Johnny Neihu's Mailbag

Goodbye and hello again

Dear Johnny,
Where the hell are you?
Leave without saying goodbye? Any plans on a return from leave?
Michael Faass

Johnny replies: Well, here I am. I can’t tell you exactly where I’ve been, but I’ll give you some options.
1. With the change in government inevitable, I decided it was time to head to a Himalayan peak to locate my old martial arts teacher and brush up on my fighting skills. It was an arduous journey because I had to skirt the Chinese border instead of crossing it (the Chinese border guards rejected my Swiss passport with an altered mug shot of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), which surprised me).

2. I went to Tibet to see for myself what was going on and established the “Johnny Neihu clique” to advance the interests of Tibetan separatism. You’ve got to hand it to those Tibetans: nothing but yak meat and they can take on the world’s biggest army. And that’s assuming they’re not monks.

3. I raided my pension fund to fly to Australia to see what all the fuss is about with that country. It just so happened that in the last days of my trip the Olympic torch was in Canberra, so, in the best agit prop tradition, I impersonated an official from the Chinese consulate in Sydney and rounded up some poverty-stricken Chinese students, instructing them to beat and insult the Tibetans and any other sympathizers.

These students, the poor dears, were terribly enthusiastic. All I had to do was say “Opium Wars,” “Belgrade” and “CNN” and they drooled with patriotic fervor. But my efforts were upstaged, because the Chinese consulate had done exactly the same thing with several thousand others anyway.

Believe whichever you want. And cut me some slack, Michael. I’ve missed two columns in two years – and that was for Lunar New Year, surrounded by ankle-biters and other irritating relatives.