Autobiography of My Friend
It was a pleasant 12 pm, sun and breeze. The saliva-drooling all-day breakfast at Amaroni’s seemed unpalatable, for the first time. I used to cherish the chipolata sausages sizzled with olive oil. This time I stopped at the first bite of the tiny cherry tomatoes. My Dad was having his double-espresso instead of a full meal that day. Mom did not order her favorite risotto dish. Beautiful music played along, though I didn’t know if was actually tragic.
It was never understandable to me, all of it. If the stock market plummets, one day it will revive again, won’t it? If a relationship falls apart, someday it will be glued together eventually, won’t it? That was the way I imagined it. Good things come to those who wait. I was aware that my parents purchased stocks of the Accumulators and the Lehman Brothers Mini-bonds. The exact quantity I’m not certain. I am certain that it was due to the financial crisis that their watch collections and a favorite massage chair had to be sold away. Money never means so much to me. I was never a fan of materialistic possessions. Yet, I saw how money causes fissures, and I started talking to myself.
Many terms welled up. Inflation, Economic Bubbles, Mortgage, Stock Prices, Unemployment. Some say kids never experience financial difficulties of adulthood. Shouts and table-slamming, though, outweighed any applause for the diving contests of Olympics on television. I had to cover the ears of my then 5 year-old sister. I had to withstand the volume. The following day, the audience of the Olympics in front of the television decreased from 4 to 3. It was the summer of 2008.
Change is the only constant. I used to think the massage chair was humongous. Perspectives change. It was but a massage chair. Maybe that applies to the impressions of parents too. I used to think that they were irreproachable figures and their orders could be taken as parameters of the absolute. They are also human beings, prone to sentiments or hard times.
It was the 1st term of form 6. I was sleeping, or half-asleep, on the sofa. It was probably a weekend night. My sister went out for a concert. By that point I had already tried to stop my parents physically fighting, or jumping out of the window. They were arguing really loudly in that suffocating weather. A loud bang and the sound of glass woke me up. My father’s fist, half-way through the thick glass of the door of a cabinet. The glass was the very thick, tempered type and tiny pieces pierced into his flesh. Uncountable pieces. That stopped my mom’s nonsense.
I dragged my dad into the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do. A trail of blood dotted the blue tiles. I got a pair of tweezers, and a pack of bandages. I tried to pick the glass from my dad’s hundreds of wounds. His fist was covered in blood. The sink was blood. I was crying and shaking. The bandages wouldn’t stick because they were too wet from blood.
I called my uncle for help. I wanted to stay at home to take care of my mom. I sneaked out in the chaos to tell my sister not to come home. I told her to go to a cousin’s place, as she was having a high fever.
My mum calmed down, I think. My sister came home. The next day I visited dad in the hospital after his overnight surgery. The glass cut his right thumb tendon and he had to go to rehabilitation therapy to learn how to use his left hand for stuff. He couldn’t feel his thumb for 2 years. And my parents still argue about the same thing. They have not solved anything for 4 years. The surgery reconnected his thumb tendon
This event is not singular. I do not mean to classify my life as a literary genre, but my emotional elements, resembling a pendulum, constantly swing to both sides, sadness mostly. It could be considered a tragedy. At the age of 6, my parents were again quarreling again. I do not remember why. There were not gruesome scenes, but I was sensitive.
I almost had decided to go for Economics when I was selecting subjects for universities. It was maybe this way I could understand them better. Understand how money as nothing but a unit could drastically cause two human beings to depart from love, to be mired in quarrels every night.
“Sharon! what is the answer to Question 16?” Sharp and Obtrusive. It was the accounting class. I had not been sober since the previous lessons, but I knew well who it was just by sensing the aura of arrogance and dread in the voice.
“Sharon?”
36 hours. I had been hardly sober for 36 hours, but 36 ordinary schooldays were not as overwhelming. But that was not why I could not answer this question. It was because I never had made sense of numbers. Absolute silence. Half of class was peeping at me, the agitated teacher getting even more agitated, and… the bell rings. “Alright, class is dismissed. Don’t forget to read…” Students barged through the door to get the limited sale of hotdogs in the canteen. I fell onto the table and let out a long breath. I now love silence.
Two things happened in that semester.
“Why this book?” Miss Emmanuel with her vintage glasses was looking into the painting I selected for the assignment in practical criticism of English Literature. “Dickens, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and oh, more Dickens…” She started flipping through the assignments submitted by the class on her table. The smile that was usually hung on her face became a frown. “This makes me worried about your psychological health.” Her hand rested on the cover of the book and blocked the first half of the book name, leaving only the second part visible.
The Fury.
“The narrative style of any fiction or a life does not have to be necessarily linear and straightforward as life is interweaved with a multitude of thoughts and emotions…” I honestly voiced out my thoughts without a second thought in front of my favorite teacher. “The interior monologue is always complex and loose and is an oscillation between different events in the past and not necessarily punctuated at one…” “Right.”
Miss Emmanuel got to her feet and wandered about the well-decorated room. She looked across her eclectic collection on the exquisitely-crafted mahogany made bookshelf. “What worries me is not your obsession of the stream of consciousness per se, my dear. I used to very much admire the style of Faulkner, and Proust, too…” She rested her sight on a particular book. “What concerns me is that your focus on the novel is restricted on one dimension, that is, the chaos inside a family, and how disharmony pulls the family members apart… But sweetie, this book is much more than that.”
“Life,” tinkling with the rustic-style accessories, on high-heel shoes knocking the weathered floorboards, Miss Emmanuel returned with a thick novel in her hand, “Life is much more than that.”
“Ulaa-ulaasees?”
“Ulysses.”
I gazed into the stone-piled tower depicted on the sea-blue cover of the novel and started wondering what the novel would be about.
“If Ulysses is not fit to read, then life is not fit to live.”
From what Miss Emmanuel said, I started to have a feeling that this book must be dense and full of complexities. There must be unfamiliar subjects I had never studied, a scope of materials I had never faced.
“Life is more than 1 episode, Sharon, and each episode could be quite different. This novel contains 18 episodes, and 18 episodes all have a different theme, a different scene, a different symbol, a different color, and a different art. Each of them can be viewed as a separate story.”
Maybe I am ready for it.
That was the first thing that happened in this semester. I received a book that remains my favorite till now. As for the second… “Sharon!”
“What are the principles of effective management?” “Division of work, unity of command and direction, authority and responsibility.” The teacher picked on me to answer questions he expected me not to have any slight grasp of, for some reason.
“Oh, looks like little Sharon has finally picked up what we have gone through a few months ago. What are the advantages of the free capital economy?” “A free capital economy increases consumer choice when there are different shareholders participating in the market economy. Companies are allowed to manufacture goods and provide tertiary services without the need of seeking approval from government agencies.”
The class went silent again, but this time, for a different reason.
I managed to get rid of the abomination I used to have for numbers. Maybe it is never a question of either or. Maybe life is more than one single literary genre.
The number of audience that used to cuddle around in front of the television soon grew back to 4 again. My mother moved back from her house at the other side of Kowloon. Has the story returned back to the development of the main plot?
“Sharon and Esther, where do you prefer to have dinner tonight? Amaroni’s or –” “Shall we just dine at home tonight?”
Surprised. My Dad peeped at me while he was counting the amount of cash in the worn-out leather wallet. I secretly nudged my grumpy sister who was already down to pronounce the syllable of “A” with her half-opened mouth. “I can help with the cod, I have been watching some videos of Jamie Oliver.” In the weariness that has stolen the enlivened spirit which is replaced with grizzled hair, it was my first time to see my Mom smile wholeheartedly. “The veggies too,” my sister raised her hand.
No. There is no such thing as a main plot. My parents still argue about the same thing. They have not solved anything for 4 years.
Every single event is indispensable. There is a plot. As simple as that. It is a start of another episode. It is still the same story. What is different, is just that the number of co-writers increased from 2 to 4.
For the music that played along in Amaroni’s, now I know it was the second movement of Pathétique. Some say that life itself is also divided into different seasons and separate movements. It seems to me an oversimplification. Life is not strictly divided into segments. Life is each of the season and the movement, in and for itself. The text goes on, despite the history. It only depends on whether one is willing to continue to make this script cover the genres one would like to read.
“And such is the sophistication of the Chinese word.” Our Chinese teacher presented us with his elegant calligraphy of a Chinese word, “Dao”. The classroom was in a sweltering heat under the blazing sun. It completely drew my attention. I finally realized that the meaning of that Chinese proverb was true, “When your heart is quiet, your body will be in a cool state”.
“The denotation of ’Dao’ means a ‘way’. In Chinese Philosophy, it signifies the ‘natural order’. When combined with the two other Chinese characters, ‘Kung’ and ‘Shou’, it means ‘Karate’. But the essence of the whole word lies in its linguistics formation. If you view it in the sense of Chinese etymology, it is actually a ‘head’ that sails on a ‘boat’. What it means is, thinking is never enough to fulfil the rationales and the ideals of the Dao, but one has to keep searching, appropriating, and moving forward.”
Maybe it is with and only with these ebbs and flows, one can sail where one has always yearned.
“Are there any more words that also have such interesting denotations?”
First time in 16 years, I raised my hand in class.
“There is a Japanese word ‘Kintsugi’. ‘Kin’ means ‘Gold’, and ‘Tsugi’ means to ‘join together’. It is an art of craftsmanship of ceramic repair. For Zen artists, they resemble the broken pieces of any smashed ceramic products. They glue them together with lacquer and inflect it with gold powder. It renders the ‘fault line’ more beautiful and stronger than the original product.
I eventually settled on linguistics in university. It was actually my priority, where my passion lies, and 11 year old till now, I failed to convince myself that money per se was the panacea. It was something else that helped us pass through the conundrums in life.
“Come on! Take a look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Sarah! Be realistic!”
I still believe money itself does not necessarily determine happiness and stability. It is whether we as a whole, like different parts of a word serving different functions, the different phonemes clustering the formation of a word, are willing to voice up, and speak out, to articulate the beauty of every single word.
“This book belongs to you forever if and only if you promise me that you will not be made to further expand the old chapter, sweetie.”
I am no longer passive. Every action of mine determines the total development of family. I am no longer the kid answering “yes” or “no” to commands. The fissures are still there, they still fight. Maybe all you could do is avoid more fissures. That alone might suffice for a grown up, letting go and, embracing the ones you care about, too.
“‘Kintsugi’… Such is the art of the word, ‘kin’, being as it were, that it has one single variation. But with the latter part, it synthesizes into infinite refined products…”
Hands are not to catch. Hands are to write, and to write on. Does not matter if it is just a chapter, a sentence, or as simple as a word. So far as you are ready, there are blank pages ahead, you can create a world.
