This is really funny. Catherine Tate plays an interpreter that had to stand in at the last minute because the professional didn’t turn up. All of us hold prejudices and stereotypes, and this short video shows us some of the subconscious ones.
My apologies if you find this offensive. You know who to call to prevent yourself from getting into a similar pickle.
Flat out at the moment putting this forum together. Counting down to next Monday. A few tickets left if you’re keen to come check this out.
The International Sustainable Cities Forum to be held on 30 March brings together government and business leaders from both China and New Zealand, in conjunction with the first anniversary of the signing of the China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement.
The organisers have managed to secure the attendance of approximately 50 senior business and government leaders from China to attend this Forum. Amongst those attending is Wang Shi, the Godfather of Chinese real estate, Chairman of Vanke, with market capitalisation over US$10b, the largest property developer in China. Wang Shi is also the he oldest person in the world to complete the 7+2 (scaling the highest peaks on seven continents and to trek to the two poles). Many of the delegates are members of the China Urban Realty Association (CURA), and are well-known entrepreneurs and investors. Government delegations from Chang Xing County in Zhejiang Province and Wu Jin District in Jiangsu Province will also attend.
The Chinese participants are keen to look at partnership possibilities in New Zealand. They also want to better understand New Zealand’s capabilities in the area of sustainable development, especially given the significant challenges faced in China.
I came across a good story in the Summer issue of Bright, the NZTE magazine that goes out to people interested in international business.
Key stories in this issue include coping with the international credit crisis; insights on trading in the Middle East; tips on perfecting your sales pitch; the world’s growing bioeconomy; interviews with two members of NZTE’s China Advisory Board; carbon-labeling of exports; staying sharp in the adventure tourism market.
I want to highlight some salient points from the interviews with the 2 members of NZTE’s China Advisory Board, who have in-depth China market knowledge and have lived and worked in China for a long period.
If you have some time, do read the article. The 2 guys interviewed are:
David Mahon, Chair of NZTE’s China Advisory Board.
Andrew Browne, partner in a corporate communications advisory company, Beijing Brunswick Consultancy Ltd.
Some quotes from Mahon:
Quotes from Browne:
Also want to highlight an opportunity for Kiwi businesspeople to connect with Chinese investors and businesspeople at an upcoming event on 30 March 2009 – known as the International Sustainable Cities Forum. A delegation of high-level business and government leaders will be in New Zealand for 4 days to explore partnership opportunities.
It’s the perfect opportunity for those wanting to do business with the Chinese to attend.
Times are tough. People are worried that they might lose their jobs as the unemployment rate starts creeping up. Job summit or no job summit. As always, during difficult times, the ones worst hit are the ones who are lacking in qualifications and experience.
It’s time to upskill. It seems university enrolments are up around the country, according to various local news articles. Recent graduates who can’t find work are going back to university. But so are many students looking at gaining more qualifications in order to keep pace with developments.
During such perilous times, it’s important to understand what skills are in demand and how to stand out from the crowd. In New Zealand, where almost all native English speakers can only speak one language, knowing some basic foreign language can indeed be an advantage. Most of all you demonstrate to prospective employers that you have the ability to persevere with something as well as the ability to work across cultures. As New Zealand becomes more and more multicultural, the ability to communicate across cultures will be as essential as knowing how to use a computer.
New Zealand is an exporting nation. We would be poorer than Samoa or Tonga if we didn’t trade with our friends, and foreign tourists stop arriving. There are in fact more Chinese and Spanish speakers than there are English speakers. Naturally, these are key languages to learn if one wants to learn how to communicate with our future customers.
But learning any language is useful. New Zealanders have traditionally learnt French, German and Japanese at school. Knowing any one of these languages would be useful. I have written at length about why one should learn each one of these languages, so feel free to check out my blog entries on why learn language
I had a look at our blog stats and surprisingly, one of the posts driving the most traffic from google searches was one I wrote in May 2008 on cross-cultural relationships, exploring some of the reasons why and how cross-cultural relationships happen. It seems a lot of people are interested in the reasons why in most of the cross-cultural relationships, the guy is typically Kiwi and the girl is typically a foreigner, mostly Asian. So the real question is why do Asian girls date Kiwi guys but Kiwi girls rarely date Asian guys?
I found some really funny videos on youtube.com addressing this very topic.
A funny video made by a Chinese guy talking to his Caucasian friend about the reasons Asian girls prefer white guys. Not very scientific but good humour value.
This is another video from a white girl’s perspective. She has real life experience going out with an Asian guy. She addresses some common myths about cross-cultural relationships, and share some of her personal reasons why she prefers Asian guys (eg. she doesn’t like hairy men). Perhaps one comment that stood out is that she thinks Asian guys should be more confident. If an Asian guy thinks that there’s not going to be chemistry with a white girl, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. The key is to just give it a shot.
She seems serious but it’s pretty funny.
This one is more representative. The interviewer actually went out and asked some Asian girls as to why they prefer to go out with white guys. I guess the saving grace for Asian guys is that in response to the question “When it comes to a serious long term relationship, you would give Asian guys a chance?”, all the Asian girls said yes. Phew…. and I can hear all those single Asian men heave a sigh of relief.
I just got back from a Vietnamese dinner in Otahuhu, hosted by one of my Vietnamese friends. He had a theme going, which he called a Vietnamese “show-and-tell”. Nothing sleazy I assure you. The idea is every person brings something along to share with the rest. It has to be something related to Vietnam.
I have been thinking about this for days. Today I asked my colleagues to see what they thought. Peter suggested talking about the Vietnamese hat. I’m glad I didn’t as 2 other people talked about hats.
Instead I decided to talk about something that Vietnam is famous for in South East Asia. And that is for the prowess of their football teams. Vietnamese people are really into football (OK, so’s the rest of the world outside of NZ). Considering their size and economic status, they tend to do pretty well.
As a Malaysian, I’m pretty embarassed to see the Vietnamese constantly beating Malaysia’s football team. In the most recent incident, the Vietnamese Women thrashed Malaysia 11-0 in the group stage of the Southeast Asia Women’s Football Championship in Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday. I know my Malaysian friends will say I shouldn’t be writing about this. But this is what I shared…
Perhaps a better story than the alternative, which was to talk about bean sprouts…frankly that was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about Vietnam. You know the kind you get when you order raw beef noodle soup…
We have to start organising some show and tell events at Euroasia. French show and tell, Spanish show and tell etc.
I am sure at least some of you would be keen…
It’s almost a truism that liberally-minded, progressive people of the world make an effort to understand and appreciate other people’s cultures, no matter how different they might be from our own. We might find practices ranging from arranged marriages to initiation ceremonies among Papuan tribes people a little strange, but we would not, heaven forbid, stand up and denounce them as “wrong”. To do this would smack of cultural arrogance, imperialist hangovers or worse.
Does this mean, then, that everything deemed to be part and parcel of any culture is acceptable?
I think we have to distinguish between cultural practices and cultures in their entirety. No, we should not dismiss any culture in its entirety as “wrong”. There may be certain aspects of the culture which we find distasteful, but that does not justify our dismissing it out of hand; anthropologists have taught us to see that people with cultures which seem quite alien to us may actually lead happier lives than we do. When it comes to cultural practices, however, I would suggest that we might take a different point of view.
Culture is not static: very few cultures in the world are exactly the same as they were 200 years ago. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it would have seemed entirely normal to most people within our western culture that children would labour in factories, that people would be sent to the other side of the world for stealing a loaf of bread, or hanged for poaching. Our culture has moved on from that, and most of us are happy to see that it has. Closer to home, cannibalism was once part and parcel of the culture of certain Pacific nations, including New Zealand – it no longer is; the culture has moved on.
Undesirable practices can be eliminated from cultures without the culture in its entirety turning to dust. And perhaps there are today still certain cultural practices which we really should not be tolerating. The problem, though, is how we determine what is “undesirable”.
We come back to cultural arrogance. We might well denounce some “primitive” initiation ceremony, yet perhaps the practitioners of such ceremonies might well denounce certain aspects of our culture, possibly the materialism and greed which threaten the stability of the earth. Which of the two cultural phenomena represents more of a threat?
I think there are criteria which might help us to determine whether we can, and perhaps should, denounce certain cultural practices with a clean conscience. For example, if the practice clearly results in permanent physical harm, if it is inflicted upon children or anyone against their will – then I think there is a clear case for condemning it. A case in point is female genital mutilation, practised in certain African cultures. In this instance, the criteria just mentioned clearly apply, and I think we can say this practice is wrong and should be stopped. That does not mean that we condemn lock, stock and barrel the cultures espousing it, but it does mean that this one aspect of their culture should disappear.
This is fine, but what actually do we say in response if we asked to change one of our cultural practices and stop destroying the planet?
Yes, it must be election time again. And once again it’s time to pick on the Asians.
Why is it that it’s always Asians and Arabs that get picked on? How come no one’s calling for Pacific Islanders to be sent home? Is it because they are bigger and hence more likely to win a fist-fight?
I expect comments like those made by New Zealand First Deputy Leader Peter Brown to increase in frequency as the general election approaches. Of course migrants need to integrate. It goes without saying. Why else would they come to this faraway land and leave their friends and family behind if they had no desire whatsoever to integrate? In any case, effective settlement does not depend on immigrants adopting a new set of values and behaviours and ditching their own.
It must be a 2-way process. Most migrants are not interested in building “Asian mini-societies”. I think those who do have no choice, having been rejected by the host community. Browsing through the Herald reader responses to Peter Brown’s comments, I think I can safely say that the sad fact is a significant number of locals believe Asian migrants should drop everything they believe in and adopt “Kiwi” ways of life – whatever that means. I have come to the conclusion that when locals say you have to “be Kiwi”, in reality the message is “be like me”. One respondent said “with the influx of immigrants from different ethnic groups, our culture and values are changing. It seems, so as to not offend these newcomers, our public Christmas celebrations have been watered down!” Another: “Silly that we let so many people into this country that can speak little if any English at all”.
The fact is most migrants can speak English, and can speak it well, some even better than locals. If we measure the desire to integrate on the basis of language ability, my guess is 90% of migrants speak good enough English for most jobs. However, 90% of born-and-bred Kiwis speak only one language well, ie English. So who’s not really wanting to integrate here? Of course you would argue that this is an English-speaking country, but doesn’t the fact that most Kiwis can’t speak any other language and have little desire to do so a sad indictment?
I feel a little uncomfortable writing this, seeing I have many good friends who are of New Zealand European or Maori descent, and I can’t say that they have ever told me to be more Kiwi in a derogatory way. OK maybe sometimes, when I express my dislike for vegemite or weetbix. It would be most unfair for me to tar all Kiwis with the same brush, in the same way that those people who have responded on the Herald website have concluded about Asian migrants.
Many Asian migrants are sick and tired of all this rubbish. They don’t want to be treated in this manner anymore. Especially not in the new New Zealand, where 1 in 4 residents was born overseas.
This could explain why Asians and other immigrants are swinging to National in this election at twice the rate of any other group, according to a Herald survey. Of 38 “Asians and others” asked, 21 said they voted Labour last time, and only 8 are staying with the party this year. Whether this is fair, I don’t know.
But I’ll be Kiwi now and just call it like I see it.
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