Dear Neil,
I didn't have much difficulty finding this piece out. You didn't keep me waiting, though. I have been busy with a job lately, transforming all my guitar music collections (tapes, video tapes) into mp3 file and then make them safe on my computer. I'll burn a CD containing all of them after it's finished. Some of my collections have been kept more than ten years and the quality of them is getting worse. All these treasures may vanish into this air one of these days if I just leave them alone and don’t come to their rescue, you know, they used to be my all in all!. Thanks to the modern tech-science, I can turn these old, hard-to-maintain white elephant into a piece of round disk! Amazing, isn't it? Amazing people do amazing things. :P
Oh, my, you are setting an inviting bait for me by asking me my hobbies! Since you were the guest formally welcomed by me in this forum, I’ll just give up my long-needed day off and rise to the bait. Let’s see how long article I can write within one hour.
Yeah, guitar music collections, that’s what I am talking about. They were collected one way or another by me even when I was a medical school student. I remember clearly how I had been crazy about the six-string musical instrument since it first caught my sight and my attention once walked by a teacher’s dormitory and the teacher happened to be playing it. I just fell in love with it at first sight. I was a poor student then, living a hand to mouth life. However, to own one guitar, I believed the sound it made was right out of this wide world, I decided to buy one at any cost. After some time’s “money-amassing project”, I got my first guitar. Before long I found it impossible to learn with neither a teacher nor books, tapes…so I again made up my mind and tightened my belt a few more notches for quite some time. That’s how I had all my collections in my trunk now.
You see, before I returned to English learning, guitar learning was my favorite. Music is the gift given by God, I think. Music eases your anxiety. Music gets you peace. Music offers excitement. Music is magic. Listening to music rendered by others is fun, sure, though, playing music yourself is surely different! Guitar is an instrument to produce music you have to touch the strings with your fingers, which, physically speaking, is one of the most sensitive organs of your body. The feeling of mastering a piece of classical music is beyond all description! I used to call all the etudes “little things”. Short and plain they might sound, they offered the same pleasure! The self-taught guitar playing lasted about fourteen or fifteen years. I had been seen an exceptional boy in other’s eye. I just couldn’t care less how they saw me, actually neither can I now. I am glad I have been a little different than others. Most people love reading books and I am no exception. You know what, Jinyong (金庸) is my most favorite. Oh, no, don’t tell me that you haven’t heard of him and his books! Also, I’ll give you a wide berth if you think them low grade! All his works are well-organized and most of them have a gripping story. I love them so much that I go to the lengths as to give up going to rest room once I pick up one until the volume is finished. Of course I have all his books in my study room and its electricity version. I also keep them safely in my PPC and any of them are available any minute I want them. JinYong is of course an unsurpassed genius in terms of Chinese literature! Suffice it to say that most of them were written in the 50’s, but they are still being adapted again and again and again into TV plays and movies and sound-novel programs today! Both producers of TV and movie and the audiences never seem to get tired of seeing his TV versions and movie versions, they seem to love every minute of watching them instead. JinYong researchers and related websites are ubiquitous and some of them even make both fortune and fame only by studying “JinYong Phenomenon”. All his books are not only cliff-hanging stories, but they all contain meaty and profound, convincing philosophy; I am not over-blowing. Isn’t it a miracle? Remember how many times I have said that I am glad you were sent to learn Chinese and now are able to read and speak Chinese, the most beautiful oriental language? If you were not able to read Chinese, you lost the pleasure of enjoying one of the most invaluable literature treasures in this world! I am sorry that David, Mary, and Tim have to be left out this time. It’s a loss for them, true. The most scary part is that JinYong’s books cannot really be understood and enjoyed when they are translated into any other languages. Some people, you know, there are always the good, the bad and the in between everywhere, don’t like JinYong. They accuse the KungFu novels of being ridiculous and senseless. Yuck! Fake scholars are everywhere, too, I think. They are not worth a damn and I just avoid them like plague.…I have to stop here…the power failure is always ready there, you know, it’ll be a heartbreaking disaster for me if I lose all my afternoon work in a second…
How Chinese live their lives? Oh, another big topic…let me sleep on it and do another piece another day, please.
:P
Panpanpan.
