memories of wild swans

i am going to do some aimless rantings in this post.

and these rantings came about following a short online/ sms conversation with a friend on friday evening. you see, just as he bade me good night, he shared that he would be heading back to read the book "wild swans" before retiring. hmmm, the title sounded familiar i thought. so, after our conversation ended, i googled the title and realized i had read the book some 7-8 years back (or perhaps even more?). and the image of the book reminded me of a couple of things...

i was with james back then. and that was the time where heading to the bookstore was a routine thing for us. we would head to either kinokuniya at taka, or borders at wheelock. yes, borders at wheelock. the one that recently closed (in a way, its closing marked another closure of a piece of my past). for james, he would head straight to either the gender studies section or the magazine section (he was a huge fan of entertainment weekly). as for me, i would usually hang around at the fiction, the self-help or the cooking/ recipe section... that was how we spend our evenings. reading.

talking about wild swans... well, i couldn't really recall the story per se. but it did remind me of a specific remark that james made one evening at kinokuniya. he remarked that i only read stories that depict lives of people (particularly women) during the period of the cultural revolution. heh heh... indeed i was. i supposed in a way, these stories reminded me of my mum's younger days. and through these stories, it also gave me a glimpse of what china was like during the revolution.

lastly, i was also reminded about how anal i was about spelling mistakes/ typo errors. you see, while reading the book, i noticed a couple of typo errors. and being someone who's rather anal about such mistakes, my first thoughts were - this is so unprofessional! how could the author possibly make such mistakes! i felt sufficiently disturbed to google for jung chang's email and wrote to her about it. i was rather surprised when i got her reply, but when i read her reply, i was totally unimpressed. she sounded super nonchalant about it, so below my expectations of a professional writer. well, i couldn't recall her exact words, but it went on something along the following tone... oh, it was no biggie, really... i mean, it's only a few words out of the whole book... damned! i thought, that was so unprofessional! she should have at least acknowledge the error and promised to change it in subsequent reprints. and she did not even thank me for reading her book! anyway, after that, i kinda lost my interest in jung chang's books...

:-)