Reading is so Fun

Because of English footballer's freckles, I started to miss London very much. I bought the 20 hour long BBC documentary of religion and Agatha Christie's "Murder is Easy". I lay the book in the project room and my client looked at the title, asking me in a worried voice "That is not a non-fiction book, right?"

I accidentally bought another copy of a book I possessed but have not read. Gee, I am really getting old. That is a novel whose background is set at Beijing under Japanese's control before world war II. The cruelty and violence bit are often heard, but I am really interested in the description of real Beijing life.

Beijing natives are very proud to be useless. The ethinic group, Chi, were from east north of China. They came into the central land, drving away the Ming Dynasty and started Chin Dynasty. Those Chi people were absolutely minority but shared the glory of becoming the govening class in central land. As they induldged themselves in foods, drink, having fun, they lost their fighting skills. No longer knows how to ride a horse. However, they are all masters of the art of good living.

Working hard is viewed as very low class thing to do, that's for the servants. They breed birds in spring time, train eagles in summer, bet on little cricket fight in fall and go to the famous brothel in winter. They worship uselessness.

Take breeding bird for example, it is definitely not an easy work to do. First of all, you have to get the right bird, get the most delicately carved cage and work out different bird foods in different seasons. You then have to wake up at 5am to "walk" the bird. Walking with the bird in a cage but you have to swing the cage so the bird's muscle can be trained while holding tight to to the stick. The next thing is to find a good environment for the bird to learn how to sing. You have to get the bird in the middle of other birds for quite a while so it feels intimidated first and wants to do better later. It is very very important to get the bird into the right crowd, otherwise, it would learn the type of singing it is not supposed to do.