#11, baby, don't cry

“Balak took Balaam up to Bamoth Baal.” That is an excerpt from the old testament. Is it just me? Or does that actually sound funny?

Dear friends,

What does it say about ‘not going to cry’?

When I finally tracked down my grand parents, my grand father was already dead. It was the year 2001. I just turned eighteen. They kept my grand father’s ashes in an ash house, in Taiwan, the deceased is still treated as a social object, they need accommodation and a community of their own even after they are gone and couldn’t care less. My uncle and aunt took me to worship him, a ritual, not like a maniac. I thought to myself, “I don’t think I’d cry.” After all, this was the family that decided not to contact me through reasons of their own since I was eleven. I didn’t expect I’d get emotional at all.
            It was a Saturday, I think. We couldn’t find him. Just when we were about to give up and leave, I accidentally roamed into the aisle of his, and found him looking at me with at least thousands of other companions around him. The urn was the color of jade green. It had his name, the dates and his picture on it. His glasses were carefully placed before him, wiped clean and dusted.
            I called out to my uncle, told him that I found him. I was still pretty much mentally intact then. They joined me, told me how my grand father sent for me before his deathbed. And how my father, the only one in the family who knew how to find me, refused him. My uncle guided my hand to touch my grand father’s glasses. I cried. And I was sorry, sincerely.
          
Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favorite actors. In Capote, he played the role of Truman Capote which won him the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Critics' Choice Award, Golden Globe Award, SAG Award, and much more.
            It’s certainly a tricky business what Capote did with his In Cold Blood. You feel that especially in the movie when facts were altered a little to emit a more tragic narrative. A New Yorker writing about a small town merciless homicide discovered another man who shared a similar twisted childhood upbringing. In Cold Blood tells a story of a family murdered in cold blood. It also tells the outcome and tragedy of a child raised in distanced parenthood. Capote tells a writer’s search of the complicated mindset of a seemingly benign killer. And also tells a writer’s greed and grief to turn a dying victim with a life parallel to his own into his success and later, doom.
            Before shooting the scene where Capote visited the prisoners for the last time before the execution, Bennett Miller, the director, asked Hoffman to cry on the scene which Hoffman sternly said no. Hoffman argued that it would be too sentimental and almost seemed faked which reminded me how the real Capote might utter the same decision before he himself entered the door.
            Camera rolled. We all saw how heartbreaking it was on big screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone told me it’s all one take. The performance was vivid, deep and disturbing. Hoffman cried, after all.

When I was still a teenager. There was a Japanese pop star called Amuro Namie. She started a phenomenon called the Amuro effect in which high school girls in Japan started to dress like her, dye their hair like hers and get their skin tanned like hers, which was unheard of until she came along.
            Amuro comes from a small island of Okinawa. Before turned, through military force, into a prefecture of Japan, Okinawa used to be an independent nation called Ryukyu. It was cited for its entertainment feast and now famous for tourism and the long lives of its people.
            Amuro never finished a formal education. She debuted as a member of a girls band. After a few years of struggling, Amuro was suddenly spotted by a then-evincible producer Komuro Tetsuya, who is an even more curious case himself, then sky rocketed to a superstar.
            At the peak of her early success, Amuro got married suddenly, which was a dangerous thing to her career, and had a baby boy in months. The marriage did a little damage to her status as the then top performer. It also boosted the popularity of the expression ‘to get thunder marry’. A big part of her fans abandoned her to her new role of a fat housewife. But Amuro fought her way back to the game. She lost weight. She got a divorce. She started to work with other producers. And she is still now, as popular as ever before.
            Seriously, Britney Spears can learn from her. 
            Anyway, it was in the period when she first tasted how it feels like to be an Oricon, Japanese Billboard, number 1 artist that she had a single I Don’t Wanna Cry with Komuro. In a Japanese popular talent show back then, nearly thirty percent of the contestants performed this single. She sang, “I gotta find a way so let me go. ‘Cause baby I don’t wanna cry.”
            Amuro won the best artist from Asia of World music award last year, which although is not Grammy, but is still, at least, a thing.

Bob Marley also had something to sing in this matter. Born by a white old man and a black young woman, Bob Marley faced the problem of his own ancestry probably his whole life. His father died when he was ten. He once declared, “I don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. I dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.”

“Ob-serving the hypocrites, as they would mingle with the good people we meet, good friends we have had, oh good friends we've lost along the way. In this bright future you can't forget your past. So dry your tears I say. No woman, no cry. Oh my Little sister, don't shed no tears. Everything’s gonna be alright.”
           Marley fathered many children. He died in 1981, at the age of 36, of melanoma. He was buried with his guitar near his birthplace in Jamaica. His last words to one of his sons were, “money can’t buy life.” I don’t think money was all he had. And I don’t think life is that tangible, especially to a kid who’s about to lose his father, too.

Betty Smith was born in Brooklyn, New York. She had an impoverished childhood growing up in Williamsburg, now a chic and artist dominated neighborhood. She described her experience of poor immigrant life with a lucid account that many readers found related to.
           Smith married her first husband and moved to Michigan, where she attended the university of Michigan. So unlike her character, she had the chance. She gave birth to two daughters. In 1938, she got a divorce and moved south. Five years later, she was married again.
           Smith’s daughter remembered her writing in the kitchen in the morning, an inch long ash clinging on the tip of a cigarette. She was a professional writer and she writes about everything. She kept detailed records of her works and she never missed a deadline. She’s determined and observant, qualities I wish I could grow to obtain.   
           In Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. A young girl named Francie Nolan was growing up out of concrete and hostile earth. Her father, Johnny, was a handsome man, had a beautiful voice and a good nature. He had dignity and was proud of his union. But he was weak and gave most of his wages to drinks. Her mother, Katie, was a strong willed woman. She had a soft voice that was inherited by Francie. She loved and risked for it. She bore the bitter outcome of her passion and worked her hands rough. When dreaming in the world of literature as most heroines are, Francie learned from an early age that there are things you get and there are things you don’t.   
          Yes, the language of the novel as you could imagine is old fashioned. And sometimes, it seems too educational or too obviously holding a grudge about growing up with no money. When Johnny died and the Nolan family was left without a man in the house. Katie ordered her children not to cry for their father. Does that somehow make a gril stronger to face what’s to come? Or does that give a girl right to place blame?
          Or perhaps, that problem was just plain fiction?

Percy Bysshe Shelley was romantic and free, viewed by so many as inspiration and admired as heroes.
          Shelley was, in a more modern terminology, bullied when he attended Eton College. He had a thin and pitched voice. He was sentimental and spent hours reading. Those made him the target of ridicule. He was expelled for publishing The Necessity of Atheism.
          After being expelled from the university, Shelley eloped with his then sixteen-year-old first wife and had a child. Three years later, Shelley abandoned his pregnant again wife and child, and ran away with his new-found love to Europe. Two years later, his first wife drowned herself. He got remarried in the same month, but lost the custody of his children. The court said it’s because he was an atheist. I said because he’s an asshole.   
          Shelley was a friend with Byron and Keats. His second wife Mary Shelley was also a writer and was probably best known for Frankenstein. Before he turned thirty, Shelley was drowned at sea. His body was broken. His heart was snatched by his friend at the cremation and Mary kept it until she died.
          It is possible that Shelley was a vegetarian. He was a devoted advocate for social justice especially for the lower classes.  In one of his poems, he wrote:

When passion’s trance is overpast,
If tenderness and truth could last
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,
I should not weep, I should not weep!

G from work is from Malaysia. He came to Taiwan when he was sixteen. Now twenty years had passed, he’s still here, when his visa is long out of date.
            His family recently posted an ad in the papers, and his friend found out. G was hesitating. He hadn’t had any contact with his family these years. And he’s afraid that the reason they are looking for him now was because, well, you know the worst.
            I tried to consult him not to take things too gravely. Yes, it could be that someone had died. Just call back, ask what happened, cry about it, then he can have his life back, back with his family. It is true that if he leaves, he might not be admited back.
            “There’s nothing to cry. I don’t cry.” G replied. “Things like this happen. I’m forty. And it’s about time.” G said he couldn’t remember how his mother looked like.
            However, G did call back. As it turned out, everybody is fine. And they promise to stay in contact via Facebook. What a nice little story for a headline! And in this case, it’s true that lost relation was found on Facebook.

What does it say about ‘not going to cry’? Sometimes, it’s pointless. Sometimes, it doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes, you just do. Sometimes, you don’t. At some points in our lives, we all think that. One thing is certain, though. We are all complicated and we all have stories of our own, to cry, or not to cry.