Educating Mao ※

Subject: contact with frank∼Eastwood hill

Subject: last email∼semester holiday∼email attachments

Hello Paul
My last email to Dad was four days ago. Maybe Dad means he is not getting much information about me. On the surface it looks like I am living an exciting life. The reality is it is actually quite lonely and stressful. Because of past employment problems, I have no confidence in my employment situation and dislike looking and planning ahead.

I am not the only one who feels this way these days. White males are just machines for everyone else. We created their world they have no intention of returning to us or abandoning. If we say anything that challenges, they classify it hate speech and lock us up. Amnesty International is at the forefront of it all. Then they campaign for that idiot Dalai Lama.

Having got that off my chest, I am having a week semester holiday. The sophomore girls in my classes incessantly flirt with me. Asian girls are like that. Or maybe it is just me. Two asked for my telephone number, which I declined. The boys, with very few exceptions, are shambolic. I wonder if that is the consequence of the one-child policy. They have never learnt how to be boys. My classes have been all sophomore, second year college. After semester, I will have freshmen classes, first college year.

I have been unable to access attachments on received emails. In consequence I have still not read the full report on Eastwood Hill.

I will forward the email attachment with the email to you. Maybe Dawn could work on it and send it back to me. It is no use offering technical advice, as in China everything on the computer system is in chinese. Or maybe you or Dawn could make an email copy of the attachment and email it to me?
Sorry this might be a bit of a bother.
Lloyd

Subject: china news∼semester holiday∼email attachments

Dear Dad
Paul has emailed that you are missing my emails. I sent one four days ago. So perhaps you really mean you are missing news about China.

I am on a week holiday semester. Jackson has just given me my new semester timetable. I have three extra classes which are the freshman (first year classes).

My students generally don't cause disruption. It is after all a communist country. I feel sorry now Uncle Harold didn't achieve his dreams and make New Zealand a Communist country. He would have made an excellent Minister of Education in a poor but integral and highly educated society. But no point lamenting that.

As everywhere else, the girls shine while the boys goof-out. The girls can't stop themselves flirting with me. Asian girls are like that. Maybe it is just me. Two asked for my telephone number. I declined. The boys are mostly quite shambolic. That is a characteristic of Chinese young men. They are quite floppy and many can barely speak a word of English after seven years of instruction and a year at College. That seems to contradict above. But the fault is mostly their western ESL instruction. Also I think the one-child policy has stopped their development as boys.

I am using the university library and now have a book out – 100 Banned Books. It was published in America about ten years ago and is amazingly fair and objective.

Most of the other foreign teachers have taken holiday. But I am staying at the college. Unfortunately there has been another mess up with iServe. I will have to ask you to arrange a fifteen dollar payment to National Bank in Gisborne. I have forwarded you the iServe email to show to the bank officer. Two days ago I deposited in the BNZ about three hundred dollars. In an emergency I can still withdraw that. It was an enormous undertaking. The bank officer was quite mad and queried everything while laughing manically. She also didn't speak a word of English. I don't want ever to do that again.

I will post you today the twenty dollar NZ bill. I will cover it up in bank papers. I have not had problems posting letters from south China before. We will just keep our fingers crossed.

It is now very quiet at the College. Meals continue to be supplied at very small charge. In semester, there is a loud broadcast of music and Chinese news from seven am. I suspect that is to wake everyone up. So I am happy to have that. Unfortunately it goes on for hours.

I read that Mayor Foon is in hot water over his support letter regarding Donnelly. Judging by the correspondence, all of society has given up on reforming street male Maoris.

As Anne Salmond once wrote, it is a reversion back to 1810. 1810 was the Boyd massacre.
The Maori warrior then was wild and irrational but he was not a degenerate.

How was your week with Mary? I have just seen the email on Mum's church service. I had missed it. Unfortunately I will have the same access problem of the attachments. There are two. I have asked Dawn if she can transfer them and the Eastwood Hill service to emails.

I hope this makes you feel better. Nice cool weather here.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: re: china news

Subject: Eastwood Hill obituary∼East Coast society

Dear Dad Paul and Dawn
I have now read the funeral service for mother. I had missed reading it because on the email list it was right below another miscommunication with Internal Affairs which drove me into such a tizz that I missed it. Could Dawn transfer to email the Eastwood Hill obituary?

It was very interesting. I was amused at the garbled reference to myself as an English Lecturer at Beijing University. That would be a miracle!

I had originally been told I would be teaching English literature atChenggong College. However, it is ESL oral communication. That is much better. My degree is not actually literature. It is history. My background in employment is ESL. If I was asked to teach history, I would have to ask to be excluded from teaching twentieth-century history! I call that the three h problem, Holocaust, Hitler, Whanganui.

I had not heard the grandchildrens name of Queen Nanny. Mum was always groomed extremely well. Her birth date 1927 seems such a distant era when society seemed so stylish and mature.

I have just looked at the Wikipedia file on Meng Foon. He is quoted as saying to the New Zealand Herald that the Ngati Porou foreshore grab will not make any difference, or much difference, because 90 per cent of the people on the East Coast are Maori anyway. That was not reported in Gisborne and could bring him down.

I imagine he would reply it was a boo-boo. So the people who actually built the East Coast society are expendable and reduced in his statistics to ten per cent. Well as someone once said, "If you don't write your history, other people will write it for you."
Lloyd

Subject: dinner with Daniel∼College classes∼pidgin

Hi Dad, Paul and Dawn
I am having quite a quiet time. I had dinner last night with Daniel who teaches Movie studies. He met me when I was walking down the road to the local cheap eating and drinking places. I got on the back of his motor bike. Daniel still doesn't know which side of the road the Chinese drive on. So I got off when we crossed roads. He is an Armenian-American.

When I had coffee later at his apartment, I overheard on his mobile phone that some of his students were complaining they can't understand him and he had to meet the administration to discuss it. It is very unfair that happens. His instruction has to be English, a subject they have for seven or so years been rottenly taught in. The College doesn't have a probationary period. But in China, that doesn't seem to make much difference. They don't have a basic concept of equity. He has a lovely Chinese wife in his apartment that will to some degree insulate him from eviction.

I have a week semester off and will not recommence until this Friday. There is some confusion. My College University is a private University located just outside Gongji city. Gongji is in Henan province which is in south-east China.

I had been employed in a summer camp which is near Beijing. But never got there, as the position was terminated when the camp heard of the loss then of my passport. That was a loss of about a month of income and free accommodation.

My College classes are nineteen and twenty year olds. So they qualify as young adults. I gave some information about my classes in my previous email. We just talk English. We have text books which I adapt. The reality is non-colonial China has never had the advantage of professional English instruction. They went into English in a big way at the same time, the English language teachers went into English as a fun subject.

In consequence they are still talking a more elaborate version of pidgin. That is chunks of English or sometimes Chinese words. For example classical pidgin includes terms such as no go no see, no go area, Confucius he says, chop chop. They crept into the English as colloquial terms. I don't try to break the habit as that would cost me my job.

In the same issue of self-preservation, I will not now report lost property to the NZ Government. But to the more advanced classes I discreetly slip in the odd grammar instruction. I told one female student, not in my class, we should have conquered you. I pretended that was a joke.

I talk myself as little as possible. When I arrived five minutes late because of a building confusion last Thursday, the class a lower one applauded at my arrival. I thought that vaguely encouraging. Modern teachers have little professional back up, at least the white male ones, and have to be completely sycophantic to everyone.

Thanks Dawn for the transference to email of attachment. I don't know how you do it. Some people have the knack, others don't.

It is similar maybe the same as immigrants to a new language country. Some pick up the new language, some don't. Only the children all do and pass it on to the next generation. I have been told it is a motivation issue. I don't think so.

There is a very interesting article in the New Zealand Herald about the foreshore issue. It was the foreshore issue in Fiji that brought down the civil Government of Fiji and brought in Baramaramara. There are old urupa, grave sites everywhere on the foreshore. As everything is now made sacred to its area, the situation for negotiation is impossible. Eastwood Hill does give some perspective on the Maori side.

The article is by a retired Teachers College Social Studies Lecturer. Just google New Zealand Herald and click onto Opinion.

I won't send any more letters to the Gisborne Herald.
Lloyd

Subject: printer problems

Subject: lovely spring morning

Subject: re: lovely spring morning

Dear Dad
Good to see you are up and about. Good luck with your driving test. As I recall your birthday is November 20.

The Chinese Post Office caught me trying to post the twenty dollar bill. So it cannot be posted to your house. I can use it for English talk in the classroom. When I get back to NZ, I will have to have a night out with you at an expensive restaurant to refund your support.

I have followed the Paul Henry saga. He is himself is of gypsy origin on both sides. That explains his fuzzy hair and dark look like John A Lee. The New Zealand Herald blogs are full of it. However they characteristically only post criticism and boorish remarks. I posted that there was not a media fuss when the Indians rejected an Italian for their Prime Minister. I object to the double standard and the insinuation that the non-pc are mentally ill. Herald did not post it. So I have repeated it in another post. I will let you know if they post it.

It is cooling down in Gongji. Yesterday night I had some drinks with teachers at the teachers compound. One of the teachers was able to access my internet site on his Blackberry.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: Julie∼experiences in class

Dear Dad
I just got a phone call from Julie that tomorrow afternoon she will be taking me to the police station to get my registration. I had been waiting for some days for this and was getting worried.

I had some interesting experiences in class today. One of the girls called out "present" for another girl that was absent. I caught her out and she said she did it because it was her best friend. I have started to threaten a punishment regime for this misdemeanour and absence of books by marking absent in class. I haven't put it into place yet. I think I should be allowed to do that as they have to miss a third of classes before they are ineligible for the exam. I made arrangements yesterday for showing videos in the multi-visual room.

I am working on showing them how to construct English sentences. They somehow miss that. I have a slogan which I write on the white board.

All the rules of the language are in the sentence.

In a way I have been a martyr for professional English. I just cannot bear to see bright people missing out on a language system that is quite easy to learn and quite ingenious. My skill there is my great strength and that got me this position. But I have to balance it to keep my position.

How are you keeping? It is cooling down and I now have three thick blankets on my bed.

I am quite liking my library book History of Media in America. How America has fallen when they displaced the wasps and white men! If you try to find the truth now in America they sneeringly call you a truther. Once you got the Pulitzer prize for that.

Herald blog posted my second comment about Paul Henry. I sent another, that we are not a smorgasbord. They haven't posted that one. An entire political and commercial elite has been foisted on us and protected by the charge or insinuation of anti-semitism or racism.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: problem downloading attachment

Hi Paul and Dawn
I have had the same problem downloading this attachment. Can you do it for me and send it back.

I got a communication from Dad yesterday. He sent me a new email. He also tried to reply with the same email but it came blank. I would tell him to make new emails. But I am afraid he might post the email address incorrectly. This morning he sent the same reply in two emails.

I am rather counting the days until his ninety-second birthday when he should be taken off the road.
I am however bothered, even if he is safe now, a renewed licence will give him another two years' grace.
He mentioned Paul took him to the hospital.
Does that mean he is no longer driving?

I doubt it, knowing these old guys from the air force.
Lloyd

Subject: re: problem downloading attachment

Subject: able to access the attachment

Hi Paul and Dawn
I was able to access the attachment from a printer shop.

I feel rather sorry for poor old Dad. After a few weeks his drivers licence should lapse. Then at an opportune time someone should very tactfully suggest he sell the car to a non-family member. His garage would be a lot nicer without an in-effect abandoned car.

I am sending him a nightly diary as he says he reads my emails half a dozen times. Hitler's retired munitions minister Speer kept his mind alert for twenty years in Spandau by every day walking a dozen times around the court yard, then measuring how far he had moved on a world map if he was walking around the world.

He then imagined he was actually there and what he would have encountered.
Very German!
Lloyd

Subject: Dad's driving

Subject: Who is Julie?

Subject: re: Who is Julie?

Dear Dad
Julie is the office administrator. She doesn't have real power and she is very helpful. She took the place of Jessie who left to have a baby.
There are no letter boxes in China. You have to post through the Post Office. I had tucked the twenty dollar bill inside a form. But there is no glue supplied and the clerk checked inside it. China has no democratic sense. They say America is becoming ungovernable and it has a quarter of China's population. I was very annoyed at that Chinese dissident winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Chinese dissent is going through the 1960s stage. They really know very little about the west and swallow whatever the CIA tell them. I am cautious to talk too much about China, even in an email.

The language problem in the city is usually huge. Even bank clerks and post office officials have very little English. But every now and then one finds a fluent one. I always ask hopefully for them.

The issue about the money is this. I can send it to the bank account of iServe. But that is terribly difficult and would cost me about fifty dollars. I would spend about half the day arranging it and nearly have a mental breakdown. Maybe you could arrange with Glennis to go with her to the National Bank branch and deposit the fifteen dollars into iServe account. Or you could post iServe a cheque for fifteen dollars. In that case I will have to ask iServe for their postal address and account name. I am turning fifty seven! on October 31. That would be a lovely birthday present. I have deposited three hundred dollars into iServe account for monthly withdrawals. So unless an upheaval in my affairs, I won't have any more bank problems.

I will forward you again the iServe account.

I would have enjoyed the Watergate program. It now seems an extraordinarily idealistic time. The only time the post-war generation, the WASP population, did anything heroic.

A few years ago, the US Secretary for Transportation, under oath at a Congressional hearing, testified that Vice-President Dick Cheney refused to change his orders despite requests by the military when the missile was flying towards the Pentagon on 9/11.
No Congress person asked "what was his order". The order could only have been "don't fire at the missile."

People who seek the truth these days they call – with a sneer and hint of subversion, truthers.

So Ray Skyrme has died. I knew she was on a walker.

How glad I am that you are up and about. I hope you are doing therapeutic exercise as that is free at the hospital.

So Ming Foon won. He seems a good man.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: Ray Skyrme obituary

Dear Dad
I will email you the Gisborne Herald obituary on Ray Skyrme that quotes my online website biography.
Lloyd

Subject: iServe

Subject: chenggong website

Subject: month's salary today

Dear Dad
I got my month's salary today. There was a mess up and they paid me in cash. That has been deposited into the Chinese bank.

Chenggong College rescued me from a horrific situation. Julie is an office administrator. I got a telephone call from the head of my department on my first night back from Hong Kong. They were concerned I had got lost. I don't have any contact with the higher administration and prefer to avoid them.
I am now showing english language videos to classes.

A friend Jerry at the College promises he can help me learn to upload my website. I am taking it step by step.

Dawn is no young thing. She must be very close to sixty!

Gisborne Herald must have downloaded my website and read its biography section.
At least in cyberspace I really am a famous author.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: iServe

Subject: iServe already paid

Dear Dad
You have already paid the fifteen dollars to iServe.
October 31 is coming on quickly.

Today after College I went to town and bought some really nice pyjamas.

I had dinner with Daniel and his wife Dawn from next door at the foreign teachers compound.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: your Birthday present

Subject: concerned about Dad

Hi Paul and Dawn
I am becoming concerned about Dad's increasingly confused emails. He keeps forgetting what he has just done. How is he?

A few days ago I had an unexpected visitor in my classroom.
He is an English major student and was reporting back on the serious charge that I was teaching grammar. He sat for half the class, and while I was showing things on the whiteboard, read a book. Then he complained again and disappeared.

Teaching grammar is a serious charge.
It is the domain of the Chinese teachers.
When he told me that, I snapped back:
‘the students don't know the grammar’
and he went into a dudgeon.

I await for any possible developments, but am more careful now to only slip it in to the bright students – i.e. only a sprinkling of boys and nearly all the girls.

English structural use is a shocker in China and most of Asia. That major student himself is barely communicable. They were unlucky to enter into the English language at exactly the time the ‘progressives’ took over the classrooms. They now regard that as normal.

It is quite a serious matter as I have no organisation to back me up, tossed to the wolves as it were – i.e. as the white man. He built the modern world. When displaced, the modern world fell to pieces. If he tells the truth, they lock him up.
Anyway, Love from Lloyd

Subject: Don't worry about Frank

Subject: shopping with dawn

Dear Dad
That is lovely to receive this present. I have deposited about three hundred dollars from my Chinese bank into the BNZ. It can be done but it is an experience I don't want to repeat. If you do deposit it, I will use it for an emergency if necessary.

I think you mean chinese purchase of a New Zealand farm. I think the Chinese company is now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.
The old New Zealand-type rural economy is on the way out.
Chinese business and employment methods have no concept of equity, just masters and serfs. Your only protection is to throw yourself upon their sense of mercy and justice which is Confucian based.

Yesterday I went with Dawn, another Dawn, who is a major English student. We went shopping and I purchased a new sweater, coat and jeans. Then we looked at the Song Temples down the road from the College. They are the graves for seven Emperors and go back a thousand years.

Friendships are permitted with College students, provided they do not become intimate or there is no overnight sleeping at the teachers' compound.
Dawn lives in a domitory and shares her room with five other girls.

I am now reading a book Beirut to Damascus by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. It is very interesting, and was written twenty years ago. It tells us as much about Thomas Friedman's privileged Jewish-American life as it does about the Middle East.

I am quite shocked at times at his coldness. Empires do that to their followers.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: Reply button

Subject: email from Dad

Hi Paul and Dawn
I am sending your this email from Dad as he continues to have problems with the reply button. Maybe you can understand this. I sent some advice.

I suggest you go step by step with him at the p.c. Then write down on a paper left beside the p.c. every step.

I tried that one to teach him keeping files. It worked but I did not conclude with close window box. Then he panicked and wouldn't go near it.
Lloyd

Subject: dairy farm purchase in China

Dear Dad
I see you were right, a New Zealand company purchased a Chinese farm. They are all cannibalising each other. Multiculturalism, we have now been told, is a bad thing. When it suited the elites, anyone who said otherwise was ignored or demonised. As far as I am concerned let them stew in it. I hope Lord of the Rings supplants Maori culture as New Zealand's brand. I am sorry about the recent very shorted-sighted problems with Peter Jackson. He is actually our Prime Minister.

Lord Of The Rings was written in the time of Aryanism. I think the power of the white man should be returned but chastened.

Your previous reply to my email had no problems. I only had one copy sent to me. Just click Reply once. Then type your email above the email sent to you. Then change the address next to to the address of the person who will receive it. Then click Send.

People can then refer back to old emails.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: $42m dairy farm purchase by Fonterra

Subject: the Fonterra purchase

Dear Dad
I will send you an email from the China Daily news that covers the Fonterra purchase. I had sent it to you but gave your email incorrectly. If you don't find it, it is because I can't now find it.

You are right, it is in a province – Herbai that borders my province Henan to the north. I passed through there on my way to Gongyi from Harbin.

The land is quite scrubby compared with New Zealand pastoral land. I saw no dairy farms.
The Chinese are only now starting to take dairy products, primarily as milk powders.

As you may recall there was a scandal about that. I imagine Fonterra is cashing in and planning to send its milk products direct to the Chinese customers.

I am delighted you can now send reply emails. It is a much better system.
I went to my friend Jerry yesterday and checked my website. He can access it on his blackberry phone. The images, especially the pictures, look excellent, sharply focussed.

I checked the iServe website and found my website Sargon Press is being read through by about six people a day. My readers come from all over the world, including Russia and Seychelles.

Jerry was very impressed. He is giving me lessons how to upload my site.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: Lord of the Rings

Dear Dad,
I hear there is great excitement that Key has had a coup with Lord of the Rings. I am very enthused. New Zealand should be known as Middle Earth.

Tolkien was a great friend of C S Lewis and in the 1930s–1940s they kept out of the leftist literary scene. The Hobbit was originally written in the 1930s.

Not much to report. I suppose for you that is always good news. I forgot to tell you when the freshman classes started the College gave me an extra freshman class for which I receive bonus payment.

Did I tell you in my last email Dawn–the student–left slippers hanging at my door? I was unable to contact her. Perhaps that is just as well. They keep me very warm. I now have good warm clothing for the Winter. Hassan downstairs has lent me a heater I am using now.

On Tuesday I attended the English Corner. That is a student club. We get together with students and talk English. I found out some more information. Freshman (first year students) have to do one hour work in the College grounds every day. I often see them doing it. They are not permitted without permission to leave the College on work days.

How is the weather in Gisborne? It got very cold here. Today and night is not so bad. I have three thick blankets and am careful to sleep on one and under two.
Love from Lloyd

Subject: 56 years ago

Subject: John Key

Dear Dad
Thank you so much for your present. I am actually fifty seven. I keep reading the ages of famous people in the world and being alarmed at how much younger many are. There is definitely a 40s personality and a 50s personality. A 40s personality thinks they are on the cusp of change. A 50s personality has lived long enough to have seen it all before.

I notice a certain weariness by you about the media. The NZ media have followed the streamlined corporate American media. They pick up a story and run it to saturation point.

John Key was given the nickname of the "Smiling Assassin" in London when he worked for a finance corporation now exposed as crooks.

Yesterday I went to town with Pupy, a male major English student. I purchased a box of nutrient stuffs to mix with my morning yogurt. We also went to the Sung temples down the road from the College and climbed up to the top of a tomb. When we got home, we did a general winter cleaning of my apartment. We washed the floor. This morning I have my pyjamas and sheets drying after a wash. They are sunning on the porch.

I completed reading the Friedman book. I skim-read the Chinese classics on "The Art Of War". It declares that war is bad and should be always avoided. It is required reading in American military colleges. But the officers don't seem to take the least notice of it.

As I was saying to Pupy yesterday, the next great social movement in America will be obesity rights. They will eventually celebrate the first obese American President.

I read you had an earthquake. Did you feel it?
Love from Lloyd