I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw you. We were in the living room of my parent’s home. We heard the sounds of someone coming down. We turned around and it was you, with a smile so bright, so full of life.

It wasn’t until later that I found out that the smile was hiding a deeper sorrow, a heartache caused by a breakup. But by then, I already had fallen hard for you, and you, unknowingly or not, shattered my heart in return.

I am in my room, sitting on my bed, with a book in my hand, probably a Murakami. A few days before Christmas, it is cold, but the house is alive, with all its family members back, filled with excitement of hosting new guests.

I hear steps coming up to my room. It is you. You ask if you can come in. You ask if you can borrow a book from me. Surprised, but pleasantly so, we start talking. We sit down on the thick carpet of my floor, lean against my bed, and before I know it, we are talking about all the important things in life that people talk about when they first get to know each other – with an understated tension, but a spark of unanticipated excitement.

At some point, you fall asleep in my lap. I am frozen. “Does she like me?” “What does this mean?” “What do I do?” “What am I supposed to do?”. I decide to gently lift and hold you in my arms, carry you to my bed and cover you with a blanket. I look at your face for a long time, serene but so fragile. In amazement of this small miracle. Afraid you will wake up, because I don’t want this moment to end. My finger tracing your neck, thinking I discovered the secret of life. I sit on my bed, next to your side, and guard you, until I forget time.

Hours later, you are up and we are sitting on my bed – a comfortable silence and conversation, deep in the night. And then, there is the blackout. “This can’t be for real”. Sensible as you are, you suggest to look for candles. I go down and come back, you light them. A faint and soft glow envelops the room. We continue our talk, and at some point I mention to you that I don’t know how to tie a tie. You tell me how you used to help your grandpa on Sunday. You look up and ask me if I have a tie, and I hand you one. You get up and sit close behind me. You slowly wrap your arms around me, softly whisper in my ear, gently show and teach me, how to tie a tie.

Days later, and you left. Snow fell the day after, as if to erase the footprints in my memories. Faintly, I still hear you knocking on my door, asking if you can come in.

As if snow was falling in April.

It’s 6pm. I’m sitting in my chair, with a book. I look out the window, and listen to the cars drive by, drifting away in distance.

I imagine we’re walking on the streets, your hand in mine. The sun is setting, radiating a slow golden glow that covers the city, the trees and the streets. Life slows down, and we are no longer in a rush. The occasional talk. Silently smiling at me with your eyes. So natural, yet so extraordinary at the same time. Your hands feel soft. And the world is made just for you and me. Melodies in my head, playing the soundtrack of our life. As time goes by.

Standing in front of the door, I remember the feeling of coming back home.

I walk in the building, greet the concierge, go into the elevator, anxiously wait for it to go up to the thirteenth floor. The cranky elevator takes it sweet time, every time, no exception. But then I am there, in front of the door. And I know you are behind that door. Waiting for me to come home. I no longer have to come home to an empty space, unlit and dark, curtains drawn, cold, with only the walls speaking to me.

You are lying on the couch, book in hand, covered with a blanket, soft music playing. You hear the sound of the key turning, the door opening, and you look up from your book to greet me, a smile understated from the outside but so warm from the inside. I walk over to you and I give you a hug. Your hair smells nice, you must have just showered. I rest my head on your shoulders for a bit. You stroke my hair, and ask me if it was a long day. I nod, close my eyes and feel the tension flow out of my body, finally home.

In the park. Music in the distance. Reading.

When a girl came to sit next to me. Quietly.
With headphones.
Her look drifting off. Smoked a cigarette.

I lean back, and gaze at the sky.

After a while she puts out her cigarette
picks up a pocket book from her bag. Japanese.

I’m breathing real slow. Life is good.

(to the girl with headphones who came to sit next to me, in washington square park, on a sunny saturday afternoon – July 25, 2009 ~4pm)

green trees solitary, passing by
quiet, desolate towns
stories, unspoken and untouched
clouds, still, stern and magnificent. looking over us.
blue, endless blue sky
the end of summer
the end of all summers

Sitting on the curb, the cars in front of us driving past. The street light illuminating the little stall where we got our food from: a bowl of beef noodles for me, chicken rice for my friend. We’re waiting for our other friends to join us – there is a party to go to tonight, after all.

We silently eat our food, gazing at the cars passing in front of us. Their lights, yellow and red, illuminating the dark night. It’s chill, but not too cold. A slight breeze keeps us comfortable.

“This rice is good”. I inhale the heat of the soup, take a bite of my noodles, turn my head and smile in agreement.

His friends arrive shortly after – grabbing a quick bite – doing some pre-party drinking from the local 7-11, and off we go, to the second floor in Taipei. The “second floor” is really on the second floor, it turns out. In line, I show my ID to the guard. He looks at the face in my passport, then lifts his eyes, gazes at me for a second or three, looks at my passport again. “It’s okay if you wanna use, but please don’t sell any, okay?” I give him a slightly blank look, smile and go in.

The night is still young – as the evening progresses, people come and go, and the floor fills up. The music becomes more intense, taking over our sensual sensory experiences. We start dancing, and dancing. To the beat that doesn’t stop. Friends come and go, it’s getting late and they start leaving. But it’s me and my friend. And we go on and on. We laugh, we concentrate, we leave our consciousness on the floor. We dance til deep in the night.

It’s getting light when we get out. “The birds are singing, fool!” he shouts at me, laughing, and chucking his half full bottle of water at me, trying to splash me. I laugh and push him back. As we cross the streets, we see people in suit, carrying briefcases, on their way to the train station, ready to go to work.

hearing you speak like that brings back memories of a time when the music really meant something. a time of relating, where people seem to shed the defenses built up while living in this sometimes cruel world…a place where people were friends no matter our backgrounds – where we lived, what we did in life, what ethnicity we were – everything was dropped because the only thing that mattered was that we stepped in time with the beat, and that is how we shared our universe. can’t explain the thoughts and the things we did. it just meant something then and it no longer means the same thing now…

Why is it that we attach such great importance to the need to be understood? It is in shared understanding that we find solace, comfort and a feeling best described as ‘home’. Home is not the place where you were born, or were you grew up, or even where you spent most of the time of your life. Home is not even a space. Home is where you are understood. Where unspoken words resonate, where people are able to read your tiniest gesture and know what to do with it. Where people know that something is wrong with you, depending simply on how you say and convey “hello”, “hi”, or “hey” to them.

Home is what you lose when you travel so much that people no longer notice your silences, let alone are capable of reading them. Home is what you long for when something terrible happened to you, when you need company, not just any company, but your true friends, those you (thought you) share an unspoken bond with. When you are too confused to make sense of what happened, and too tired to explain over and over again to the people the whole story. Where not only you wish you didn’t have to spend so much energy in explaining the obvious and the trivial, but where you wish someone could help you take off the load, assist you in thinking it through. When mere words are inadequate. Where you wish you had, in Joan Didion’s words, “a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines.”

Tired, of explaining, of coping, of pretending I am okay. Grasping for air. . and sorrowless understanding. Drowning in a vast bottomless sea, miles and miles going nowhere.

You wonder what is worse: To be overcome in moments of time with extreme surges of grief – where you walk down the road, lost in thought and memory, and tears just well up in your eyes, uncontrollably. Or the thought that eventually, this too, shall pass away. I never understood how the passing of time, the healing of wounds, can be considered a consolation. What if I don’t want it to pass away? What good is it to stop feeling, to lose hope, to give up, to give in to resignation? To be slowly dying away, losing the capacity to feel, even if it is pain.

Being alone is part of coping with grief. Grief, as Freud once suggested, being a state of mind that should be classified as a mental disorder, one related to manic depression. Grief, however, also that can be overcome with time, and something we eventually all have to deal with, somewhere, sometime. Being alone as a ritual, allowing the irrational possibility that your lost one will, can, might, has to eventually return. If only you continue the routines, as if she was still here. . If only, you freeze yourself in time, in stasis. . There is still, there remains the possibility, the hope that she might return.

But of course, she is long gone. I just pretend she isn’t.

La Ritournelle (the only love song)

Oh nothing’s going to change my love for you
I wanna spend my life with you
So we make love on the grass under the moon
No one call tell, damned if I do
Forever journey on golden avenues
I drift in your eyes since I love you
I got that beat in my veins for only rule
Love is to share, mine is for you

It sounds like something straight from a Murakami novel: the chair on the top of the hill at the end of the world. And yet, it really exists. b and I rented a car, in search of some .. solitude, together. We printed out a Google map with directions, brought some books and snacks, and took off on a whimsical note, looking for some combination of adventure and quiet, as well as time alone together.

Who knew that there is this little beach 40 minutes away from where we live? On a strange day where it was over 60 degrees in New England, with a strong wind blowing, the weather was nice, with wind blowing in our hair, with dogs frolicking around, and the setting quiet but not all desolate. Walking on the avenue, we gazed at the boundless sea, fueling our imagination, wondering what was beyond the horizon.

But we digressed – we were in search of world’s end. Turns out we missed one turn, and instead went too far, ending up at the beach instead. Sometimes trivial choices of left-or-right lead you off the original destination, but nevertheless, what this teaches us, I guess, is that life is less about destinations than it is about the journey itself. After a nice walk at the beach, we turned around. We got to world’s end.

Arriving there, we were told by an old lady with a nice yet firm voice that we were really late, that the park was about to close. Whether we still wanted to go in. “Yes, please”. She charged us five instead of the usual ten dollars entrance fee. Wow, a discount at world’s end! And so we went in.

Left or right? What to do? Faced with the choice, we instead decided to opt for neither. We went straight up the hill. Racing b for the top, she suddenly pointed out – there it was – the chair on the top of the hill at the end of the world.

It was about to get dark, the sun was setting. We had to turn back fast and get out before the lady closed the park. But before we went back, we enjoyed a brief moment of bliss, sitting on the chair, together enjoying the marvelous view that I will leave up to your imagination. We capped the night in satisfactory fashion with some good Italian food at North End. Glorious day.

What do movies tell us about what kind of people we are?

Imagine the following: you are an alien from outer space, who is about to get into the space ship to visit planet Earth. Before you leave, you are instructed to learn as much as possible about the people and their culture who live on this planet. Your homework: to watch all the movies produced in the last year.

Think about what kind of image you would get from looking at what kind of movies we produce and watch as people. There is an abundance of Hollywood movies. You might think we are all American. Or that we imagine to be super heroes. So much special effects. How would our lives look like if they were like Hollywood movies? But of course, our lives are most of the time nothing like Hollywood movies.

Showing a movie that just portrays how we are would be boring. Would it not? Ann Hui doesn’t think so. She provocatively titled her latest movie The Way We Are. Ann Hui is perhaps the most gifted story teller in Hong Kong, at least when it comes to film making. The same way Ozu chronicled the lives of Japanese society, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang documented the day-and-nights of Taiwanese people growing up, Ann Hui is the cultural biographer of Hong Kong.

When it comes to Hong Kong movies, most people might think of kung-fu stars, like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or Jet Li, or perhaps triad movies, made famous by John Woo, and more recently Johnnie To. Some might even think of Wong Kar Wai. But the films of Ann Hui are those who directly go to the core of what Hong Kong is about – but this core is as most of our lives perhaps unspectacular, mundane, and banal.

Ann Hui nevertheless manages to weave an incredibly rich story detailing the mundane lives of people in a part of Hong Kong that is often sensationalized: Tin Shui Wai. It’s a part of town that is considered desolate, characterized by social problems, unemployment, with high buildings (some might think of them as Hong Kong’s version of “the projects”).

What is worth telling here is a story from a part of society that you otherwise would never see or hear. But that they don’t exist in our popular imagination doesn’t mean they exist, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t know about. Most movies have spoiled the way we “consume” them: often slick, highly visualized, with something to grab our attention every three seconds (if not less). This movie by Ann Hui needs to be slowly taken in, with patience.

That is to say, our starting assumption should be that there are really no boring people. That every person has a story to tell, and that when they try to tell you their story, the least you could do is listen to them, with the patience and respect every human being deserves. Because, that’s the way we are. Ann Hui, thank you for reminding us of this important lesson.

(I was compelled to write this review after reading this review on IMDB that I .. slightly disagreed with).

 Last Friday, we went to Club Passim in Cambridge, MA to see Vienna Teng. Going to see and hear Vienna is always a delight. She is an exemplary human being in many ways. An inspiring artist, a humble person, in search of excellence.

Allow me to tell you why. My first encounter with her was a moment of serendipity – my friend Herman asked me whether I wanted to go see a concert a few days before the weekend. Being in Philadelphia at the time, the invitation came at the right time as I had an urge to visit New York City, so despite knowing little about who would perform that night, I decided to go, visit NYC, hang out with my good friend and open myself up to the chance of good music. Little did I know I would be blown away.

It was in a small venue, and the concert was really a sample of a few artists who all would play a few songs and tracks. After a few unnoticeable tracks, this Asian looking girl took stage, started to play the piano and blew my friend and I both away. Breathlessly listening, I occasionally would stomp my friend and he would nudge back saying “I know”. . I went back home, ordered all her CDs on Amazon (friends making fun of me), and started looking into her background, fascinated by this human being. It turns out she is Asian-American, Taiwanese descent, grew up in California, and what caught my interest: got a degree in Computer Science at Stanford, even went to work briefly for Cisco but in the midst of the dot.com boom, decided to pursue a career in the arts. Perhaps I saw some semblance of that in myself – who also briefly pursued Computer Science (but never finished it) and instead turned to study China Studies instead. In her, I see someone to aspire to. After last Friday’s concert, I am even more inspired. Here’s why.

The concert last Friday was my third, and while she has always been a great performer, her confidence and conviction made me think she really took it to the next level. Her passion, her singing skill, have all been there before, but seeing her how comfortable she was in a setting where she had not planned a specific order of songs to sing, but was taking requests from the audience, experimenting with some tracks while at the same time exuberating enjoyment, comfort and confidence left me wondering how I can ever reach such heights.

I’m really impressed with how she seems to be quite a humble, down-to-earth and perhaps even introverted person, who nonetheless enjoys interacting and talking with the audience, telling us little bits and pieces of insight behind every song, while making jokes about herself. But how also once she is about to sing a song, becomes an intense performer who takes pride in her work – it’s quite a stunning transformation. 

I think her performance for me exemplifies the virtue of ‘excellence’ the way Hannah Arendt has described it. Excellence, necessarily a public act, caring for what you care about, to incessantly improve yourself, because you take serious what you do, but also tremendously enjoy what you do. To measure yourself against others, not because you want to be better than them, but because you want to be a better person. To make a difference in the world through this pursuit of excellence. 

She mentioned briefly during the concert what her feelings were with regard to her being an Asian-American. How she never thought of herself as an Asian-American artist, but just as an artist. How others look at her and see her as such, but that she herself refused to be cast in a category. That perhaps people should like her work because for what it is. 

To me, as an Asian-European, that is incredibly inspiring. It might be ironic, because she doesn’t think of herself as an Asian-American, but in the process becomes a role model, precisely because she refuses to “play that card”, to be reduced to a single adjective, even thought that might come with many benefits: the first Asian-American artist! being the biggest fish (in a small pond)! Instead, she wants people to measure her, and she measures herself, squarely in the larger public of all creative artists.

Which leads me to the end of this post: in requesting songs from the audience, I could not resist requesting a particular song (that nobody else I think requested that night): a song sung in Chinese. I was considering for a brief second whether I should yell “Green Island” in English or “Lu Dao” in Chinese, deciding for the latter. Great was my satisfaction and intense my enjoyment when she sung the song to cap the night. And what a night it was. (I recorded most of the songs that night in pretty good quality, leave me a comment if you are interested in hearing them).