Leave me alone

My mind is getting out of control. It's taking me away from sleep, rest, and happiness.

I ask myself: Why is it that now I am doing what I love and I feel so empty?

Most of the time, I am too tired to think. I feel like there are endless demands, from people in and out of the circles. And I can't cope with them anymore.

I want to be left alone. I want quietness.

I don't want to answer your questions.

I don't want to listen to your voice.

I don't want to hear your shouts.

I don't want to see your face.

If every day when I wake up, I can only think about the things I don't want to see or hear and how I can avoid them, what's the meaning of it all?

Right now, I don't have any answers either.

I feel suppressed. And I want to break it.

Life. It doesn't make sense.

SARS anniversary

This year is the 10th anniversary of SARS, a respiratory disease that has killed many in 2003. 

Because of work, I have to find some survivors to speak to. And I found a student who has been infected with SARS with his parents. He and his mother survived but his father had died.

He was only 15 years old when he got sick. The day he was released from hospital was the day when he said goodbye to his father. He told me his story and how he went into deep depression, and got out of it.

Then I talked to his mom who lost his husband. She told me how she remembers him: gracious, humble, loving. She also told me how she wanted her children to understand how important it is to treasure every opportunity they can be together, as they never know when it will all end.

And I also talked to his teacher who lived in a residential area badly infected with the disease. That year, he witnessed it all before his eyes while fearing he or his wife could be next. He became paranoid and washed his hands all the time.

Then another mother told me she got sick with flu and she knocked herself in her room for days, not allowing her two children to go near her.

10 years on, our SARS memories may vary but every one of us still remember it. We have fought it together in Hong Kong.

If there is anything we've learnt through this sad experience, as many have told me, is that:

Life is very short.

Value those in your life - now, 

More that you value your work and money.

There is sometimes no reason - and I think, even no meaning in what happens to us.

But there is always hope

and love around us

Being poor

This month, I'm starting a new story about poverty and have been talking to different people of their experiences. And I came across a female artist.

At first sight, she isn't someone you will notice. She has a small figure and a quiet voice, and smile.
Her eyes don't speak of a confidence like in other artists I've interviewed. Sometimes, I had to wait for her responses to my questions, as if she was trying hard to find an answer to fit. There were often pauses in between her lines, like too many full stops in one sentence. And I liked that.

After a long pause, she said: "I don't feel bad or deprived being poor."

She used to live in a small space with 20 other people, with her own family of 10 and some relatives. Being the smallest in the family didn't make her more privileged - like it would for a child in today's family.
Rather, she never had any new clothes of her own. Everything she wore had been worn by seven others, before being passing on and worn by some more relatives in the mainland.

"It was how things were," she said, politely.

Now she has a day job as a designer. In her free time, she works on her own photography projects - which to me are where her passions are: the old unwanted stuff collected and kept by cleaners; the lost art in the Chiuchow culture; the killing, bloody scene inside a cow slaughterhouse. These projects aren't for making money or her exhibitions.

"It's my interest. I'm curious to find out what other people live like in their world. I had a very limited view of the world when I was a child because of our living condition," she said.

"What do you think of money, after living in poverty for 20 years?"

She paused.

"My experience in the past hasn't made me obsessed with money, but some of my siblings have become so," she said.

She paused, again.

"I feel that every day my life is better than yesterday. That's good enough."

There was a long pause from the both of us.

I wanted to say something to her but didn't. I thought whatever I was going to say would not be good enough to appreciate her, being this quiet.