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| The pool yesterday. Hong Kong Central in the distance |
I’ve started and it’s going along pretty well.
I’ve decided to convert this blog into one following my writing of the book.
LATER: major change, right?? Still some issues. Can’t get the comments working, and don’t know how to add other stuff to it. But meantime, is cool look I reckon.I don’t want to start a whole new blog, because I’ve already got this one, with nearly ten years of posts on it. I don’t want to lose it. Just redirect it to the book project.
It started with a dream.
Early last Saturday morning, early as in 04:15am I woke up from a vivid dream. Now there can be very few more boringly horrifying things than someone saying to you “I had an amazing dream last night” and you realising that you can’t escape.
But this began this and so.... this...
There’s a plane on the roadway, the highway, and it needs to take off. I’m in charge of making sure the road is clear. I find out that there are dozens of people working on the road, all with yellow bandanas, Japanese style, but these are Chinese as I soon discover from their chit-chat. And I see that there are some parts of the road that are going to interfere mightily with the take off -- a scaffolding, for example. Chinese-style, the scaffolding is made of bamboo. That’s when I realise I have a chance of getting them to take it down in time for us to take off. I ask the workers, in Chinese (in many of my dreams in recent years I speak Chinese...) where is the boss. They point out a fellow with a Mexican moustache, like Pablo Escobar.
And right there, in the dream, I realise what’s going on.
In the movie, Loving Pablo, which I’d seen just the night before, there’s a tremendous scene of something that apparently really happened: a semi trailer run by employees of the notorious drug kingpin, blocked a freeway in Mexico while a plane flew down and landed on the road. The back door dropped down, dozens of waiting Escobar Employees ran over and hauled out sacks of cocaine, into the cars waiting on the opposite side and sped off. Then the semi-trailer turned back and let the traffic get on its way.
Clearly this dream was from that, and I realised it in the dream. I started to discuss this with the Chinese Pablo in the dream, when I realised I shouldn’t waste time on reminiscing about drug kingpin movies, but get him to move the scaffolding.
I played to his vanity. “You blokes are such hard workers, you Chinese, you can do it, no problem”, says I to Chinese Pablo, still all in Chinese. By the way, I ask, what’s your name? “Xie”, he says. “Ah” says I, Xie as in Ganxie 感谢的谢, Xie as in “thank you” （Ganxie de xie). “Right”, says Xie, and so I move to “Xie Jingli”, 谢经理. Manager Xie, would you be so kind as to ask your staff to take down the scaffolding just until we can take off (qifei). And then, I say, I surely “thank you warmly”. Haha.
And he ignores the flattery, but looks at me with an Escobarian half smile, a wicked one that I know I ignore at my peril, and says...
“You know, my friend, you said we work so hard we Chinese -- 我们这么努力工作 -- you ought to write something about us, about our values, our culture” .... and I was shaken, and I woke up and I wrote it down in my notes, thanks Siri.
And so I’m also going to redo the blog to focus on this, the writing of the book.
