2 November, 2011 : Picking up the blog again…
I think my granddad’s weekly column, Moyuan Suibi in the
newspaper Nanyang Siangpao, can be considered an early form of a blog. I often
wondered how he found the time to write and how did he decide on a topic, but
he did leave a clue, he said he would rummage among photo’s of his paintings
and pull out a particular one to write about. When I translated these articles
for my own understanding, I sometimes found it a bit of a ramble and sometimes
rather disorganized, but from those writings, I did discover bits and pieces
about his life. I had not realized that his house was bombed in Vietnam and
thus he lost everything he owned except some of his documents. They did have
their lives and managed to make their way back to China, but now, I am
rambling…
I am trying to pick up the blog again and found it kind of hard, the time in
Shanghai was intense and also rewarding, that I found it difficult to express
the joy of a string of smaller events, like watching the workers at the Museum
put up my granddad’s paintings, listening to the symposium speakers, the
feeling of gratefulness for many of the contribution of the speakers and even
gifts; the time I got to spend with the paintings as they were hung up, to
listen to the children’s reaction as they looked at the exhibits or the
audience as the watched the documentary; or over hearing the calls they made to
their friends to come and take a look at the exhibition; and the gratefulness
that many of my friends that came to attend the event.
Then there were other happy strings of events while in Shanghai like my family and I also got to meet distant relatives (sharing a common ancestor 6 generation up, linking through a blog entry written by my distant cousin about Huang Yao) and also closer cousins, children of Huang Yao’s brother. Spending time with my aunt and my mom-in law who came out for this event and even my cousin who is now living in Shanghai. Again I am rambling…
The point I am trying to make is that I now see the value of my grandfather’s method of selecting a topic to write about. Pick a picture and then build a story around it. Well with modern technology, I can include uploads of links to the Shanghai Art Museum event and here it is compressed into a 2 minute clip…
