(no subject)
paul sam - there is sometimes a fear of meeting an old friend, a great friend with whom you've lost touch with. the fear is hardly one of security, but a disruption nonetheless. our lives we often construe to ourselves and relay to our friends in tidy narrative fragments. 'oh i remember in grade seven, we used to shoplift candy from the convenience store, and this one time...'; 'remember that time when so-and-so asked such-and-such out and...'; 'remember that pool party in oac at so-and-so's house and...'. these narratives reinforce a bond, a link; these are citations of closeness, camaraderie and friendship. and so goes with paul sam, my closest friend in those very elementary school years of grade 4 and 5. the fact is, i can't remember everything, i can't remember the quarrelling, the things we laughed about, the particulars of the women we naively thought we'd marry one day. despite this lack, the general lacunae inscribed in human memory, there is nonetheless a sentiment, a feeling, and an accompanying story to support these pangs of nostalgia and bittersweet tears at such a precocious time.
ah, paul sam...he whom i spent my recesses with playing big 2 or "showhand" - influenced by some cantonese movie god of gamblers. he whom i followed every friday after school back to his home and watched cartoons for an hour while his mother prepared a snack for us. and after this snack, the television was turned off, and we either battled with his action figures imagining elaborate storylines; or we picked up his toy guns and ran around the house as rebel police officers - influenced by another cantonese movie whose title eludes me - booking imagined crooks and looking supremely cool in the process, for what is a rebel cop without his coolness?
this is the story. a whole complex relationship of certain ups and downs, an entire collection of events and moments generalized for your convenience and mine in little more than a paragraph. this is how paul sam exists in the narrative of my life - we often like to imagine our lives as narratives, narratives give the impression of an ending (a happy one of course), of certitude, and this comforts us. paul sam becomes a particular event, a nugget of purity and innocence, the first of many great friends to cross paths with this protagonist in this narrative, my life.
and so meeting up with paul sam some fifteen years later, in hong kong no less, becomes somewhat peculiar. you have to accept some things beforehand, you accept a priori that despite that splendid childhood, you really are no longer friends. your only citations of closeness resting some decade and a half ago in a faulty memory (but preserved in a beautifully constructed narrative). he certainly is cherised but in a very particular way, bound up in innocence and purity - but this is a very different setting indeed, we both now some one hundred seasons old. and this is the disruption: how am i to reconcile this meeting with my life? my life as narrative, of course, and how might this alter the rest of this narrative? this all sounds so silly, but think about it. what if he's some raving homophobe, a lunatic racist, an obnoxious brat? even though what's history is history, the present in miraculous ways alters our perceptions of that past - and for someone as neurotic as me, i'd prefer not to have what i've constructed tarnished, left to reconstruct, to engage with questions that i really have no reason pondering.
we had dinner. i almost cried. my dear paul. he's bigger now. he's dressed every bit the yuppie a hong kong professional would dress. he's followed in his father's footsteps, working as an architect under him. he lives well, he's in repulse bay. he scratched up his car driving along those weaving mountainous roads in constant fear the other day - he just got his driver's license. he's every bit as gentle and courteous as i recount him being, and he's also wildy just as different - obviously, of course. maybe it was all an act, maybe not.
it's strange, but after this fifteen year chasm, we're reunited. in this technologically-connected time, we communicate again through messenger. i've plans to visit him in hong kong at his place in repulse bay. we've plans to reunite the rest of the gang - victoria fong, rebecca leung. sometimes relationships in our lives come full circle - which seduces us into thinking 'this story's goin' somewhere'. but no, life just happens, and you roll with the punches - or hugs in this instance. but nevertheless, we sometimes just can't help but impart the past with some teleological meaning - a future meaning. a future meaning that justifies now.
ah, paul sam...he whom i spent my recesses with playing big 2 or "showhand" - influenced by some cantonese movie god of gamblers. he whom i followed every friday after school back to his home and watched cartoons for an hour while his mother prepared a snack for us. and after this snack, the television was turned off, and we either battled with his action figures imagining elaborate storylines; or we picked up his toy guns and ran around the house as rebel police officers - influenced by another cantonese movie whose title eludes me - booking imagined crooks and looking supremely cool in the process, for what is a rebel cop without his coolness?
this is the story. a whole complex relationship of certain ups and downs, an entire collection of events and moments generalized for your convenience and mine in little more than a paragraph. this is how paul sam exists in the narrative of my life - we often like to imagine our lives as narratives, narratives give the impression of an ending (a happy one of course), of certitude, and this comforts us. paul sam becomes a particular event, a nugget of purity and innocence, the first of many great friends to cross paths with this protagonist in this narrative, my life.
and so meeting up with paul sam some fifteen years later, in hong kong no less, becomes somewhat peculiar. you have to accept some things beforehand, you accept a priori that despite that splendid childhood, you really are no longer friends. your only citations of closeness resting some decade and a half ago in a faulty memory (but preserved in a beautifully constructed narrative). he certainly is cherised but in a very particular way, bound up in innocence and purity - but this is a very different setting indeed, we both now some one hundred seasons old. and this is the disruption: how am i to reconcile this meeting with my life? my life as narrative, of course, and how might this alter the rest of this narrative? this all sounds so silly, but think about it. what if he's some raving homophobe, a lunatic racist, an obnoxious brat? even though what's history is history, the present in miraculous ways alters our perceptions of that past - and for someone as neurotic as me, i'd prefer not to have what i've constructed tarnished, left to reconstruct, to engage with questions that i really have no reason pondering.
we had dinner. i almost cried. my dear paul. he's bigger now. he's dressed every bit the yuppie a hong kong professional would dress. he's followed in his father's footsteps, working as an architect under him. he lives well, he's in repulse bay. he scratched up his car driving along those weaving mountainous roads in constant fear the other day - he just got his driver's license. he's every bit as gentle and courteous as i recount him being, and he's also wildy just as different - obviously, of course. maybe it was all an act, maybe not.
it's strange, but after this fifteen year chasm, we're reunited. in this technologically-connected time, we communicate again through messenger. i've plans to visit him in hong kong at his place in repulse bay. we've plans to reunite the rest of the gang - victoria fong, rebecca leung. sometimes relationships in our lives come full circle - which seduces us into thinking 'this story's goin' somewhere'. but no, life just happens, and you roll with the punches - or hugs in this instance. but nevertheless, we sometimes just can't help but impart the past with some teleological meaning - a future meaning. a future meaning that justifies now.