Writing a Sequel

A few friends had asked me whether and when I would write a sequel to my first memoir published in January 2021, which was not exactly a best seller, judging from the space taken up by the left-over stock languishing at my mini-storage. But the few friends who had checked out my website for whatever reasons would not fail to notice that I had continued to write, albeit rather sporadically and erratically. I had read that most successful writers are very disciplined and hardworking people, so that there is no such thing as a writer suddenly becoming famous overnight, unless the authors are already famous or are very good in their own right. I may not be too clever, but I know enough about myself to realize that I have neither been famous or any good and probably never would be. Nevertheless, I plan to continue to write and am planning to write a sequel. As before, it will be a continuation of the vanity project that my friend Mike Rowse once referred to, or to put it bluntly, I am writing for my own therapy.

I don’t think there would be a shortage of subjects on which to write, as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is going on, and one can always recycle one’s thoughts and ideas. I had even thought of writing about all the cars that I had owned or driven, or the flats in which I had lived. In my earlier lives, from the days when I began to qualify for a monthly Private Tenancy Allowance, I moved on average every four years when the landlord increased the rental beyond what my allowance could match and I couldn’t claim hardship under the Landlord and Tenants Ordinance.  All those moves were not only expensive, time consuming and bad for the morale, but they were real boring stuff and I won’t want to write about them. One thing I would have liked to do is to chronicle the people that had some impact on my life at different times and for whatever reasons, but it gets logistically difficult. As a start, I have never been able to decide whether to use their real names, unless that had already gone before us, or unless in the fashion I had recalled them in the last chapter of my first memoir.

Eating and drinking sessions often make good stories, which is why they take up so much air time on TV and which is why recipes are now routinely included, together with photos, in best sellers that look like serious or educational books. For example, our very good friend Csaryne, who had received training in both Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine and whom I had consulted when I had an attack of shingles last year, published Healthy Skin – Chinese Medicine for Common Skin Diseases in the Spring of 2024. Her book included some 70 recipes which are conducive to keeping heathy skin. She had also separately made videos at the requests of friends on making heathy food and soups and at the time she had her book launch earlier this month, those videos had attracted some 2 million viewers. I have also noticed that there are increasingly more programmes on TV related to food and cooking, often involving celebrities, current and past. It is clear that food and cooking are big businesses.

I recall my days in Tsing Hua University in 1998 when our professors invited us to their homes to have dinner. Invariably they were all very good cooks, and there is a reason for it. In the days when China was developing, professors and academics were not paid well so that most of them did their own cooking. They had the time for such activities and practices make perfect.

Maybe I should encourage Su to write about her cooking. Right now, she had surrounded herself in Mei Foo with numerous cook books, old and new, Chinese and Western, and of course a rather good collection of cooking wares and utensils many of which she had only used occasionally. I believe she would have a good following. Indeed, I suspect that many readers were attracted to my blogs by pictures of the dishes she had made, rather than by what I had written.

I had sometimes referred to my own memoir to check for dates and records of my past, and invariably whenever I did that, I tended to read a few pages more of it. It could be a deep-seated narcissistic instinct in me, but I often liked what I saw and was at times surprised by what I had written. Somebody has told me that there is a software which can produce an index that one normally finds at the end of a book and suggested that I try to use it for my sequel. Maybe I would.

I hope to talk to you again after my operation next week.