KEY POINTS:
For those wanting to end a friendship with me, one way to do it is to tell me you are an insurance agent or a financial planner.
Last week, I was thrilled to receive an email from a childhood friend who had looked me up on the networking site Facebook.
But that turned to custard when he said one of the reasons he was keen to catch up was because he wanted to help me with my insurance needs and planning my finances.
After reading that, almost instinctively, I hit the delete button.
I don't know why I detest insurance agents and financial planners. Maybe it's because I feel that all they are after is my money, or that they have a way of ruining a perfect day by asking questions like: "What if you die tomorrow?"
A bigger reason, however, could be not so much who they are or what they represent, but more because of the person that I am. I like being in control and feel uncomfortable talking about things that are beyond my control, like the future.
It is for that reason that I don't even like to make New Year resolutions because come the end of the year the result is usually just another string of broken promises.
New Year, however, quite often puts me in a reflective mood. I remember my first New Year in New Zealand 10 years ago when I had dinner with a Kiwi friend at an Italian restaurant.
I had dirtied my fingers after devouring the crayfish and pizza we ordered, and had to excuse myself to go to the washroom. When I got back, my friend said he had paid and stepped outside for a smoke.
With that, I too grabbed my bag and made my way out of the restaurant only to be called back by the manager telling me that my friend had paid only his part of the bill.
That was my rather embarrassing introduction to the Kiwi habit of splitting a single bill in half at the point of payment. Where I came from, what's normal is for one person to foot the full amount and then split it with the other later.
But over the years I have come to accept that just because things are done differently here doesn't mean they're wrong.
Living in New Zealand has also given me the experience of what it's like to be in the minority, and opened my eyes to the fact that not everyone thought the same way I did, or even enjoyed the same food.
But I still get annoyed when people have a slanted view of Asians. No, not everyone who looks oriental comes from China, some of us do speak good English and no, we are not all bad drivers.
Time flies. It doesn't seem so long since I started writing this column but it has been 20 months. My brief for this column was to share my thoughts on life and matters in New Zealand - as an Asian and as an immigrant. I started with a piece on how a trip to the Auckland Zoo sealed my decision to stay in New Zealand, and along the way have touched on issues such as my struggles to let go of my first country and giving my take on issues such as the anti-smacking bill and freedom of speech.
A topic I found most challenging was showing how Asians, or even the Chinese, differ among themselves.
I hope these stories have shown how much we still have to learn about each other and how, sometimes, the more we find out about things, the more we realise how much we still don't know.
One of the reasons I am feeling extra nostalgic today is that this could be my last contribution to this space. I'm giving this column a rest as I begin my new job next week reporting for this newspaper.
Many years ago, as a trainee reporter in Singapore, one of the first stories I had to work on was "New Year, new beginnings", in which I had to interview 10 people about their hopes and dreams for the coming year.
Handing in the assignment, I had to face a telling-off by my first editor. The problem with my story was that everyone I interviewed was Chinese. I was found guilty of not breaking out of my comfort zone and getting opinions only from the group of people I was familiar with.
But what he told me that morning became my mantra in my later years in journalism: that behind every story, there is a black, brown, yellow and white view.
This New Year will herald a new beginning for me as a journalist at the Herald, where I hope I can play a part in sharing a little bit of my first editor's wisdom and add this colour to the stories reported here.
My thanks and best wishes go out to you. And if we don't meet again on this page, then I'll see you in the news pages of the Herald in 2008.
Happy New Year.
* lincolntan@xtra.co.nz
