As many Hong Kong people know, this is a Cantonese song sung by Eason Chan. It tells a story about a young man bursting into tears after swigging a few glasses of alcoholic drinks. The joyful party music was then brought to a halt and his friends came around him. The story ends with the consoling thought (or the thought consoling to the lyric writer himself) that when all young tears run dry (!) you will find yourself a mature person missing the old days. Physiologically speaking, however, tears are secretions that can be repeatedly produced through lacrimation as long as you are not dead.
Understandably, "young tears" may be different. I have heard from many people that they sometimes felt extremely lonely when in the loud laughing crowd, but would not cry in the public after a certain age. Deep loneliness cannot be dissolved easily by talks about the bright side of life or the eternality of anything. Loud laughs in the party are but flavourless background music when your mind plunged deeply into loneliness.
Fortunately, there are some people who often laugh from the bottom of their hearts, without a gleam of melancholy. Perhaps that may be a stage that will pass eventually. Yet they deserve to be envied by any “mature person.”
