Day: August 31, 2010

Thanks Dad

My dad just dropped around to drop off some lemonade and food treats, on account of hearing that I’m home with a cold.

He is a good man, my dad.

It’s just a little cold. I hope. Fascinating sleeplessness night-before-last though, as the sickness rolled in on me like a stormfront, and I found myself lying awake nearly face-down on the pillow and with the clear awareness that my head was a seamless component of an enormous crystalline array of cubes constructed of thought. Ideas represented as small visual icons flipped through the cubes to line up in long significant sequences, but it was impossible to complete a thought because the meaning always extended out of reach into the distant extent of the array. I was awake and asleep at once, like a lucid dream that perfectly overlapped with reality. Heh. Consciousness is fun.

But, thanks dad! Yum. Red licorice.

Asian People in NZ: Having a hard time

One of the strands of being really busy is finally resolved and open to public view: the Diversity Issues page on the Issues.co.nz site. This has been a long-term idea for my work at the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research, dating back to some attempts way back in ’04 to develop a better way to communicate about cultural diversity outside of the academic sphere.

The specific impetus was the well-received report by CACR and the Human Rights Commission, launched at the Diversity Forum last Monday, about the experience of discrimination by Asians in NZ. It’s a great report, easy to read, and worth at least a glance by every New Zealander. Here it is on Slideshare:

Barriers to asian equality discussion paper

Of particular interest to the From the Morgue audience, I think, are parts 3.2 and 3.3, about employment access – the comments of recruitment companies (in 3.2, page 12) are shocking and the study where the same C.V. was sent out with either a Chinese name or a European name (page 14) matches it.

Overall it produces a pretty rough picture, but also the message is clear that Asians in NZ aren’t being destroyed by this consistent unfairness. They’re happy here, and happy to be here. That’s good to know, as they’re a huge demographic group in this country and growing all the time.

So I hope you’ll check out the report, and pop over to the Diversity Issues site to look around there and maybe to add a comment. Discussions online are always hard to foster so any contributions would be welcome!