Re-reading the previous entry, what happend then seems almost trivial now.
Some background about "23:20" - It was something that really did happen the family quarrel on the street. I felt quite disturbed during the time, being the "I" in the poem, sort of trapped in that particular situation on the confined space of the family car. Part of me wanted so much to open the door and bolt - leaving everyone else behind and just hop into a cab - I actually went over the action, frame by frame, in my brain. In the end I didn't, and stayed where I was. And then the news about aftermath of the horrific traffic accident came on the radio. There was something theatrical to me that very moment. It was as if one of Life's many adsurdities had been illuminated, and I was the one trapped in that particular space and particular time to witness it. And that I should write it down.
All my life I feel I have been blessed with the family I was born and grew up in. There have certainly been disputes, but they are rare. The extended family may be a bit more complicated, but I seldom have the chance to experience it firsthand. Most of the stories are from hearsay - anecdotes my parents would occasionally let out given the right moment. And I have always been my peace-loving self, almost never bringing up a quarrel. Read: Almost never. Quarrels - just hearing them, not having to be a part of it - actually give me an adrenaline rush, making me a slight dizziness and a state of mind I don't usually carry with me. It was at such a stage that I saw that strangely highlighted moment at 23:20.
I reckon I don't handle quarrels well when they do happen. There are always something irrational about them, and what I should have done only appears in afterthoughts.
2009年4月5日 星期日
2009年2月8日 星期日
23:20 on Jan 23, 2009
Words between Siblings (Spoken or not)
There was such a night:
After the festive family gathering,
Having bode their aged parents goodnight,
Dad, the big bro, said “We need to talk about money”
To his brothers.
Parked their cars along the road, stepped out to the side walk
In the chilly wind, they
Left their children on the cars
And spoke.
* * *
Discussion soon turned ugly argument
Loudly the men spoke
While the women looked on.
Each had his own concerns
And all failed to take a step back to put themselves
In each other’s shoes.
* * *
I tried not to speak
The chaos outside was drowning out my own Bro’s phone chatter, and the radio’s.
I listened but didn’t want to hear
Just hiding behind the latest edition of Economist
Squinting in the dark
I don’t want to know.
* * *
“You have no idea how tough my business is getting.”
“I have work so hard to put things in order in this family.”
“You called this accounting? Hah!”
“I am so tired.”
“And you expect me to pay you back – all ten grand – in one go – now?”
“Think I am in an easy position?”
“Don’t think that you are indispensable to us!” –
I guess that must hurt. A lot.
Cruel words as such
A brief silence.
* * *
And there was the radio
Soft and mellow in background, until
The clock struck
Wailing relatives lamented
Deadly accident cost six lives
Gone instantly on the road
With no chance for farewell – or any other words – at all.
“Money can’t bring my dear bro back,
“What’s the use giving me that?”
* * *
In the awkward air
No words exchanged between me
And my dear bro
Except that I wanted so much
To scream
I don’t want this to happen between us
Never
But is it something inevitable
When we grow old?
* * *
Phone rang
Out came the frisky voice of an 8-year-old.
Through the two panes of glass
I saw my cousins in their family car
Smiling and waving
Locked up in their own little quiet world
Sweet, innocent kids they are
Little brother and little sister
Seeing but not hearing
Their beloved aunts and uncles growl.
“Tell me what they are saying,
“We want so much to know!”
2009年2月5日 星期四
Necrology
We were shown this little gem of a short film in Mr. Ho's second lesson. I've wanted to write something about it for quite a while.
There is an air of suspension almost throughout the whole film, from its beginning with its title "Necrology", to the last men and women before the credits roll. It is created by the music score (which sounds like the kind very often used in black-and-white silent thrillers), and the viewers' expectation for something to happen (as provoked by the macabre association with the film's title). When the credits finally roll, however, the viewers immediately feel the humor of the director. Although the film is obviously without an obvious storyline, it does create a desire in the viewers to want to know what is going to happen, and provide some sort of "resolution" in the end, albeit in a non-traditional way. Also, like any other good stories, it sets one's mind musing after watching it.
The "resolution" comes when the credits give little bits of information of each character the viewers have just seen in the film. The viewers grab the sliver of information they have, trying to make sense of the faces and figures seen previously on the film - which have seemed so trivial to them a moment ago. Doing so gives them a sense of consolation, and they feel that they have known so much more about what has been happening. Of course, the big irony is, do they really know a lot more? What does it tell you when someone is being introduced as "a man who just got his tooth extracted" other than that, well, he just got his tooth extracted? Interestingly, people naturally think that they know more than they really do.
When I was invited to play a sort of ice-breaking game with a classmate at the beginning of Mr. Ho's first lesson, the first thing I blurted out, pretty much without thinking, was "But I know her!". In a second, it came to me that I had fallen into such a trap.
It sounds like a huge blind spot, but grabbing whatever information we can get hold on and figuring out the rest by ourselves may just be the way we get by. We have to know the name, some basic information and, even better, a story of a particular person before we can feel connected to them as human beings. That is why the media include little stories or photos of individual victims when reporting disasters. No matter how brief or trivial the stories may sound, they bring weight and meaning to the reportage. Without the stories or photos, the news would just be a listing of the number of casualties to the readers/audience, and lose its power to move people and evoke empathy.
This reminds me of a recent read. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book "The Black Swan", writes about how the partiality to what can be seen blinds us. He uses the example of the hurricane Katrina to illustrate that people only focus on what they can see. The reportage of the hurricane, which did not run short of stories of the ordeals and struggle for life of the victims, filled pages after pages of newspapers and countless airtime on television. Attention and financial aids for the victims flooded in as a result. Taleb points out that much less was given to cancer research and patients even though during the same time more of them died every day than Katrina victims - because the former did not get much mention.
Sure we all need stories, no matter how brief or flimsy, to feel connected to each other.
To Death, of course, your identity or story does not matter. Death sees everybody just like how you see the random faces on the short film as they roll by - with equal apathy.
There is an air of suspension almost throughout the whole film, from its beginning with its title "Necrology", to the last men and women before the credits roll. It is created by the music score (which sounds like the kind very often used in black-and-white silent thrillers), and the viewers' expectation for something to happen (as provoked by the macabre association with the film's title). When the credits finally roll, however, the viewers immediately feel the humor of the director. Although the film is obviously without an obvious storyline, it does create a desire in the viewers to want to know what is going to happen, and provide some sort of "resolution" in the end, albeit in a non-traditional way. Also, like any other good stories, it sets one's mind musing after watching it.
The "resolution" comes when the credits give little bits of information of each character the viewers have just seen in the film. The viewers grab the sliver of information they have, trying to make sense of the faces and figures seen previously on the film - which have seemed so trivial to them a moment ago. Doing so gives them a sense of consolation, and they feel that they have known so much more about what has been happening. Of course, the big irony is, do they really know a lot more? What does it tell you when someone is being introduced as "a man who just got his tooth extracted" other than that, well, he just got his tooth extracted? Interestingly, people naturally think that they know more than they really do.
When I was invited to play a sort of ice-breaking game with a classmate at the beginning of Mr. Ho's first lesson, the first thing I blurted out, pretty much without thinking, was "But I know her!". In a second, it came to me that I had fallen into such a trap.
It sounds like a huge blind spot, but grabbing whatever information we can get hold on and figuring out the rest by ourselves may just be the way we get by. We have to know the name, some basic information and, even better, a story of a particular person before we can feel connected to them as human beings. That is why the media include little stories or photos of individual victims when reporting disasters. No matter how brief or trivial the stories may sound, they bring weight and meaning to the reportage. Without the stories or photos, the news would just be a listing of the number of casualties to the readers/audience, and lose its power to move people and evoke empathy.
This reminds me of a recent read. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book "The Black Swan", writes about how the partiality to what can be seen blinds us. He uses the example of the hurricane Katrina to illustrate that people only focus on what they can see. The reportage of the hurricane, which did not run short of stories of the ordeals and struggle for life of the victims, filled pages after pages of newspapers and countless airtime on television. Attention and financial aids for the victims flooded in as a result. Taleb points out that much less was given to cancer research and patients even though during the same time more of them died every day than Katrina victims - because the former did not get much mention.
Sure we all need stories, no matter how brief or flimsy, to feel connected to each other.
To Death, of course, your identity or story does not matter. Death sees everybody just like how you see the random faces on the short film as they roll by - with equal apathy.
2009年1月18日 星期日
Random thoughts
I kept having the following thought during Mr. Ho's class last Saturday. I imagined what would happen if the people in my company, especially my bosses and senior colleagues, were there in the classroom, attending the class. Once I started, I somehow could not stop.
Some background information: I work at an information system engineering company which does outsourced jobs from the government. It is headed mainly by people who have been there for 15+ years (that is, ever since it started), and whose lives revolve solely around the company. They are people who can be found working at the office at 4 in a Saturday afternoon. Surely they are respectable people who work hard trying to make some contribution to the society, but I sometimes wonder if they truly LIVE at all. Have they ever had the chance, or been inspired to examine their lives from a new perspective? Would they feel being thrown into the deep end if they were asked to do so? Would one of our directors, an avid storyteller, be able to re-examine her many stories, which are often loaded with prejudice and hasty generalization?
It is also sad for people to become so jaded and weary because of the humdrum of life and "business concerns", failing to recognize the simple pleasures.
Some background information: I work at an information system engineering company which does outsourced jobs from the government. It is headed mainly by people who have been there for 15+ years (that is, ever since it started), and whose lives revolve solely around the company. They are people who can be found working at the office at 4 in a Saturday afternoon. Surely they are respectable people who work hard trying to make some contribution to the society, but I sometimes wonder if they truly LIVE at all. Have they ever had the chance, or been inspired to examine their lives from a new perspective? Would they feel being thrown into the deep end if they were asked to do so? Would one of our directors, an avid storyteller, be able to re-examine her many stories, which are often loaded with prejudice and hasty generalization?
It is also sad for people to become so jaded and weary because of the humdrum of life and "business concerns", failing to recognize the simple pleasures.
2009年1月16日 星期五
Dimension
One of the first assignments in my early days as an architectural student was to take Chinese calligraphic characters, manipulate them and create shapes, forms and space from them. The instructions we got read something like:
"...explore the 2-D, 3-D and 4-D architectonic possibilities of the Chinese calligraphic characters ..."
The 2nd Dimension and 3rd Dimension, we could understand perfectly well. "But what the heck are we going to do for the fourth dimension?" Perhaps for the first time in our lives, "dimension" became a mind-boggling word that was too much for us to handle.
Shortly after, we pulled out yard after yard of tracing paper to work on the drawings, and later, buried ourselves in piles of foam boards, trying our best to carve/cut out some nice looking, pristine white models (to this day I still remember the horrid smell of melted polystyrene). For some of us, the 4-D models were just upgraded, fancier versions and variations of the 3-D ones. We had quite a hard time making sense of how to present space-time through the models.
Ironically, while working on something about dimensions, we got trapped - trapped in the plane of creating fancy graphics and physical form of the models, but failing to project ourselves one step up into another dimension - to experience (or imagine to experience) the kind of feelings we might get from entering into the space we had created. Walking through a structure is a space-time experience. Each step you take places you in a new perspective, giving you new sights, and possibly new insights as you move about.
"...explore the 2-D, 3-D and 4-D architectonic possibilities of the Chinese calligraphic characters ..."
The 2nd Dimension and 3rd Dimension, we could understand perfectly well. "But what the heck are we going to do for the fourth dimension?" Perhaps for the first time in our lives, "dimension" became a mind-boggling word that was too much for us to handle.
Shortly after, we pulled out yard after yard of tracing paper to work on the drawings, and later, buried ourselves in piles of foam boards, trying our best to carve/cut out some nice looking, pristine white models (to this day I still remember the horrid smell of melted polystyrene). For some of us, the 4-D models were just upgraded, fancier versions and variations of the 3-D ones. We had quite a hard time making sense of how to present space-time through the models.
Ironically, while working on something about dimensions, we got trapped - trapped in the plane of creating fancy graphics and physical form of the models, but failing to project ourselves one step up into another dimension - to experience (or imagine to experience) the kind of feelings we might get from entering into the space we had created. Walking through a structure is a space-time experience. Each step you take places you in a new perspective, giving you new sights, and possibly new insights as you move about.
My Story
One of the first "classwork" exercises we did in the first lesson of the Adaptations, Theatre and Culture course last week was to work in pairs, with one team member telling (and then re-telling) a story about herself, and the other just listened and later compared the two versions told. A couple of classmates, who did the listening, got the chance to interpret the stories they heard in their own words/actions.
In my pair, I was agreed to be the "speaker". It wasn't until then that I realized it was actually not easy to be able to come up with a story about myself all of a sudden - a story that is worth telling, in which I have learnt something from it (and hopefully the listeners would learn something from it too). Suddenly my mind was filled up with all sorts of vignettes - memorable fragments that have left a mark in my life, such as...
the child assessment test that I, aged 2 1/2, took - the dawning of my free will;
a slammed door;
a particular walk in the park;
being alone, devouring orange in a little house bathed in late afternoon Aussie sun;
a merciless but purifying rainstorm in the floating city
They can hardly be qualified as stories on their own. They are in no way epics, and may not even be moral tales. But together, each having its own unique place, these vignettes make up what is essentially me - my memory, my consciousness of this world.
Still...
From now on, I should spare more thoughts on collecting, forming and editing my own stories. Who knows... They may probably come in handy some day. Some day soon.
In my pair, I was agreed to be the "speaker". It wasn't until then that I realized it was actually not easy to be able to come up with a story about myself all of a sudden - a story that is worth telling, in which I have learnt something from it (and hopefully the listeners would learn something from it too). Suddenly my mind was filled up with all sorts of vignettes - memorable fragments that have left a mark in my life, such as...
the child assessment test that I, aged 2 1/2, took - the dawning of my free will;
a slammed door;
a particular walk in the park;
being alone, devouring orange in a little house bathed in late afternoon Aussie sun;
a merciless but purifying rainstorm in the floating city
They can hardly be qualified as stories on their own. They are in no way epics, and may not even be moral tales. But together, each having its own unique place, these vignettes make up what is essentially me - my memory, my consciousness of this world.
Still...
From now on, I should spare more thoughts on collecting, forming and editing my own stories. Who knows... They may probably come in handy some day. Some day soon.
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