“Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East”, is the title of a new book that has graced the front pages of several major Chinese newspapers including China Daily and South China Morning Post, since the beginning of November 2009. The book tells, in an autobiographical and novelized style, the life journey of a young man from Africa to America and then making it home in China. Born in Nairobi, Kenya and educated at elite universities in the United States, Mark moved to China after losing his marketing job in the American high-tech field, and has carved himself a nice niche in Shenzhen, China’s boisterous and rapidly-growing metropolis across the border from the capitalist, former British colony of Hong Kong, as an English teacher, pianist, internet-businessman, and charity sponsor.
Not that African businessmen in China are rare these days, or that they always receive favourable attention. When I was working in 2001 in California’s Silicon Valley as a software design engineer, a young African-American sale representative in our small company in San Jose had a Chinese girlfriend who was a secretary in Shanghai, and he was always looking forward to visiting her in China but was not always sure what the girl really wanted.
I don’t know what has happened to this former colleague’s cross-continent romance after October 11, 2001, when I was notified of my immediate layoff effective mid-month, given a reason of economic downturn due to an unexpected event one month earlier. I insisted on a grace period for adjustment and the vice president of engineering who gave me the layoff notice was kind enough to allow me 3 months of nominal status with the company (during which I was not really welcomed at the company and showed up only once).
I suspect the VP granted the grace period as a kind gesture given that I had worked directly under him after joining the start-up company – here I refer to as “MS” – around the start of the New Millennium, and had been hired personally by the company’s founding president, both of whom held graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D. and M.S., respectively). But for the last year-and-a-half I had been reporting to our algorithm-development manager Bill, the VP’s former colleague recruited from another company who held an engineering Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The story of the young man from Nairobi to Shenzhen was remarkably similar to mine, even if it isn’t by now. Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 in the United States, Mark was also laid off – in Atlanta by the Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel Networks – despite his impeccable education pedigrees, which included an MBA from Emory University in Atlanta (that surely beat my mathematics Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, just north of Silicon Valley), an Ivy-league degree in physics and mathematics from Brown and another Master’s from Stanford.
I had grown up in Guangzhou, China, the provincial capital only 80 miles north of the city Shenzhen in the title of Mark’s book, “Nairobi to Shenzhen”. Back in August 1988 after my Berkeley education I had moved to work in Vancouver, Canada, and become a Canadian; so in 2002 I moved back to Canada , this time settling in Toronto.
A change of location was logical for me returning after leaving Canada in 1997 for work in the United States – if not enough which I did not realize at the time – for the reason that in 1991-94 I had been involved in political activity attempting to air certain views critical of certain important figures, some then in the academia in British Columbia and some in leading role in Canada, and for several years afterwards had trouble finding employment (see my other blog articles, February 20, 2009 – present, for some of the circumstances of the politics I had become involved in in the early 1990s).
I began working again in Vancouver in 1996 only when I was introduced to a businesswoman who had moved from Taiwan, who also told me her late father had been the political secretary of General Sun Liren (Sun Li-jen) in Taiwan when (in August 1955) the Virginia Military Institute graduate and World War II hero was put under house arrest by strongman President Jiang Jieshi (Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek), which then lasted for almost the rest of Sun’s life until March 20, 1988, shortly after the death of Jiang’s son/President of Taiwan (for the history about Sun Li-jen, see, e.g., Wikipedia).
That tale of family connection to the dark and tragic politics of a fading era from Liza Chiang (no relation to Chiang Kai-shek, her family name in Chinese is actually the same as at the time President Jiang Zemin of China when I met and work for her), was not a good omen for me. I had wanted to move to Toronto as early as in 1994-95 but for some family reason, and in 1997 when my former Berkeley roommate David phoned from the University of Hawaii about a teaching job I packed and left Vancouver.
For the young man originally from Nairobi, after his post-9/11 Nortel Networks-layoff experience in Atlanta he moved on to another new world in the same year 2002: spurred by whims many undoubtedly wouldn’t understand about someone in his circumstances, i.e., already sitting on an impressive education and work resume in America, Mark moved to China to find opportunities. There, settling in Shenzhen, the first Chinese city to reopen to Western capitalism in recent history, Mark fell in love with a Chinese girl and made a remarkable adjustment in a country previously unfamiliar to him to say the least.
Not that his education, experience and ambition would not have counted, but to strike it rich in the Chinese marketplace of phenomenal economic growth and chaotic entrepreneurial activities, Mark likely lacked the type of connections expected of someone from America (wait, from Africa?). Sure, he had a half-brother who had been born in America, was a black-community organizer and regional politician in Illinois who also taught at the University of Chicago, but that was probably it – when Chinese entrepreneurs thought of opportunities abroad and it had to be Africa, they more likely thought of selling jeans there (several years back a Chinese friend told me her ex-husband did just that in Africa and not much else, though making good money).
I am not sure what Mark’s experience was in 2001-02 looking for another marketing job in a telecommunications company in the United States after his post-9/11 layoff. For me, before 9/11 while still employed I had some contacts with job recruiters and one of them, Beth Evancheck, called me from Indiana on behalf of Scientific Placement in Austin, Texas, and several times recommended the company MathWorks in Boston. I had some familiarity with that company, whose chairman Cleve Moler taught part-time at Stanford in one of my fields of graduate study, but felt that with my background it would be somewhat ‘inbreeding’; but of course it wasn’t for Canadian telecommunications engineer Maher Arar.
The Maher Arar story that would not go away because of U.S. government’s refusal to settle with him for his ‘rendition’ experience in Syria, has become more controversial as time goes by (see, e.g., Flaggman’s Canada (Weblog), March 18, 2007, by Neil Flagg, “Maher Arar: Why the US won’t (and shouldn’t) let go”; Georgia Straight, November 6, 2008, by Charlie Smith, “Was Maher Arar linked to the FBI?”; and, MetroWest Daily News, November 2, 2009, by The Associated Press, “Appeals court: Former Framingham man, detained by mistake, cannot sue the US”).
After my 10/11 layoff, a recruiter by the name of Ken Button phoned me, who was recruiting for Microsoft Corporation. Pitching the benefits of working for that company in Seattle, he said someday I could have a private office there (in the small San Jose company I had been allowed the privilege of a private office even though I was not a manager); but I was more interested in engineering-related computational issues, and had had a minor episode with Microsoft in Vancouver when I was in the early 1990s’ political activity which included a dispute with my boss at the University of British Columbia before the end of my computer-science faculty job there.
Looking back, if Bill Gates was to launch a teacher into space, who do you think it would be?
To be fair, I have been using the Windows computer operating system and a Hotmail e-mail account for many years, and when I started my first weblog I also chose Windows Live Spaces.
In January 2009 when I started my first (political) blog, I was surprised and pleased to discover a small number of press stories about Mark Ndesandjo, the young African-American man originally from Nairobi, Kenya, after his Nortel Networks experience enjoying successful business and charity activities and a quiet family life in Shenzhen.
In my first blog posts dated January 29 and titled, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, I discussed two newspaper articles dated January 16. One was a Canadian story (The Toronto Star, by Nicole Baute, “Mrs. K.I.'s kids are singing Obama's tune; His story electrifies multicultural Brampton school”) about my landlady’s daughter, local high-school principal Kyra Kristensen-Irvine, organizing “Obama committee” activity for her students celebrating the November 2008 election of the first African-American U.S. president in history – it has been a long way considering the favourite claim of “Mrs. K.I.”’s mother about her daughter in the past had been that of teaching Shania Twain (the pop singer) years ago in the small city of Timmins, Ontario.
The other January 16, 2009 newspaper story I discussed in my first blog post was about Mark Ndesandjo, President Elect Barack Obama’s half-brother living in the Chinese city of Shenzhen just south of Guangzhou where I had grown up (Chicago Sun-Times, by The Associated Press, “Obama's half brother performs in China”) .
At the time, Mark Ndesandjo was refusing media-interview requests but was wiling to be reported for his fundraising piano concert to benefit local orphans in Shenzhen.
Another ten months has passed and in early November, Mark finally made his first official media interviews, for the publicity of his new book “Nairobi to Shenzhen”. The location of the press conference was – a surprise to me – Guangzhou, which used to be the center of China’s foreign trade when the country was first opened to the Western world in the 19th century and earlier, and in recent decades has been the site of one of the world’s largest annual international trade fair – the Canton Fair (also China’s only permanent foreign-trade fair during its Communist isolation period in the 1950s-70s) – but lately has been overtaken in capitalist experimentation by the special economic zones Shenzhen and Zhuhai located directly across from Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau. (My January 29, 2009 blog posts had references to part of this Chinese history.)
In his first media appearance, Mark Ndesandjo garnered much attention from the Chinese and international media: on November 16, China’s leading official newspaper, People’s Daily, comfortably proclaimed, “The other Obama, already at home in China”, referring to the arrival of the U.S. president for his first official China visit during which he was also meeting Mark and his wife in Beijing, while the day after TIME Magazine exclaimed from Guangzhou, “Obama’s Half Brother Makes a Name for Himself in China” (November 17, 2009, by Ling Woo Liu).
For some other American and international media venues, the intense interest has been on something else: the story of abuse suffered or witnessed by Mark Ndesandjo growing up under the brothers’ alcoholic and physically abusive father, Barack Obama, Sr. It is a main topic in Ndesandjo’s book, “Nairobi to Shenzhen”.
For instance, in a The Huffington Post article on November 4, “Mark Ndesandjo, Obama’s Half Brother, Recalls Their Abusive Father”, William Foreman of The Associated Press reported:
“In his first interview, Mark Ndesandjo told The Associated Press that he wrote “Nairobi to Shenzhen” in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.
“My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don’t do that,” said Ndesandjo, whose mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.’s third wife. “It’s something which I think affected me for a long time, and it’s something that I’ve just recently come to terms with.”
Barack Obama, Sr. had left Kenya at age 23 to study at the University of Hawaii (the same age also for me when I went to study in the U.S., but I later taught at the University of Hawaii, from the fall of 1997 to the end of summer 1999 after which I moved to Silicon Valley in California), where he met and married President Obama’s mother and produced a future U.S. president – the only one from Hawaii; he then went to study at Harvard, met Mark Ndesandjo’s mother and returned to Kenya with her, where Mark was born. (See, e.g., Wikipedia)
The childhood abuse was apparently a reason Mark Ndesandjo felt little attachment to either Kenya or Africa: the Time Magazine article quoted Barack Obama, Jr.’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father”, describing the brothers’ first meeting during which Mark professed it to Barack.
In that book, Obama also recorded that when they first met in Nairobi his half-brother was a physics student at Stanford but Obama had thought it was Berkeley, and then he heard from Mark the latter’s lack of attachment to Africa (see, Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Crown Publishers, 1995 & 2004)
The theme about the difficult life experiences of some of the Obama family clan in Kenya – including that of his father’s – stands in stark contrast to the idyllic images one sees of President Barack Obama’s immediate family and their lives, such as of his graceful and gracious wife Michelle and their lovely daughters Malia and Sasha, and of the relaxed vacations at Kailua Beach and Martha’s Vineyard – hard-earned after Obama’s string of important and/or historic political victories (the only black U.S. Senator at the time when he went to Washington in 2004, the first black presidential candidate of a major political party in June 2008 and then the president-elect in November) yet not out of place compared to the lifestyles of ones before him (see, e.g., Star-Bulletin, August 9, 2008, by Craig Gima, “Celebs find serenity on cool Kailua Beach”; MSNBC, August 23, 2009, “Obama family vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard”; and, Wikipedia).
In 1963 when his father left him and his mother Stanley Ann Dunham, a white student at the University of Hawaii born in Kansas and grown up in various parts of the continental United States, Barack Obama was only two-years-old; neither side of his parents’ families had approved of the interracial marriage, which at the time was legally permitted in Hawaii but not in 22 other states in the United States. Barack’s mother later remarried an Indonesian student and took Barack to that country after her husband was summoned back to his home country following the rise to power of military strongman Suharto, sending Barack back to Hawaii to live with the grandparents when she wanted a good education for her son at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, which Barack liked better than schooling in Indonesia. (See. e.g., Wikipedia; The Washington Post, December 14, 2007, by Kevin Merida, “The Ghost of a Father”; The New York Times, March 14, 2008, by Janny Scott, “The Long Run: A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path”; and, History News Network, February 23, 2009, by Peggy Pascoe, “The Election of Barack Obama and the Politics of Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage”.)
It could be Kenyan presidential politics as Barack Obama described in his 1995 book, or the economy of life in Africa, or still something more, that his ambitious, U.S.-educated economist father later suffered career setback in Kenya and became an alcoholic and physical abuser; but growing up in apparently better family environments in Indonesia and Hawaii, and then going to college and university in the U.S. mainland, Barack the son also had a period of life during which he experimented with things like drug use (see, e.g., The New York Times, March 14, 2008, referred to earlier, and, October 24, 2006, by Katharine Q. Seelye, “Barack Obama, asked about drug history, admits he inhaled”.)
But in America Barack Obama was able to transcend life’s traps. He felt strongly about racial discrimination from which he suffered as a school boy, became active in anti-discrimination activities as a university student and then a community organizer. After becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 (see, The Boston Globe, January 28, 2007, By Michael Levenson and Jonathan Saltzman, “At Harvard Law, a unifying voice: Classmates recall Obama as even-handed leader”), and before entering Illinois state politics in 1997, Obama embarked upon the task of connecting his family’s past to some of the larger political issues, through his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”.
In that book, Obama talked about his childhood idolization of his father (whom he met only one more time in his life), of his father’s intellectual brilliance and ambitions as told him by his family, about his visit to Kenya to discover his family roots there and about his eventual cry, at the graves of his father and grandfather buried next to each other, over the “mocking fate” from which his Kenyan grandfather could not escape, and from which his father tried but failed in the end.
That notion of their father’s intellectual ambitiousness and goal orientation is now being contradicted by Mark Ndesandjo’s stories in his new book, “Nairobi to Shenzhen”, who emphasizes his personal experience of parental abuse and domestic violence (see, e.g., Bloomberg.com, November 11, 2009, by Le-Min Lim, “Obama’s Half-Brother Recalls Father’s Drunken Beatings in Book”; and, The Telegraph, November 14, 2009, by David Eimer in Guangzhou, “Our alcoholic father beat me, says Barack Obama’s half brother, Mark”).
President Obama no doubt realizes the importance of this issue, who had said in his 2004 speech “The Audacity of Hope - 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address”, that “my story is part of the larger American story”. When one looks at the larger African-American story from Mark Ndesandjo’s angle, one sees that over half of African-American boys live in fatherless families, with 40% of these households impoverished (see, The Washington Post, December 14, 2007, referred to earlier).
Before Ndesandjo’s book, Obama’s detractors have been trying to hammer home this issue, with stories gathered from his family members and friends that contradicted some of the political claims in “Dreams from My Father”: his parents’ marriage had not been destroyed by racism from their respective families but by his father’s “bigamous double life”, and his father’s career downfall in the Kenyan government civil service should not be blamed on corrupt Kenyan politicians who had “taken the place of the white colonials” but on his father’s “weak character”, they said (see, Daily Mail, January 27, 2007, by Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot - what the US Presidental hopeful HASN'T said about his father...”).
Now Mark Ndesandjo is adding fuel to the fire with his own take from his experience living in China that has taught him the importance of family life and family goals – things he hopes President Obama will come to an understanding of (The Telegraph, November 14, 2009, referred to earlier):
More than anything, living in China seems to have helped him come to terms with his traumatic childhood. He will be passing on what he has learned to President Obama when they meet. “I’d encourage my brother to understand that China is really about family,” said Mr Ndesandjo. “Families here have a tremendous bond. That’s why people in China work so hard and have the goals they do. You have to understand that if you want to understand China.”
Having been away from China for so many years now, and visited only a few times to see my family during all this time, I do not know if I should agree with Mark that “China is really about family”.
Here are some differences in perspectives.
Mark went to graduate school at Stanford whereas I went to Berkeley across the San Francisco Bay – although applying from Guangzhou my first choice had been Stanford. Berkeley’s math program was the largest in North America and a leading international one, but the popularity of Stanford’s computer science program is undisputed: for a number of years until recently the building that has housed it was the only university building in the world named after Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (another at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh has just been completed, while the computing laboratory at Cambridge in England has had its building named after his father William Gates; see, Wikipedia).
Berkeley was known for its leftwing activities that were quite opposite of family orientation. That however might get something done if family orientation couldn’t. Shortly after I received my Ph.D. and left for Vancouver, it worked for 23-year-old actress Justine Bateman, star of the popular TV sitcom series, “Family Ties”: beginning in March 1989, a man repeatedly approached Bateman at the show’s set in Los Angeles using false premises, such as bringing her new music cassette by John Lennon’s son Julian, but each time was escorted off by security guards; finally in September that year at the premiere of “Lulu” at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre – a play starring Justine Bateman in a lead role – the same man came asking for her, and eventually brandished a gun and threatened suicide unless Bateman would see him, claiming he had met and dated her seven years earlier (and had even been raped by her); after several hours of standoff with Berkeley police the man, John Thomas Smetek of Texas, surrendered and was taken to a psychiatric assessment and dealt with by law. (See, e.g., Spokane Chronicle, September 8, 1989, “Police arrest an obsessed Justine fan outside theater”; People Magazine, September 25, 1989, By Bill Hewitt and Dianna Waggoner, “Justine Bateman Becomes the Latest Celebrity to Be Menaced by An Obsessive Fan”; and, Linden Gross, Surviving a Stalker: Everything You Need to Know to Keep Yourself Safe, Marlowe & Company, 1994, 1998 & 2000).
The Berkeley incident involving actress Justine Bateman took place only two weeks after the stalking-murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer in LA (by a man named Robert Bardo); it propelled Bateman to the occasion of testifying in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about stalking, and her efforts also contributed to the enactment of an anti-stalker law in California in 1991 – the first in the United States (see, e.g, Linden Gross, referred to earlier).
The Justine Bateman incident is sometimes compared to a 1981 incident when former child actress and Yale University student Jodie Foster was receiving persistent love letters and phone calls from a young man, John Hinckley, Jr., who supposedly wanted to do something big to demonstrate his love for her (see, Linden Gross, referred to earlier; and, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, “THE HINCKLEY TRIAL: HINCKLEY'S COMMUNICATIONS WITH JODIE FOSTER”).
Later after Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for attempting to murder President Ronald Reagan and wounding several people, and was psychiatrically committed, he reportedly also developed an infatuation for Jeannette Wick, the Officer in Charge at St. Elizabeths Hospital where he was incarcerated, who had the reputation of being a tyrannical manager but also a petite blonde with resemblance to Jodie Foster. (See, e.g., Washington City Paper, May 1-7, 1998, by Laura Lang, “Doctor’s Orders: At St. Elizabeths Hospital, a tough manager is driving employees mad”; Robert I. Simon, Bad Men do what Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illustrate the Darker Side of Human Behaviour, American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., 2008; and, J. Reid Meloy, Lorraine Sheridan and Jens Hoffmann (editors), Stalking, threatening, and attacking public figures: a psychological and behavioral analysis, Oxford University Press, 2008)
But had Jodie Foster alerted the authorities sooner President Reagan might not have taken a gun shot that nearly killed him, the idealist would imagine.
Justine Bateman did just that. in September 1989 in Berkeley she immediately phoned LA security expert Gavin de Becker, a personal-security agent whose clients included Bateman’s “Family Ties” brother Michael J. Fox; back in 1988 de Becker had warned Bateman about this man, and this time he promptly verified Smetek’s profile and advised Berkeley Repertory Theatre on security measures. Gavin de Becker had also developed a computer-assisted threat assessment system, MOSAIC, that was used by California law enforcement, U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Marshals Service, and the CIA. (See, Linden Gross, referred to earlier.)
This is not to say that anyone with a concern, whether substantiated or not, should act on it. On the contrary, it’s about doing the right thing and not the wrong thing.
In my first blog posts dated January 29, I told of staying New Year’s Eve 2000 – the Y2K night – in a Hong Kong hotel, on my way to Guangzhou to see my parents; not knowing the future that someone like Mark Ndesandjo would move to live in Shenzhen just across the border, my mind was only at pondering about the look of the hotel owner’s daughter who reminded of a student girl I had come across often on Berkeley campus back in the old days:
“When the New Millennium began, I and others didn’t know that in a couple of years, in 2002, a young American man by the name of Mark Ndesandjo, originally from Kenya, would move to Shenzhen and make his life there as a businessman and piano performer, and that – something many people today still don’t know – this young man is half brother of 2008 U.S. President Elect Barack Obama. Honestly, at the night of the New Year’s Eve on December 31, 1999, I found it more interesting that the hotel owner’s daughter emceeing the countdown celebration in the hotel lobby looked like a certain student girl I had come across frequently on UC Berkeley campus during the 1980s.”
Well, this Berkeley student girl I had a crush on looked just like Justine Bateman’s twin.
Hmm, interesting. What would have happened had I tried to approach her more seriously? I guess as long as one did the right thing … but wait … others saw him as an obsessed fan at best yet John Thomas Smetek imagined himself Romeo courting Juliet!
And then of course I went to work in Vancouver, though choosing UBC instead of the adjacent Simon Fraser University in Burnaby – a top Canadian university in education nowadays but in those days probably not as famous as the city being where Justine Bateman’s “Family Ties” brother Michael J. Fox had grown up and attended school – high school, mind you (see, e.g., The Vancouver Sun, May 23, 2008, “Michael J. Fox ‘deeply moved’ by honorary degree from UBC”; and, The Province, November 9, 2009, “Michael J. Fox named Canada's most influential expatriate”). Fox was born in Edmonton, Alberta, which happened to be also the original hometown of my then manager at UBC, “Maria”, who also relocated from California (IBM Almaden) in 1988.
I didn’t even know Fox had dropped out of high school.
There is more to add to the Justine Bateman lookalike story. During the years at Berkeley I had gone to only one show at the Repertory Theatre, as I wasn’t really into theatre plays (but I hung out at the Zellerbach Hall numerous times for classical music performances); and in that only time to Berkeley Repertory Theatre I went accompanying a movie actress – well not exactly accompanying but acting as a guide to lead her entourage there.
My roommate, “KZL”, was a Chinese student association organizer and on that occasion was contacted to have someone give direction to Joan Chen, who and her all-boys entourage had come up from California State University at Northridge where she was a student. I eagerly volunteered.
In hindsight, if anything I had unwittingly volunteered for it must have been the role of a eunuch – with Joan Chen’s fame to come as the Empress in the 1987 Oscar-winning movie “The Last Emperor” (see, e.g., All-China Women's Federation, Profiles – Celebrities, November 4, 2007, “Joan Chen: An Actress with Exploring Spirit”).
The Joan Chen episode was probably before “Shawna” (or “Shauna”) began to show up at Berkeley campus – I mean the Justine Bateman lookalike (sorry that I remembered how someone once called her, but like I say, to me it’s about doing the right thing).
Berkeley wasn’t a family town and the China from where I came in the 1980s wasn’t family oriented, either. My then roommate’s previous roommate “ZWM”, i.e., the guy before me sharing the apartment, from China had stayed for only one summer and gone to Stanford’s MBA program – not exactly family orientation but making money was closer to it in the minds of many, especially if they spoke another language.
After I moved out I became roommates with David, who later went to Hawaii a few months before I went to Vancouver.
British Columbia, on the other hand, was well-deserving of having been the home of the most famous “Family Ties” star, Michael J. Fox, who through his many movie/TV roles cultivated a fabulous stereotype of a young Republican who was incredibly smart and creative with making money but often crossed path with unsavory and ruthless characters – usually prevailing in the end thanks to his down-home sense of doing the right thing.
For several decades, B.C. had been under the influence of pro-business and family-coalition type of politicians: the rightwing Social Credit party’s Bennett father-and-son dynasty from Kelowna in the interior Okanagan region, premiers W.A.C. Bennett and Bill Bennett, had ruled the province for most of the 1950s-1980s – 1952-1986 except 1972-75 when New Democrat David Barrett was premier in between father and son – coinciding with Michael J. Fox’s (backward) time-travel span 1955-1985 in the original “Back to the Future” movie (see, e.g., BBC Movies, October 5, 2000, “Back to the Future (1985)”; and, The Globe and Mail, November 24, 2009, by Ian Bailey, “The rise and fall of the B.C. NDP”).
But locally in Vancouver when I lived there, Michael J. Fox wasn’t even the big star: the local icon was Jason Priestley of the hit TV series about superrich kids, “Beverly Hills, 90210” (see, e.g., People Magazine, September 9, 1991, by Tom Gliatto, “High School Confidential: Beverly Hills, 90210 Gets Its Heat from a Dangerously Cute Cast of TV’s Hottest New Stars”; and, Western Living Magazine, 2008, by Neal McLennan, “Black Hills 90210: Actor Jason Priestley is behind the scenes of the Okanagan’s top cult wine”).
It so happened that Jason Priestley had an actress sister, Justine Priestley, just like Justine Bateman having an actor brother, Jason Bateman, whose early roles included that of an orphan in the TV series “Little House on the Prairie” (see, e.g., People Magazine, May 16, 1988, by Susan Toepfer and Michael Alexander, “Riding Out a Storm of Rumors, Justine and Jason Bateman Battle Their Image as Showbiz Brats”; The Internet Movie Database, “Biography for Justine Priestley”; and, Femail Magazine, by Paul Fischer, “Jason Bateman The Kingdom Interview: Jason Bateman Adds Laughs To A Kingdom”).
Doing the right thing might not be enough in Vancouver after all.
It was not surprising that a very smart Michael J. Fox went to Hollywood – dropping out of high school – and did so with an American dream that was convertible between art and life: he even married his “Family Ties” girlfriend, Tracy Pollan, in real life in July 1988. What was tragically surprising has been his incurable Parkinson’s disease, which started around 1991 and has all but ruined his acting career, turning him instead into a high-profile spokesman for awareness of the disease – uncontrollably restless, fidgety and shaky in his appearance and broken in his speech though as smart, optimistic and unrelenting as ever. (See, e.g., People Magazine, December 4, 1989, by Michael Alexander, “Getting Back to His Future: Hard at Work on the Final Episode of the Time-Travel Trilogy, Michael J. Fox Walks the Line Between Career and Family”; and, The New York Times, November 11, 2008, by Joe Nocera, “Taking Science Personally”.)
What a pity that such human tragedy struck Fox, despite him being so proud of doing “the next right thing” and not the “next thing right” (see, e.g., Zimbio Magazine, May 8, 2009, by Caryn Gottlieb FitzGerald, “Optimism”; or, Embracing My Journey – Living with passion! (weblog), May 8, 2009, by Caryn FitzGerald, “Optimism”).
In British Columbia, the rightwing Social Credit party also disappeared from the political scene, around 1991 – the year Fox first had symptoms of Parkinson’s – not long after the reigning Bennett dynasty had come down.
In my ongoing other blog posts, February 20, 2009 – present, I mention links between my early-1990s’ political activity and some prior efforts by others to challenge Bill Bennett’s successor, Socred premier Bill Vander Zalm, before he resigned due to the Fantasy Gardens scandal.
That political party then collapsed when Vander Zalm’s successor Rita Johnston, the first-ever female provincial premier in Canadian history, lost the 1991 election in a landslide. Two years later in 1993 on the national scene, Vancouver Member of Parliament Kim Campbell succeeded Brian Mulroney as the Progressive Conservative party leader and became the first-ever female Prime Minister of Canada, and then suffered the worst electoral defeat in Canadian federal political history, losing even her own Parliament seat; in that same election Audrey McLaughlin, the first-ever female leader of a major Canadian national political party when in 1989 she became leader of the national New Democratic party, also took her party to one of the worst defeats in its history. (See, e.g., R. K. Carty, Politics, Policy and Government in British Columbia, UBC Press, 1996; International Women’s Democracy Center, 2008, “Women in Politics: A Timeline”; Georgia Straight, May 12, 2009, by Charlie Smith, “Can NDP's Carole James break the jinx on female Canadian leaders?”; and, my other blog articles, February 20, 2009 – present)
The pitfall of obsession with women could extend to that in politics with female leadership – a notion of historical progress that turned out not necessarily welcomed by the voters even in a country with a progressive reputation.
Then in 2001 when the B.C. Liberal party came to power, Bill Bennett’s son Brad was invited to become the chair of that year’s B.C. Liberal party convention, and has for several years now been the chair of the Board of Governors of the University of British Columbia. The university’s president, Stephen J. Toope, on the other hand had been the founding president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the family foundation started in 2002 in memory of the most revered leftwing (Liberal) prime minister in Canadian history. (See, e.g., The Vancouver Sun, May 9, 2001, by Petti Fong, “Where transformed Socreds rule: The sun-drenched Okanagan still remains Bennett country, where the legacy of two former premiers remains alive, but this time ex-Socreds have banded together under a Liberal banner”; The Province, May 25, 2003, by Ashley Ford, “Well past peaches and beaches”; University of British Columbia, March 22, 2006, “UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA NAMES NEW PRESIDENT”; and, The Vancouver Sun, November 20, 2008, “Liberals all a-bustle in the happy hunting grounds of the Okanagan”).
Go figure.
In the real world people of different stripes sometime cohabitated or cooperated, and when the society became entangled in a complex web of social and political connections – knitted with family relations – it might acquire a degree of sophistication and civility that would reduce savagery and overt violence.
But if as a person originally from Africa, and living in today’s China after his American experiences through Brown, Stanford, Emory and layoff at Nortel Networks, Mark Ndesandjo has acquired any similar perspective on the merit of family to the society, it is at odds with President Barack Obama’s view of what is important for Africa – regardless of Obama’s own happy family time Americans see on television.
In “Dreams from My Father”, Barack Obama quoted his Kenyan grandfather as saying the difference between the white world and the black world had been due to all the whites working together whereas the blacks working individually with own family or clan.
The problems of violence, poverty and lack of family values in Africa – which as commented earlier are also prevalent among the black communities in America – cannot be overcome simply by orienting toward family values per se, or at least not according to Hussein Onyango, Obama’s Kenyan grandfather. Onyango was quoted as telling his son, i.e., Obama’s father, that the success of the white world had come from collective power and organization (Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Crown Publishers, 1995 & 2004):
“And he would say that the African could never win against the white man because the black man only wanted to work with his own family or clan, while all white men worked to increase their power. “The white man alone is like an ant,” Onyango would say. “He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together. His nation, his business—these things are more important to him than himself. He will follow his leader and not question orders. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the wise man. That is why the black man will always lose.”
In this 1995 memoir after quoting his grandfather, Obama also records his own thoughts – thoughts he had while visiting the graves of his father and grandfather – on what Africans need to do to see progress: they need to end mutual silence and mutual betrayal, and instil a native faith in other people. Obama’s wisdom is no longer as hostile or confrontational towards the whites, or as much stereotyping about the whites being collectivist, as his grandfather’s was, but nevertheless is expressed through a sense of optimism based not on individualism but on genuinely cooperative efforts by the people – something close to his 2008 presidential campaign slogan, “Yes, we can”:
“It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed at the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead– a faith in other people.”
In these thoughts, Obama mentions not only industrial and technological power as indispensable to progress, but also – due to the power’s danger – certain social conditions for its absorbance, namely a new way to view the world and a collective native faith – born out of hardship – in other people.
(Continuing to Part 2, next blog post)
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