Learning to Speak: Douglas Crets.

Hong Kong: The identity Issue.

D Fresha wrote this on the sixth and I read it today. He jokes that we are connected by an invisible wire because we write about the same things without knowing the other has and it’s never even what we talked about together. I don’t know how but we seem to be coming to the same conclusions about many things unsaid. Here is a repost.

Some lessons learned among friends who had wilder, more revolutionary beliefs than did I when I was younger.

I have had conversations with people in Hong Kong who consider themselves the minority, because they are white.

It’s not color, they should be thinking about. It’s language. It’s how you speak to people that effects people more than divisions by skin color.

As a test, speak Cantonese to a Chinese woman. She won’t blink an eye, but she will say, “You speak good Cantonese.” Speak Cantonese in a taxi on the way home after tying one home. You won’t have to pay $5 to pass through the Aberdeen tunnel.

You don’t have to know a lot of Cantonese. But once you learn a little of a language, the rest poors in. It’s like a virus. It grabs hold of your shaking head. You want to say “No, I can never understand this,” but like Neo in the Matrix you will one day wake up from your sleep and say “I know Tae Kwan Do.”

And why?

Well, cuz, you opened your mind with love. You stopped playing a game. You stopped trying to step on others in order to be recognized.

Yeah, I”m speaking to myself here. A secret to living in a city is that people see you, regardless of whether you are acting like an ass or not, in order to get attention. It is quite simply the most amazing thing to be in an elevator, your head down, gazing at your shoes and the water marks from the rain on the floor and here an electronic click:

“Hello, hello, hello!”

You snap your head up. What was that?

It’s the speaker in the elevator. The Security Guard of your building thinks you look sad.

“Hello, hello.”

You wave at the camera. Your colors all bled out into a black and white elemental version of yourself on his flickering electronic survelliance camera.

“Bye bye lah!”

You wave again, and smile. That’s better than believing in god, I think.

“Ka.” The door opens.

Home.

PS. For My Friend Who Lives in the Same Country as Me, Except it’s Called Taiwan.