Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, It's not the first time I've called a book out of its morgue, a place to keep what is dead, pending final burial.  A morgue can also be a reference file in a newspaper office, collecting old clippings and books and such for future use, to move forward by looking back. Can you read the print on the sleeve?  It says: "Borrowers are responsible for returning this book in good condition.  Please examine before taking out and report any defacement."  Beneath it another line stamped on in all caps "OVERDUE FINES 10¢ PER DAY."  And the 10 was hand-printed over the original stamped 5.  That's an 100% increase. The world has become more user-friendly now, a kinder place.  The fine system still exists but only to embarrass the service-givers.  Nowadays if there's a late fee to collect a librarian would by default suggest it can be put off to the next visit in perpetuity.  We've paid enough tax to take care of matter of 5 and 10. 

Dear Eugene, "So this is Christmas, and what have you done?"  There asked John Lennon , then a few others, but none with more moralistic authority than Celine Dion . The tune is ok, but I'm sorry, the question is wrong, adds itself to an all-wrong world. Not that it's not a worthwhile question.  Only that there needs being asked a few others, in fact a series of more fundamental human questions before we could arrive at a humble place--ourselves humbled, that is--to genuinely seek the true answer--answer in truth, that is. To begin with, Why should I do anything about anything?  If there's something wrong with this world, it's a wrong ongoing: it doesn't take a special season to sermonize ourselves into acknowledgement. And what if I acknowledged all along this world is wrong?    Still , what can I do about it?   It's hard to not read this question as pure cynicism, but really, just say the plain six words and try to answer:  What can I d

Dear Eugene, Tonight I recalled something I've been recollecting over the years, bits and pieces, all revolved around the something that I recalled yet again tonight. It was years ago during my early teen years in Hong Kong, in a church camp of some sort, for youths or for everyone I can't remember, and there was this young leader--how young?  Again I don't know, wasn't old enough to care about facts.  What I am seeing now is what I saw, that in my eyes then he was obviously young er than other church elders in his look and being more accessible to "kids" like me. I remember his face mostly for his high cheeks bones, deep dark eyes, almost all black with no sclera (is it even possible?), and his mouth moving constantly, all the time, always with a grin like he's sharing with you where he's hiding his treasures.  He prayed like an adult churchgoer, all serious, self-conscious, by-the-number-evangelical, but with a grin like God's love, stea

Dear Eugene, If we are given the choice to choose all over again, are we going to choose any differently than how we have already chosen to live? Given the chance to choose the kind of bubble-tea we want, we are free to decide.  We are also free to imagine a single mother of three living off a bank account now carrying a balance not enough to pay for a bubble-tea, not even before tax, not even small size, but that is the sort of freedom we rarely, if ever, choose to exercise. If the choice is presented us, usually more readily this time of the year, we probably wouldn't mind making ourselves answerable to the obscenity of helplessness, however abstractly: to fill a shoe-box, hand in an "imperishable" food (as if there ever is one), free our closet of items that are needful enough for the needy but no longer nearly good enough for ourselves and our truly loved ones, the ones who shall never taste despair under our auspices and fine management. Once the choice is

Dear Eugene, It's only been a month since I first started to use a hand grinder to prepare coffee, and now it feels like it's just the way how coffee drinking is meant to be.  Now if I don't need to grind my own beans to make a cup, I'd just be using coffee, instead of making it, fashioning the creation of it, and, really, enjoying it. A program was already running when we first burst into the scene.  Bang , there we were, out of watery chaos into a strange world of order.  And it worked, a true blessing indeed, like a mother to a newborn.  We were given a place in the program without even knowing how badly we needed one. And the program has a strange built-in feature, that it invites us to question its legitimacy.  Life is good, in many ways, even to those who have been dealt the worst hand.  But still we search, still we ask: Why can't it be better? As if we know better . Grinding coffee beans with my own hands, the minute before I bring to birth a n

Dear Eugene, What is the meaning of life? You think I am so full of myself to actually attempt to answer it here?  No, of course I can't. But I also can.  I can say for sure it has a lot to do with the relationships that we have--no, more, nurtured and cherished. The past half year for me was a sudden detour on a magic carpet.  Yesterday I said goodbye to many staffs and very senior clients in a care facility where I served during this time, and it was bitter, and sweet, and I didn't know what else was boiling in my body numbed by an unspeakable loss. It's appropriate that I don't have a picture of any of these friends.  For privacy reason no picture is allowed.  They took pictures of me but only for the interiority of the place, chamber of their hearts. I shall continue to re-imagine them, their faces, their expressions, their gestures, their smiles and tears, and make them real all over again, for my days and nights to come. And for ever. Yours, Ale

Dear Eugene, Yesterday when I was driving his friend home, my son made a comment that he hasn't found a way to grow out of since first making it a few years back: "Why do we have to learn Shakespeare?  Like someone's gonna ask you question about him in a job interview?" I suggested maybe one day he will find truth from the mouth of "King Lear," truth that might make a difference of life and death to him.  Or maybe without Shakespeare there's no Eminem . The preeminent Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye suggested, "Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at," and that "wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep." So in a world where eating and sleeping and reading are no problems, we tend to be ignorant of how problematic lacking any of these could be if we a

Dear Eugene, Anyone who thinks there's genuine hope in this world hasn't gotten oneself a teenager.  Or two. Is it really that bad, being a parent of teenagers? Worse than my parents had had it, I say, for sure.  I kinda regret not giving my parents a run for their money and now can't even claim solace on the basis of karma. But I feel for the teenagers. Here I have words to make sense of my share of suffering, words that I can call my own and have taken years and tears to claim.  How about them? They want to be themselves, but in doing so must be like everyone else.  I am sure a case can be made that many of us never really grow out of our adolescence, but still the intensity of such contradiction, self-betrayal, finds no healthy language during teen years to modulate itself, especially when the lexicon and syntax of the quest is gladly and generously supplied by adults who know how to exploit the unhealth.  Mobile phone is the worse invention since the ato

Dear Eugene, “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”   Peter Handke , the latest Nobel Prize laureate in literature, said that. I asked Peter, What's worse, to lose your storytellers and childhood, or to be told your story isn't real or right and your childhood didn't exist ? I'd love to believe the Nobel Committee has committed a stroke of genius in choosing Mr Handke, a genocide denier , a way to smoke out the hypocrisy in all of us, to force on the world the question: Can we celebrate gunpowder for its pure dynamism?  (Can anything be good without being finally morally good or put into morally good use?) Words are the worst weapon: they create and re-create, fabricate and obliterate.  We are what we remember, in ink and blood, in zeros and ones. Yet after years of telling ourselves "What is good/right to you might likely be bad/wrong to me" and arguing this as our default moral position (which actually assumes itself to be