Bum Problem

I am proud to announce that Wellington has a bum problem. Aro Park in the inner-city suburb of Te Aro has always had a pretty hippy rep, what with the community centre next door and the wool and tie-die lot who sit round the park. Awhile ago some hippy kid yelled out to me asking for LSD as he sat round with his mates: harmless of course, but completely gormless and full of affectation. Anyway, the truth about Te Aro is that it is really a student and left wing lawyer type place to live. But of late there has been a constant group of drunks at the park's picnic tables. The crowd is about half brown, half white and about ninety percent male - a really smelly bunch dressed in black biker style (well actually jeans and woollen jerseys). They drink all the usual cheap beers (an inspection around the park bin turns up Steinlager and Tui boxes - not that cheap really!), Woodstock Bourbon and cola, unidentified stuff out of plastic bottles and also openly sniff glue.

Passing through the park in the last week or so, birdsong has been accompanied by a cacophony of what couldn't really be described as human speech, much less English, but more the slur of the truly down, out and wasted.

Now apparently this lot come from a nearby halfway house, and after several complaints the police arrived last Thursday, but there was not much they could do: drinking in public in NZ is legal. TV 3 News also put in an appearance, reporting that the Wellington council may include Aro Park in a proposed inner city liquor ban.

After the TV 3 News item the number of drunken bums in Aro park has skyrocketed. Bums watch TV, it's a party man.

Nanjing Cemetery of The Martyrs: A China Rant

This memorial to communists killed by the nationalists in the Chinese Civil war is a little creepy. If you go to Nanjing you’ll probably skip it and take in Sun Yat Sen’s mausoleum up on Purple Mountain, which provides, to be honest, a more satisfying day of sightseeing. In the museum of the martyrs there is a hologram display in which KMT guards/soldiers whip and beat their communist prisoners, the accompanying soundtrack is an endless loop of blood curdling screams. I see this kind of thing as quite disturbing: ‘hey, look how evil these nationalists were, we the communists would never do something like that, we are the good guys, history is black and white’. The display is obviously trying to stir an emotional response. Showing the equipment used for torture is educational in a museum; but having a hologram reenacted torture scene?

How often the rebel comes to resemble that which he has overthrown. Anybody listening to Fidel's 'History Will Absolve Me' speech in 1953 would not have believed that 50 years later this guy could be throwing people in prison for the crime of being his enemy. Or maybe a few old cynics would not be surprised at all that Fidel was acting somewhat like Fulgencio Batista, the dictator he overthrew. The tomb of the martyrs (which along with the museum is part of the cemetery complex) is imitative for me of a Chinese imperial palace, or perhaps a Ming tomb, only the statues are larger and rougher, the stairs are concrete not stone and the complex, built in the eighties, is not especially refined. The main focus for the tomb is a Soviet style statue of a martyr and a huge obelisk. Under the stairs leading to the obelisk and statue is a Mao Zedong museum (which is certainly not the only one in the country). The man who was 70% right and 30% wrong is depicted in displays of books, statues, key rings, playing cards etc...a DVD of Mao being cheered by the red guards is playing, I pause to watch, keen to be educated by this seventies film roll; however the frowning girl who sells these DVDs turns it off. You can't watch that for free is the message, it's just one of those little annoyances that you go through in China, like a non-responsive taxi driver, or an extra inquisitive man who will follow you around; I try (often unsuccessfully) not to let these irritants cloud my vision.

What right do I have to pass moral judgement on China? I have been a drunken procrastinator and worse - but still the Chinese government can seem criminal to me. If I too am a criminal then I felt, in my time in China, like we were two cellmates. The difference being that while I could admit my crimes and my conscience suffered for them, my cellmate could only feel the wrong done against him. He could never admit what he had done wrong - he was mentally sick - even if you showed him his crime clearly, like shoving a dog's nose in its own shit, for him it still didn't exist. He only saw the Tibetans destroying property; there was no consideration of the 50 years of reasons that may have led them to do so. The most dangerous people and governments are those who are sure they are right and are 100% convinced in their beliefs. Much like now, as the Chinese government is on the offensive against the western media for its biased coverage of the riots in Tibet. To those whom have never lived in China I would think this complaint is quite ridiculous: it is, after all, the Chinese government preventing western journalists from getting in there to report the real story! For people more familiar with China and CCP propaganda this development will come as no surprise. The focus for the CCP is not international opinion, but maintaining a nationalist feeling amongst the Chinese middle classes. Last night I watched on BBC ‘Hardtalk’, the Stephen Sacker interview with the writer and musician Liao Yiwu. Liao was jailed in the nineties for four years because of his subversive writings. When challenged by Sacker to be critical of the government which jailed him, Liao's answers seemed to me incredibly indirect and moderate for a man who once held in solitary 23 days straight with his hands shackled behind his back.

Where does this moderation come from? well from the idea, which suits the CCP very well, that to be against the government is to be against China - and as the party boss of Tibet recently commented, to not love your country is tantamount to being inhuman.

The usual Chinese government reaction to criticism is to point out problems in the US or elsewhere. Their other tactic is to actually blame the US or Japan for their own problems, always with the desire to set up some bogeyman for the populace to see as the enemy. I don't doubt that what is going on in Iraq is far worse than what is going on Tibet, however, I reserve the right to comment and criticize a country which I lived in for over three years. I have only ever spent a few weeks in the US and so have no personal experience of the problems in that society, but certainly I would comment on them if I had resided there. When hurricane Katrina came along I didn't see the US pointing out that there were floods in China. There is a problem in Tibet and Tibet is symptomatic of wider problems in China. The 'Leninist' style capitalism has done a lot for China, great wealth has been created. But now, it seems like a complete free for all, which only advantages completely unscrupulous businessmen. I guess the Tibetans feel a bit like the farmers all round the country: kicked off their lands by hired thugs to make way for private development. These peasants - the CCP's original support base - are now second class citizens behind the rich of the east coast cities. Although the government still wants to keep nationalism strong among the peasants, imagine if poor Han peasants and poor rural Tibetans found solidarity?

As I’ve said the problem with the Chinese government is that it can never seem to see or admit its mistakes. This is not only the government’s problem but a problem with all levels of society. In city block I used to live on it was quite easy to see this. One day I saw a foreigner (it is more appropriate to call him simply a foreigner than to refer to him by name or nationality, such shades being irrelevant in China) I knew attempting to cross the road with the cross signal, in the company of his visibly pregnant Shanghainese wife. His wife, who stood on his left side (and so exposed to the traffic before he was) was almost mowed down by a car turning right through a red light. The foreigner, obviously enraged, managed to hit the passing car with his fist. The blow made a sound, but produced no damage. The car immediately stopped without making any attempt to pull into the curb, the driver, a youngish man in business clothes, leapt out. He was absolutely livid, and started berating the pair of people he had just about killed several seconds ago. His face was pale and twisted; he could not believe his car had been struck: he OWNED a car, he was somebody, and you couldn't treat him like this. As far as I could see there was no relief in him that he had narrowly missed injuring or killing a pregnant woman.

The driver had been going too fast and not looking at the road ahead, but actually I do believe the foreigner was in the wrong. Although the law probably states you cannot turn right through a red light, everybody does, and China is rule of the masses not the law. Secondly he was wrong to let his wife stand on the left. He later told me he always allows his wife to stand closer to the traffic and lead him across the road. The roads in China's cities are dangerously hard to cross, since cars do not stick to lanes, obey lights, or stop at pedestrian crossings; one is often forced to inch across a road bit by bit. The foreigner’s reasoning for letting himself be led was that his wife had much more ability to cross safely as she has been doing so her whole life. Here he was wrong, locals seem not even to look when crossing the road – I put this down to their blind belief in ‘Minyun’ or fate; or even perhaps a death wish.

So my main problem here is not that the car turned through a red light and almost killed someone: this is a regular scene. My problem is the shouting and raving driver, and his feeling of having been wronged because his car was touched. Didn’t he realize he had almost killed the wife of the man that struck his car? Couldn't he understand the other’s emotion? The crowd (for there always is a crowd) who surround this incident also interested me.I feared they would take the Chinese man’s side, but in fact they were impassive. They looked on like inanimate objects a the stage set. As the Italian writer Alberto Morovia commented in his book 'The Red Book and the Great wall' the crowd act as unconscious Taoists, lost somewhere deep within themselves – the inactive mob – observing merely to perform the role of observers, to call them curious seems a mistake. They were not interested in the rights and wrongs of the scene they saw before them, but they could have reacted to this altercation, if somehow the foreigner or driver pushed some button which appealed to their nationalism. If this emotional response (inner-software), was booted up, the foreigner would be in trouble.I had intended here to talk a little more about Tibet and the Chinese crowd, but I think I have written enough for now – I hope I can muster something a little more positive about China to write about next time. The photo at the beginning of this post shows brave communist martyrs of different types: interestingly one is an intellectual...

People of the Abyss

`BUT YOU can't do it, you know,' friends said, to whom I applied for assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of London. `You had better see the police for a guide,' they added, on second thought, painfully endeavoring to adjust themselves to the psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better credentials than brains.`But I don't want to see the police,' I protested. `What I wish to do, is to go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how those people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.'`You don't want to live down there!' everybody said, with disapprobation writ large upon their faces. `Why, it is said there places where a man's life isn't worth tu'pence.'`The very places I wish to see,' I broke in.

Jack London, People of the Abyss

Jack London's book, which can seem a bit silly and snobbish, was sort of a forerunner to George Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris And London'. In it the author purposely sets out to experience the life of the poor in London's East End. I think most of the action happens around White Chapel, Mile End etc. These days London has no such horrific slums, but of course cities divided in to rich and poor who never meet still exist. Latin America, in my experience anyway, seems to be place where this phenomenon can be readily observed. Although no city is divided perfectly into two halves - some come close, Buenos Aires: rich north - poor south, Santiago: rich east - poor west, Bogota: rich north-east - poor south-west (not sure I've remembered that correctly). This situation does have its advantages, I can assure you: in Santiago the kids from the Eastern suburbs of Las Condes and Vitacura would almost never go downtown, so as a high school teacher at private colegio on the right side of the tracks, I knew I would be safe from being spotted by students in a downtown disco (on the wrong side of the tracks). In Bogota crossing the line seemed more dangerous: once getting of a bus a couple of stops too late I really felt like I had crossed the line into a danger zone; there was a 'feel' to the place (whatever that may mean, my observations here, I'll grant you, are not particularly profound

So in quite poor countries in Latin America it is possible by just strolling the rich suburbs to think everything is hunky dory? Well no, because the rich are usually, perhaps rightly, paranoid about crime. It is always hard to tell how much danger there really is in some Latin America cities. In the well to do suburb of La Reina in Santiago, you'd think you were living in a community under siege. I have never seen so many metal gates, huge aggressive dogs, or broken glass put on concrete walls. Walking to the shop for milk after dark was not scary because of ne'erdowells on the street, but more that a dog may actually get you.

I guess this segregated city could also be Los Angeles or Auckland, but certainly not a city in China - where slums and ritzy apartment buildings are side by side - the occupants of both cruising for a deal at the local vegetable market. The result of a non-violent society? or the result of a place where the rich put getting a deal over a nice environment?