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 【小说连载】When Pigs Fly (1. Central Park) 喜欢就说声好, 没有三个以上跟贴我就不搬了. |
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欢迎拍砖
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作者：游客 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
When Pigs Fly
By William Liu
1. Central Park
I swore long ago I would write about him.
However, life between then and now has been such a busy business. As with all my other promises, this pledge went benignly into a lengthy "to do" list. Then came my divorce. My ex-wife took the list along with my investment portfolios on wagon-making business and Iraqi oil prospect--she was a very meticulous person.
Now here I am, divorced, recently downsized, and don't exactly know what to do next. But I am not in a hurry to fulfill my early promises. I remember when I was 14 or 15, I promised myself to win a Nobel Prize. Should I try to fulfill this one, now that I don't even have a $30-a-year membership in American Physical Society?
Life has its own pace and rhythm, and if you don't think about it, reason. I chugged along. New York City was a big place for me to explore. Since I threw up my textbooks on superstrings and joined the 100-year old investment bank Merry Stench on Wall street, I had been swimming fitfully in the ocean of derivatives--never mind I had mastered the art of calculus almost 20 years ago. The New York City I knew was largely the concatenation of subway station names on my commute to and from Manhattan. The highlight of my cultural experience was those hurried lunches at Chinatown. I didn't even have time to go to the 42nd street for more than a handful of times -- a couple of those times were for the business of renewing my passport in the Chinese consulate.
So there was no shame in unemployment--I urged myself on. But New York to an unemployed person was suffocatingly oppressive. Had I been a Boyz in the 'Hood, I might be better able to deal with, even enjoy the leisurely lifestyle. But, all my life, I had been under this tremendous burden called ambition. It took sometime to get used to the freedom of being free.
Slowly, New York starts to unveil her charm. I finally went to Broadway to watch a live musical, rubbed my elbows with the raucous crowd at the Late Show, and had my photos taken with Mujibar and Saraju at Rock America.
I discovered Central Park and convinced myself that those pigeons were not temporarily put together by movie directors to give those cheesy emotional melodrama an autumnal backdrop of flight and soaring stupidity. I even kept a log of the traffic of noontime joggers. Not that I think NY metro transit authority would be interested in such information, but the scene of a middle-aged fat man having his sweaty hand around the buttock of his minimally dressed female colleague was just irresistible--it reminded me of my wife and her boss. Oh, #### it!
One sunny early afternoon, having dispensed all my bread to the pigeons, I sat on a bench and struck a conversation with a man of roughly my age and presumably the same situation--a young man in his 30's sitting in Central Park at 2:30 pm was either stinkingly rich or unemployed. He was latter. Interestingly, he, too, went for a Ph.D. program in theoretical physics but withdrew after two years -- his mind was just not in it anymore after finding out that superstring theory, standard model, and chaos were just some bad poetry. So he wandered for a time--rock bands, night clubs, and Las Vegas. Now he had settled down, living with his aged aunt in Brooklyn, and dedicated himself to writing a novel based on his best friend who died of AIDS several years ago.
That evening, having stood motionless by the Hudson River for I-knew-not-how-long, I went back to my aprtment with early morning dews and a commitment to myself and all those dear and close to me: Writing about my friend who died of Culture Shock in this country.
作者：游客 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 【小说连载】When Pigs Fly (1. Central Park) 喜欢就说声好, 没有三个以上跟贴我就不搬了. -- 欢迎拍砖 - (3704 Byte) 2004-6-05 周六, 02:11 (940 reads) - 先顶！ -- 孤枕难眠 - (0 Byte) 2004-6-05 周六, 02:19 (146 reads)
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