Category Archives: Personal Life

Personal Life

Chinese New Year? Bah, humbug!

3 Comments

It’s Chinese New Year and since I got to go on holiday for it last year, it’s my turn to sit it out here in the Solomon Islands. Not that I particularly mind, since to be honest, I’m not particularly fond of it as a festival. Oh, I don’t begrudge it as an annual family gathering, that aspect of it is universal enough that there’s an equivalent of it in every human culture. The Chinese New Year however has another prominent characteristic to it that’s of special annoyance to me, and that’s the whole “may you make a fortune this year” thing.

As a out-and-out capitalist, I have no objections to people making money. In fact, I regard making a profit as creating value for society as a whole, and respect the entrepreneurial courage and tenacity that all businesspeople must possess in order to succeed. What I’m uncomfortable with is the idea of unearned wealth, that fortunes come and go as if on a fickle and random wind without regard to hard work, strategic vision or talent. Yet the traditional Chinese New Year wishes of fortune and prosperity imply just this view of how wealth is obtained and this explains in no small part why the festival itself is so strongly associated with gambling activities from card playing to buying lottery tickets to visiting the casino at Genting Highlands. The merry faced God of Fortune is the most emblematic example of this. I can understand a God of Hard Work, or Intelligence, or Skill, or even Good Health, but Fortune?

Of course, not everyone is so crass as to wish people with the utterly materialistic “Gong Xi Fa Chai” greeting. The first time I spent Chinese New Year with my wife’s parents, I noted that they preferred to greet people by saying, “May all your endeavors this year go according to your will,” and “May you enjoy good health” and so forth. I can only hope that others can learn to be more enlightened and use a similar blessing that makes more sense than wishing for someone to have money miraculously and inexplicably fall on their heads.

This isn’t the end of my complaints about the festival either because there’s something about it that brings out the worst in celebrating Chinese. I suppose I’m in the minority on this but I find utterly bewildering the concept that the most enjoyable dinners are the most raucous ones in which it is practically impossible to actually hold a real conversation across the dinner table due to the noise from endless toasts and inevitable karaoke droning. How about a bit of real wit and culture please? What I find really annoying however is when Chinese force others to drink toasts. I generally do not drink alcohol at all, and I feel that being pressured to drink for social reasons is extremely disrespectful to me as an individual and highly offensive to me personally. And unlike most Chinese, I don’t hesitate to make my views known either. I suppose that explains why I don’t get invited to many parties.

Games, Personal Life

The Child-Man

2 Comments

The gaming world has been lit abuzz by a fiery editorial piece by conservative writer Kay Hymowitz entitled “Child-Man in the Promised Land” that appeared in City Journal and was featured on National Public Radio in the U.S. You can read a reply to her editorial on Gaming Today here. Hymowitz’s basic point is that men today don’t grow up. Whereas the previous generation used to leave school, get a stable job, marry a wife and raise children in his own house, men today tend to drift through life aimlessly and refuse to commit to marriage, and are often still living with their parents even well into their 30s. To her, the phenomenon of adult men playing video games, the biggest segment of gamers are men between the ages of 18 and 34 she cites, is the perfect symbol of the child-man.

The blatant sexism of the entire article is disgusting. As one commenter to the article in Gaming Today put it, if Hymowitz had been a man and talked about women in the way she talks about men, it would have been impossible for her to keep her job in the United States. For example, she writes, “Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, travelling, and dining with friends. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving.” Why is it that women spending their leisure hours shopping, travelling, and dining with friends is perfectly okay while men spending their leisure hours drinking, socializing and playing video games is a sign of their immaturity?

Continue reading The Child-Man →

Games, Personal Life

My Orange Box

3 Comments

dsc00100_reduced.JPG

As you can see, my copy of The Orange Box is finally here. I’d actually ordered it a couple of months back from PCGame.com.my to be delivered to my wife’s house so that she could get it from her parents when they visited Australia. Unfortunately, when I tried activating it, I got an error message about how my license key is only valid for Russia and surrounding territories. I suppose that the Russia part is some mistake by Valve, and in any case, it clearly says on my box that this copy is only valid for Brunei, Cambodia, Indonedia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam and the Solomon Islands is not in this list.

Continue reading My Orange Box →

Personal Life

Hakchai and Lucky

Leave a comment

dsc00008_reduced.JPG

Some pictures of Hakchai, previously already mentioned in this blog, and his new friend, Lucky. Hakchai and Lohwong were the only two dogs that we kept from a litter of puppies by Rainbow. Rainbow was herself originally owned by one of our local Solomon Islander employees, but after he resigned for medical reasons, he left Rainbow here and I kind of adopted her. She’s a mongrel, and still a little wild. She’s a pretty small dog, but she loves chasing and killing things smaller than her, like birds, chickens and kittens.

Hakchai was wounded in a car accident when he was a puppy, so one of his rear legs is really weak. This means he can’t jump, so when he gets excited instead of jumping around, he just kinds of claws people’s feet instead, which can be painful. He’s also a really, really timid and submissive dog. When he was a puppy, as soon as anyone yelled or even glared at him, he’d curl up on his back and pee in submission. This means he’s totally useless as a guard dog, but also means that he’s perfectly harmless. He does make a lot of strange noises and howls sometimes. My wife says he likes to sing.

Continue reading Hakchai and Lucky →

Personal Life

Internet Censorship in China

6 Comments

In an effort to make new friends and increase traffic to her movie reviews website, my wife spent the weekend visiting similar blogs by mainland Chinese citizens. Some of the reviews sites are of surprisingly high quality, and it’s good to see that some Chinese at least have access to an impressively diverse selection of films, much more so than is available in Malaysia I think.

However, when some of the Chinese expressed an interest in reading more of my wife’s reviews, we discovered that they couldn’t. At first we thought that it was because internet connections to sites outside China were restricted by the schools of some of the Chinese, but we later discovered that it was a more general problem. Apparently, none of the Chinese who wanted to visit my wife’s blog could do so.

After some googling, I discovered this list of notable websites blocked in China on Wikipedia. This confirms that the hosting company I use, BlueHost, is banned. More shockingly, just about every free blog website seems to be banned too, including Blogspot, WordPress.com, LiveJournal and Xanga. Even Wikipedia, which is about as neutral a source of information as you can get since anyone can edit anything on it, is banned, as is the Project Gutenberg, which is simply a website to make available for free books that have passed out of copyright.

Most of us know of what is colloquially known as the Great Firewall of China, but this is the first time that I’ve run into it personally, and for me, this rams home the vast scale of the censorship being carried out. As a libertarian, I believe in high levels of personal freedom for everyone everywhere but many Malaysians that I know tend to excuse such dictatorial practices in China as an acceptable price to pay for social stability and prosperity, or at least turn a blind eye to it.

But the truth is that no society can ever really be stable and peaceful until its leaders are enlightened enough and mature enough to allow criticism against them, even if they disagree with the criticisms. This is true for China and it is true for Malaysia as well.

Personal Life

A New Year Walk

1 Comment

dsc00029.JPG

It was a lazy afternoon here in the Solomon Islands with nothing much happening (except for a lorry carrying a lion dance group going by in the morning, quite an unusual sight here), so my wife and I went for a walk at the company’s sawmill site in Lungga. This is something that we usually do every Sunday but we missed out on it the previous Sunday since my wife spent too much time baking a baguette.

The sawmill site occupies a fairly a large piece of more-or-less private land so it’s a pleasant and mostly quiet place to have a stroll in, with plenty of greenery, a river and a beach. The main reason we come here though is to visit our dog Lohwong (Cantonese). He, together with his brother Hakchai, previously lived with us at our workshop compound in Ranadi, but he turned out to be a bit too aggressive and boisterous, actually biting a couple of camp workers and frequently chasing children and passersby, so he was banished to the more remote Lungga site a few months ago. It turned out for the best though since Hakchai, who has a bad leg due to a car accident when he was a puppy and is much lazier, has been happier now that his bigger brother isn’t around to bully him, and the huge Lungga area gives the more active Lohwong plenty of space to run in and explore.

Continue reading A New Year Walk →

Personal Life

A Christmas at the Beach

1 Comment

dsc00408.JPG

I went with my wife and a couple of work colleagues to a beach west of Honiara in the Solomon Islands on Christmas. Pictured above is us together with the two children of one of my colleagues. As a fairly unremarkable beach outing, only the children actually played in the water and the adults merely dipped their toes. Of particular note is that the two children have been bugging me to get some games for them but since their father’s laptop only has a Centrino processor and integrated video my choices were limited. So I decided to give them my old copy of Starcraft, which I bought many years ago in Gabon, Africa. This seemed to appeal to them after I taught them some basics. The elder one was somewhat dumbfounded though when I remarked that when the game originally came out, he was only 1 year old. I spent some time in the afternoon helping them beat a Starcraft level.

Continue reading A Christmas at the Beach →