河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

(the first of a series of articles related to my trip to Java and Bali in Indonesia)

There are shops all around me but I have nothing to buy.

There is food and restaurants all around but I had lunch only two hours ago, and I'm supposed to be watching my weight so eating just for the sake of eating is out of the question.

There's a movie theatre but I've already seen one movie today and I'll already spend much more time sitting down today than is healthy.

My plane arrived at Bali at around nine pm. Once through customs, I exited the airport terminal looking for any sign of Isah, our helper. She was going to meet me there. It didn't take long to find her. She was standing at the end of the lines of hotel people holding up signs advertising the names of the guests they were there to pick up.

It was great to see her and she looked as healthy and vibrant as ever, if only not as slim as she was when she worked for us. I guess walking ten dogs four times a day really keeps the weight off.

Isah wasn't alone. Accompanying her on the seven-hour "kijang" minibus journey from her home to the airport were her husband-to-be, her twelve-year-old son and one of her nieces; a really nice bunch of people.

I don't know what time it is. I've been asleep for a few hours since arriving here this morning but can't be sure exactly how many hours. There's the sound of activity outside the wall that separates me from the markets next door, and there's the sound of hushed conversation outside in the living area. The family's up.

I walk out into the living area. Isah's flat is small. There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living area all within approximately four hundred square feet. Under normal conditions, her mother sleeps in one room while Isah sleeps in the other. I'm not sure where her son sleeps.

I woke after only a few hours sleep to the sounds of activity outside the wall of my room. I remember walking through the bamboo matrix that is this town's markets just before sleeping. Covered by a roof of galvanised iron with patches of canvas, the markets were quite large. Before coming here, Ipah had warned me about the noise of the markets, worrying that the noise would prevent me from sleeping. She had nothing to worry about. I wasn't affected by the markets at all. Nor was I affected by the sound of motorbikes driving past the front door of her small flat on their way to the markets.

I got up from my bed and inquisitively looked outside my room into the family room of the flat. Ipah's mum was already up, sitting on a wooden stool outside the door watching people come and go. Ipah was up too; probably hadn't slept at all; preparing breakfast for her son and attending to the things she needed to do every day. It was five thirty in the morning and the world was up and active.

The bathroom was simple and very different to anything I'd seen before. A square room, tiled on all sides and on the floor. The front half of the small room; barely larger than a closet; was bare with buckets on the floor to one side and a drain hole on the other side. The left side of the back half of the room was the toilet, one of those squatting toilets commonly used throughout China. On the right side was a square water well, a brick and tile container of water, roughly three feet high.

There was no running water in the bathroom. Ipah purchased her water; used both for cooking and bathing; from a nearby public bathroom. Before I arrived, she had to carry the water from the bathroom to her home by bucket; two trips every day. During my stay with her, she purchased a hose and laid the hose down between her home and the public bathroom. Future refills would simply require connecting the hose to the public bathroom's water tap, filling up her well, and then paying the bathroom owner. It's entirely possible that this hose arrangement was only temporary, to be used while I and her other family guests were in town for the wedding. We'd obviously use a lot more water than just Ipah, her mother and her son.

With only eight days remaining before Christmas, I thought I'd better write this now before it's too late.

My wife and I are going to visit friends in Dundee, Scotland for Christmas. We'll be in Dundee from December 26 to 30, and then in London from December 30 to January 1, 2006. Yep. We'll be in London for the new year.

It's been a while since I've posted any articles here, but you can be sure that I'm still here, and you can be absolutely sure that I've read every one of your comments, even if I haven't responded. And I appreciate the comments. Even if it's not obvious, your comments are important to me and provide an important source of support.

In the time I've 'been away', I've filmed a new series at TVB. The name of the series is 寫意人生 and I'll talk more about that in a later article. It was a pretty busy part, including two sessions of five nights of continuous studio filming involving nine to eleven hours of filming each night.

Six days. That's how long I've been here in L.A. It feels like forever. I can hardly remember getting off the plane at LAX and catching the buses to my motel. Did I say buses? Yep. Three to be exact, but I managed to get to the motel for only US$5.50 instead of US$50 or more if I'd caught a taxi. I'm a student here, and I therefore need to keep my expenses as low as I can although I still occasionally spend a little more for better food.

L.A. is not an attractive city to me personally. I much prefer Hong Kong, or Brisbane (Australia), or the beautiful Blue Mountains (Australia). My home in Hong Kong is surrounded by bush and country. My home in Australia is also surrounded by bush and I grew up in the country so it's only natural that I prefer country to the city. For me, the city is an impersonal place where many people live superficial lives, where what you wear and what you drive (and how large your -silicon- breasts are while the rest of your body remains as skinny as possible) identifies who you are rather than the real person within you, and where people compete nonstop to better each other in financial and status terms. It's not a good way to live.

I came to L.A. to study singing, nothing else, and the studies are coming along wonderfully. I have one-on-one lessons with my teacher once a day from Monday to Friday. Additionally, I attend one Cabaret workshop with other students on Tuesday nights and another singing workshop on Saturdays in a totally different place.

My teacher is simply amazing. Her knowledge of singing is so broad and extensive that I would never be able to learn everything from her even if I stayed here a whole year. For the workshops, she has a friend and partner who acts as the musical director. He is also incredible and I feel incredibly lucky to have met both of these people. Sometimes, you get lucky!

Other than my lessons, I have very little to do, so my days are relatively relaxed in spite of the small hiccups I've encountered along the way (which I'll describe in a later article).

I'm tired!

This morning, I didn't have any chores to do and I didn't feel like going to Starbucks again, so I started walking with a full backpack on my back. An hour and 25 blocks later, I discovered a very nice 'French' cafe Le Pain Quotidien with tables outside on the sidewalk. Inside, incredibly attractive breads and cakes were on display and I knew this was the place I wanted to eat at, so I sat down at one of the outside tables and ordered breakfast: a parmesan omelette and a double-cappuccino.

Everything at this restaurant was 'organic', meaning that any animals involved were treated humanely and any food products were not processed any more than necessary. The omelette was fabulous, the cheese wonderful (I'm a cheese lover). Even the organic butter tasted great. The bread was above average, and the organic Belgium jam, marmalade and hazelnut spreads were also wonderful. The coffee was so nice; served in a large cup without handles; that I ordered a second cup. The food wasn't cheap. In fact, by Hong Kong standards, it was very expensive but it's simply another case of getting what you pay for, and I'm only here for a few more days so…

I'm back in Hong Kong, back home with my wife and our kids. It's great to be back although the trip back was a little sudden and rushed.

Before going to L.A., I was filming 寫意人生 at TVB. Because filming took longer than previously hoped, I had to delay my trip to L.A. until September 16. Furthermore, TVB had another series planned for which I would need to be back in Hong Kong by October 16 or earlier if possible. This placed strict limits on the time I could spend in L.A., but the trip was important to me; improving my singing technique is always on my mind; so I worked around the limitations as well as I could and left for L.A.

My time in L.A. with my teacher was fabulous. My teacher and I clicked immediately, as if we'd known each other for a lifetime and my learning was significant.

My singing has always been important to me. Often, music is a precious companion, the one thing that will always be there no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Over the years, I've tried to improve my singing whenever possible. Through multiple unintentional spans of time when I didn't sing at all followed by periods of re-training and learning, I was able to forget some of my bad habits and learn better technique. In July of 2006, I was still not at the place I desired to be and hungered for further improvement. I needed a teacher.

My previous teacher had taught me well but you can only learn so much from one teacher and I needed more. I needed someone who could take me to the next level. Finding a teacher is always a gamble. You can never know until after you've begun working with them whether or not they'll be good for you but if you don't gamble, you'll always lose. I had to try.

It was Peisha's idea. Almost from the beginning of our time together, Peisha strongly recommended that I have a 'product' to take home with me. She meant that I should record a couple of songs, if only to show the folks at home just how much I had improved.

I wasn't totally sold on the idea at first. It was the potential financial cost of doing the recordings that kept me from committing to the idea, but as time went on, as my voice continued to improve, and as I discovered more and more songs that I loved, I grew more attracted to the idea. After three weeks of being with Peisha, I made the decision to record the songs. It's a decision that I'll never regret, and I'll forever be grateful to Peisha for her encouragement and insistence that I do the recordings.

I might be going overseas for three months. I'm waiting for confirmation. I hope it happens but it's out of my control. The departure date though, if confirmed, is January 1 which doesn't give me much time to prepare. It's not the packing that I'm concerned with. It's making sure that everything at home is in working order, that our pet supplies are sufficient and that we have enough medicine for them, that our computers and my MacBook Pro are running well, that I have all the computer programs that I might need while away, that my camera and lenses are in great condition, that I have everything that I might need, that… You get the idea.

In January, having just left TVB, I found myself working with Mr Chow Yun Fat 發哥 as his personal dialect coach, flying business class to a small city called Durango located in Mexico where we lived and worked for just over two months working on the Fox production Dragonball. It was quite an experience but not much fun (acceptable, taken that this was a working trip rather than a pleasure trip).

Most people, at least here in Hong Kong, have the impression that working for a Hollywood film production company is fun, or at least much more pleasurable than working for a Hong Kong film production company. The perception is that the work is not hectic or rushed, the working hours are shorter (and that hotel standard food will be provided). The perception is wrong.

With Dragonball being my first Hollywood production, I was not entirely prepared for the calibre of the crew. They were quite extraordinary.

The director

James Wong was the director. I watched him carefully. I wanted to see how Hollywood directors interacted with their cast. At TVB, our directors had (past tense because I'm no longer there ;-) very little time to discuss our scenes in detail with us. There was virtually no sharing or exchange of ideas. We simply arrived on set whereupon the director would glance at the set, decide where and how we would move during the scene (what we refer to as "blocking") and then run us through the scene. At TVB, most scenes were 'rehearsed' in mere minutes.

It has been a very busy past week or so, and I haven't had time to update the blog. I apologise for that.

The big news is that I'm now in L.A.. I'll be studying singing with Peisha (she has a new technique to teach me), and scoping around for an agency to represent me too.