Korean honored by NZ in Queen’s Birthday List

Chi Kap-chong (L) is congratulated by New Zealand Ambassador to South Korea Patrick Rata (R) on becoming an honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit as deputy head of mission Daniel Mellsop and defense attache Col. Jeremy Ramsden look on. (Courtesy of N.Z. Embassy)

Seoul, June 4 (Yonhap) When Korean Chi Kap-chong was made an honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit Monday as part of the Queen’s Birthday New Zealand Honors list, he was in august company. One of very few non-New Zealanders to win the award, Chi shared the distinction this year with the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

The orders are awarded to those “who in any field of endeavor, have rendered meritorious service to New Zealand or have become distinguished by their eminence, talents, contributions or other merits.”

In presenting Chi with the letter investing him with the honor, New Zealand Ambassador to South Korea Patrick Rata said the former war correspondent continued to be important to New Zealand-Korea relations.

As chairman of the U.N. Korean War Allies Association, Chi was instrumental in establishing the New Zealand ANZAC memorial at Gapyeong, about 60 kilometers east of Seoul.

“Chairman Chi’s tireless work over more than five decades to promote better understanding between the U.N. Allies, including New Zealand, and Korea is highly valued by New Zealand,” Rata said.

Chi has been honored previously by many nations for his part in honoring service members of other countries who died in Korea’s 1950–1953 war, during which he was a correspondent for the U.K.-based Reuters news agency.

He said the New Zealand order was made more special by being bestowed on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee.

“I didn’t ask for any decorations,” he said. “I am serving. This is my job.”

Chi said many Korean people did not know what other countries served in the Korean War and that was why he made individual memorials for each nation.

Speaking of his days as a young reporter, Chi told an anecdote of being in New Zealand in 1968 covering the state visit of President Park Chung-hee. He spoke to a young New Zealand Army officer who had lost his father in the war when he was only 3 years old.

He told the president about the officer and Park made a point of thanking the New Zealander.

“We must remember them,” Chi said Monday.

South Korea, New Zealand celebrate 50 years of friendship . . .

SEOUL, May 4 (Yonhap) -- The suburb of Yeoksam, in Seoul's upmarket Gangnam district, is home to many of the capital's tallest skyscrapers and office towers that headquarter some of South Korea's biggest businesses. The shining metal and steel architecture of Asia's fourth-largest economy was warmed Thursday by a whimsical performance by a New Zealand theater company, as the two countries celebrate 50 years of diplomatic ties this year.

The Red Leap Theatre company opened their production, "The Arrival," at the LG Arts Center to a capacity crowd that included New Zealand Ambassador Patrick Rata, a large number of "Kiwi" residents of Seoul and many South Koreans with ties to the Pacific nation. The evocative and imaginative performance featured puppetry, sharply choreographed physical theater, humor and an invented language to tell the story of a migrant in a strange land, based on an illustrated novel by Australian author Shaun Tan.

Speaking at a reception hosted by the New Zealand Embassy following the show, Rata said the relationship between New Zealand and South Korea has grown from being "allies on the battlefield" to a "contemporary relationship with vibrant trading links and strong political connections."

"The migration theme of tonight's performance is one that will be very familiar to many families and individuals from Korea who have chosen to move to New Zealand in the past two decades," he said.

New Zealand, which has a population of just over 4.4 million people, is now home to 28,000 "Korwis," Rata said. "We welcome another 12,000 or so Korean students who study in New Zealand each year and about 60,000 tourists who visit."

South Korea has a strong New Zealand business community, he added, with more than 2,000 New Zealanders living and working here.

"It's a wonderful bilateral relationship and one we must take forward," Rata said, before asking his fellow Kiwis to join him to finish his speech the traditional New Zealand way, by singing a "waiata," or song in the indigenous Maori language. The embassy plans to hold other events throughout the year to celebrate the "Year of Friendship."

Deal With It

It's been a busy week once again in Aotearoa, New Zealand, with a tragedy still unfolding with whanau of a marae I have ties with after a boat was hit by a rogue wave and overturned in Foveaux Strait. Nine people, all extended family or close friends of each other, were heading from Bluff to Stewart Island for an annual muttonbirding expedition. As of this morning, one survivor had been rescued clinging to a petrol can, four to five bodies had been recovered (news reports often differ at this stage and I have not heard an official number) and the rest, including a 7-year-old, were still missing, in chilly, unforgiving seas.

Further north, here in Christchurch, a 27-year-old Somali-born man went on a 90-minute rampage during which he kidnapped and stabbed a delivery van driver then seriously stabbed a council worker whose car he jumped into after the van driver escaped. He is also accused of menacing a school caretaker and a teacher before kidnapping the driver.

I listened to the driver, Marteine Robin, yesterday morning on National Radio and read another interview with her this morning in the Christchurch Press and was struck by her earthy Kiwiness. She initially thought her attacker was a hitchhiker when she saw him walking down the road, "then the door flung open and he had a knife in his hand and he was pointing it at me, telling me to drive or he would stab me."  (Press)

"I told him to get out of my effing truck," she told National Radio, softening her, "I said, 'Get the f*** out of my truck', " quote she gave the Press. She explained to the National Radio host that she had asked him why he was doing what he was doing, and he said he had issues.

"I said, 'We all have issues. Deal with it.'," she told the host, in a matter-of-fact tone.

Those two sentences to me epitomize the Kiwi spirit, and explain the cultural divide between myself and many American friends, one in particular who means much to me. If a Kiwi or Aussie friend is annoyed or irritated or mad or frustrated by something, I'll listen for a short while and often agree the situation/instigator is at fault. But before too long, if it's something out of my or my friend's control, I'm likely to say, "Yeah, life bites sometimes. Get over it." It's just a blunter version of the Serenity Prayer in a way - "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference." In the terse, to-the-point and often taciturn culture I come from, we distill that prayer down to, "Get over it."

Probably not surprisingly, this often doesn't translate well when used with American friends. My blunt, "Get over it," statements (another is that all choices have consequences and, having made the choice, there's no point whining about the consequences) are taken as harsh and uncaring. They're actually anything but. To me, accepting and moving on is far healthier than continuing to be angry/frustrated/resentful/guilty/insert negative emotion. If you can change it or improve it, do so, but if you can't, don't allow it to negatively impact on your emotional well-being any more than it must. I'm not belittling the problems we all face, I'm merely refusing to let them dictate my happiness or unhappiness.

Having that attitude helps me immensely right now, as I visit with a dying friend for whom the medical community has given up intervention. "It would only prolong his life," they say. So his extended family, of whom I am privileged to be one, and friends gather to celebrate his life and achievements and the house is filled with light and love and laughter. We're all sad at what must come, but being sad does not prevent us being joyful.

Sometimes life bites. So we might as well enjoy every last second of it that we can.

Products of our Culture

We are products of where we come from.

I consider myself one of the most non-Kiwi New Zealanders I know, and when I visited home last year I kept being asked what part of America I came from. But yesterday, being the opening of the Rugby World Cup in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I found myself in a sports bar watching the game. I cheered the Tongan Sipi Tau, had shivers down my spine at the All Blacks' Haka and drooled along with every other female and a few males as Sonny Bill changed his shirt. And learned a little about our culture viewed through other eyes.

I was sitting with a couple of Irish guys (my other nationality, so I felt at home) and they were talking about New Zealanders. Apparently the rest of the world thinks it strange that when you tell a Kiwi to come stay if ever they're in town, they do. Being a Kiwi, it had never ever occurred to me that people would offer you a place to stay if they didn't mean it. In Aotearoa, we tend not to say things we don't mean. Apparently, in other parts of the world, people say things just to be polite (yes, even in Ireland, which is not the first country that springs to mind when one thinks of polite gentility). The Irish boys told me that in Ireland you have to say no the first time anyone offers you something and wait for them to offer again before accepting. They also said they miss out on a lot of things because of that.

The conversation left me feeling defensive, uncomfortable and wondering how many people I'd inflicted my presence on when they hadn't actually meant the invitation they'd extended. We're a very literal people and believe what people say - and I hope I don't begin to question that because I prefer to believe people. But I just found out that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily work that way.

It's a very strange thing to feel I need to apologize to people for taking what they say as truth, but that's how I feel right now. So, to anyone I have inflicted my presence on in the misguided belief that an invitation meant a welcome, I humbly apologize. Though I do advise you to think before you say things that you don't mean.


THIS JUST IN: I have been advised by a number of American friends and my Australian guru that they all mean it when they invite someone to visit - perhaps it's just an Irish thing?

Talking Dirty

We’ve been talking some serious shit around the dinner/breakfast table recently.

At the weekend, herself cleaned out under the chookhouse and added it to the compost heap, I cut comfrey (oh, for a scythe) for the next layer. One of my tasks today is to gather cowpats from the top paddock to be added. Everything is a cycle, and good gardens require great compost. It’s all about putting food on the table, and shit from chickens and cows is a boon there.

Whanau members visited for a few days with a health scare that required coming to the big city hospital for a colonoscopy. The daughter, a fae  sprite, was phobic about the bucket toilet out back. She elected to stay and entertain the pups and I yesterday while her parents went to the city and toileting would be needed. We walked the dogs, talked about how dogs  needed to be exercised and toileted, and discussed why she was afraid of the outhouse. She was afraid she would fall in, which is a horrible thought, I tell you. I asked if she had ever fallen in her flush toilet at home (“Of course not, silly!”), explained that the seat here is smaller than on a flush toilet and all was well again with her world. When she needed to go, I offered a peg for her nose if needed and she came back proudly to tell me she didn’t even need to block her nose.

The health scare appears to be just an irritable bowel problem, (blessedly) and the person concerned asked the IB nurse what foods she should avoid or eat. The nurse told her that what she ate was irrelevant. Excuse me?!? A quick Google gave patient reams of information that the medical profession here seems to view as irrelevant. Not a very holistic view of health, and certainly not a promising one for the nurse’s patients. 

Aforementioned bucket toilet is precisely that, a bucket that gets emptied into a hole and covered with dirt. It’s not a pleasant task and one I’ve managed to avoid every time but one, but when I had to do it, I ladied up and did so. It means you deal with the fact that human animals, if they’re fortunate, consume food and liquid and it gets expelled. Most people in the world don’t have flush toilets and how they deal with their waste is, in my mind, a better indicator of civilization than the size of their cities. In Jakarta, many thousands of people live on the edge of reservoirs and waterways and use the water to bathe, toilet and wash clothes. (Check out http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/waterworries ) A new house is being built where I am that has to have a flush toilet included, but I'm confident the bucket will be here to greet me when I next visit.

There’s a conversation that’s been going on in Aotearoa of late about “freedom” camping and the fact that many campers defecate wherever they are and leave it. There’s a carpark at the bottom of the hill for a beautiful track and often, when himself takes the dogs for a walk, there is human excrement and toilet tissue strewn there. It incenses me that anyone would come all the way here to one of the most beautiful spots in the world and treat it as their toilet. The mindset to do that must view it as not their home, as I doubt they shit in their own front yards, but isn’t Papatuanuku, the earth mother, the only home we have?

In Christchurch at present, there is a severe toilet problem and it’s not being handled well. Thousands of chemical toilets have arrived from as far away as the U.S. but no provisions have been made for emptying them and people are trying to empty them into Portaloos. Thanks for sending them folks, and thank you everyone else who has come to the aid of Christchurch BUT many people are simply using chemical toilets, which add chemicals but leave waste PLUS chemicals to be disposed of, which creates its own health issues..

The Otago Daily Times yesterday had this quote: 

“I live near a woman in her 70s who broke down crying, too embarrassed to go to the toilet in a bucket.”

I’m sorry lady, toughen up. (And while we're talking dirty, ladies, find a pleasant place to squat, the bucket is for solid matter - my favorite here has a view worth millions and an inquisitive pup to hold away, Take your tissues away with you, or use mallow leaves which are soft and silky.) 

I understand that the toilet problem is just one more straw added to the many that Christchurch has suffered since September and I don’t deny or attempt to belittle the magnitude of the trauma that all are experiencing. And, aware as I am of NOT being part of the immediate community, I'll quote Joe Bennett, a brilliant Lyttleton writer who experienced the quake and the recovery first-hand. In his most recent column, he wrote about how whanau and tribe responded. The entire column is worth reading (can't find a link sorry), but two sentences summed it up for me:

“On the second day power was restored. We were then better off than most people in the world.”

To paraphrase  him (kia ora Joe, great party you guys and the Navy put on last week), if we have a bucket and a spade, we’re better off than most people in the world.

For inspiration, http://www.showusyourlongdrop.co.nz/