Tannic Teeth

For those of us who have grown up under the southern sun with parents who were immigrants will know what I mean when I say culture clash. There is something perturbing and possibly deeply traumatic about upping sticks and settling down in a foreign country. Especially when English is not the spoken language ‘back home’.

Alice Pung’s account of her parents struggle to adapt to Australian way of life from South East Asia is particularly poignant. Well for me anyways as my parents are from that landmass but further east, that is, Burma. It deals with the expectations put upon the generation of children by their parents to become doctors, lawyers and engineers. The auspiciousness and prestige when they can say their child is a doctor, thus increase the auspiciousness and prestige marrying you off. Say nothing of the arts or farming. For they are the realms of the esoteric and serfdom.

It’s a huge theme and complimentary to that, the questioning of what is means to be ‘Australian’. Flag-wavers love to throw around the word ‘UnAustralian’. What does that mean? Do you discard your (Asian or whatever) culture, and assimilate into Australian society? How far can this envelope be pushed before it becomes something it’s not? Before something breaks?  The word assimilate itself has an undercurrent of a forced existence. Force against force negates itself. Cronulla riots of 2005 was case in point.

An interesting read. Funny at times, plyably frustrating at others, and in my view I’d call it  NuAustralian.

Ever have those points in your life where you think that your future dangles tentatively from a tiny filament of chance? Where a singular point can become the turning point for an entirley different life for you and your loved ones. Perhaps it was missing the train only to meet the love of your life, or not running the red light to see a hurtling semi-trailer plow through the intersection.  This is a story about a young boy in a family of 9 living in crushing poverty during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Li Cunxin was that young boy, chosen on a teachers whim to enter in Madame Mao’s Dance Academy. It’s an autobiographical story, Li’s narrative speaks humbly, his language is not verbose or overtly descriptive, it’s simple yet elegant; poignant. It’s a wonderful read with introspective qualities about it; you question how hard your life really is when you complain about trivial matters. From where Li came from, it’s inspirational.

Kindly given as a gift for my *gulps* quarter of a century birthday celebration by ‘Some Loser on the Internet’, The Ancestor’s Tale is a fascinating regressive view back towards the origin of life. The author Richard Dawkins, well known for The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene plus many more popular science books eloquently takes the reader back via certain ‘rendevous’ points in history, tracing that holy grail of explanations: the ancestor of life as we know it. Darwinian from start to finish (sorry creationists!)  it’s a in depth view of evolution spelled out via whispers left in geological sediments. Quite scientific from start to finish, there were times I did have to Wiki some terms, but over all if you paid attention during high school biology, chemistry and geology you shouldn’t go astray. My only gripe with this book is it’s is a bit too long for the average scientific reader. The story starts to become protracted towards the end, and like the impending flu season immunisation- you just want it over and done with. Considering I started it with such gusto, it was a bit of an effort to finish it and many thanks to ‘Some Loser on the Internet’ for it as a prezzie. 4 stars

Ever wonder why the world ended up the way it is?

More precisely, why humanity unfolded the way it did.

Why did Europe for so long dominate ‘New Worlds’ making the natives subservient, imposing their way of live among millions? Why did some continents develop sophisticated technologies whilst others remained hunter-gatherers?

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jarred Diamond (Vintage –Random House Publishing), offers an extraordinary view into the 13,000 years of humanity. Following disciplines of evolution, history, biology, ecology and linguistics this book falls under popular science, though is not too out of reach for the average ‘non-science’ reader.

A highly recommended read for those wanting to better understand many historical events from Darwinian-omnipotent view; From the many issues still plaguing Africa and developing nations, right down to the misinterpretation then maltreatment of our own Indigenous Australians. This is an excellent book to lift the veil on some of history’s most difficult questions.