warns us what can follow. This four-year experiment is expected to culminate in 2020 with an election special, which determines the seriesâ fate for a renewed batch of episodes.
Kendall Jenner can do anything. She can solve riots with cans of Pepsi. Forget flower power.
Kate loves Willy, so they expect another kid.
2018 Kanye West became Donald Trumpâs biggest fan and joins the cast of his experimental four-year show. He plays an unhinged character who believes slavery was a choice.
Harry loves Meg, and tie the knot. Meghanâs Dad, however, was too busy pursuing a career in modelling to attend.
Taylor Swift gets the voters out, and the public hasnât seen anything like this since David Hasselhoff brought down the Berlin Wall.
Kate loves Willy, so they have another kid.
2019 To keep the ratings up for his long-running show, Donald Trump gets jealous of Greta Thunberg, as she didnât have to fake her Time Person of the Year cover.
He heads to the UK for the D-Day commemorations, and bonds with HM the Queen, telling her, âMy Dad was German and my Mum was Scottish, too.â
The British attempt a remake of Donald Trumpâs show. They search for a man who is born in New York, cheated on his first two wives, has five kids, funny hair, used to espouse more liberal views, before trying to sell ethnonationalism as part of his schtick. They find him: Boris Johnson, best known for his earlier work on Little Britain USA. Within weeks heâs already cheated on his partner Carrie by giving everyone in the UK a weak pound.
Harry loves Meg, and this year, they didnât need Kate and Willy to provide the baby news.
I know Wikipedia is full of fiction, so what’s one more?
I know, you’re thinking: why don’t you stop moaning and go and fix it if it’s such a big deal?
First up, for once I actually did try, as I thought the deletion of a sentence would be easy enough. But the site (or maybe my own settings) blocks me from editing, so that’s that.
Secondly, it reinforces this blog post.
This one sentence was presumably written by a New Zealander, and one who knows very little, though they have more editing privileges than me.
Like the 12-year-old ‘Ford CE14 platform’ piece that only got corrected after I posted on Drivetribe, I have to ask: what possesses someone to invent fiction and to be so sure of themselves that they can commit it to an encyclopĂŚdia? (Incidentally, subsequent Wikipedians have reintroduced all the errors back on to the Ford page since editor Nick’s 2017 effort to correct itâyou simply cannot cure Wikipedia of stupid.)
I know we aren’t being set very good examples by American politicians (on both sides) and by British ones these days, but surely individual citizens have some sort of integrity when they go online to tell us how great they are?
For the record, the Familia nameplate was never used here in the last generation for a new carâyou only see it on Japanese imports. Secondly, the three-door BH shape was only ever sold here as a Ford Laser, never a MazdaâFamilia, 323 or otherwise.
“Post-truth” is nothing new: it’s been the way of Wikipedia for well over a decade. It was all foreshadowed online.
It still begs the question why I don’t see such callous edits on the German or Japanese editions of that website.
When Douglas Bader recorded in his log book on the aeroplane accident that cost him his legs, he wrote, âBad show’.
It was men like Bader, Audie Murphy, Claire Lee Chennault and Douglas MacArthur that my father spoke of as heroes from his childhood.
There were plenty more from our own culture but Iâm using these ones given my largely occidental audience, and Dad really did cite them as well.
None of these men, by the accounts Iâve read, were braggarts. Most were indeed very humble about their contributions to their countries.
But even my late pacifist veteran grandfather (he served, but desperately hated war) would consider these men heroes, as my father did.
I may have blogged at other times about my first years in New Zealand, but I wonât go into depth about it as it would be too much of a digression from the point I want to make.
Perhaps itâs growing up in an immigrant household that what your father tells you a real man should be trumps what you witness at school from your classmates about what they think masculinity is.
And you see your own father display the qualities of what he considered to be gentlemanly. Children are good mimics.
A gentleman, he would say, has the ability to refrain. A lesser man might act out, or strike someone, but that is not a civilized man. Society runs best when people are civilized.
Those ideas of what we call toxic masculinity today were never displayed in my household and are utterly foreign to meâand as an immigrant, âforeignâ has two meanings in that sentence. I may be the âforeignerâ as far as others (such as certain Australian-owned newspapers) are concerned, even after living here for 43 years, but from your own perspective, you can more easily distance yourself from any undesirable behaviour, saying, âThatâs not who I am.â
In the early years at my first high school, I may have had some cause to doubt the fatherly advice because what I witnessed was an extreme and intellectually stunted form of hero worship that might was right. That the brute force of the rugby player was true masculinity and if you didnât have it, then you were a âpoofterâ or a âfaggotâ. Brag, brag, brag, be it about sports or sexual encounters.
This, as any real rugby player knows, and I have met men who have represented our national side, is a wholly inaccurate perception of who they are.
They will tell you that true men display values of camaraderie, teamwork, quiet achievement, tolerance and decency. No All Black I know talks himself up as anything other than one of the boys who happened to be lucky enough to be chosen.
Indeed, some of the bigger blokes who wound up in the school rugby teams, especially the Polynesian and Māori lads, were generally gentle and protective fellows with strong family values.
Yet that misplaced perception held by immature high school boys, I fear, informs many young men of how they are to conduct themselves in adult life.
They think that being jerks toward women is the norm. ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen,’ is the familiar refrain.
Iâve had comments over the years of, âWhy didnât you make a move on me?â when I either could not read the signs or felt that forceful âmasculineâ behaviour was not particularly respectful. As a middle-aged man I wonder if the patriarchy, âjust the way things areâ, has warped expectations for heterosexual men and women. (I canât obviously speak for our LGBTQI community.)
However, what I do know is sending intimate pictures of yourself via a dating app or messaging service is disgusting (and, incidentally, has not worked for any man in the history of the planet), and that constant desperation is particularly unappealing.
I remember a female friend showing me the sorts of messages she received from potential suitors on a dating website.
âHoly crap,â I said. âThis is the calibre of men out there?â
And when I talk to my partner today, she tells me that that was par for the course.
But I have a quality relationship because I did listen to my father and behaved in a way that I thought he would approve of. Whatever he taught me wound up being hard-wired in me and I never aped the boys in my first high school. He was right after all, even if it took longer for me to be in a long-term relationship.
No, I donât have a massive list of âconquestsâ because it honestly isnât about quantity and life is too short for empty encounters. And while my behaviour at uni age, and shortly after, wasnât always exemplary, as I tried to figure out the norms, Iâve also come through this knowing that I didnât have to lie to any woman, and not a single woman out there will be able to say I did anything physical without her consent.
While I obviously told my other half of my career when we met (âSo what do you do?â), I never mentioned my mayoral bids till our fourth date, a month in to our courtship (she lived out of the country when I ran), and I admitted I didnât always have an easy time in business during a period of my life, including the recession. I am human, after all. And if one canât accept me for the bad as well as the good, then is the relationship founded on reality? Or simply fantasy?
Weâve recently had a murder trial here in New Zealand with the accused a young man who is described as a serial liar, and accounts from women he had met were tragic: he would lie about his occupation, bigging himself and his family up, or pretend he had terminal cancer. Enough has been written on this creep.
I had the misfortune to meet another young man who has since been exposed by the Fairfax Press as a con man, who also told constant lies about his life, thinking that talk of personal wealth would impress me and a co-director of one business we have.
Mercifully, the latter case didnât wind up with anyone physically hurt, and I know plenty of young people who would never behave like this. But it got me wondering whether the core of these cases tells us something about how certain young men feel inadequate, because of a misplaced hero worship of a warped form of masculinity that leaves them as outsiders.
Iâm by no means excusing the murderer because he frankly committed a heinous crime, in a premeditated fashion. I remain appalled at the victim-shaming that I saw reported as though the deceased, the one person who couldnât answer, were on trial. Iâm also not excusing the failed con-man who any viewer of Hustle would be able to spot a mile away: his actions, too, were his own. But I am pointing at society and how we men have shaped expectations.
For I look at some male behaviour and they are entirely at odds with what a man should be.
While examples like Douglas Bader might not resonate with young men today, because his example is too far back in history for them (the biopic is in black and white), surely we can find ones of humble men who accomplish great deeds and donât have to go on social media to talk themselves up.
Just tonight I was at a dinner for Merrill Fernando, the 89-year-old founder of Dilmah Tea, who was earlier today conferred an honorary doctorate by Massey University.
When I asked if he was now Dr Fernando, he replied that he would still be Merrill Fernando, and that all the honours he had receivedâand they are plentifulâwould never change who he was. His humility and his faith continue to inspire me.
This is the mark of a decent and admirable man.
And surely we can find examples where men arenât being disrespectful to women and show us that that is the norm.
Surely we donât need to berate anyone who doesnât fit the trogoldyte mould and use homophobic slurs against them.
Because, chaps, I donât believe what defines a man, a real man, a fair dinkum bloke, has actually changed, at its core, from what my Dad told me.
There is room for the jocks, the geeks, the musos, the artists, the romantics, the extroverts and introverts, because we all have our strengths.
One female friend of mine tells me that itâs safer for her to presume all men are jerks as her default position till proved otherwise, and I know fully why she would take that position. On social media she points to the âbrosâ, men whoâll gang up on women because they donât like them for calling it as it is, or having a different viewpoint. In real life she has had unwanted attention, even after she tells them sheâs queer.
These men, the bros, the braggarts, the dick-pic senders, the liars, the bullies, the slanderers, are actually trying to change the definition of what a real man isâand that, to me, seems to be non-masculine, insecure and inadequate. We can do betterâand history shows that we had done once.
People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isnât what itâs cracked up to be.
Last month, Bob Hoffmanâs excellent The Ad Contrariannewsletter noted, âI believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, Iâm writing a book about it.) If I am right, and if the article in question is correct, we are in the midst of a business delusion unmatched in all of history.â He linked to an article by Jesse Frederik and Mauritz Martin (also sent to me by another colleague), entitled âThe new dot com bubble is here: itâs called online advertisingâ in The Correspondent. In it, they cast doubt over the effectiveness of online ads, hidden behind buzzwords and the selection effect. If I understand the latter correctly, it means that people who are already predisposed to your offering are more likely to click on your ads, so the ads arenât actually netting you new audiences.
Hereâs the example Frederik and Martin give:
Picture this. Luigiâs Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two canât make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: âI stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria.â
The summary is that despite these companies claiming thereâs a correlation between advertising with them and some result, the truth is that no one actually knows.
And the con is being perpetuated by the biggest names in the business.
As Hoffman noted at the end of October:
A few decades ago the advertising industry decided they couldn’t trust the numbers they were being given by media. The result was the rise of third-party research, ratings, and auditing organizations.
But there are still a few companies that refuse to allow independent, third-party auditing of their numbers.
No surprises there. Iâve already talked about Facebookâs audience estimates having no relationship with the actual population, so we know they’re bogus.
And, I imagine, they partly get away with it because of their scale. One result of the American economic orthodoxy these days is that monopolies are welcomeâitâs the neoliberal school of thinking. Now, I went through law school being taught the Commerce Act 1986 and the Trade Practices Act 1974 over in Australia, and some US antitrust legislation. I was given all the economic arguments on why monopolies are bad, including the starvation of innovation in their sector.
Roger McNamee put me right there in Zucked, essentially informing me that what I learned isnât current practice in the US. And that is worrisome at the least.
It does mean, in places like Europe which havenât bought into this model, and who still have balls (as well as evidence), theyâre happy to go after Google over their monopoly. And since our anti-monopoly legislation is still intact, and one hopes that we donât suddenly change tack (since I know the Commerce Act is under review), we should fight those monopoly effects that Big Tech has in our country.
What happens to monopolies? Well, if past behaviour is any indication, they can get broken up. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is simply recounting American history when she suggests that thatâs what Facebook, Google and Amazon should endure. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats would have been united on this prospect, given the trusts that gave rise to their Sherman Act in 1890, protecting the public from market failures like these. Even a generation ago, theyâd never have allowed companies to get this influential.
Also a generation ago, we wouldnât swallow the BS an advertising platform gave us without something to back it up. Right now, it seems we donât have anythingâand the industry is beginning to cry foul.
Like many, I headed to the Kilbirnie mosque to pay my respects several times after March 15, but I would like the events of that day to be remembered beyond those that. I want our Muslim whÄnau here to know that I haven’t forgotten them, and here is my way of showing that.
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.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonât name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iâll 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:
⢠have forward-thinking policies;
⢠appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
⢠resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
⢠frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canât advise how to win since I didnât. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
⢠Use rose-coloured glasses;
⢠appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
⢠resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
⢠suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnât 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 wasnât about to tell me that I wasnât on the âfirst page of Googleâ: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iâve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnât work anyway. I canât remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: âWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.â 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, thatâs not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, âIâm not angry at you, only at your employer.â And words to the effect of, âA man has to make a living, so I donât have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.â
He did say, âIf I had that experience, Iâd hate them, too,â and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: âItâs not just about my experienceâitâs all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneâs.â
Nevertheless, you canât stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesâ 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 didnât 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 universeâparallel 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.
Iâve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iâve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iâve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iâm tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donât want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donât want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereâs a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatâs the prognosis out there? Since I actually donât 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.
Iâve 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 Iâve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iâve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyâll 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, weâd avoid it as much as we could. Instead, most go to Google, pull their trousers down, and bend over.
I didn’t read this thinking of Trump, which is what the Tweeter intended. I read it thinking of New Zealand. Heard the ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’ bullshit a lotâI dare say every immigrant to this nation has. English-born American columnist Sydney J. Harris, in 1969, answered it better than I ever could. (I hope the image appears in the embed below, since I see no img tagsâit seems reliant on Javascript.) Presumably this is either the Chicago Daily News or the SunâTimes.
Someone kept an American newspaper from 50 years ago for its historic #MoonLanding coverage. This opinion piece was in it.
Jennifer Lawrence brings publicity to her new film, Silver Linings Playbook, by falling at 
