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?
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?
Posted by: Philip | July 28, 2004 at 01:06 PM
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.
Posted by: Chris | July 28, 2004 at 01:36 PM
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.
Posted by: Congrats | July 29, 2004 at 12:10 AM