Your Grandchildren

Well, I'm not surprised. The real question is whether their parents are themselves reasonably good people. But to my mind, many of them would get tired of giving a moment of unprejudiced thought to such questions as "Why should I live?" We care about smartphones, food and drink, cosmetics, and seek attention (deserved or not) on the net day after day. I don't mean that these things must be unworthy to do, but the is that we usually care too much about them while giving little or no attention to many other things. Yes, you can call it blindness. Our grandchildren will probably be even worse off, not only due to climate change.

The Way We Dance

I didn't like dancing or seeing people dancing, and never found myself able to appreciate any part of Hong Kong's popular youth culture (so some people said I was cynical and 老人精). But when I was leaving the cinema, I missed all the movements, all the steps, all their pain, and all their smile, all against the background of dance music. I have a hunch that《狂舞派》("The Way We Dance") will be considered by many film critics as a remarkable Hong Kong movie of all time.

Crying in the Party

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.”