How the incredible koreans taught me softness

No one in this planet does it better than the Koreans when it comes to pumping out tear jerkers – they are the indisputable Toyota motors of the love stories genre; when I first started writing love stories to supplement my income; they were simply inspirational in every way possible – from plot, cadence, speed and texture – I copied these masters unabashly, now you know why the brotherhood press love stories division is so prolific – some may balk at all this; and say most of these yarns are nothing more than superficial rehashed Mills & Boons reads – I disagree; the plot may seem trite only because you’re distanced by your prejudice and ignorance – but once you immerse yourself in them and get beneath the triteness and invest your heart and soul in the plot; they’re astonishingly beautiful, sensitive and heart warming in every sense – many years ago before the internet age began; I lost someone who was very dear to me to lymphatic cancer – she was snatched away from me and this left an incredible hole in my heart which I can only describe as an eternal abyss – at first, I tried to bring her back to life in the virtual; I scoured the world for the best animators, best mathematicians, best illustrators; money was no object; I even once stormed a replica of Taj Mahal with 100 Sardokhan elite troops to create paradise for her – despite their very best efforts no matter how real they fashioned her; they were never able to capture her essence; – her spirit always remained elusive and afar; and that hole in my heart was never ever filled – it was only when I sat down and began to write love stories and started churning them out like a cookie factory; that I began to understand for the very first time in my life – how pain and joy are in fact one of the same reality; and the rest is really grist to the mill; as I had to immerse myself into my characters and experience what they really felt – and with that came a deep spirited understanding of love and courage.

Someday my animators in the gaming world will get it right and she will smile the way I remembered her – till then while the story goes on – somewhere in amid the tears and laughter, there will always be a place called paradise and she will never be far away from me.

Happy Birthday Sarah, Darkness forever – I’ve see you in my dreams.

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“I am a hard man. You could say life made me this way. One learns to be hard very early on in life especially when hardness seems to be the only thing the world seems to dish out – hard even when I was growing up. As I realized very early on in life, it doesn’t pay to back out from a fight, not in the neighborhood, I grew up. Sometimes you just got to stick it right in and give as good as you take – hard even when I strived to get an education against incredible odds. I am not like the rest of you. I went to London with just a tube of Mentos in my pocket and some loose change – made the rest up by holding down two shift jobs while trying my best to squeeze lectures in between. Those were desolate and bitter years and you could say, I hated the world and often wondered to myself why had fate dealt me such a lousy hand – it’s very easy for a man to be bitter about life when hardness is all he has known. I remember one incident clearly, when I attended lectures in soiled overalls and had dirt underneath my fingernails – and the rest of my classmates just moved away. And so that became an allegory of my own life – people can be cruel without really knowing it – it was clear as day to me; they didn’t regard me as one of them, I was an outsider. You know the sort of person who everyone pretends not to see in a room – I didn’t belong, didn’t fit in and you could say, the battlelines were drawn very early on in life. So I became harder. When I started working, life was hard again – my boss was a white motherfucker, he gave all the cushy jobs to his own motherfucking ang moh tribe – and sent me to Godsaken postings that none of his buddies wanted – fucked up third world countries – where it was not unusual for people to point guns at me at least 3 or 4 times a week – but what is a man to do? I needed the money and building water treatment plants in Mindanao paid very well –  As the Cantonese say, “Mah seih, lok tei han,” – When horse die, man has to walk – but make no mistake, only a hard man thrives in those fucked up countries – if you’re soft, you end being kidnapped or ass fucked and returning home in a NTUC plastic bag. It was tough and comical when I think back about it. As it was not unusual for me to carry a Samsonite briefcase in one hand and a semi auto in another – but that’s how it is when one is posted to a fucked up country. Much later on, life got easier, even then I had to scheme my way to get rid of my enemies and consolidate my power, but that hardness that I has always been with me, left a residue on my character. This time, I was polished, but incredibly deadly hard. But I don’t think a man can live an organically balanced life when so much of his character is hard – so what I did was work very hard to set this aspect of my character to one side, like a man who puts his stamp collection in a shoe box slides it underneath his bed. It was only when I started to write love stories to supplement my income that I began to realize how much of life I was missing out on – beauty, sensitivity and the ability to just hold time in one grain of sand that’s a big part of life – you could say the most rewarding and satisfying part of life. It’s not true when people say those sort of  things are arty-farty – it wasn’t trivial to me, not at all. You’ve got to understand, all I’ve ever known is hardness – and now a whole world of softness had suddenly opened up before me. I remembered feeling scared, but I said to myself, I will permit it to pass over me. So I went with the flow and when it has gone right through me I turned my inner eye to see the wake of the departing hard man – there was nothing thereafter, only I remained – that’s why I think, it’s very important to be soft to those who have only known hardness – even if you cook a nice meal for a girl and treat her like a lady for one evening, you could very well change her outlook in life for the better – or to reach out to that troubled teen and just to spend some time with him or her, that could change everything in the way you press the reset the button and set it alright again – little acts with bits of softness. But all this can really only come when you’re like an eclair, hard on the outside, buttery soft in the inside – finding that balance is important that’s the way, I see it.”

Darkness 2012

Captured in a thread in Ekunaba – Brought to you by the Brotherhood Press 2012