The Most Ironic Critique of Mike Daisey's Inaccuracies

It has been nighttime in Australia, and I am just starting to look at the many Mike Daisey reactions that have come in during Sunday daytime for readers in North America.

But there is one I have to deal with right away. A writer named Jason Mick, at the Daily Tech site, criticizes, as I have, the things that Daisey got wrong or made up. Then he adds:

(In another moment of his monologue [Daisey] states, "The moments of our life where we're actually truly honest with another person are so f**king rare, that when they happen we usually end up married to that person."

Mr. Daisey is married to Deborah Fallows, a Chinese native who wrote the book Dreaming in Chinese.)

It is true that Deborah Fallows, shown at right on the balcony here in Kirribilli, wrote the book Dreaming in Chinese. It is true that friends have told her that she might as well have been born a native Chinese person, since her spirit matches that of Chinese women in so many ways.

But she is a native of Chicago, not China, and of Czech rather than Chinese ethnic background. And she is most definitely not married to Mike Daisey. At least that is what she told me when she stormed back into the bedroom this morning irate about what she had just seen about herself online.

Jason Mick might want to ratchet back his outrage over Mike Daisey's sloppiness with facts. I would not bother to mention this except for the tendency of Internet myths, unchallenged, to take on lives of their own.