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Well, there’s nothing for it but to start
by Francisca

The AHA! moment came to me while we were having a simple bowl of noodles for lunch on a typical hazy day mid-March in the place I call my pink tile nightmare. That would be in the industrial town of Songgang, about halfway between Hong Kong and Guangzhou, the location of our office-showroom for the past five years (more about this later).

Life had brought me to another major crossroad and for nearly a year, I’d been asking the universe, “what’s next?” New business opportunities kept vying for my attention and I kept resisting the calls; my heart was just not in it, and besides, I was (and still am) getting my fill of the trade coaching the marketing team of the company I co-founded. Rather, I was yearning to find a meaningful outlet for my creative urges… while not having a clue what form that could or would take.

Frankly, our entrepreneurial efforts the past two decades have not delivered on the expectations of financial security for us. Fortunately however, we’ve never needed much and we’ve always had enough. So therein the rub. To continue even our modest — albeit unique — lifestyle, there’s an imperative to fatten the bank book. Thus until I can see how our creative talents can be developed to pay the bills, I have reluctantly come to admit we must focus again on developing a new business venture.

In the meantime then, to remain inspired, I had to find a way to balance this work with some creative endeavor. One idea we’d been floating around for quite some years was to co-write a book. However, there never was, and in our present circumstances there still are not, enough hours in the day to tackle both a business and a book. And writing a book now would stretch out longer than our meager savings could carry us.

We needed a writing format that was fluid, free of constraints, allowing us to write as little or as much as we wanted or had energy for… and then… the AHA! We are hardly the jump-on-a-bandwagon type people, so it had not occurred to me earlier to join the swelling ranks of bloggers online before. Yet once I was clear about our message, our goal, our leitmotif, if you will, the way was crystal clear.

And it was to my great joy that this way also immediately resonated with my soul mate. We were on to something good! Real good!

So who are we and what is it we want to do, exactly?

My name is Francisca, also called Cisca or Iska, and the name of my love and life partner of 20 plus years is Lordson (that unusual name has a tale begging to be told). We are both true global citizens; we travel more than plenty and feel just as at home eating in a swanky restaurant in Vancouver or Vienna as in a tai pai dong (street food stall) in Hong Kong.

A much abbreviated backgrounder: Lordson is Chinese-Canadian, born in a village near Zhongshan (home of Dr Sun Yatzen) and raised in Guangzhou. I was born in Brussels but had a Dutch passport, and was raised mostly in Helsinki. In 1967 each of us emigrated to Canada where we were further educated. We met in the summer of 1985, and for over two decades now we have lived and worked in Asia. Today we travel on Canadian passports.

An account of this life of ours in Asia, as individuals, as a couple, is what this project is about. We are not expecting a measurable audience (in all humility we recognize that this may not be fascinating to anyone but ourselves); we are not chasing fame or fortune. Unlike many blogs, this will not be a journal in the sense of a daily diary. What we seek to do is to tell our own tales in the form of vignettes or essays or whatever is the form flavor of the day; stories of events and experiences, of feelings, observations, thoughts and/or opinions, whatever comes to us, whenever it comes to us. We expect to write about where we are and how we got here. We’ll write about our adventures and our misadventures, and those of others we have met along the way. We’ll write about the mundane and the supernatural.

As the title of our project suggests — the phrase sounded just right as soon as Lordson uttered it — our narratives will be written in retrospect, and that has the inherent risk of memory mutilation, but so be it. We just want to have fun with this. We’ll write from the heart, if not from the head. No fuss, no muss.

And so we start.

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The floodgates of my memory are ready to burst
by Lordson

It was a quiet December afternoon. The temperature was almost perfect, 20°C with a breeze. The air was clean and the trees were green. I was sitting on the patio in the back of our home in the south suburb of Manila, surrounded by green plants and a bamboo wall. Occasionally I would look up to see the white clouds in the blue sky. This comfortable surrounding was such a huge contrast to the hustle and bustle of the small industrial town of Songgang, the place Francisca calls our “pink tile nightmare” and where just a week earlier we were struggling with the cold weather, huddling in bed to keep warm in our second home.

So I was just sitting there asking myself the same question I’ve asked over and over again: how did I get here and where will fate take us next? I glanced back over our lives the past decades and saw the many places we had lived and traveled to, the incredible changes we had seen, and the many unique people and friends that we had met.

Several people came to mind immediately, each with their own unique story. My good friend Park, a top artist from Hong Kong who ended up as a night janitor in the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Another close friend, Chin Shek, a renown Chinese painter, calligrapher, philosopher and fortune-teller, who struggled to change his painting style to modern abstract in Canada. Lok Sook, the fengshui master, who cheated death several times and did amazing things with the practice of fengshui (wind-water — the ancient Chinese practice of placement to achieve harmony). Deng, professed to be the nephew of the top man in China, who saved the lives of our friend and his wife by making a phone call. My two grandfathers, one who invested in business and became the richest man in town, while the other invested in people and died with a pile of uncollected IOUs. My grand uncle, a poor village boy adopted by a British couple, who eventually got himself educated in the London School of Economics and rose to prominence by becoming the finance minister of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. There are, of course, many more.

Then I went on to think of our own personal experiences. I have uncommon stories about myself to tell: my getting out of Communist China as a teenager in the early 1960s; my obsession with getting a higher education in Canada when I did not even speak English; the power of chanting in my first failed marriage…. and on and on, the tales are endless.

I sat there thinking a little sadly that these stories of interesting people and interesting experiences, no matter how unique, if not recorded, would soon be gone forever. I just didn’t know if I had the patience, discipline or even talent to write a book.

And so, when a few months later Francisca first raised the idea of starting a blog together, I was taken back to this afternoon and my thoughts about writing these stories, and I did not hesitate to give my support. The format of writing distinct episodes or vignettes as they come into my mind rather than a formal chronicle of events in a book appealed to my style as a story teller.

And now that we have started, the floodgates of my memory banks are ready to burst.

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