Mastery and growth in a time of artificial nihilism (AN)

Another week, another series of AI-related misconduct cases. In the past I had to deal with academic misconduct on, at its most common, a monthly basis; more commonly though it happened barely twice a year. At those times, I would treat it with the utmost severity, talking of the stigma of cheating, leaving those evildoers long not knowing whether their devious acts had led them to be expelled in order to leave a traumatic imprint on their psyches that would leave them incapable of contemplating using subterfuge to pass an assessment ever again, before discussing their redemption.

Now, AI-related cheating is prevalent to the point that it's hard to even meet with them each infringing student, nor with enough time to really even energise myself up to any kind of theatrics about it. We are almost at the point of mass-producing study agreements to have them acknowledge their deeds, put boilerplate terms and conditions, before releasing them back into the wild to cheat, probably in a better way, next time. In the international education, which I can speak about, it is rife.

I have started pathologising it to a degree with AI use and then dependence being akin to a problem gambler. The victim starts to use AI tools to be able to present better than they really can do without them, but then cannot stop using them for fear of failure, even if capable, or showing their real ability, if not; then, as time goes by, they are expected to do be able to do higher level things. But at some stage, the deficit between their capability and the demand of the tasks is so great that in no world could they actually do it without assistance. Cheating now is a bit like the moment where the victim has to break the rules to sustain the habit like stealing from the tills, whether they want to or not. (A similar thing has happened in chess, where with the development of "chess engines" that can analyse any position in milliseconds, there are notable cases where players have been caught misusing technology. While it might be possible that they were caught their first time ever cheating, more it wasn't, the only way to "keep rating points" was to keep cheating.)

Two weeks ago, I had a minor victory in persuading a past/future cheater to acknowledge their real ability and negotiate them into their proper class. He had entered a high-level Academic English class with a strong entry test, gone through Orientation and did a strong grammar and vocabulary test but his writing diagnostic was clearly AI, and was flagged by their teacher. He was spoken to by the programme leader but despite requiring translation to understand her he could not be talked out of remaining in class. Then he was spotted with AI glasses, the first case of them being noted in our student body, and I was asked to speak to him. What I learned shocked me. His family had been in New Zealand since 2020, which would have been about when he was 15, and despite a few classes, he did not have an interest in learning English. He would have seemed to have bounced between China and Auckland. His main enjoyment here was to go to Hampton Downs for the car racing but otherwise would have preferred to enjoy his China life. But the family decided he should start proper study and he qualified for this high-level course despite not having any foundation English. His reason for refusing initially was not because of his own preferences, but because his family would not accept it. 

Anyway, in our meeting, I started by speaking to him in English, very slowly, to see how low he actually was. It did not take long for him to request to wear his glasses, which I declined. After cutting off his recourse to technology, he could understand some basic things, functionally an Elementary user. I let him know I could speak Chinese and we switched. I said that there was no way he would be able to pass the programme, even with re-enrolment, because it did not give him the foundational skill that would be required. I said I imagined that sitting in a four-hour English language class five times a week must be really hard when you cannot understand anything. I let him know that I had experiences like that in my language learning. He said it was really difficult, but his family would not let him leave this course. I had said the school could help out with that - as he had clearly cheated on the tests, we could withdraw him from the course if they did not withdraw him. He asked to speak to his family and the agent, and despite initially wanting me to speak to his agent, the notification that he was changing to general English came within a few hours without any further involvement from me.

To be honest, though, he might have only came of age a few years too early. There is a compelling argument that language learning might be unnecessary in the near future with assistive technologies. Could we have students with only ability in their mother tongue going to any country and receive education their with wearable translation technologies? And could they respond to assessments in their own language with it translated for submission for marking? 

Some people analogise the rise of generative AI as similar to the advent of the calculator into school life. It was a part of my lived experience that we had to learn times-tables (which is presumably still the case for kids now), long division (which is probably not), and then schools widely introduced calculators as a particular age, and at the time it was feared that they would "make our children dumb". In the laboratory of real world life, it would appear that the prevalence of the calculator has had huge utility, and the loss of mastery of some aspects of maths has not really happened, or has not become too apparent. To be clear, the teaching of mathematics was rarely done particularly well, and it was never a a majority of students who learned, mastered and internalised the principles of mathematics so they could be retained. But using a calculator well did provide all people with immediate understanding of numbers.  

The loss of status around handwriting is probably similar. While it is still taught in school, the mastery of a keyboard is even more important these days. There is more recognition that some will struggle with handwriting for reasons not due to their intellect or discipline. The key question is whether something is lost in the replacement of these legacy skills and I would say that it is always a balance. 

Times-tables, for example, might have been memorised as a song or phrase ("Two times two is four"), or as a visual representation (just remembering how it looked "6x7=42"), rather than anything remotely involving associating it with computing numbers. But those are all skills. And then when you have more complicated numbers you deploy these particular memorised facts to figure out 13x17, by doing 10x17=170, and adding 3x17=30+21=51, and thus 221, and hoping to do that in your head, which itself is a skill of memory. In a truly post times-tables world, the repetition of this kind of technique would not happen, most likely someone who had to do that off the cuff would succumb to the temptation to use technology. Or even if they could, not trust that the 221 they had in their head was necessarily correct.

If you could count how many hours a year were spent during my university years searching for words in bilingual dictionaries, quite possible the operative unit might have reached days. Those days' worth of flicking could have used for other productive uses, but I would also presume it gave me something. For vocabulary, it always gave me similar words, the requirement to distinguish similar characters in different languages. It innately gave me knowledge that words in one language to the next were not 100% conceptual copies, and that reading and comparing were required. I might have had a strong visual memory beforehand, but on the foundation of those, in my 40s, I can have a working understanding of the Persian, Hindi and Cyrillic scripts, and also memorise the diacritical markers of Vietnamese without rote learning. 

Handwriting is an interesting one because I was poor at that in primary school, but I recall being obsessed with kanji (Japanese versions of Chinese characters) in my teens and would repeatedly write them. I might not have hit that mythical 10,000 hours of mastery, but the hour count would have been high. As a result, learning Chinese was much easier at university, and even today I can still have the ability and fine digital motor skills to write them. And writing Persian now, though not even similar, is not difficult. 

What is being lost and how much is gained is a key question. Or whether doing times-tables in your head, handwriting, speaking a foreign language will be akin to knitting or carpentry. I mused a couple of years ago that authorship and creative works might have "organic certification", that is, a label to say the prose or the ideas were strictly from a living, breathing, unaugmented mind. But it would run into the same issues of organic produce today: To have an author slowly writing their own prose, producing a work every year at best, could never be economic and be increasingly expensive; completely generated works or AI-augmented works would be able to be mass produced. Organic works would have its spots, and wouldn't always taste the same as the last one. The AI-enhanced works would be consistently "good". The self-authored work would be expensive, and possibly this would give room for fraudsters to use technology in a sneaky way and claim their works were genuine 100% human made.

Birthday (a)bounding

It's a birthday again and back to a prime number, to boot. The day was spent: a GP appointment, a cafe-stop with language review, a 21km waterfront run, picking up my wife from work for a burger lunch (mine was free for my birthday) with my first L&P since I-cannot-remember-when, followed by dropping off a malfunctioning water station to a maintenance contractor, then home for a shower before taking mum out to a garden centre cafe for a coffee and shop. Shortly the day will wind up with a Turkish themed dinner from Ubereats. If described it would seem not very celebratory, but it ticks the boxes of what would be a perfect day for me.  

I gave myself "a gift" the previous day: I am now entered in the Auckland Marathon. Auckland Marathon, along with being one of the more expensive marathons around, has a well set-up entry transfer function and I have now used it twice in a row to take an entry off the hands of an injured runner. There is no profit to be made in this to be clear - the transferer pays the transfer fee to get refunded what they paid (i.e. they've just "lost" the cost of transfer) and the transferee has to pay the current price to make the refund happen. Often it is someone getting back an "Early Bird" rate and the transferee paying something more expensive. Last year I managed to do this very early on (June, I think) and this is very late in the piece - I only have a month really to tune up, but overall I am happy with the deal.

This year has been an odd one. 2025 was stellar with a marathon, half marathon, 10km and 5km personal bests and I was training smoothly into 2026 expecting some progress. Perversely, both the half marathon and 5km PBs have not been under any threat at all - not even close. However, the 10km PB was smashed. For context, I broke 40 minutes for the first time in my life in 2025, but only just, with 39:56 at Te Atatū. In 2026, my 10km times were 38:55, 39:45, 40:42 (Te Atatū), 40:30, 40:51, the first two runs smashed my best from the previous year, but there was an odd drift upwards in times. The fourth race, though, I came third at Western Springs - a podium finish - which I never expected was possible. 

Until the Auckland Marathon entry transfer yesterday, this year was possibly going to be the first since 2022 without a marathon. Without much information, it's hard to know what exactly should be my goal time because of the paradoxical results. 

Last Sunday, I had the rudest of good results for the Devonport Marathon. In my "build" year of 2024, I achieved 1:30:30 there, which I was a bit unhappy with at the time. Two years on at Devonport, 1:30:32. I did the same course, with apparently better fitness, but 2 seconds slower. 

But in the 2024 Auckland Marathon, a I had a tough 3:16 that I was still proud of but would not want to get this year. 

But go back three weeks, I did the Millwater half marathon for the second year in a row. Last year, I got 1:29:56, and in the 2025 Auckland Marathon that followed, 3:09. This year, my Millwater time was 1:28:40, so technically I should be able to do better than 3:09, and thus achieve a PB?

Such is the complicated nature of choosing a goal time. While the overall time for each of these races is data, what led to each time is usually a complicated narrative. Devonport last Sunday was a disappointment but it was the weekend after two weeks without a Senior Teacher, and a sick Programme Leader in the two days previous, I was exhausted. I started too fast and struggled in the last five kilometres. And the conditions were tougher with a horrible headwind, which in itself isn't a big problem, but if you're knackered it might lead to a listless period where you just aren't pushing.

The Millwater event this year also had one of the most horrible post-run experiences. I went through the finish and while talking to a fellow competitor felt my plantar fascia becoming more and more unbearable, like it was spasming. I took off my shoes but it got to the points that I couldn't continue the conversation and I thought a calf massage might be in order. I struggled over to the massage tent but afterwards I could neither walk or stand. It took drinking electrolytes, taking in food and about 30 minutes rest before I could even hobble in the most ungainly way possible. A St Johns medic walked me very slowly for about 200 metres before I felt I could hobble without risk. I still ran 100km the following week without issue. 

Running is such a fickle thing. Today's run was almost scrapbook perfect - and as a mid-week long run, something that I find hard to pull off with my schedule, it gives an impetus to what should be the two biggest weeks of training in a marathon. What comes of all of it will be revealed on 1 November.

A discipline

In July 2025 a special promotion of Duolingo to English teachers launched a month long competition, which also gave the participants a free year long "Super" membership. This basically meant that those who took up the offer could use the app in an unlimited fashion, without needing to watch ads to top up the free daily time quota of use. I had used Duo over ten years previously and had not been terribly impressed, but free was free, and I decided to take the offer, and use it as a familiarisation tool for learning Vietnamese from scratch, which I did want to pronounce correctly, understand the contours of the language so I could relate to it more, and maybe even use in some travel in the future.  

I shouldn't have been surprised that the app's quality had increased and I really started enjoying it to the point that I made it an important part of my daily routine. Unfortunately, the supply of Vietnamese units was limited so late last year I decided to broaden the focus to re-activating my Japanese, and start on Portuguese. Later, I decided to bring Korean into the mix (which I have learned before), then in the last month of the trial, I thought I may as well learn Cyrillic through Russian, and then recently decided to add French and Spanish. (And I cheat on the bird to learn Persian, which I wish it had, but use my own tools to learn.)

Writing all that, it does sound rather manic, and one may ask how much one can actually meaningful learn a language through an app, let alone eight languages concurrently, in a year. In fact, there are plenty of youtube videos and Facebook ads that would encourage you to "dump the bird". (Duolingo has a green bird, Duo, as its symbol and mascot.) The videos tell stories of people with their multi-year streak of use still not having no communicative competence once they achieve their goal of travelling to the country of that language. And if you are like me and you have any interest in language learning, Facebook's algorithm knows it, too, so I am inundated with the AI-based language learning products that will claim to give you real competency through conversation. 

Yet I persist with "the bird" and in fact have paid my own cash for an extension of Duolingo but with "Video Calling" included (where you can talk to AI bots). My reason is based in how I see language learning for almost three quarters of my life and teaching it for over half. 

When I speak to students about learning English, I always give an analogy that learning English is very similar to learning to swim. "Can you learn to swim reading a book about swimming?" "Can someone tell you how to swim? Or can you watch youtube videos and become a good swimming?" "The only way to learn is to get in the water, try as much as you can to float and get training while you're in the water." And thus I encourage our students to be active as possible with the language, and they learn by themselves using English as much as possible, and they shouldn't just speak to and listen to the teacher.

To be honest, swimming isn't the best analogy with language learning. I sometimes think a triathlon might be more apt; sometimes I think rugby; occasionally I ponder about a dancing analogy for grammar. It almost has to be with a physical component because there is a physical and neural dimension to language learning that is not really appreciated by those who wish to learn. 

To use language completely, you have to master four different skills in a range of different contexts: being able to listen and understand when that language is launched at you, to be able to speak and produce understandable language when you need to, to be able to read when you need to understand written language, and finally be able to write or type in an acceptable format what you need to commit to text. Depending on your purpose, you don't even need all four. Many people who learn Chinese cannot read, and even if they can, they might not be able to write. And even if they can, they might be able to write words but not necessarily into the format expected for the many genres of writing (e-mails, articles, diary entries, etc.). 

The advantage of analogy is that in can get around some of the pre-conceptions. If I were to use rugby as an example, if we were talking about passing a rugby ball, it is clear not everyone, even if they've watched TV before could walk up to a rugby ball and pass it to a stationary person two metres away. I think I've seen people throw them straight in the year at first attempt! It's an odd shape and you have to hold it the right way; and passing involves coordinating the arm, wrist and hips. Physical movement like that, if you haven't done it regularly before, is hard because there are no neural pathways to automate the process. You need to consciously think about your wrists, and arms. When you get going at it, there might be little confidence of getting it right on target, into their arms, without the receiver moving. And then once you can do stationary passes, then you need to learn to pass on the move. Then maybe how to spin the ball for distance, how to pick up the ball and pass.

No one in their right minds would think that just that one skill could be taught quickly, or retained. And then that skill has to be deployed eventually in a real game, with pressure, to the right person, quickly and accurately. 

It's not unlike learning to pronounce unfamiliar sounds in your target language. Portuguese is actually my first foreign language with a strong "r" sound, and took some time to hear and get right. The work there though really helped with learning Persian, which had a similar R. Persian was the beneficiary, too, of the hard work I put into getting "kh" sound in Vietnamese, which is similar if not the same as خ. I can remember the difficulty and work needed to hear and produce a correct different sound reliably in Mandarin for "ch" and "q" (both which sound like "ch" in English). 

All of these literally were coordination of mouth, lips, tongue, throat and muscular training. I remember having my face go numb after practicing Mandarin tones for too long in university. And that is just to produce them in isolation, then you have to make them with a range of words, then in sentences with a lot of other sounds bumping into each other. And then you need to do that feat of oral coordination on demand. Now you're running and passing!

If only it were puffing the sounds out, you also have to do it meaningfully. And in that it takes two to tango. I enjoy being a blissfully uncoordinated on the dance floor, and the thought of actually mastering a dance routine, or a system of dancing, like tango would scare me, as much as it scares others to speak in a foreign language. But dancing is not a bad analogy for grammar. There is a pattern and with a bit of practice, you can put those steps together in a wooden way. Again, it takes a bit of laying down new neural pathways and muscle memory, and then you can do it. But remembering the steps when you need them, and maybe with a different partner, might be challenging, especially if you need to do a boogie here, a tango there, and passo doble over there. Grammar patterns are like that, but worse. Knowing the steps, and being able to physically do the steps when needed are not a waltz in the park. 

But it is not just grammar, on the other end of the continuum is vocabulary. Each word is a little bundle of knowledge, and vocabulary is the closest to actual "knowledge" that languages have. And it is huge! I spent hours on Vietnamese without being able to read much or understand much outside very controlled texts or recordings. For Chinese at least there are not the inflections of European languages - but god all mighty, Russian! Nouns have so many cases. The verbs need to be conjugated, too. The main limiter to fluency is vocabulary.

So why Duolingo for me if it doesn't do all those things? The point to realise is that expecting any one of "classroom lessons", apps, an online tutor, or a textbook to give you the ability to use a language in one or more of the four skills is a pipe dream. There are so many sub-skills to these that any one is not enough. You need to commit to a lot of different kinds of training, basically all opportunities available for you to receive and produce that language, with tools to give you the grammar and knowledge, and hopefully the feedback when you're not doing it right. 

Duolingo fills some of that. It does give you the vocabulary. It gives you a few dance steps. It helps you learn to hold the ball, and maybe pass it. And it does it in a repetitive way to get some of the neural pathways working. Is it complete? No. Is it part of an arrangement of tools and experiences that can get you toward capability in a language? Very certainly. 

So thus Duo and I will be getting our learnings worth, and hopefully with the right expectations, find more experiences and resources to build on the foundation built. Language learning is a discipline, and one that takes a lot of discipline to develop.

Even keel

The three months since China have flown by with a maelstrom of work, the health of my mother, maintaining running and an increasingly ambitious list of languages that I have been learning. Though time has been at a huge premium, I still haven't really thought about cutting back the discretionary time use (largely the latter two, running and languages) to allow a bit more rest and de-stressing. 

That being said, this period has been extremely productive, nonetheless. For the running, the time between arrival back and early April had seemed a bit of a malaise. My recovery from my fall in China was smooth once I knew that it was a mild strain and nothing more and I even ran 20km a few days after the last post without issue. But compared to last year, I just was not hitting my paces. It was disconcerting in fact to see what I was casually hitting in training a year prior - I almost hadn't realised for a while that I had been that quick. 

As my first event post-China approached in April, I knew I wasn't going to match previous year's effort. It was the Waterfront Half, an event where literally every time I had run it I had got an improvement in my lifetime personal best time. But this year was going to be the first time to fall short: 1:27:17, over a minute short of my 1:25:55, which was unbelievable for me at the time. 

As I had already low expectations, I was still satisfied though, and even thought it was a "win" because I only had a slight slowdown toward the end.

But the event seemed to have been just the tonic I needed. Almost all the training runs after it were popping; so much so that as I approached the first race of the Run Auckland 10km series, I was quite optimistic to match my race time of the previous year.

Last year, the Ambury Farm 10km had been my first serious 10km race in years. The course was flat, good, but almost entirely gravel, bad. I had locked into a pace, trying to break 40:00 for the first time, and was rewarded with 40:12, and a surprising 5th place. Even more surprising was that one second behind my time was a speedy 12 year old, who I'll refer to with his initials, AF. AF was even faster in the subsequent two races beating me and most of the field with ease. Only a few adults could consistently place ahead of him, which did not include me. He had a stress fracture half-way through the series but had recovered and was back running at pace.

This year was almost a re-run run of last year, but even faster. I locked in a sub 4:00/km pace and generally managed to keep it there: 

AF was leading for the first few kilometres but fell back slowly in the placings as the race progressed. At about the same point as last year, 7.2km mark, I ground past him, and held a solid closing pace to finish 38:55, in 7th place, this time beating AF by 7 seconds. 

Rivalry aside, 38:55 is my new lifetime PB for 10km. Previously it was the Te Atatū 10km, also last year, where I just managed to break 40:00 for the first time with 39:56. Now with this effort at Ambury Farm I have broken 39 minutes. Making a new PB in any category definitely shows I'm back to some sort of form and I can look to push other distances.

Back in October last year, I talked about my twin projects the second of which was language learning. At that time, I had already indulged in Vietnamese and Persian. Both languages have progressed nicely, especially Persian which I can now read fairly confidently despite the new alphabet. What I wouldn't have expected back then was that with my wife being influenced by me into starting to study Japanese on Duolingo, I also started re-heating old ability in Nihongo. Then, with the Vietnamese lessons running out on Duolingo, I started to learn Portuguese for fun. Then, in the same spirit as my Japanese study, I decided to reactivate Korean as well. I recently started getting Claude (an LLM AI) to make me the same story across my languages, and even got it to do a te reo Māori version too. So after a linguistic spiral, I find myself sustaining six different foreign languages that are not Chinese.

How long that can last, I don't know, but I am pleased that for the time being it's sustainable, and oddly, have not been too confusing to "keep apart". It would seem that the only cost is that I can't make huge strides in any one language - but to a degree you cannot go too fast with a single language, anyway. I'm enjoying it.

I am grateful for the spare time because any particular strand - my mother's health or work, or otherwise, could soak up all additional time with a change, and leave the other projects stranded.  

China curing

So, there I was lying on a massage chair with needles prodding, and then cups hugging me. Neither of these were the sites and experiences that I want to share, nor the best use of precious time. I've had these before and did not really wish to repeat them, but the final eight days of my China trip were slowed down considerably by a sore hip. 

Now, all of you will be thinking that I must have overtrained but it started when I was playing with the kids, as I do, probably a few hours after quite a lot of drinking and I tripped, as I do. At the time a grazed knee, hand and an incipient black eye were all I had to blush for. Overnight though I felt enough pain in my hip to reconsider even running the next day. In fact, even getting up was more than uncomfortable. It was an oddity because though my belly flop of the previous day was impressive, the impact was nowhere near where this horrid ache was coming from. It was not just a spot, but the whole lower part of my right hip and lower back were inflamed. 

I did an x-ray, because in China it is quite easy, which ruled out a broken rib but the pain remained and kept me from sleeping well or running. On our trip to Zhaoqing the pain eased - I could walk and be active without issue, riding bikes was painless, but running was not. It lingered till afterwards and I did want some treatment akin to a kiwi-style physio which is almost non-existent in China. I opted for 推拿 (tui na) which is a method of Chinese massage. The result, worse discomfort. Any gains in comfort I had with a vigorous trip out to Zhaoqing were erased.

I dallied on booking a physio for my return and missed out on a booking for Saturday morning. And so the day of our return flight, I decided on the acupuncture route. I am not a big fan of acupuncture or cupping even though I have had dry needling at kiwi physios, too. It is just that what I wanted was some form of non-aggravating massaged, and some prescribed exercises, not for hit-or-miss Chinese medicine (from my experience). But I wanted some relief for the flight and wanted something to change the trend in some way.

The Chinese doctor in this case did not instill in me much confidence by not asking about my symptoms, taking my pulse and then saying I had kidney stones on the right. I had already indicated to him my pain was on the right but no one had told him the cause so it made me recall how cold readers tell fortunes. Middle aged guy, pain near kidneys, well, why not guess a kidney stone.

But we went on, the needles went in, the cups absolutely sucked but the pain I had was noticeable lessened and not just from the relief of not being tortured any further. Reading more about kidney stones though, maybe he was onto something. The early signs of them are literally what I have been experiencing so it will be the first thing I explore on my return, and possibly my spectacular fall were either coincidental to them or might have dislodged one or two that have now re-lodged unhappily. Either way, I really want an answer and really want to lace up my shoes again to run! I hope both of these can be achieved when I get home. 

China travelling

I was glad that this trip to China gave me a chance to travel. And prior to this trip, the candidate destinations were those I hadn’t been before. But as Sam Gung’s passing went into the mix and people had to make decisions, and bullet train tickets during the Spring Festival period became fewer, the destinations became Shantou and, later, Zhaoqing. Both places I had been before; Shantou I’d been to pre-NZ return but Christy had been unwell so apart from the riverside and a few trips out for the local cuisine, it was unmemorable; Zhaoqing, I had a history with having visited way back in my first visit in 2000, and then with my sister in 2010. That all being said, I was happy to stomp their ground again.

Shantou was interesting if only because others would say that there was “nothing to see” – plenty of people were asking why we’d go. But there was plenty to see, and more importantly for us and the two friends who we went with, people to see. Guangdong, although synonymous with Cantonese and Cantonese culture, is home to a multitude of cultures. The majority culture of Shantou is actually more akin linguistically and culturally with Fujian Province further up the coast. And those areas speak a dialect of Chinese that is not identifiable in any way to Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghainese. It probably split at least two thousand years from other Chinese dialects which in a western respect puts it well beyond where the Romans unified Europe. Most of those Romance languages have some similarity to each other, say French to Portuguese to Italian, which is analogous to China’s dialects in a way. But Shantou language is more distant. And thus its culture too is more distant, too.

Culture though is not that readily visitable unless you can speak with people and those were some people were the key sites to see! Our main guide was a previous student who had kept in touch with our friends. She took us back alley eateries, baristas as well as the best restaurants for Shantou cuisine.

The barista element took me by surprise – although a tea city, the coffee was probably the best I had ever had in China. We got take to one superb café, but stumbled on another which matched it.

My runs in Shantou were the most interesting of the trip. Shantou being a port city, it is close to the ocean as well as estuaries, so my runs also went along these. One my first run, I encountered the most surreal scene: As I approached a bend in the seaside promenade, I heard shouting, but not the argumentative kind. It was like a primal scream or loud, visceral sighing from different voices. As I approached there were middle aged men, topless, who may have just emerged from their swim in the estuary, one was stark naked dousing himself with fresh water, others were projecting their qi loudly into the bay. I ran past them with a mutual greeting, one even ran after me obviously infected by exuberance for running. The scream/sighing continued but I realised it wasn’t just coming from the men behind me but also from the bay itself. I spotted heads bobbing around in the water to see multiple men slowly cruising to shore with a life preserver, one of the reading aloud a famous poem from Mao Zedong, each verse being greeting with the qi explosions from the men on shore. With a bit of distance I took videos of this and no one could explain the middle-age man primal screams to me. 

River swimming is a thing, even in this so-called winter. You saw people swimming in the murky waters in Qingyuan and Zhaoqing. But it was Shantou that turned me into David Attenborough, trying to fathom where this all came from. And still do not know.

On another run, I bumped into another runner and had a nice conversation – the first I had with a fellow runner since arriving. The difference was probably that he too was a tourist having arrived a day later than me and also randomly looking for a place to train.

Our Zhaoqing trip was of a different nature because it was with family, ten of us in total, and we stayed in a 民宿 (minsu), which translates directly into “homestay” or “boarding with a local” but it’s more akin to Airbnb. We all went into a three storey renovated old building with all of us fitting into the four bedrooms. It had a “lounge” which was a table that you could play mahjong on. Since my trips in 2000 and 2010, it has developed quickly – no similarity to the place I went on each occasion. The constant was the main site, the Seven Star Crags, a series of large limestone towering peaks that emerge out of a lake area. Our minus was on a peninsula opposite now with a multitude of really good restaurants and cafes. The first day we mainly ate, drank and scoped out the place, especially Paifang Park, which we used hireable bikes to go to and from. Being a family trip, it was a good time to talk and I heard our niece, who is now an adult talking much more than I had ever heard before. The following day was a big day on and around the Crags. Christy and I were the only ones to climb one, the rest of the family happy to walk around them and use the boats to explore. One advantage of going with a family group is it took me out of my usual minimalist approach to parks – I would never usually shell out for a full ticket with all the boats, bells and whistles, but there was some benefit in this. The boat ride into a cave was actually worth it, and with older folk in our group, boat rides were a good way to break up the exertions.

Our final day was a site I had not been to, Dinghu Mountain (鼎湖山). It was a significant mountain because of it having a lake at the top, and also a significant Buddhist temple. For the average foreign visitor, it is not that interesting unless you really like temples. And although you can walk the whole mountain, we did this mountain with three shuttle buses up and three shuttle buses down. It is quite the carry-on with buying tickets, queuing and getting on and off.

We still have travel dreams in China. Despite an untold number of trips to China, I have not been to the North-East, home to some of my favourite cuisines, Xinjiang, deliciously dangerous, and we both want to go to Xi'an, me for the second time, Christy for her first. She also wants to see Qingdao, which is another city I have not visited. And we have barely scratched the surface of Hunan province. At this time still, travels outside of Qingyuan cost quality time in so the parents or family are either with us, or we travel closer to home. There is no rush though, even with an incredible four weeks of holiday we did not achieve all we wanted to do. The rest will wait for another day.

China dying

In mid-2023, Christy's grandfather passed away suddenly at the age of 100 (in accordance with the Chinese way to count age). It doesn't feel right to say that someone so old could die "unexpectedly" but in his case, it was against all expectation. My wife had made it over to China just days before it happened, and  Over a year later, as recounted in Crypticity's abound: Life and death of the villages.

This year, I have had the weird privilege of having attended a New Zealand funeral and a Chinese 葬礼 within a couple of months. My Uncle John passed in the first month of this year. For me, it was a surprise, but apparently his heart surgery three years ago had a three year warranty and that it wasn’t necessarily unexpected that he would pass. Though I in all honesty did not have much time with him as we always lived far from where he lived, he always impressed me as a vigorous, kind person. My second cousin Michael, his son, did a great eulogy, talking about his father, who had passed in front of an unnecessarily complicated jigsaw puzzle after making a dryer than usual Christmas cake. You could say it was a good death in that he had a clearly good life which was taken while enjoying life.

My Sam Gung was different. Sam Gung, A Gung's younger cousin, had been struggling for years. Sam Gung was literally a neighbour in the hometown so I knew him well. He was an educated man; he was the one that the village trusted to put into characters the words of ceremony. When big things happened, he was the one who wrote it in beautiful Chinese characters. He was one of the older people who didn’t have any hesitation in welcoming me and speaking with me. When I was back previously he had been struggling with more than one obvious medical condition, and his wife was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s. And now, a heart condition had struck him hard.

When we arrived, he was expected to pass at any moment. On one day when I had planned to be out with a friend, his family had brought him home from the hospital, and I was asked to come home earlier just so I could see him before anything happened. The “bringing back from the hospital” element is something cultural – I am not sure how often it happens in New Zealand, where people don’t have as many qualms about the elderly dying away from home. That day I didn’t manage to come home much earlier, but still I saw him. Whether he knew who I was depends on how compassionately you ask.

He was expected to pass quickly, and as he was close clan, there was some caution about planning travel. His immediate family members had, three years earlier, dropped everything when A-Gung passed to attend the funeral. But a few days later he was still alive and, according to some, even doing better.  

Three days before our expected trip to Shantou, there was quite the kerfuffle where members of the family had got anxious and wanted him to go back to hospital if he might pull through and make it to the year of the Horse. There was a cultural practicality about this. If he were to die on Chinese New Year’s Eve he might have no one attend the funeral. And it might have the double blow, culturally, of being inauspicious to 探亲 (visit relatives) of a grieving family during the Spring Festival period. So the argument was either to stay the inevitable course with him at home so he can have a village death, and accept whatever consequences with the timing, or to send him back to hospital and hope to buy a couple of weeks but also have the risk of him passing in the cold sterility of a hospital bed.

The latter side won, an ambulance was called late at night and the very next day died.

This was the first time I had been in China for the full process of someone dying. The evening of his passing, proceedings began with the clan gathering at the family home, the following day the body was brought to the home so he could rest in state. The children of the deceased and their partners have white hats or belts, and the children face the body for throughout the day and the night. Guests come in, light incense, bow three times before the body and then stand the incense in a stand before the body. Spiritual money is burned, too. During the three days, there are no speeches, eulogies, no photo collections or songs. I always find it incredible that the village people have enough to talk about for hours and hours. I talked with a grandson of Sam Gung for about an hour, but I was lucky as I didn’t know him and he knew barely anything about me. All the while, people come in to burn incense and there are firecrackers to notify the dead.

The family would stay up through the night but we are distant enough to have a night of sleep. The next morning there are the road rituals for the deceased to be able to be removed from the house and transported to the crematorium. For the road rituals I saw again the Daoist priest from A Gung’s memorial ceremonies. He did his thing and we walked around the coffin three times, and then waited for the equivalent of a hearse to take the body to the crematorium.

The crematorium was a half hour drive from the village so we had two buses ride along with the hearse and then waited our turn. Unseen by us, the body is prepared with flowers and put in a crematorium casket, and after some time, we’re called to the Farewell room, where we walk around the casket three times, and then he is taken into where he will be reduced to ashes. The family wait in a building similar to a bus station waiting area for an hour and then are told it is time to collect. Some members of the family go to check the ashes and bones are his. I was not part of that. And then these were interned into an urn and wheeled over with an umbrella cover to a small concretion designed for final rites. (An umbrella was maintained over the urn until it was buried.) The family then again burn incense, before it is taken to the bus for the ride to the village burial spot where his ashes would reside for a year. (There would be another ceremony to relocate him to his final, final resting spot at some stage later.) It was an interesting hike to a non-descript space for the burial spot, through brush and up a hill. His urn was placed and buried then incense was burned, and then an odd rice throwing ritual. And then that was that. We walked home.

In the land of the living, there remains his wife and the thorny issue of how you care for someone with Alzheimers who relied on her husband at home, and has never known life outside of the village.

China racing

Any given Saturday. Or Sunday. In New Zealand adults have running races to run, and groups to run in. It is normal for grown-arse men and women to put on colourful clothing, and supershoes, and neglect other important duties and run for themselves, with peril to their knee cartilage, and run with other adults, and children, early in the morning.

This is not so in China. There are prescribed ways to exercise: old ladies can dance together in “square dancing’. Taichi people do taichi things. Old people do back/front catching, and extreme hamstring stretching. And young people, now have gyms. Adults running in groups or competitions is not really a thing (yet). It is truly when you live in other countries that you can really your own cultural assumptions.

Oddly, running marathons is a thing in China now, but these are run by city councils to stimulate tourism. Anything shorter than a half marathon barely exist, because they are not stimulatory to tourism and there are no grass-roots organisations that would run them. ParkRuns don't exist (yet). 

To be clear, New Zealand itself went through a process where Athletics New Zealand used to run the show, and that it was focussed on producing champions (which China is too) but not organising anything beyond those needs, and potentially feeling challenged when there is demand and initiative from the broader society to have events beyond the youth and elite. In that time, other events struggled for recognition without the Athletics NZ approval. It was only after a lot of effort that non-Athletics NZ events would be recognised.

So, in China right now running events are mainly for the youth and elite, and now marathons for the tourism income for the general runner and tourists. But in a running sense for a general runner this is back-to-front: no one should have a marathon as their first event without having raced shorter distances, and ideally in anyone’s training they should have variety, and the chance to test themselves without the whole-hog of a marathon.

Before my current trip to China, I did look for any running events apart from the marathons that are springing up in all Chinese cities, and I was initially very disappointed. I just could not find a single event similar to what we have, a dime-a-dozen, in little New Zealand. I hadn’t been in China for the November Guangzhou marathon, and I wouldn’t be in China for the March Qingyuan marathon and it appeared that in province of Guangdong there was nothing shorter in between those two dates outside of elite running races. With some patience though, I found one single event, a 10km race “no less”, in Qingyuan where I was going to be, a week after my arrival. I told a running relative-in-law but he affirmed what I already knew in a very unencouraging way: it was a tourist thing, and that virtual races are where China was at. But I was not discouraged. I entered into a 10km race and thus on 8 February 2026, I ran my first race outside of New Zealand.

It is through my participation I gain new respect and appreciation for the event-craft of those in New Zealand, and realise that these often shoe-string or community oriented events are run on collective learning and culturally moving runners and organisers together to a better way of running. In China, they are not there yet. My race showed everything that I should have known about a race organised by a city council, not a experienced race organisation, and with runners long deprived of event.

I arrived at the event, had my bags x-rayed and my body fondled with security wand, before doing my usual prep of bathroom, bag drop, bathroom, warm-up, bathroom and preparation to enter the starting chute. But there was a full stage act with singing in the process, with some instructions between songs. It was a cool morning that encouraged some hustle about the place. I heard that runners should hang out to the left and wait to enter the starting chute. I did while another song was song and 30 minutes before the scheduled start time, the gate suddenly opened and there was a charge toward the front of the start chute. I was pretty nimble but only got into the second row of racers, behind a lot of “Ayi” aunties and a guy with a flag with a long metal pole who had managed to react a bit faster.

In New Zealand there is both the implicit and explicit instruction that faster runners should “seed” themselves toward the front, and those who are going to have fun and potentially walk it to head towards the back. In the nascent running culture of China this was not the case. And the organisers indulged it: the event photographer took photos of the people at the starting line, and those aunties really could pose. Another bunch of twenty somethings pushed in front of everyone to take their own start line photos and then stayed there.

With thirty minutes to wile away in the cold, apart from giving the evil eye to those who have no place in the front row of a 10km race, you could only jog on the spot and discreetly stretch in a way that didn’t both others. You could also watch the security who had fenced a metal barrier about 20 metres away from the start line. They fiddled with it and then five minutes before the start line they dismantled it and then these adult men came forward and held hands to form a human barrier in front of the starting line, which was also a starting ribbon.

This is unthinkable in New Zealand where a starting line is a commonly understood line on the ground unobstracted by anything that you cannot cross until a start signal. In China, whether by unfortunate precedent, or suspicion of the common people, a barrier whether ferrous or flesh must be erected to prevent premature starts.

Perhaps for the same reason, there was no countdown to start, or so I thought. Actually the stage with the speakers was about 100 metres away from the front of the start chute. Even with my average Mandarin I couldn’t make out much of what was being said on stage. And I don’t think I was the only one with no clue, because all of a suddne, the security guards let go of each other, the ribbon broke and the aunties charged, and it wasn’t only be who was flat footed at the start. The event photo shows that about five seconds from the start a woman in jeans was leading and that was because she was the fastest to react to the sudden start.

Pre-race, I didn’t know who would be racing in such an event. The North River riverside, which is a beautiful perfect place to run, had sparse utilisation by runners, nowhere close to what you’d see on Tamaki Drive, so if only the local casual runners were running, I might do the awkward thing of winning. Alternatively, with a whole bunch of strong runners from over Guangdong, starved of races, the race could attract the best of the sub-elite best and I might be in the pack.

What happened? Well, once the initial charge was complete and the aunties’ photo moment was completed, it was clear from my watch that even at my initial unsustainable adrenalin-fuelled downhill pace I was in not in the top 30, it was more of the latter. In New Zealand you expect to see a few people who are far too optimistic in the start and such was the case, I settled into my race plan pace and ground my way to the mid-20s. The course was interesting: It started with a downhill section to a fairly flat road, with out-and-backs downhill then uphill back to the road, then a huge downhill, run-around, then running back up the hill, then after a bit of road, an uphill stretch to the finish line. I had thought my Glen Eden hill training would put me in good stead but these runners seemed hill-trained, too, and I only had a marginal advantage.

The intrigue came after the midway point I got to a point in the course where I should have completed three out-and-backs on side roads but I could clearly remember only doing two. I started to doubt myself, that I may have completed missed a required turn. Countering those doubts was the fact that I was never really separate from other runners, and also should have noticed a turn on a well-marked course. I did the final third with the thought that it was almost impossible that I would be running a full 10km. During that time I grinded past a few runners to find myself in 21^st, a single place out of the prize money. But about 500m out, one of those I’d bested earlier bested me, smoothly overtaking and leaving me in the dust. Another that I had grinded past I heard galloping behind me in the last 100m, the uphill finish. I probably put in my best ever sprint finish, uphill, I’ve ever done. This runner managed to do even better passing me, to some laughter from the spectators just to rub it in, and pip me by a few seconds.

I went through the finishing line in 23^rd place out of 1000 runners, and was greeted by a person putting not a finishing medal but a number around my neck. I was then greeted by a person with a QR code telling me I had to scan it. This I hadn’t seen before and I was unsure if this was part of their verification of result, which didn’t really make sense because the bib had a magnetic strip to record times. Nonetheless, while trying to catch my breath I complied, scanned, and then had to fumble to enter information: full name, passport number and then bizarrely my bank account number. It was at that point that Christy went over and relieved me of my phone so I could proceed up. In almost any race in New Zealand, next would be to grab a cup of water or electrolytes, if not a banana. There was none after the start line so I went to get my bag from the collection point. Apparently any drink had to be purchased, so we did and then did the walk down to the car.

My phone confirmed what my watch had already stated: I had only run 9.3km. I wasn’t sure if my 23^rd was actually the case until a lot of checking afterwards revealed that the course route had been changed at some point in a pre-race message, but without highlighting the change nor that the course would be 9.3km, not 10km. This was a relief – I didn’t miss anything. Even with the unexpected short course, I still probably would have run it the same way, and had paced it pretty well. In the end, I do think it was a so-called “peak performance” – I genuinely wouldn’t have been able to run it much faster than I did. The final 100m I would have been the fastest finish I’ve ever done in any race and it was uphill. So despite the head-scratching organisation and the “scare” of possibly having missed a corner, I’m very happy with my effort.