The First Return

I slept for most of the plane journey back which was unusual indeed. Didn't realized how exhausting the First Return Trip as a Visitor was.

There was a long queue at the customs both at the arrival and departure halls. At arrival, I remembered to join the Visitors queue (verily long it was) but did not remember to fill up the embarkation card as I was so used to just flashing the HKID. The officer was nice about it, and said Welcome Back to Hong Kong. They still had the sour plum sweets at the counters.

The 2006 Offsite was held at Aberdeen in mahogany rooms filled with ancient marine maps and other colonial artifacts. While doing multiple presentations in the long boardroom, one had the view of the southern rocky islands set in the bluish grey South China Sea.

The Ritz had the view of Statue Square set against the Bank of China, Cheung Kong and the mid-levels. I was only on the 7th floor, but this gave the eye the perfect elevation view of the city set against the cloud-capped Victorian Peak range. There's something about that sight. It's Hong Kong at its most elegant and beautiful. In the diffused lighting of a drizzly summer morning, it would still be one of the most romantic views in my mind of any city.

Causeway Bay became doubly crowded with pedestrians holding up large golf umbrellas in the rain that fell relentlessly from morning till the afternon.

The sashimi steak was still as thick and scrumptious at Yun Shan. :)

It was an exhausting week - I had almost forgotten how much information there was to take in constantly in Hong Kong. How the mind has had to jump from one thing to another. To listen to 12 different accents from the world over in the office. The flood of familiar faces in the church congregation in a sea of new faces. People coming and going and coming back again in this pulsating city that was home for a while.

But it was still a good week of conversations with life's best friends - how many of those might be our last ones face to face for a while? Of seeing things come to a full circle and knowing that healing can, and has occured. And then of putting away past mistakes, and hurts, and laughing about headless chickens and fainting goats.

Daily Quotes

The Mammon Tower has a Viridian Green gym on the 9th floor with a Deep Azure pool that's too heavy for it. Outside the gym, there is small Ebony chalkboard on which a different quote appears each day. I usually only notice it on the way home, being too rushed and hungry in the morning to contemplate what's written on it. Most days, the last words of wisdom encountered are as tired as the working day, "You never fail at anything, you only learn how to succeed in that thing" .

The other day, I saw one which stood out from the usual motivational soundbites.

"The tree that has few leaves stands strongest in the wind."

Simplicity in life has its advantage. Being too much adorned with possessions and toys of this world often means a greater sense of insecurity in crisis times. Must remember that.

Pick-up Sticks

Rules: Each player gets twenty or thirty multicoloured sticks and tosses them on the ground and tries to pick up as many as possible, one at a time, without disturbing the rest.

It just struck me the other day that I don't think we can play pick-up sticks with people. In relating to someone, you can't just choose the parts that you are comfortable with and avoid those that interwine and touch like spaghetti with the scarier parts, all in for fear of losing the game. By doing that, you are already out of the game, and you will only be dealing with the peripheral and superficial. What it really takes is great care, patience and perception to decide which stick to move first, the right order at the right time, gently, so that you don't scramble the delicate sticks or the person.

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

Was reminded of another favorite funny poem for the night skies during a green laser demo on Sunday :)


Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings

--they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside
--a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry itto their lips
and soothe it to sleepwith sounds.

And yet they wake it up deliberately,
by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to sufferopenly.
Adults go to a punishment roomwith water but nothing to eat.

They lock the door and suffer the noises alone.
No one is exemptand everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die, they hide in pairs
and read about themselves --in colour, with their eyelids shut

- Craig Raine

Night Poem

A favorite night poem.

We were very tired, we were very happy
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
The sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

- Recuerdo, Edna St.Vincent Millay (1892-1951)

This Week's Economist

Interesting reads from The Economist this week:

Wall Street vs Wall Street Why the stock prices of U.S. investment banks are lacklusture despite record earnings (read: why the recent announcement that we will get more stock options in lieu of cash bonuses does not bode well :-( ).

Obituary of Kenneth Lay, founder of Enron, who died of a massive heart attack last week - he believed he was innocent until the end, and was likened to Job in his misfortunes. erhmm.

Every older brother that a man has increases his chances of being homosexual by 33%. Having younger brothers and female siblings have no effect on his sexual orientation.

The Confucius Institute is fast becoming an icon of Chinese language and culture overseas, much like the Goethe Institute, Alliance Francaise and the British Council are for the respective countries they represent.

(Note: Some articles are only available in the print edition in the staff lounge)

Variations On A Word

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell it.

We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word Love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.

Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

- Margaret Atwood

Like BF was saying tonight, "it" is definitely there, but is "it" enough for them to risk it all, to "hold on" or to "let go"?

Atwood calls "it" the word that "has only four letters" - a little word that purports to hold up so much. "Far too short", "too sparse". Now, that's quite true, isn't it? "It's not love that [polar bears] don't want to fall into, but that fear."

Only a much longer Love, made of Infinite letters, that fills all of silence and Eternity will do.

(Came across the Brian Evans gallery of soundscapes. It's lovely to see how he puts colour and shapes to music.)

Turquoise Lakes

(Photos of Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan, 2001)
Was talking to someone about travels in Sichuan and remembered these scenes. Gorgeous, ain't it?