In a night a few weeks ago the writer of this post couldn’t sleep till the small hours and decided to spend the waking time on researching on what some Chinese poets had written about insomina. Below are a few of related poems (or parts of them):

張繼：「月落烏啼霜滿天， 江楓漁火對愁眠； 姑蘇城外寒山寺， 夜半鐘聲到客船。」

蘇軾：「……轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠……」

李商隱：「雲母屏風燭影深， 長河漸落曉星沉…… 」

杜甫：「……床頭屋漏無干處，雨腳如麻未斷絕。自經喪亂少睡眠，長夜沾濕何由徹！……」

韋應物：「懷君屬秋夜，散步詠涼天。空山松子落，幽人應未眠。」

張九齡：「自君之出矣，不復習理殘機。思君如滿月，夜夜減清輝。」

白居易：「……夕殿螢飛思悄然，孤燈挑盡未成眠。……」

溫庭筠：「玉爐香，紅蠟淚，偏照畫堂秋思。眉翠薄，鬢雲殘， 夜長衾枕寒。梧桐樹，三更雨， 不道離情正苦。一葉葉，一聲聲，空階滴到明。」

On Monday (March 31) afternoon I went to a book talk at the University of Hong Kong, organised by the HKU library. The writer invited to speak at the talk was Jeffrey Archer. (Readers of this post interested in who this person is could, for a start, visit the Wikepaedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Archer. Archer’s offcial personal website is: http://www.jeffreyarcher.co.uk/index.htm)

I haven’t read anything written by Archer, but I know he’s a best-seller novelist. So it’s pretty much out of curiosity about what a best-seller novelist would say about writing and about his works that I went to the talk. Archer delivered an entertaining talk. In response to Archer’s well-scripted words and calculated gestures, the audience burst into laughters almost every half minute during the the one-and-a-half hour talk, whole-heartedly or out of courtesy.

Among a wide range of issues he touched upon, he spoke about his experience of getting his first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, published. It had been turned down 17 (hope I remember right the figure) times before a publisher decided to publish it. He also told his audience how he organised his life when he wrote his recently published novel, A Prisoner of Birth. At some point of the book talk, when someone from the audience challenged Archer by saying that there were similarities in this book and the novel about revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo, Archer admitted so, and went further to say that his book was intended to be a contemporary version of The Count of Monte Cristo. He said, when he set out to write this book, he had this daily schedule: woke up at 5:30 in the moring, then wrote from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., then took a two-hour break and resumed writing from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00, then had another two-hour break and back to writing for another two hours, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., then took another two-hour break, then back to writing from 6:00 p.m to 8: p.m., and he went to bed around 9:00 p.m. This went on for many weeks, until the first draft of this recently novel was completed. Then he put the draft aside for a few weeks, and then took it out and refined it into the second draft. In the end the novel that its readers would read turned out to be the 15th (again, I’m not sure I remember the number correctly) draft. Archer’s revelation of a writer’s life seemed to succeed in impressing the audience that the fame and success he has achieved was well deserved. Writing eight hours each day. That certainly requires much self-discipline. 

When answering questions from the audience, Archer made the point that it’s safer for writers to write about things that they are familiar with, not things they don’t know. Indeed, he didn’t hide the fact that it’s because of his few years of imprisonment as a result of being convicted guilty of perjury in 2001 that he was able to write in detail the prison scenes in his new book.

Archer also made a point that there are differences between a writer and a story-teller. I didn’t quite get what he meant by this, but I got the impression that he wanted people to consider himself a story-teller. To illustrate what he meant by story-telling, at the end of this talk he read out an extract. He said he didn’t know who’s the writer of that story, but he believed he/she would be an Arab (my question: why? Can’t people other than Arabs write a story with an Arabian setting? I later found this story on the Internet, and I’ll append the story to this post for readers of this post to work out what in this story makes Archer think that it’s an excellent story. See below.)

When someone from the audience asked Archer at which stage did he have the ending of his novels worked out in his mind, Archer replied that what often happened in the course of his writing a novel was that he wouldn’t know the ending of the story until the very late part of it. His argument was something like this: “If even I, as the writer, don’t know the ending, then it’s very likely that you, as the readers, do not know how the story is going to end as well, and that helps to keep the readers go on reading”. So writing a novel is opposite to writing a short story, Archer said. When writing a novel, you don’t need to have an ending in mind until the very late part of your writing; when writing a short story, you begin with an ending in mind, and then develop your story in the direction of that ending. Quite a point to ponder upon for aspiring writers, I guess.

After the book talk ended, Archer stayed behind to autograph his book(s) for people who bought it/them at the site. A Prisoner of Birth was priced exorbitantly for HK$300 something (again, I forget the exact figure), and although it was being sold at a 20% discount at the book talk, I still would have to pay around HK$240 to get the book to get Archer’s autograph on it, not to mention that I’ll probably have to queue up with the others and wait for another 30 minutes for the autograph. So I left the book talk venue without buying Archer’s new book.

P.S. The story that Archer praised a lot at the book talk (quoted from the website http://www.k-state.edu/english/baker/english320/Maugham-AS.htm , with minor punctuaion changes. ) :
Appointment in Sammara: “There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, she said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

To me, this story contains food for thought. Rather than trying to work out why Jeffrey Archer considers this a good story, readers of this post might like to ponder on what message this story tries to convey.

I got infected by flu a couple of days ago. Since then I’ve been lethargic about almost everything. What symptoms have I had? Just mild headache, sore throat, slightly stuffy nose, very occasional cough, occasional attacks of feeling of coldness, and occasional slight fever. Yet merely these minor physical discomforts have already been enough to make me disinterested in eating, in talking, in having my regular cup of coffee with my wife at our favorite “tsar-tsan-teng” (restaurant in the HK language) every morning, in responding to my wife’s questions of concern (now, this time I have a good excuse), in meeting up with friends (partly for the reason of not to spread germs/viruses to them), in doing my freelance income-generating work, in doing my regular voluntary work, in practising the few musical instruments (Guzheng, Erhu and Dongxiao) that I’ve been learning to play, and in doing almost anything in life. I can’t imagine how I would behave if I suffer from illnesses more severe in nature to the extent like those that had tortured Lydia Shum (Fei-fei) until she passed away. Maybe I would just kill myself? Or perhaps I would even be too lethargic to do that?

In Buddhism, there is this notion of the “Four Noble Truths”. The first of these four truths is: Life is suffering. But this notion is different from the relatively naive version of “there is suffering in life”, which is a more widely accepted notion. What constitutes suffering in life? Illnesses, for one, in addition to a host of many other elements of life, which I’m too lazy to explore into at this moment. How does the notion of “there is life in suffering” link to the notion of “life is suffering”? There are people who would admit that “there is suffering in life” but reject that life itself is suffering. From a really Buddhist point of view, it’s not enough to make one a genuine Buddhist if one only accepts “there is suffering in life” but rejects “life is suffering”. Here, maybe the key issue is how the word “suffering” is being interpreted by different people. Anyway, again I’m too lethargic to elaborate on this topic now.

I would have to admit that, being a person having retired from regular full-time work and able to live a simple yet decent life by relying on income from investment and freelance work, I might be abusing the luxury of being able to stay home to allow my lethargy its full play just for this minor illness called flu. Most people, having acquired flu, would have to keep going to school or to work and staying home for a rest remains a luxury to them. I should be grateful for being given the luxury.

In Buddhism, there is another notion called “non-duality”, i.e. not to fall into either extreme of things. So acquiring flu and being lethargic for that should have its positive effects as well as the negative ones. For the past couple of days, during my flu, at least I managed to read a large portion of a science fiction that I would only read when I’m riding the MTR or waiting for a bus at a bus stop. Also, I managed to write this post for the blog.

(Readers of this post who do not know who Lydia Shum was may like to visit this site to get an idea of the person this post writes about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Shum )

What’s the life expantacy of a Hong Kong female? The CIA World Factbook says it’s 84.6 (as at 2007) (source: http://www.indexmundi.com/hong_kong/life_expectancy_at_birth.html). Although the life expectancy for a person born in 1945 would be a few years shorter than 84.6 (the writer of this post could not find the exact figure), I would still be inclined to consider that Lydia Shum, who was born on 21 July 1945 and passed away on 19 Feb 2008 at the age of 62, lived a life much too short to deserve God’s early summon to leave this world. 

However, for a person who began her career in Hong Kong’s entertainment industry at the age of 15 (in 1960), Lydia Shum made her continuous presence to the people of Hong Kong for a period of 47 years, i.e. almost half a century. And who in the world (not to say Hong Kong)  has been able to stay active in the entertainment business in its history for a period longer than Shum did? What is more, what Lydia Shum did for the people of Hong Kong and for those in the wider Chinese community throughout the world, is that throughout her performer career she brought laughters to her audience. Laughters do not necessary imply happiness. The writer of this post buys into the Buddhist notion that life is suffering, and that happiness in life is unachieveable for people who lead only a mundane life. However, this should not prevent one from living a life of laughters, albeit admist suffering. Indeed, the fact that life is suffering makes laughters and fun all the more valuable for ordinary people like the writer of this post. Thus the loss of performer Lydia Shum is saddening, for throughout her entertainment career her presence always brought her audience joy, fun and laughters. Lydia Shum was large in size, and for that reason she was nicknamed “Fei-fei” by people of Hong Kong (a side-note for English readers who do not know Chinese: “Fei” means “fat” in Chinese). But every time when they refer to her with this nickname, whether it’s when she was alive or when now that she’s gone, most of them call Shum “Fei-fei” with sibling-like affection. And it’s beyond doubt that she deserved that.

Despite her always-fun-provoking image in front of her audience, Shum probably lived a life much gloomier than she appeared on stage after suffering understandably the most serious setback in life, when her husband Adam Cheng Siu-chow left her for another woman in early 1988, only eight months after she had given birth to their daughter Joyce Cheng Yan-yee. But Shum was a brave woman. She recovered fast, and kept on entertaining her Chinese audience in Hong Kong and Chinese communities in other parts of the world with her unique laughters. This bravery in her won the heart of probably every of her audience.

It certainly is extremely sad and unfortunate for an eight-month-old baby girl to lose her father and for a twenty-year-old young woman to lose her mother. Both things happened to Joyce Cheng, Fei-fei’s daughter. Joyce was never given a chance to enjoy her father’s love in the way most children do during their infancy, childhood, and adolescence. And now, having just passed her teenage, her very dear mother has been taken away from her. All parents with children would certainly have their hearts gone out to Joyce (the writer of this post parents a nineteen-year-old young man). In that regard, it’s comforting to see in the past few weeks since Fei-fei’s passing away how maturely Joyce has handled her mother’s passing way. Fei-fei would have smiled with great satisfaction upon seeing the way Joyce has been handling the misfortune of losing her at such a young age.

Without doubt, Fei-fei’s laughters will be fondly remembered along her name among all Chinese who have seen her performance in the past 47 years. Who hasn’t?

(P.S. Just a side note: Lydia Shum received her high school education at the Shanghai No. 3 Girls’ Middle School (http://www.ssnz.sh.cn/), which is probably the top high school in Shanghai. I happened to have visited this school in 1996 and 1997 and lived inside its campus for two weeks, when I was Head of the Chinese Department at Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School (http://www.bggs.qld.edu.au/) and took my students to visit this school in these two years, because the two schools were sister schools at the time. So I’m connected to Lydia Shum not just as an admirer of her character and talents, but also in having had some common experience in a very remote way.)

The quotation from Mother Teresa below (texts in bold print) is more for reminding myself on how I should handle my life than for sharing. Readers of this blog are welcome to contemplate on it though.

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centred; forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway.

If you are sucessful, you will win some false friends and some true friends; succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone would destroy overnight; build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway.

Give the world your best anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway.

Note: Believers of different faiths could interpret the word ‘God’ in the quotation in their own way, in accordance with how their faith defines the word. I interpret the word to be equivalent to one’s conscience.

In the Chinese culture, today (7 Feb) is the Chinese New Year (CNY) Day. It’s also called the “Spring Festival”. On CNY day, and for a few days onwards, when the Chinese people meet their relatives, friends and acquaintances, they would exchange a few phrases of good will such as wishing each other good luck, making great fortune, etc. Like Christmas and the Mid-Autumn Festival, in Chinese cities like Hong Kong, the CNY has become highly commercialized, in the sense it has become an occasion for many businesses to make money from it. When I see a commercial on the TV paid for by a certain business, such as a supermarket, offering good wishes to its audience, I can’t help suspecting that the boss of this supermarket does so more for his/her business than for really wanting his audience good luck.

Although I’m Chinese, I’ve never liked CNY. I would even say that I have always disliked passing CNY, for different reasons at different stages of my life.

I didn’t like CNY even when I was small. Most people would find this strange, because children are supposed to be its great beneficiaries: they get to wear new clothes and new shoes, eat plenty of candies and other confections that are only available during CNY, and, most of all, accumulate wealth through receiving “lai-see’s” (red paper packets with money inside) from married adults they happen to meet during the CNY days. And they usually meet many adults on the first few days of the CNY, because these are the few days in a year that their parents would take them to see their relatives and friends by making visits one after another.

True, that’s the general situation. But when it comes to individual situation, I never benefited from CNY in such ways when I was a child. As far as getting to wear new clothes is concerned, more than often it became a disappointing and frustrating issue, because when I was small my family was rather poor financially, and while seeing other kids wear new clothes and new shoes on the CNY days walking proudly on the streets, I and my siblings often did not get our wish that our parents would buy us new clothes and new shoes fulfilled. There was often some hope when time got near CNY, but often it just ended in disappointment: we still had to wear the same old clothes and old shoes when we were taken by our father to various places to make new year visits.

But did I not get to eat more candies and confections than usual. The answer is affirmative. However, the candies and confections were things I never liked. On the few days before and after the CNY day, my parents would make various kinds of traditional confections specially for CNY, such as dumplings in sweet soup (tang-yuan) and fried taro strips. The problems was, while every year my parents would try to convince me that the dumplings in sweet soup was tasty to the extent of almost coercing me to eat them, I would feel it’s like having to go through an ordeal every time I was made to finish a bowl of such dumplings in sweet soup. At least there was something positive that I learnt from such experience: that something that’s nectar to person A could be poison to person B. It’s due to such experience that throughout my life I never make efforts to persuade other people to eat something that I think is delicious, because I strongly believe that while something is delicious to me, it can be the opposite to another person.

What about the benefit of accumulating wealth through receiving “lai-sees” from married adults? Well, more often than not I ended up collecting lai-sees without accumulating wealth. Therefore in the end it turned out to be another frustrating experience, even more frustrating than not getting new clothes to wear. What happened was, due to the poor financial conditions of my family when I was small, my parents would confiscate the money I and my siblings got from the lai-see’s. They did that with really grand reasons: they would save up the money for us, so that it could be used for purposes related to our studies, such as buying dictionaries, etc. They never considered that we didn’t get such lai-see’s without making sacrifices. Acutally, from the CNY day onwards, for a few consecutive days, I would have to go out with my father regardless of how cold or how rainy the weather was. He liked making new year visits to his relatives and friends. So from the first day of CNY, he would take us to his relatives’ and friends’ places, usually one after another and going to more than five places on the same day. Everytime when we arrived at the place of one of his relatives or friends, my father would begin a long chat with those people, leaving me (and sometimes also my siblings) bored to death with sitting in his proximity with strangers or semi-strangers not knowing what to say or do except sitting there and continuously feeding myself with candies offered to me (TV was still a luxury when I was small, and households my father visited generally did not possess one for poor kids like me to kill time by watching whatever was on it, like kids nowadays can do). But the whole exercise was really boring. To me, the only positive outcome of such visit was receiving the lai-see’s from the perons who my father visited. But then eventually they would be confiscated.

In addition to not being the beneficiary of the above myths about what kids would like about CNY, I also had to suffer other things due to CNY. Because my father was kind of a Buddhist, he would make visits to various temples during the several days after the new CNY began. And he often took me with him. The problem was, every time when I was in a monastery or temple, whether Buddhist or Taoist, I would be made to feel very uncomfortable by the irritating smell of the incense being burned in the temples. I always got my eyes and noses irritated to the extent that I would leave the temple or monastery with tears in my eyes, not because of anything sad, but because the incense had irritated my nose and my eyes so much.

That’s why I never enjoyed CNY when I was a child.

When I was in my teenage, I disliked CNY for some other reasons. At that time I subscribed to communism and when the Cultural Revolution in China occurred, I was excited about the movement to “eliminate the four olds and establish the old news” (po-si-jiu, li-si-xin). One of the ‘olds’ to be eliminated was traditional Chinese folk customs. The traditional ways of celebrating CNY were of course among the targets of elimination. I particularly detested (I still do, although to a much lesser degree) the practice of saying four-character phrases to whoever you meet on the CNY day or the few days after it, wishing them things like “make great fortunes”, “get unexpected money at hand”, etc., and, for someone subscribing the communist belief that one deserves only the fruits of one’s labour, they definitely fell into the cateogory of bourgeois or feudalistic wishful thoughts that should be eliminated. Understandably, such interpretation of the nature of traditional CNY practices would only enhance my dislike of CNY. The good thing during this stage of life of mine was, as a teenager, I was rebellious enough not to succumb to my father’s demand of following him to various places to make new year visits to his relatives and friendsf any more. That saved me from having to endure the boredom of seeing people who I didn’t know why I should be seeing once every year.

After entering adulthood, my zeal for communism died down, partly because of my disillusionment with the ideology as a result of the series of political events that happened in China in the years 1976-80 (and especially 1976) and partly because of the hard reality of various aspects of life that I had to face after leaving the ivory tower of university. However, my dislike of the CNY persisted. This time the reasons of my dislike were a mixture of those that made me dislike this Chinese festivity during my childhood and my teenage. And then while time passed by year by year, the dislike persisted across to another stage of my life, i.e. when I became a married person.

Living in a community permeated with Chinese culture, a married person is, during the CNY period, expected to hand out lai-sees to those still unmarried, regardless of whether the latter are children or adults. The person is also expected to make visits to relatives from his/her family and those from the family of his/her spouse. Many of these relatives are people one would not think of for a second throughout most part of a year, and suddenly on this CNY, or maybe a day or two before, one would have to make plans on the itinerary of making visits to these people, or plans on hosting gatherings at one’s own place to accommodate visits by these relatives. Those who subscribe this practice of the Chinese culture would say that it’s exactly because relatives and friends are too busy to contact each other over the year that the CNY provides a good chance for everyone to meet up and sustain the relationship. Yet I find much irony and hypocricy in such a justification for the practice. If there are people who are not close enough to you to the extent that you don’t make any effort to contact them occasionally during the span of almost a whole year, why should you want to do that simply because it’s CNY time and because they are your relatives?

And then there is this issue of giving out lai-sees. The Chinese claim that giving out lai-sees is a gesture of good will. But then if one naively believes that and just gives out red paper packets with slips inside expressing good wishes instead of cash notes, then one will very likely be finger-pointed from the back by the recipients of one’s lai-sees after the encounter is over. So any lai-see giver is expected to put money, preferably cash notes rather than cash coins, into the red paper packets, so as to make their receipients happy. Now here comes the issue of how much money one should put into the lai-sees. If it’s really just a symbolic manifestation of good will, then theoretically speaking the amount that should go in the red packet should be constant, with no concern of who is to be its recipient, because after all, one shouldn’t have such partiality that one would wish one’s brother more luck than one’s cousin. But then in real life, one has to work out different amounts of money for different categories of lai-see recipients. So every time when CNY approaches and when it’s time to prepare the lai-sees, I and my wife would have to work out: first, whether for that particular year we would need put in more money than we did in the previous year in accordance with the inflation rate of the year; two, how much should be for our son, how much for our son’s cousins, how much for the janitor and the cleaner of the flat we live in (and whether the amount should be different between them), etc., etc. Often I would become irritable about having to do all these things, and sometimes my wife would take that as a sign of my being unwilling to spend money on giving out lai-sees. But that’s an unfortunately misunderstanding. I would have been happy to spend a few thousand dollars just to have someone to help deposit whatever amount of money into the bank accounts of these target lai-see recipients just to free me from having to go through the lai-sees preparation stage, to carry out the actual act of handing them out to the recipients, and, to do the verbal replay of those so-called CNY luck wishes to them. It’s actually not a matter of having to spend money. It’s a matter of being made by this culture to do something the value of which I don’t buy. For example, why should the money in the lai-see that’s to be given to my wife’s elder brother’s unmarried daughter, who probably couldn’t even address me properly when coming across me on the street, be more than that in the lai-see to be given to the janitor of the flat where we live, who helps to guard our flat from intruders and who I see almost every day? And, why, in the first place, can’t a good wish represented by a lai-see be a good wish without money in it?

With my attitude towards all these conventional practices of the Chinese culture regarding CNY, it won’t be hard for this post’s readers to appreciate the fact that for many of the years since I got married, the issue of giving out lai-sees and visiting relatives during CNY time would become a source of tension between me and my wife, who holds a much more positive and welcoming attitude towards CNY and the conventional practices associated with it. Experience in the years since we got married suggests that our amity tends to ebb during CNY time. This is sad, because the ebbing is for an unworthy reason. Perhaps my teenage fanaticism against traditional Chinese culture is still having effects on me, and for that reason I tend to be apathetic towards almost any Chinese festivity: Ching Ming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, whatever. Yet at least those festivities could be celebrated rather individually and do not involve other people. On the other hand, CNY does not allow you to pass it on your own and in your own way. Therefore, while I often manage to take other Chinese festivities neutrally, I often turn irritable during the CNY time, because it doesn’t let me pass it the way I like, but drags me into those interpersonal encounters that I see no point in having.

Now at my current age, I dislike CNY and other festivities on a more intellectual level. To me, CNY and other festivities are no more special than the rest of the 365 days of a year. It’s only due to human beings’ desire to entertain themselves with various excuses that they make certain days of the year festivity days and call them CNY or Mid-Autumn Festival or whatever. It’s similar to the case that the Earth itself does not have national boundaries to segregate groups of people, only that human beings themselves draw up this and that artificial lines on a political map of the world to separate people into nations. For a migrating bird, it flies across physical regions without having to have any passport. In the case of CNY, it’s just a normal day for non-Chinese people, not to say for a migrating bird. Call me an anti-establishmentarian for such a belief. I don’t mind.

But then one could ask, why not just pass CNY the way you like? Why not forget lai-sees giving and relatives visiting during those few days? I wish I could do that. Yet my cowardice in going against conventions makes me comply with the conventional practices, albeit reluctantly. Moreover, I don’t want to allow my own unconventional attitude towards festivities and, in particular, CNY to affect my relationship with my wife and other people of my tribe. So I still give out lai-sees. And I still make new year visits. Before my son went to study in Brisbane, I followed conventions and took him with me to make new year visits, just like what my father did to me when I was small. I was well aware that I was putting him in situations like what I was in when I was small. I sometimes would feel guilty for that. Such incompetence to defy convention would certainly be frustrating to me, and I would either hate myself for that, or turn my frustration into the irritability that I would direct to people around me during the CNY period. Of course, the greatest victim of such irritability would be my wife, who has to stand all my grumblings about CNY practices every year during this time of the year.

I’m hoping that as I get older, my negative attitude towards CNY could soften, and that I can enjoy passing CNY in future. But then, will I?

(P.S.: I began writing this post on the morning of CNY day, but it took me more than a day to complete. Partly because in the afternoon and the evening I had to make new year visits to my wife’s mother’s place and then to my younger sister’s place. So when I finish writing this post, it’s already the second day of CNY. On this second day of CNY, I was meant to make a new year visit to my wife’s eldest sister’s place with my wife. Thanks to my wife’s understanding, she accepted my preference of staying home and has made the visit on her own.)

To continue with the revelation of why I spend time on blogging, here is my third reason to blog: to make myself write. Wait a minute, isn’t this the second reason for my blogging? Well, yes and no. Yes, but as my second reason, it refers to how often I write: this blog is to serve to make me write more often than I would normally do. No, because as my third reason, it refers to providing me a platform to express my thoughts and feelings about a wider range of issues than I would do so without it.

I’m a person who has his own views on almost anything, and such views are often unconventional. I enjoy expressing my views on things. Yet, being at the same time also a person rather sensitive to other people’s feelings, I normally don’t want to make other people listen to my views, in case they would get bored with my ‘lecturing’. Not my students (when I used to teach), because as a teacher I knew my duties were anything but making my students listen to my unconventional views on various things. Not my wife, nor my son, despite their being the persons closest to me — my wife has sacrificed enough for me in other areas of her life for being with me for the past twenty odd years, and after all she has listened to my comments on this and on that with more patience than any wife should be expected to have, and my son is a teenager who deserves freedom from being lectured by his old man. What about my friends? Aren’t one’s friends supposed to be one’s good listeners? Well, sometimes I do tell (nowadays mostly via emails) them my feelings and thoughts about certain issues. Yet the problem is that when I do so, it would make them feel obliged to respond. On the other hand, through blogging, I can write my thoughts and feelings on almost anything, and thus fulfill my desire to express, without having to worry about whether I’m boring my wife, or my son, or my friends, because, first, they won’t have to listen to or read such thoughts and feelings, and, second, even if they come across my posts on this blog, they can choose to leave this blog anytime they want, without having to worry about whether they would hurt my feelings by exercising their right to freedom. For instance, right now, if they’re reading this post, they can choose to leave it regardless of up to which part they have read. I wouldn’t know, and so I wouldn’t get hurt. But if I’m telling them my views on things in a face-to-face context, or over the phone, or even via email, it’d be hard for them to turn away from me without fearing the likelihood of hurting my feelings. And on my part, I don’t want to have them to experience such fear.

Therefore, one has reasons to believe that by blogging, one’s relationship with one’s family and friends would not be jeapardized because of one’s desire to express, which would be fulfilled by this Internet platform. Hence this third reason for my blogging.

There is a fourth reason why I blog. But before I write about that, I’ll tell how I feel about the Chinese New Year in my next post, partly because in Chinese culture tomorrow is the Chinese New Year day for the Year of the Rat, partly because such a diversion serves to illustrate this third reason for blogging that I’ve just put forward.

It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my first reason for blogging. This evidence of my tardiness in writing helps to explain the second reason why I decided to blog: to make myself write more often than my self-discipline is able to do so. While I can almost write on anything of any length once I sit down and begin writing, my problem lies in taking the first step of sitting down. There are always other things that I consider more interesting or more pressing than sitting down to begin writing. Maybe I lack a reason to write. Blogging could play the role of offering me a reason to write.  So this is my second reason to blog: to make myself write. But then why do I want to make myself write? Well, maybe it’s for giving my thoughts and feelings a place to anchor, to be known, and to be re-visited, not all thoughts and feelings, but those that are not too personal to the extent that they should only be in my personal diary .

Since I was a university student (quite many years ago), I have had the habit of writing diary entries. I do this rather infrequently: around three to four times a year in recent years. I can’t say it’s because I have to work and therefore lack the time to write. Why? First, when I was in my thirties and forties, I wrote a lot more often than I do now. During such times when I spent almost sixteen hours a day on my full-time work, I still managed to write two to three entries each month. Second, more than two years ago, around September 2005, I quit my full-time work and became essentially unemployed (I still occasionally do freelance translation and other income-generating jobs though). Yet I didn’t write a single diary entry during the rest of 2005 after quitting full-time work. Then I wrote only five diary entries in 2006, and even fewer entries – four – in 2007. Clearly, the fact that I’m no longer engaged in full-time work is not inducive enough to make me write. Perhaps that has to do with what I do when I write a diary entry. When I write a diary entry, I don’t merely record what I have done or what has happened to me. Instead, I would give an account of the important events happening around the world and in the Hong Kong community, before reviewing my personal experiences and reflecting on my very personal thoughts and feelings. At times, such as at the end of a year or midway through a year, I would also make plannings and come up with a list of ‘things-to-do’, although more often than not such things-to-do would just remain good wishes. Yet this way of writing diary entries makes it a rather time-consuming and, more importantly, intellectually demanding exercise. Even if uninterrupted, it often takes me a whole session of a day (i.e. either a morning, or an afternoon, or an evening) or even more to finish writing a diary entry. Of course, diary writing is very different from blogging. A diary entry, by nature, has to be something that we keep it only to ourselves — I never believe that someone who writes diary entries with the expectation that they would one day be published or ‘accidentally seen’ by other people is genuinely writing diary. On the contrary, given the public nature of blogs, what we post on our blog would be something that we don’t mind letting other people read. Rather, it’s likely that we expect other people to read what we leave on our blog. Life is complex, and each day hundreds of things happen around us that induce various thoughts and feelings in us, and more often than not we would, knowingly or unknowingly, desire to share such thoughts and feelings with other people. Expressing such thoughts and feelings in a diary entry means keeping them to ourselves only, but the blog serves as a platform for us to air them and at the same time share them with others. As far as I’m concerned, this blog would serve as a platform for me to express my thoughts and feelings that I would reflect on and yet desire to share with other people. If they could make any impact on the way other people see things, that’s a bonus, but that’s not my main concern.

Of course, there are still times that I would write my diary entries, when I’d like to record thoughts and feelings that I consider too personal (or evil) to be known to anyone except myself (not even my wife or my son).

There is another reason why I blog. I’ll write about this next time.

I knew about the practice of blogging on the Internet more than two years ago, but haven’t really got down to begin one for myself until 7 Jan 2008. I can’t use “I’m busy” as an excuse for my tardiness, because I know there are many people who are much busier than I am and yet have been keeping their excellent personal blog(s). Anyway, this post is not meant to justify my tardiness in starting a blog, but to explain why I now want to blog.

The first reason is not to lag behind a young man called Raymond, who has produced a highly readable blog (http://buddhawarrior.wordpress.com/) with this wordpress blogger. Even before Raymond began his blog in August 2006, I had already thought of blogging. By the end of 2007, numerous wonderfully written posts had been put on his blog, which by then had already attracted over twenty thousand hits, and yet my blog was still non-existent. People say men are competitive animals. Perhaps there is some truth in this saying. So my first reason for blogging is: to catch up with Raymond in blogging. I reckon that it’ll take quite a while for my blog to reach the standard of Raymond’s in terms of the posts’ insightfulness, content, and range of topics covered, but somehow I’ll need to make a start if I don’t want to forever lag behind him.

In my next entry, I’ll reveal another reason for my blogging.

Mon, 7 January 2008 marks a special day for me, as it evidences the appearance of my first blog posting. In my next posting, I’ll explain what I’d like this blog to do for me.