I was sitting at the cafe today, trying to work on my book, when an elderly couple sat down next to me. I’d heard their loud conversation as they came up the stairs, but most of the old people there speak loudly.

Once they sat down, the woman began to wear the man down with a long, withering nagging session. It wasn’t just me, either; I’d bet most of the people in the room were worn down by it after just a short time. “You’ve got high blood sugar, high cholesterol,” she told him. “And you think you can work? You could die at any time, and then what?” Not a lot of it made sense as I didn’t know the background to the conversation, but the nagging, condescending tone of the woman grated. How could this man have put up with this for so many years? I wondered. Perhaps he just didn’t want to upset her and never told her the secrets in his heart, or perhaps he had just revealed them to her, expecting, hoping against hope, that maybe this time she would reveal some amount of compassion and sympathy for his plight. Either way, he was wrong. Did she know what she was doing to him, what she’d been doing all those years? But he could leave at any time, right? Yet for some reason it had become a choice between not being able to live without her and barely living with her.

I couldn’t keep working. I had to leave, lest the heaping pile of NO YOU CAN’T smother me as well as the rest of the room. It was a gray day outside, but I needed the fresh air.

The book is coming along fairly well, by the way; I’m over 80% done with this revision, and the word count is comfortably over 90,000. The last sections need more work than the earlier parts, however, so it’s taking more time and effort.

I walked over to the camera street instead of taking the MRT to my job in the afternoon like I usually do, trying to get the old woman’s soul-destroying tune out of my head. I was looking at prices of Leica M adapters for my GF1, but I was surprised to find a lens I’d been hankering after for months, just arrived today.

I didn’t buy it. Maybe the old woman was right. What a frightening thought.

A few months ago, shortly before the Chinese New Year holiday, I changed my schedule so that I’d be in the city all day instead of just going into work in the afternoons as I had before. I’d been working half days ever since I left my job at O&M so many years ago; the grand plan at the time was to be productive in other areas in my free time.

If you know me, you can imagine just how spectacularly that didn’t work. I’d stay up late each night, sleep in, and then spend the remainder of my mornings screwing around online and end up tired all the time, with nothing to show for it.

These day, however, I’m out the door around 8 or 9 a.m., and have a break from about noon to 2 or 3 p.m. in which I go to a cafe, have lunch and use my old Thinkpad to work on the English version of Counting Mantou, something I’ve neglected over the years for various reasons. Now I’ve decided to get it done once and for all.

I’ve been making a lot of progress, first going through and correcting all the mistakes a friend of mine found during proofreading, and the going through, most likely introducing a whole slew of new mistakes as I rewrite the whole damn book. I figure that my writing must have improved over the last seven or so years since I wrote it, and I might be able to make it a little more readable this time around. The challenge lies more in the latter portions of the story, since, as anyone who has done military service can tell you, the more outwardly exciting parts tend to be in the beginning. But I’ve managed to develop some internal themes that I’d neglected in the last version, and I’m happy with the direction it’s going. I’m even meeting a publishing agent from New York on Thursday to discuss it.

While I’m excited about it being a better, more engaging story, I’d also really like to see it done, even if I have to self-publish it in the end. I haven’t touched the movie since I handed it off to Darrell in ’08, and I have no excuse for not working on the book now. It’s not convenient to go back to Xindian for a couple of hours, and there’s really nothing else to do but work on the book.

Most of the time I go to a nearby Dante Cafe on Yanping South Road. The upstairs is always full of old veterans and their wives, some asleep, some shouting in loud mainland accents that bounce off the walls amidst a slight tinge of urine from the bathrooms, some simply staring into space. For some reason, I’ve always found it easier to concentrate on writing or studying in raucous environments full of strangers than in quiet places like libraries or at home. Back in my college days at Tunghai, I would always end up at one of the five Super Food Chicken joints on campus, sitting at a table in the corner going through characters on little pieces of paper.

All in all, though I feared that my new schedule would restrict my time in unwelcome ways, the new scenario has instead opened the door to a sense of accomplishment and purpose that I’ve missed for a long time, ever since I finished editing the movie. At the very least, when people ask me about the book, I can now honestly say, “I’m working on it.”