"I wished 2 things..."

"The first one is to do better of what I did"

"...The second one is to do worse of what I did"

so the line goes like this in "This is how you will disappear", the first theater play I attended in Japan which coincidentally was on the Culture Day (文化の日）. It was also one of the performing art series in the Tokyo Festival. The line was sang by a young promising athlete who was threatened by her trainer - he would kill her, and he meant it if she was not perfect. When she sang those lines, she was going though the inevitable stage of self-doubts and insecurities while muddling through the road towards stardom. The journey was long and lonely and you could never quite figure out how far you are from the end point, if there is one. 

If we were better of what we did, we could be spared from the doubts we cast on ourselves and reassured ourselves the road that we have picked.

If we were worse of what we did, we could make peace with ourselves by just giving up and move on to something else.

The line hits me particularly hard as I am paving my way towards my desired future. (I have refrained from saying that it is my dream) I am not sure if I am talented enough to do what I have aspired for myself, nor am I sure if I can convince others that I am qualified. The paradox here is how to make others believe when are in awe yourself.

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booklet given in the play - just shows how far Tokyo ahead of HK in fostering culture activities

I am an amateur in theater but few comments about the play as a whole: The meaning of the story was hard to grasp but the production was no doubt top-notched. The lighting, the sound and fog effects were at their best even though it was played in a rather small theater with only 3 actors. The artistic quality of the play has exceeded by large margins the plays I have seen in Hong Kong. As a public policy student, the question then always comes back to, why Hong Kong has failed to produced a world-class theater play and attracted renowned international theater companies to play in Hong Kong? Simply emphasizing Hong Kong residents' indifference towards art gets in the way of understanding deeper issues in this society and to say Hong Kong is a pure financial city just does not explain anything.