Rod MacKenzie

“Why can’t I use one of our new classrooms downstairs when I teach on weekends?” I asked Cindy, the campus manageress. It’s too dangerous,” Cindy replied. My eyebrows rose as I tried to figure out that one. One of the really good private schools I freelance for in Shanghai, with the stunningly unoriginal and redundant […]

Not always one for toilet humour, I still had to chuckle about a public toilet in Munich which has recently been converted into an art museum. Of course wonderful articles like this inspire puns. Creating art, like going to the loo, is a great form of relief. One is able to vent and offload and […]

Inarb Mac snores and dreams on bed-branch deep in Shanghai jungle, writing South African poems in his sub-conch-iousness … An inarb called Mac would despair Over what others preferred to wear. His clothes? Stained glass. You could see his arse, Rainbow Nation cheeks with flair. Inarb Mac grunts, wakes up on bed-branch. Rattles conch-iousness. Scratches […]

I despaired as I looked at the editing job in front of me. This being Ray’s response to my interview questions for Chinese people. His English bore some resemblance to a child’s bowl of alphabet soup in which he is thwacking his spoon about among the noodle letters. I did not want to wade through […]

We’ve all been hooted at by cars and motorbikes. Sometimes this happens when you are only a lowly pedestrian. All the commuting equipment I have in the world is my legs and shoes. But it’s a unique experience – the first hundred or so times in China – when you are walking on a sidewalk […]

I see the dreaded abbreviation MRI on the medical form. The Shanghaiese lady doctor gives me a worried look after examining me. I couldn’t stand on one leg, kept falling. And my ears ringing all the time, the whine of electronic gnats. People swim in and out of focus. The doctor patters off something to […]

I don’t like bitching, but (so sure, here’s the but) if Bruce Cohen in his blog, A nightmare called Nedbank, thinks his banking issues were hell — and they were — try China. We’re in the Stone Age here. Might as well stick your precious shells under a rock in your cave. Huh? Readers might […]

When I write about China, I prefer to keep the topics at a grass-roots level. This is the first in a series of interviews with Chinese people in Shanghai. The first is my 26-year-old Chinese teacher and friend, Wei Qian, English name Janet. Her parents, from Sichuan province, grew up in the Cultural Revolution and […]

In South African schools “corporal punishment” was not only allowed, it was encouraged. The term is a euphemism filled with denial. The reality was beating the living daylights out of bewildered male children and violating their vulnerable, private space in a sensual manner that bordered on rape. As a result I lived much of my […]