I read Ready Player One (Amazon) over the Labor Day weekend. It is a sci-fi novel by Ernest Cline, published in 2011. It belongs to cyberpunk genre, meaning that the whole story happens mostly inside the cyberspace whe the protagonists spend most of their time being jacked into a virtual world.
The reading experience is generally pleasant. The author's lack of style and literary flair is somewhat compensated by the clear and engaging story line. But the most prominent feature of the book is that it is what I will call a ultimate love letter to the 80s geek culture. It overflows with references to movies, computer and gaming consoles, games, and music of the 70s and 80s. It was more of a fantasy than sci-fi. A 80s geek's wet dream.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Monday, September 7, 2015
to father - early memories
I am reading Kafka's Letter to My Father (linked below) recently.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CK480j6khmHzAZYdR26Zu1Iu064uCo32JnESIulbFYw/preview
The short essay intrigued me in the first instance. Kafka's father is a strong man, demanding and authoritarian. The letter is a protest, in the form of narrative analysis, that summarizes all of his feeling toward his father. I am as much impressed by his thoroughness as well as the overlaps someone else's father shared with mine.
The father-son relationship always seems fluid to me. I cannot pinpoint a definitive image of my father in my head. He has changed a lot, or rather, my understanding of him changed over the years. My memory of earlier childhood before elementary school is quite blurry. It is a collection of small moments-sitting in the back of a toy dump truck and sliding across a tiny living room, saving left over ribs for a stray puppy in the yard, and receiving a beating (my very first) on the rear end for purposefully dumping a box of toys on the floor. There was the little tingling of father's stubble against my chin, and nothing much. He was a ghost like figure, affectionate and yet distant. But I can probably say the same thing for my mother. I just don't remember much about my life before seven. Besides the first beating (totally my fault by the way), my most vivid memory of him was his leaving for work one day. That morning, I thought he was leaving me for good. I had a rudimentary idea of "work". I thought it would take a long time before he comes back to my side. So I cried really hard, and I was held up by my mother, to see him disappearing around the stair case.
My father is not a strong man. He has been slim, if not thin as far as I can remember. His primary form of exercise was dancing, ballroom dancing to be more specific. Ballroom dancing was the cutting edge entertainment for young adults in the late 80s and early 90s in China. He was a good looking man-sure to have garnered a lot of attention on the dance floor, but I have no idea how popular he was back then.
He was suffering from protrusion of a intervetebral disc since his early 30s. To stay away from the desk longer, he took quite some time off from his government job. Like many of civil servants in the early 90s, he went to southern China to find a private sector job. The movement from public sector to private sector at the time was called "Xiahai/下海", literaly means "go to sea". It was an truly exciting time, when the first batch of millionaires was made in China. They took advantage of commodity and consumer goods shortages, policy loopholes, and insatiable desire for western lifestyle of the people. Guangdong was the Wild West in China during the 90s. But unfortunately, he was not one of those early millionaires. He spent a few years in the south and returned home. I remember a fun trip to Guangdong, and on the way back I took my first flight (in 1992). And I remember half a dozen correspondence between us written in Pingying.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CK480j6khmHzAZYdR26Zu1Iu064uCo32JnESIulbFYw/preview
The short essay intrigued me in the first instance. Kafka's father is a strong man, demanding and authoritarian. The letter is a protest, in the form of narrative analysis, that summarizes all of his feeling toward his father. I am as much impressed by his thoroughness as well as the overlaps someone else's father shared with mine.
The father-son relationship always seems fluid to me. I cannot pinpoint a definitive image of my father in my head. He has changed a lot, or rather, my understanding of him changed over the years. My memory of earlier childhood before elementary school is quite blurry. It is a collection of small moments-sitting in the back of a toy dump truck and sliding across a tiny living room, saving left over ribs for a stray puppy in the yard, and receiving a beating (my very first) on the rear end for purposefully dumping a box of toys on the floor. There was the little tingling of father's stubble against my chin, and nothing much. He was a ghost like figure, affectionate and yet distant. But I can probably say the same thing for my mother. I just don't remember much about my life before seven. Besides the first beating (totally my fault by the way), my most vivid memory of him was his leaving for work one day. That morning, I thought he was leaving me for good. I had a rudimentary idea of "work". I thought it would take a long time before he comes back to my side. So I cried really hard, and I was held up by my mother, to see him disappearing around the stair case.
My father is not a strong man. He has been slim, if not thin as far as I can remember. His primary form of exercise was dancing, ballroom dancing to be more specific. Ballroom dancing was the cutting edge entertainment for young adults in the late 80s and early 90s in China. He was a good looking man-sure to have garnered a lot of attention on the dance floor, but I have no idea how popular he was back then.
He was suffering from protrusion of a intervetebral disc since his early 30s. To stay away from the desk longer, he took quite some time off from his government job. Like many of civil servants in the early 90s, he went to southern China to find a private sector job. The movement from public sector to private sector at the time was called "Xiahai/下海", literaly means "go to sea". It was an truly exciting time, when the first batch of millionaires was made in China. They took advantage of commodity and consumer goods shortages, policy loopholes, and insatiable desire for western lifestyle of the people. Guangdong was the Wild West in China during the 90s. But unfortunately, he was not one of those early millionaires. He spent a few years in the south and returned home. I remember a fun trip to Guangdong, and on the way back I took my first flight (in 1992). And I remember half a dozen correspondence between us written in Pingying.
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