Ordinary Gweilo

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Time and time again

I was amused when Liam Fitzpatrick managed to fill a couple of pages of Spike magazine with the gripping story of his long association with ‘Bottoms Up’ in TST and the terribly sad news that they have closed the place down.

Incredibly, he managed to recycle this material for a special double issue of Time magazine (Asia edition). It’s all there – his mother going to pick up his father from the bar after his epic binges, The Man with the Golden Gun, young Liam going for a drink after school, blah, blah, blah.

Incidentally, why does Time magazine publish a double issue at this time of year? Christmas and New Year I can understand, but what’s with July?

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4 responses to “Time and time again”

  1. Philip avatar
    Philip

    Far from being a ‘whingeing gweilo’ (as you referred to him in a previous post) Liam Fitzpatrick is eurasian (half white half chinese) and a lifetime resident of Hong Kong. I dare say he knows more about the place than most. Sneering at a guy reminiscing about his childhood in HK (a fantastic place to grow up)is a bit low, don’t you think Chris?

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  2. Chris avatar
    Chris

    Well, I stand corrected. I knew that he had grown up here, but not that his mother was Chinese or that he was born here. I assumed he was an expat, but I obviously got that wrong.
    The comment I made in the earlier post referred to his column in Spike, where he seemed to be complaining about many aspects of life in Hong Kong. Perhaps I should have called him the whingeing Eurasian instead.
    My point here is that the article in Time is very similar to what he wrote a few months ago in Spike. I’m not sneering at him for writing about his childhood but for recycling material that I have already read. If he could have written about his childhood without hanging it on the rather tedious fact that ‘Bottoms Up’ has closed down then I wouldn’t have complained.

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  3. Simon World avatar
    Simon World

    Recycling

    Chris is being critical of the latest Hong Kong effort to re-use trash. History repeats itself, first as tradegy, second as farce (or in this case, first as Spike, second as Time)….

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  4. Congrats avatar
    Congrats

    Well done for spottong this. Fitzpatrick is just like Vines, forced to recycle his material all
    over because no one at any one mag pays him much. Sad really but that is the mediocre gwailo wordsmith in 2004 – poor.

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