A Eulogy For A Friend

This is for a friend who passed away in his sleep at his parents' home after seeing him at a picnic a week before.  I was quite shocked at the news even though he did not look too well on that day...

1 不願愁雲別凡家 Unwilling is the cloud of gloom departing from the mortal family,
2 騰向蓬山晚紫霞 Flying towards the Blessed Isles as purple clouds of the eve.
3 人生來去總長短 Comings and goings of life - be they long or short,
4 似夢非夢是真假 Like once upon a dream or not - whether real or fuzzy now matters not.

1 In Cantonese, 魂 (soul) and 雲 (cloud) are pronounced exactly the same. Chinese does not like direct terms associated with things unpleasant or ominous. This line implies that the departing soul in his previous existence is one with immortals or being one himself or someone of great virtue.

2 The Blessed Isles is another euphemism. In legends, these three isles of immortality is located in the Eastern Ocean. Since he is such a private person, I likened him to the shrouding mists, protecting the Isles from prying mortal eyes. Purplish tinged mists are always associated with fairyness of the place, very much like the mists of Avalon in western legends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Penglai

3 “long or short” can also mean the “ups and downs”

4 Chinese believe that one should not take things in life too seriously as they are but a dream and whatever earthly possessions, relationships in the end are like ethereal mists and fog.

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

June Gloom

 

1 朝雲滿天六月霧 Morning clouds are but the fog of June gloom,
2 日破中午猛然浩 Breaking out suddenly at noon, the sun blazes away.
3 綠柳塘前晚來伴 Willows by the pond has the night for companionship,
4 紫花雨後風吹掃 But the jacaranda rain has the wind sweeping the blossoms away.

1 Literally, “morning clouds fill the sky, June Fog”.

2 This is what June Gloom looks like in Southern California.  This is a picture of Seal Beach.

However, there are times when the sun does not come out at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Gloom

3 literally, “willows before the pond”

4 Technically, jacaranda is called 藍花楹. The wind is the culprit and to add insult to injury, they are swept away like trash.

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Power's Handmaiden

Again, this came about on a cloudy day of jogging…

1 白雲應悔步青天 White clouds ought to regret for stepping into the blue skies,
2 紅霞漸被夕陽眠 And rose tinted heavens slowly blanketing the setting sun into slumber.
3 明月莫伴銀河星 The bright moon needs no company of any star in the Silver River,
4 孤燈寒照大自然 For it is a lonely lamp shining coldly on the natural world.

1 平步青雲 “even steps to azure clouds” means meteoric rise to a very high position easily or safely. This line refers to someone who had reached the highest status/rank in his old age.

3 The Silver River is what the Chinese call the Milky Way. When the moon is full, it brightness obscures all the stars of the night sky.  I only know of the Greek and Chinese versions of how the name came into being. Today, l learnt more from other mythologies…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way_(mythology)

This poem is about obsessing on one thing in life, a power career.

Falling Sounds Of Water

It was a very cloudy day for a jogging and the moisture in the air is heavy…

1 冷霧微霏細語音 Hovering cold fog and sounds of soft whisperings,
2 近見水落千丈吟 On closer inspection, ‘tis the roar of water falling ten thousand feet.
3 世交輕薄如浮雲 Long time relations - flimsy like floating clouds,
4 日月朝暮永升沉 Like the constant sun and moon, forever rising and setting.

2 丈 is about ten Chinese feet. 吟 is a loud chant, sigh, groan or moan.

4 朝暮 means morning and approaching night. The only constancy of human relations are that it will rise and fall like the sun and moon.

Thursday, May 25, 2023

Rambling Rose

Greener it is from afar – by Monet,
Up close, by Crabgrass…

Growing up in the never ending oppressive heat and humidity in the tropics, I always had fantasies from the covers of Reader’s Digest of the various seasons, summery days of boys playing together in the tree house up on a giant oak tree or making snowman in the making. Life was boring while growing up. Childhood as I remembered was spent going to school from 7am to 1pm; not counting the earlier hour to wake up to get things ready and having a quick breakfast of two slices of toast and two runny eggs seasoned with soya sauce and white pepper. Recesses in the tuck shop were short and hurried as time was scrambled so that we could play with classmates. And when school was over for the day, it was for private tuition or homework. I wanted to learn how to play the piano and so I didn’t feel that was a chore. Whatever free time was having to go with my mother for her daily errands so that money won’t be spent on babysitting!

Getting up early for school is something us kids do not look kindly on. We were forced to sleep at 7pm but in practice, it was much later as we were still too wired up from the day. At least these sleeping rules were relaxed when I became a teenager. When TV sets came into the home, we were not allowed to watch programs after our bedtime curfew. I hate doing things that were forced upon me. On weekends, we were allowed to wake up later; that is, until the Carol Burnette show came on at 10am on Saturdays. I had a solid British education but American TV entertainment. Sunday was truly a day of rest. Thank goodness we were not Christians and need not going to church.

Rarer than Chinese New Year was a night out with Father taking the entire family out for dinner or even to a movie. Never had I blame him. Mother would always remind us that without father’s hard work, nary a bowl of rice be appearing on the table! In our younger days, Mother would take us to movies all day long during weekends, sometimes four in a row from 11am till the last show at 6pm with something for a bite as we drove from theatre to theatre. This was to distract the children from bickering, fighting and so forth. For crying is a bad omen for a superstitious father gambling at the weekend races. Even the word for “book” is not allowed to be mentioned as it share the same sound as “to lose” in Chinese.

I was never a top student, just somewhere in the middle ranking of the class. I remembered the first time I showed my report book to my mother that I ranked 22nd in the class out of a class of 44, I thought my mother would be pleased that I was not at the bottom of the class. She looked disappointed and what I got was the question, “Why I am not in the first place?”. Seemed that I made her lose the bragging rights to relatives having children of the same age. I was never interested in the lessons. They were boring and the teachers were not motivators. Then at the age of fourteen, I fell in love with my classmate! To please him, I became more adventurous, learning how to take a bus and going to places with him after school. He had taught me the first steps to independence from my Mother, the chauffeur. For an entire school year, when I was with him, going to school early no longer poses a problem for me. As a matter of fact, I even wanted to be at the classroom earlier so that I would be the first to welcome him and to take the opportunity to talk with him. There is no opportunity to talk when classes began. There are no rest periods between the classes. For the first time in my life my class ranking shot up stratospherically and I was in the top five. Even my Chinese classes performed well enough to get notice from the teacher. I wanted to compete with him and to excel with him so that he could look up to me. In the end, my love was unrequited.

In the next academic year, my grades returned to normal as we were now in different classrooms. No more chances to be desk mates anymore. Still, it was enough for me to into the Science Stream of the three classrooms. In a way, he had changed my life for the better. For better or worse, I am the type of person who cannot rise to the top without some carrot at the end of the stick. Of course, it would be ideal if it were a mutual love. He was the first in my life of three that without them, I would not be what I am today.

During my single years, I yearned for my Prince to come. Yes, I had kissed many toads and even frogs but none transformed. Once you were in love, poetic stirrings start to pour out from the heart and I began to write and even dabbled in poetry which I loathed in my literature classes. I agonized at the thought of dying a single life, This usually happened when my mind gets bored.

After note:

I was lucky that in the end, Heaven smiled upon me and found the light of my life. Looking back, my dreams of playing in a treehouse with friends never came into fruition, neither was the making of a snowman or a ride on a toboggan. However, I finally saw snow in my early twenties during a night drive on a lonely highway to Salt Lake City. The car stopped in the middle of a blizzard. I got out. I danced. I imagined myself to be Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain”. It lasted only for a few seconds. I didn’t want to get struck by an oncoming car. Afterwards, I had to stop by a 7-11 to get a cold large 7-Up to go! Morning came when I reached the city. I noticed that piled up snow was everywhere along the pavement. On a closer inspection, they were not pure white but very greyish and at times, blackish. At that moment onwards, I looked at snow with a very different view.

After writing this piece of myself, I remembered a poem I once wrote during those yesteryears…

Brr…. It’s so cold!
Looking back to my days of old…
A worn out top hat for him to wear,
And eyes in two lumps of coal.
Dead branches for the limbs,

One long scarf banded in red and green for the neck,
Two giant globes of white for a body of snow,
With a withered orange carrot - a pointy aged nose.

Hours squealed in delight in making a crooked upturned smile,
With what? You asked,
Now I do not know.

Those halcyon days are gone,
Limpid pools no longer flow.
Cold and blustery are the winds in blow,
Sipping hot chocolate away
As weighted years grow.

Translating this into a Literary Chinese style would not only be difficult but its explicit actions make the Chinese form sounds pedantic… This is the best I had come up so far,

1 霜降橫飛冷窗外 Everything outside the window is cold as snow falls in blustery winds,
2 歲月何易初夢改 How easy it is for Time to sway dreams of old!
3 幼時殷勤設雪人 For in childhood, how attentive I am to build a snowman,
4 今刻才知暖屋內 But now, realizing how cozy things are inside a warm house.

1 Literally, “snow falling in horizontally”. 冷 as a verb makes more sense than as an adjective.

2 初 means initial or early. I used “old” to make it rhyme. “Sway” is more meaningful than “correct” or “change”.

3 設 also means “to plan”. The line can also be translated as “… eagerly planning for a snowman”

Hopefully, as another era descends, I have enough knowledge for further refinement.

Monday, May 22, 2023