A Picture is a Thousand Words

Today, so far, I have managed to get on with my work fairly well. No swimming today as Mondays the pool is closed. It has been raining hard, too, so I did not even go out to mail something at the post office.

Our sons have recently found some of the photos of themselves in their pre-school years, and have been looking at them and laughing about how they looked then. I also found one of myself, taken before they were born and before I was married (though my wife and I were already friends and she came to see me dressed in this garb).

It all started when one of the (Chinese) language schools I was attending told us about preparing some skits/acting for an evening's performance. I played a character from the Ming dynasty, and I had to sing in the Taiwanese dialect to a nice looking American woman who sang back to me and played the role of a lover. My Taiwanese (dialect of Chinese) was very limited at that time, and so I had to rely very much on memory. When it came to the performance, I got the fright of my life as I got on stage and the curtains opened. The whole theater was completely packed with people and the TV cameras were all pointed at us. I froze about half way through for what seemed like an eternity as I forgot my lines. Anyway, I resumed, and I don't think people were anywhere as concerned as I was. They all had a good laugh. The character I was playing (Wu San Kuei) was a short guy, and it must have been funny for the Chinese audience to see someone who looked more like John Cleese than a Chinese official.

All this happened a long time ago, and I think everyone has forgotten about it. My picture can be seen on the Internet though, by clicking here (upside down for some reason!). A long time ago I edited a book for a publishing company and they decided to use this picture on the cover. This is the kind of thing that would never had happened to me if I had just lived in the UK for the whole of my life, and most likely not in the US, either.