With the passing of Richard Roundtree, I feel it only appropriate to repost photos of my childhood Shaft’s Big Score pencil case. My original post where these were featured is here, and today’s Mastodon post here. I know Richard was also in Roots (remembered it, but way too young to have understood it […]
Category: Hong Kong
Hong Kong, where I was born.
A second excellent piece by Eda Tang: where New Zealand Chinese Language Week gets its money
Eda Tang’s excellent piece revealing that New Zealand Chinese Language Week receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party came out last week, but unfortunately illness kept me from blogging about it properly. It was to have been my final post for September. Many of us suspected this from the start, […]
A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post
I take my hat off to Eda Tang of The Post (formerly The Dominion Post) for highlighting six Chinese New Zealanders and our reo tūpuna (ancestral languages). As many of us said last year (and for many years prior) during “Chinese Language Week” (NZCLW), it’s not all about Mandarin, a relatively new tongue that […]
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Nostalgia is not a business strategy
Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, […]
Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden
Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]
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New Zealand Chinese Language Week reviewed—in Cantonese
My friend Bevan was going to make a podcast in Cantonese for New Zealand Chinese Language Week, and I decided I would record a few tidbits—except it wound up being something far longer and a podcast episode in its own right. So here it is, all 13-plus minutes of it. If this isn’t your language, […]
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New Zealand Chinese Language Week: a podcast entry
As we come to the conclusion of New Zealand Chinese Language Week, a review about how inappropriate it was by being the very opposite of inclusive, for those who’d prefer to sit back and listen rather than read one of my blog posts. You’ll likely catch me on RNZ’s The Detail on Friday, […]
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The Lucire tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II
I wrote the below in Lucire—even though plenty of publications have covered our monarch’s passing, it still felt right to acknowledge it. After all, she had appeared in Lucire a few times. With the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday UK time, it would be remiss of this magazine to not mark […]
A new video for the home page
Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October. It dawned on me that despite being on YouTube, this really needs to be on the home page of this website, […]
The very simple Maramataka and Chinese lunar calendar conversion table
When I first started commemorating Matariki a few years ago, I had figured out, since both ancient Māori and Chinese worked out the lunar calendar, that it was roughly five lunar months after ours. I was also told that it marked the Māori New Year. Maybe it’s due to local iwi, but my recollection was […]
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