blog of Joe cz Liao

Few days ago my brother and I were at a Ramen place. As we waited for our orders I noticed that one waitress, not old at all (I say early twenties), looked rather worn out. I also noticed that she dropped things twice in five minutes, and wasn’t walking particularly straight (banging into chairs). When she finally bought our meals over I was certain that her thumb was dipping in the soup; when she was putting the bowl onto the table she poured some soup onto herself, which she didn’t seem to notice.

After that, she disappeared for a while. Soon later she walked out from the back of the restaurant, changed into casual clothes, and exited the restaurant speedily. She went right towards her bicycle, which was parked right outside the large window our seat was next to. The bicycle she picked up had a baby seat at the front, and another on the back.

Through the glass, I got to see her closely (also because I was no longer paying attention to the soup). She was exhausted. There was barely a glint in her eyes…

I was hoping to spend my Sunday afternoon, after the 4.3 hrs TOEFL in the morning, punching out my latest blog entry to update my friends and family about my recent idyllic life. Before I did that I tried to upload the latest pictures to my flickr page, and along the way, responded to a few emails, made a few facebook comments, skimmed through my twitter ‘correspondents’ updates, watched a video about China’s effort to fight pollution and a TED presentation. (btw, add me to your skype if you wish) At the end of all that, it was about 4am in the morning, and I needed to rest. I couldn’t help but, once again, exclaim how little time a day actually has.

My three months stay in Japan is close to half done. It is very likely that the second half will be twice as short as the first. If that is so, the next two thirds of my entire life will definitely share a similar phenomenon with my ephemeral stay in Osaka.

Being ‘Culture Day’, 2009.11.03 was a public holiday in Japan. I have decided to go to the Nagai Park (長居公園) close by to where we live with my brother and a few other friends and spend our afternoon there. The place was filled with people, mostly kids and parents, exhibiting an unaffected aura of enjoyment. We brought our guitar along, and did some singing, chatting, eating… and that was about it. All was wonderful.

See more pictures at my flickr.

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1.
Revisiting the UCLA campus surely recalled a scores of memory. The college life – some call the best time of their lives – was over for me. Not that I haven’t done much in those years, but who doesn’t feel like there was more that could have been done, looking backwards? I started noticing things I never noticed: clubs that I could’ve joined, classes I could’ve taken, and people that I could’ve met.

2.
Crashing the end-of-year party at Caltech was something I did not anticipate myself doing. Looking into the pool of people dancing and enjoying themselves like any other party I had been to, I couldn’t help but also understand that that was probably the pool of people with the highest SAT average in the whole world. We all just wanted to have some fun though, from time to time.

3.
Sitting in one of the many libraries at Stanford, observing people passing by or concentrating on whatever at their hands (while I am distracting myself from what I told myself I would do in the library by ‘observing others’), I wondered whether life would’ve been much different had I studied at this school. Would the prestige of its name make me a different person? Better or worse? Would the student there be that clearly smarter than those that I peered with? Of course these are overly-simplified questions, but then outside the shield of a campus, who doesn’t simplify the product of college education down into the names of institutions? (Some even only TLAs!) Ting told me his company wouldn’t even interview a person not coming out from one of the big-name schools…

4.
The spicy salmon and unagi hand-roll, baked salmon, organic salad, nachos with guacamole, and the mangolicious smoothy were the only food I got to try out of the many many options at Charlie’s–one of the many many restaurant options at the Google campus. The shark fins that comes out from the ground, the T-rex with a flamingo in its mouth, the coffee shop with bean bags, glass conference rooms with cartoonish hand drawings all over the inside of the room (clearly seen from outside) and the bookshelves that stores Legos quite successfully convey what life is like there for me.

5.
I wish I belong to a campus, or have a campus that belongs to me. Soon again, hopefully.

I just realized that what I thought I published on my SH trip is actually sitting in my draft box all this time. Without further ado:

[2009.3.13] Too much has happened, in too short a time. I wish I had a recorder so that I could share with you all the amazing things I have heard and seen. I regret that I could only write, and to share this with you so sparingly with my unskillful communication. (more…)

There is always this feeling in me that Hong Kong is all about business, all about money, and there is very little culture and very little appreciation for the arts. Any appreciation for ‘design’ would exist only among consumer items such as shoes, handbags etc. Art & design is superficial, here.

That could not be true. Afterall, Hong Kong is home to 7 million people.

There is quite some stereotyping going on with the people of Hong Kong. Hong Kong people constantly stereotype other people (now that is a stereotype itself). I was taught that stereotyping is not good, but it is difficult not to when more often than not there is some truth in that.

I noticed, for example, when I was visiting the artists’ studios in Fo Tan the other day, that the word ‘香港人’(Hong Kong People) appeared quite frequently. Of course, those who were using the word are from Hong Kong themselves. I deduced that among the ‘artists’ there’s a tendency to look down on the general public of Hong Kong, and pride themselves as something else. (Maybe that’s just the artists’ pride same as everywhere else?)

Hong Kong is a respectable city, with great talents all over the place (albeit a few disgusting newspapers and magazines) However I feel that people here, especially the elites, do not take pride in being a Hong Kong person. I am glad I was born and grew up here, although sometimes I feel hollow and distasteful that my profession is seen as ‘beautifiers’, but I am trying to change that whenever I could. There is so much to be done in this place.