I am reading a blog written by a woman who grew up in the same small town as I, and then lived in the city where I used to live. Her stories are like shadows of my own memories.
I had the same experience at a dinner party once, when I sat next to someone who had grown up in the same neighborhood as I. We never knew each other as children, and when we finally met and talked we were in our 30's. Growing up, each of us had been in the background of the other's life. He was friends with the much older brother of one of my friends. I vaguely knew that he was the cousin of a friend of another of my friends. He knew my house because his grandparents lived close by. We had had the same teachers, in the same schools.
As we spoke, and he told his stories, images of my early childhood came back to me. I saw myself from a distance, playing with my friends, or us walking past the big tree the guy I was talking to said he had liked sitting under, thinking, as a boy.
The tree is to the right of the tall building in the middle of the old postcard above.
The Curse of the Golden Flower is a gorgeous movie that more or less is gone from your mind the moment you leave the theater. It's beautiful enough for that not to matter, though. Almost. The symmetry and repetition of movements are stunning. There are fantastic mass scenes. The costumes are magnificient. But the plot is thin and actually not that interesting.
What I did come to think of, though, is a Swedish kids' game. It goes like this. One person asks: "The Emperor of China doesn't have any tea. What does he have?" and the other people have to come up with answers. I asked Dan, and he said "rice". That was a good answer. He asked me, and I said "milk" which actually is a good answer too, but he disqualified it because there hadn't been any cows in the movie we had just seen. (!!) (He doesn't know the secret to the game.)
