Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, If we are given the choice to choose all over again, are we going to choose any differently than how we have already chosen to live? Given the chance to choose the kind of bubble-tea we want, we are free to decide.  We are also free to imagine a single mother of three living off a bank account now carrying a balance not enough to pay for a bubble-tea, not even before tax, not even small size, but that is the sort of freedom we rarely, if ever, choose to exercise. If the choice is presented us, usually more readily this time of the year, we probably wouldn't mind making ourselves answerable to the obscenity of helplessness, however abstractly: to fill a shoe-box, hand in an "imperishable" food (as if there ever is one), free our closet of items that are needful enough for the needy but no longer nearly good enough for ourselves and our truly loved ones, the ones who shall never taste despair under our auspices and fine management. Once the choice is

Dear Eugene, It's only been a month since I first started to use a hand grinder to prepare coffee, and now it feels like it's just the way how coffee drinking is meant to be.  Now if I don't need to grind my own beans to make a cup, I'd just be using coffee, instead of making it, fashioning the creation of it, and, really, enjoying it. A program was already running when we first burst into the scene.  Bang , there we were, out of watery chaos into a strange world of order.  And it worked, a true blessing indeed, like a mother to a newborn.  We were given a place in the program without even knowing how badly we needed one. And the program has a strange built-in feature, that it invites us to question its legitimacy.  Life is good, in many ways, even to those who have been dealt the worst hand.  But still we search, still we ask: Why can't it be better? As if we know better . Grinding coffee beans with my own hands, the minute before I bring to birth a n

Dear Eugene, What is the meaning of life? You think I am so full of myself to actually attempt to answer it here?  No, of course I can't. But I also can.  I can say for sure it has a lot to do with the relationships that we have--no, more, nurtured and cherished. The past half year for me was a sudden detour on a magic carpet.  Yesterday I said goodbye to many staffs and very senior clients in a care facility where I served during this time, and it was bitter, and sweet, and I didn't know what else was boiling in my body numbed by an unspeakable loss. It's appropriate that I don't have a picture of any of these friends.  For privacy reason no picture is allowed.  They took pictures of me but only for the interiority of the place, chamber of their hearts. I shall continue to re-imagine them, their faces, their expressions, their gestures, their smiles and tears, and make them real all over again, for my days and nights to come. And for ever. Yours, Ale