Fantasy vs. Reality

Translated…

In Jinghwa Middle School, which was also the “City’s All Female Middle School” when my wife went there, on the right side of the school, in the alleys, there was a very unique food shop combined with a bookstore.

not my picture…

Why do I call it unique? N because there was a phonograph that can play the records from 1925, with an assortment of literary books.

Recently, the book I wrote and edited earned a rare outstanding award, partially because of how quickly the medicines are advancing, and because, this volume is very thick, so, my students asked me, professor, why don’t you put out an electronic version of your book?  I’d told them, “You guys are excellent with computer technologies, in the past, the hardcopies would get pirated, if I put out an electronic book, then, I’d totally get ripped off.”  Naturally, the younger generations are used to thumbing through the electronic books, but, I believe, a lot of these younger generations had, ruined their eyes, and besides, I’m still more acquainted with the books I can flip through, the ones I can mark with bookmarkers; the bad part about these hardcopies are that storage takes up space, if I lie down to read, and, I’d fallen asleep, and the books may fall of the shelves and hit my head.  That, is the primary difference between cloud and reality.

not my picture still…

And, as we get older, we’d understand more and more about the importance of recording down history.  Because people will die, but, the histories will keep accord of what one had done in one’s lifetime.  And so, that is why I’m working hard on editing a book called, “the Current Medicine Legend Journal”, although the graduate Liao, was the one who started this idea, and put it into action first, but, I’d worked for forty years, contributing to the journals, twenty-six years as its editor too.

But, other than writing down history with words being important, keeping the sounds and the images is also very vital too.  From when I was in school, I’d read up on how Edison started recording human voice, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was one of the famous starts of that.  Later on, there were those hand-played music players that can play the music from the black vinyl records, then, the use of electricity, but still needed the needles, players to play the black vinyl records.  Recalling how my father-in-law had one of those players at his house, as I was a resident, I’d bought Chopin’s music to play on it.  The machine is still with us, it’s just that we hadn’t used it in a very long time, don’t know if the sound still is good or not?

But from this 1925-left over machine that this shop is using played Pressley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” or Shuan Chou’s “Shanghai Night”, and the voices sounded so sweet, and, the music from the CDs paled by comparison, don’t know how the forefathers were able to do that?

Although music is something virtual, but because we can’t see it, but, it is, really existing.  And so, other than records with words, keeping the good sounds are, also, just as important too.

still not my photo…

I’d often thought, being a modern day man is blessed and cursed at the same time, blessed, with the advances in technology, for instance, when the patients have problems, compared to our old and used BB Calls, it’d still be hard, to find the doctors, and now, there’s cell phones, that we can talk on.  But unfortunately, this had caused the cares and concerns for one another to be lost, and doctors started fixing the patients up as if they were machines, which is one of the reasons why there would be disagreements.  How, to find that balance between the virtual and the real, is actually, an important issue, of modern day doctors.

Because of the advances in technologies, our lives become more convenient, but at the same time, we’d lost that face-to-face, intimate contact with one another, so, maybe, these advances in technology had, given us a ton of conveniences, but, think about what is being lost, when we try to have these conveniences, then, you’d realize that the older ways are, better, but, everything still moves forward, and we don’t move backward now………