河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

I grew up in the country, on the outskirts of a small town in Queensland Australia. It's only natural that I grew up running around the farm and countryside without shoes.

Skip forward 30 years and here I am in Hong Kong, still living in a 'country' area and still preferring to not wear shoes when possible; and getting lots of strange looks and questions when people notice. City people simply don't understand, and they usually have misconceptions about barefoot walking and running.

In 1987, I arrived in Hong Kong to stay, to become a pop singer if possible, without any clue as to how I was going to do that. By pure accident or perhaps fate, I discovered that teaching English was a good way to make money for foreigners staying in Hong Kong and I ended up with a teaching job at a commercial English school called 育城 which literally means "Education City". It was while I was working at this school that a coworker notified me of an opportunity to act for television and I became one of Hong Kong's few television foreign actors.

At the time, I had two jobs; my teaching job and the new acting job. Working for television was not a steady job. How many days you worked at television depended on how much your character involved, and you were never sure when you'd be asked to work until one or two days before the shoot. That remains true even today.

I have been running pretty consistently now for almost four weeks. I'm running at least four times a week. The distance is not far. I've measured it in the car and my normal run is just under two miles. This is suitable for my purposes because I need to give my body time to adapt. It has been a long time since I last ran regularly and my muscles and ligaments will need time to develop again.

The blisters which my first run rewarded me with (four on my left foot and three on my right) stayed with me for almost two weeks. I had to puncture a couple of them because they would not flatten out on their own and even the simple act of wearing shoes would keep them alive. All of the blisters did eventually flatten and dry up. Even so, I left the skin there to dry and scrape off naturally during my daily runs. I conjectured that the dry skin might serve to protect the underlying new skin during my runs, and allow the new skin to develop appropriately before it was exposed to the harsh surfaces of the road and sidewalks.

One of my friends asked me how I was getting on with my barefoot running. I had to tell him about the cramps on my last run and how it turned out that they weren't cramps at all. The pain was actually an injury which you could say was caused by not wearing shoes. Does that mean that I'll go back to wearing shoes? No and here's why.

The injury was in the calves of my feet. I say "injury" and "calves" because both calves were injured but the left calf is the one with the serious injury while the right calf has already recovered. The injury was in fact a type of tearing; tearing at the point where the tendons from the base of the ankle connect to the muscle. The calves will need four to six weeks for full recovery. In the meantime, I have to stretch them regularly every day.

I had a dream this morning. I can't remember all of the details. Dreams are strange in nature, adding bits and pieces of our lives into a montage that we call a dream.

I was in a man's home. It wasn't an expensive home. It was relatively old with lots of wooden furniture, the type that you can move around, not the built-in wardrobe type. It was open with windows all around; windows with wooden frames. I seem to remember ceiling fans.

At one side of the flat, I was able to through the window see strange things that looked like trees except that they were huge hanging mobiles planted in the ground; very artistic and very typical of the man's nature. A few seconds later, the mobiles disappeared and there were instead tables spread out in a 'U' shape, tables big enough to seat 12 people each. It was a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, with fanned paper napkins, pink actually. There was a guai lo sitting at one of the tables and a waiter serving him. I suddenly remembered the restaurant that I'd seen downstairs. It was the same restaurant although if the dream was reality, it wouldn't be possible; for the restaurant to be both downstairs and at the back of this man's home somewhere up in a high-rise building.

My next am730 article is just about finished. Part 1 was published a week ago and Part 2 should be published next week. I'll post the full article here after am730 has published it.

This am730 article mentions a teacher I had the fortune to meet while studying at The Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles last year. Her name was Elizabeth and we had a wonderful time together. One of the songs I sang during class that she particularly liked was "The Nearness of You", a wonderful song published way back in 1937. I'm going to record some of my songs and post them here on the blog and I thought this song would be a good start.

I've been watching episodes from a TV show I watched as a kid, a show called Bewitched with Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York. I didn't get to see every show when I was a kid but I enjoyed it anyway, and love it even more now because it's part of my past. That's also part of the reason I enjoyed the Bewitched movie last year with Nicole Kidman who is probably one of the most exceptional actresses I can think of.

In show business, people wish each other 'break a leg' meaning that they wish success for the person they're talking to. Perhaps, I've unwittingly taken this good luck wish to a whole new level.

A week ago while walking with a few of our kids, I was walking rather lazily and stubbed one of my small toes on a tree root sticking out of the ground. It hurt but I didn't think much of it. After all, who among us has never stubbed their toe? I continued the walk and an hour or so later returned home.

Batty had x-rays a couple of weeks ago and hip dysplasia was not evident. He's on muscle relaxants until we can work out what his problem really is, but even with muscle relaxants, he still has difficulty sitting or lying down. When the vet comes back from holidays in his homeland Scotland, we'll look at other possibilities. Who knows? Maybe he really does have spline problems. We'll see.

My health is also being investigated. With my voice easily affected by two or three songs and feeling strained most of the day, I decided to get a professional opinion. When attending Kan's 莫鎮賢 official re-debut at Olympic City, I ran into Anders Nelsson (also a little interesting history about Anders here) and he recommended that I see an old school buddy of his; an ear, nose and throat specialist. At the doctor's clinic, I described the tightness around my throat, the raspiness after singing only two or three songs and the severe cramps I've experienced at the top of my throat over the last several months. He was surprised by the cramps and said that he'd never heard of these cramps in his thirty years of practice, and simply recommended that I find myself a good singing teacher. He was a very nice doctor but somehow I think his knowledge might be out of date. He did however say that my vocol chords were fine after looking at them through a mirror in my throat.