Homecoming.1

The time before holidays is always bitter sweet at most. It is sweet to tell oneself that one will soon be able to actually hold one's wife and one's children within the shield of one's arms and bosom and feel once again the softness of their skin and the warmth of their bodies. But there is no less bitterness to be swallowed before one can really take off. The joy however turbo charges one's zest to drive an even madder rush to finish the million and one things one must do before one can leave without the lurking fear of disaster striking whilst one is away. It's a bit like the final 10 metres of a 400 metre dash. Each  contemporary office worker in the service "industry" has to pay this price:  emails and letters to clients, counsel, opposite side, notices of the impending holidays, last minute rush to complete pleadings, witness statements, conveyancing requisitions for a smooth completion, telephone conferences with client, file notes  to be left for those who looking after one's files while one is away,  laundry to be done so one may appear fresh and presentable to one's family, clearing the refrigerator of all food which cannot be kept until one's return, last minute collection of stuffs from friends and relatives to bring to one's family in between the after office talks and Spanish lessons one has still to attend....The work doesn't stop until one is done packing one's valise and under that last shower as the hot water from the shower-head hits one's aching shoulder and neck muscles. It felt so good to hear the splash of the water on one's back as it streamed down one's body, like the hands of a masseuse and to let out involuntary "ooohs" or "aaahs" from one's lips, feeling the taste of a few droplets of the splashing water in one's half-open mouth! And just before one locks the door to one's flat, one has to place the plants inside the house in places where they can still have a little sunlight but not so much so as to avoid the least loss of moisture and then pour upon them as much water as would not cause their their roots to rot!

The moment in the taxi to the Airport Train terminal in Central does not necessarily put one's mind at ease. One mind's keeps turning and continues doing mental run downs of the various files one has to do, despite all the work one has already packed into those last two or three days: "Have I in my mad rush forgotten about calling client A, client B, client C etc " or written a letter to him or her or to the other side? Have I forgotten to bring a particular book? My passport? The US currency I changed during lunch time break? Have I packed that gift or that bottle of medicine for my wife which that friend or relative have asked me to bring and which I placed on the coffee table while packing the other stuffs? Will the weather in Seoul suddenly turn bad so that it becomes necessary for me to call them at the Inchon  Airport to notify them of the delay so they don't have to rush so early to the Dulles Airport? " Such thoughts whisked through my mind as the light from the passing shops in greens, reds and yellows receded quickly behind me and my eyes were blinded periodically by the bright headlamp flashes of oncoming vehicles from the opposite direction whizzing past the taxi windscreen and the side windows as if they were just so many unreal shadows laughing at this moron's last minute count down to departure. These thronging thoughts did not vanish until I heard the tiny squeaks of the wheels of the trolley as it sweved to avoid hitting other passengers as I rushed towards the lift to to the Airport Train. I was really on my way! Only when I heard the thump of my valise upon the floor of the luggage port of the train compartment was I finally able to breathe a sigh of relief! Then only did I begin to notice the quiet hum of the train and the sudden louder click-clacking rhythm as its giant wheels grated against the rails when it changed directions before resuming its dull hum and I cast my eyes over train compartment. There, the Scottish kilt patterned red ribbon I borrowed from my sister-in-law and which I tied to the handle of my suitcase to mark it off from all the other similarly colored and shaped luggages which will be rumbling along the conveying belt at the luggage pick up counter upon arival was fluttering slightly as the train hurtled on. There were two Italian young men to my left talking with typical Mediteranean hand gestures and agitated tones. A young mainland looking Chinese executive at the seat behind me was silently gawkling at the advertisements in the built in TV monitor behind the luggage compartment wall. Didn't he have anything better to do? Opposite to me was a German couple. They were reading a book and a magazine and talking quietly and from time to time, the man nodded his head anxiously towards what looked like his wife of at least 40 years. Age did not seem to have dimmed the spark of his love. Behind them was an Indian couple. The man was sleeping! I have the greatest sympathy for him. The lady sitting beside him, a rather fat dark skinned woman with a red lucky spot right at the centre of her forehead and folded in layers and layers of purple saris and with heavy gold rings on her fingers had the mobile to her ears and was talking loudly to someone, sometimes in English and sometimes in Urdu and when she talked in English, she rolled the r's unnecessarily and introduced unneeded modulation of volume, chewing the sound of the initial syllable and and raising the tone of the last with a "flourish"! Fortunately, no gold teeth showed when she was laughing! The the interior wall of the train compartment was a grayish blue, matching the colour of the cheap fibre carpet on the floor, dutifully oozing calm and serenity. However, the white glue sealing the wall panels to the corners and glass panes to the wall panels were crooked! But I don't suppose the technician did the job whilst the train was moving! Did the project manager or his asistant check before accepting commissioning? Or was it already the result of the repair technician? Heaven knows! After all, the train has been running for nearly 12 years! 

When I was done surveying what's inside the train compartment, I took out the Selected Poems of Antonio Machado's and started reading. I have always wanted to read the book but never quite had time to get to it. The time has come! I was overcome by a quiet joy. But the joy was shortlived. Ah, I must tranlate some of them. So I better not waste time! I did not. I find reading Spanish poetry an excellent way of learning Spanish. Poets are by profession or vocation experts in the use of words. They do their best to extract the last "milligram" of meaning from them. To achieve various effects, they would use different figures of speech like rhyme, alliterations, assonance ( repetition of the vowel) , anacoluthon (abrupt changes within a sentence to a second construction inconsistent with the first), anadiplosis ( repetition of a word at the beginning of a phrase with which the last one ended), anaphora (repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines), anastrophe (inversion of the "normal" syntactical order of words in a sentence), anthropomorphism (attribution of human motivation to otherwise inanimate objects) antiphrasis (the ironic use of a word or a phrase with a meaning opposite to its "usual" meaning), juxtaposition or parallel use of sharply differing words or phrases in a balanced way to emphasize constrast, aposiopesis (or the sudden breaking off of a thought in the middle of a sentence as though the speaker were unwilling to continue because of pain), catachresis (the strained use of one word or phrase),  chiamus ( a rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structure) circumlocution ( the use of many words or an indirect reference of words when a more direct one would do for creating suspense and interest) , use of double entendre (play of a word with two or more meaning), dysphemism (the use of a less disparaging or unpleasant expression by replacing it with a more neutral one), epitrophe ( the repetition of a word(s) at the end of two or more successive verses, clauses), use of images, euphemism ( replacing a more elegant and graceful word for a harsh, blunt or offensive word), euphuism ( use of very affected language) hyperbaton ( using an anastrophe or hysteron proteron to deviate from normal or logical word order for emphasis), hyperbole (an exaggeration), inversion (placing a verb before the subject or the pronoun before the verb or placing an indirect or direct object before the the verb), the use of irony (to suggest a meaning opposite to its literal meaning) the use of litotes ( to understate something postive by negativing its opposite)  metaphors (describing one thing as if it were another), metonymy (using a word or phrase associated with another to replace it eg. Beijing or Paris for the two governments) oxymoron ( using together words or terms apparently otherwise contradictory or incongruous with one another), omnomatopoeia ( using word which imitate the sound being described normally produced by the relevant object), pallilogy (repeating a word etc for emphasis), paralipsis ( suggesting by deliberate omission), personification (representing an inanimate object or an abstract concept as if it were a person), similes ( where two unlike things are likened to each other) syllepsis ( using a word to govern a number of other words which agree in number, gender or case with only one of them or with a different meaning when applied to each of the qualified words)  symbols ( use of an image to tie very different types of images and subject matter together), rhetorical devices like motifs of sound or sense or images, synedoche (where a more specific thing is substituted for a more general thing, using the part and the more specific for the more general or abstract) zeuguma ( a single word. a verb or an adjective applied to two or more nouns when its sense is appropriate to only one of them or to both but in different senses) etc . They experiment with words, play with words, sentence structures, changing nouns into adjectives and vice versa, juggling the positioning of the subjects, the verbs, the direct objects and the indirect objects. Some of them even experiment with the creation of a new words ( neoplasms).They are a kind of David Copperfield of words. In the case of Machado, because of the unusual tranpositions of the indirect and direct objects ( sometimes before and sometimes after the verb) and also because of the interpositioning of many adjectival or adverbial phrases or clauses in the long sentences and the frequent presence of rarely used vocabularies and sometimes entirely new words which Mochado made up by changing verbs into adjectives and vice versa, sometimes I had to read a stanza several times before I got the idea of what he was trying to say. Of course, I could learn Spanish in some less effortful way, just like my fellow classmates, who merely study whatever the lecturer give to us. But I can kill several birds with one stone doing it my way: I learn how the grammatical rules and words could be twisted in unsusual and innovative ways. I learn more vocabularies. I learn to explore the different meanings of the same words in different contexts and I can marvel at the skill of the poet in language use and gorge myself upon their ingenuity.

Whatever the pros and cons of my own highly idiosyncratic way of learning the Spanish language, during the process, I was joined in the train compartment by several apparently foreign born Chinese teenagers in sweat shirts, caps, short baggy pants, flip flops or sockless sports shoes at the Kowloon Station and another one at Tsing Yi Station, each with no luggage except a back pack which they would carelessly sling over one of their shoulders . They were all engrossed in playing some video games or other or texting their friends on their mobiles or i-phones or blackberries, apparently totally undisturbed by the noise of the incessant chattering coming from the direction of the Indian woman who literally never stopped talking on her mobile from the moment she sat down until we arrived at Terminal 1, in her heavily Indian-accented English!