Paperback Edition of "Fated and Fateless"

With the help of free online tools available at the CreateSpace Independent Publishing platform (an Amazon company), I was able to create a paperback version of my novel, which has just been launched on Amazon.com (U.S.), Amazon.co.uk (U.K.), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.de (Germany) and other Amazon European sites. Obviously, print-on-demand technology has been instrumental in helping debut fiction authors who are constantly crowded out of the market to get published at no cost.

In about six to eight weeks' time, the paperback version will be accessible by bookstores, online retailers, libraries and academic institutions.

Link to the Product Page on Amazon.com

Link to the Product Page on Amazon.co.uk

Link to the Product Page on Amazon.fr

Link to the Product Page on Amazon.de

I have to admit that I am one of those book readers who still prefer to hold a physical book in my hands and feel the pages while turning, rather than just gluing my eyes to a screen.

My Debut Novel "Fated and Fateless"

Having spent part of 2009 writing the first few chapters of my first novel, I had to put the work aside in 2010 and 2011 as I found myself deeply engaged in activities related to the publication of the Chinese editions of my non-fiction title "Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong". In  early 2012 I picked up the writing where I left off and finished the first draft in the summer. The remainder of the year was spent in re-writing and polishing the work.

Throughout 2013 I patiently tried to approach, one after another, a select few U.K. publishers who are still receptive towards unsolicited manuscripts from unknown fiction writers, at about three- to four-month intervals. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I had opted not to try U.S. publishers at all. I guess I should count myself as lucky to have received two polite rejection letters from two well-known U.K. publishers, one of who indicated that although my novel is well written and is generally up to publication standard, it is not deemed a viable proposition financially in these particularly difficult times for fiction.

Then the Kindle Self-Publishing website caught my eyes late last year. I decided to give it a go.

Now the Kindle edition of "Fated and Fateless" is available for sale on all branches of Amazon.

Link to the Product Detail page.


Link to the Author Page.


Any feedback from readers of my blog would be most welcome. Better still, buy my book, read it and write a review on Amazon!


 

Happy New Year!

To celebrate the first day in 2014, I've added a heart-warming love song "Speak Softly Love" to my list of uploads on Youtube. As Lord Tennyson once said: "It's better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."

Here's the updated playlist "My Uploads":-

My Favorite Radio Program

I've just read a blog post on the Hong Kong Economic Journal Forum that laments the lack of good radio music  programs and the lack of professional DJs nowadays.  It is said that the newer generation of DJs tend to use the air time and platform like Hyde Park Speakers' Corner rather than share their passion for music with the audience.

Late last year I discovered a Radio HK music program (Radio 5, channel AM 783) that is currently broadcast every Sunday from 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm, and which has become my favorite radio program because I love the nostalgic English oldies that the program host selects. (Prior to June this year, the program used to be broadcast every Wednesday night when there was no LegCo Meeting, and there used to be both English and Chinese songs on the program.)

Here's the link to the program archive:-

http://programme.rthk.hk/channel/radio/programme.php?name=radio5/music_of_my_life&p=5275&m=archive&page=1&item=100

Have a pleasant trip down memory lane!

French Film Festival 2013 - Michael Kohlhaas

Last weekend I watched "Michael Kohlhaas", which is based on an 1811 novella written by German author Heinrich von Kleist about a true event that had taken place in 16th century Germany.

The story is about a horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas who, while passing a border, had two of his newly purchased horses unjustly taken from him as a road toll by an overbearing lord, at a time when road tolls had already been banned by law. Those two horses were worked mercilessly till they bled, and one of his loyal servants was also beaten up badly by the lord's men. When his attempts to seek justice through court proceedings repeatedly failed, his wife decided to take his case to the reigning princess but she was brutally murdered in the process at the behest of the powerful lord. Driven to blinding rage, Kohlhaas formed an army out of his servants, was forced to take his young daughter along for the ride, and attacked the castle of the lord, killing many of his men. The lord's escape into a convent did not stop him. He incited peasants to rise up in rebellion against the aristocracy. His action enraged the princess, who at first seemed forgiving and generous towards him, but who subsequently ordered his arrest and execution by beheading. To show him magnanimity, the princess ordered the judge to award him, before his execution, the justice that he had been seeking, that is, to return two healthy horses to him, to grant him compensation for bodily injuries that his servant had suffered and compensation for his own loss, and to sentence the culpable lord to two-year imprisonment.

Although the story is somewhat straightforward, the film is still quite enthralling with the gripping atmosphere created by skillful cinematography of the vast windswept and barren wilderness, accompanied by a somber sound design (with flies buzzing, wind howling and horse hoof thumping) that highlights the unforgiving countryside, plus the dark charm of the wronged hero role played by Mads Mikkelsen.

In the midst of Kohlhaas' acts of vengeance, there is a short dialogue between an old clergy and him in which the former tried to dissuade the latter from further committing acts of violence on account of faith in God, but failed, as the latter insisted on seeing justice done. The conversation has an unmistakable premonitory ring to it.

Few rational beings would risk their own lives unless they feel totally trapped with no way out. The tragic element of the story is that Kohlhaas' vindictive action resulted in creating even more victims (his own daughter being one as she was becoming an orphan), even if he finally got the justice that he had sought, for which ironically he had to pay with his own life. But then, in those days of the "ancien regime", when the royalties held all legislative, administrative and judiciary powers, what options did an aggrieved commoner have other than rise up and rebel?

French Film Festival 2013 - Hiroshima, Mon Amour

It's that time of the year again - the French Film Festival kicked off last Wednesday and will last until December 12. For the past four years, I've been one loyal fan of the festival. At the 2011 festival, I was most disappointed for being too late to get a ticket for the musical "Beloved" starring Catherine Deneuve. Luckily this year I've already booked one for her 1967 film "Beauty of the Day".

The day before yesterday I watched the 1959 film "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" in black and white, which is named a Cannes Classics at the 2013 Cannes International Film Festival. The scriptwriter, Marguerite Duras, who had her first venture in the world of cinema with this film, was nominated for an Oscar.

The story is about a French actress doing filming work in Hiroshima, where she meets a married Japanese man and falls in love with him. The timeline is about ten years after the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima. At the end of the three-day affair, the actress decides to leave her lover. The couple struggle with the pain of imminent separation. The camera oscillates between the past, with images of the aftermath of the bombing, and the present, with images of the lovers' day-to-day activities together with the actress's recollection of a tormenting end to a love affair with a German soldier at Nevers, France, during World War II, when he was killed.

I'm glad that I had stumbled upon a book about Marguerite Duras earlier in the week and was given to understand a little her unique literary style, which centers on the coexistence of past and present, memory and oblivion, love and death, which elements are readily identifiable in the film. In this film, she also departed from the conventional literary model by being sparse with descriptive details and shifting from single-voice narration to dialogue. The lack of descriptive details is intended to invoke in the audience the power of imagination. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, a male and a female voice converse with each other in the background, with the female trying to remember horrific scenes of the bombing and the male trying to negate her, representing a conflict between memory and oblivion. For the rest of the film, the protagonist's pain of memory and the pain of her inability to forget coexists with her lover's unrelenting effort to make her forget her past so that he could have a future with her.

Ten years after the bombing, Hiroshima is already back to normal life with a bright future. At the time of the lovers' encounter, the actress had also left Nevers to begin a new life in Paris. Towards the end of the film, the actress says to the Japanese man: "You're Hiroshima", and the Japanese man says to her "You're Nevers". After all, it is just a matter of forgetting and letting go of pain.

This film won the International Film Critics Award and the Film Writers Award. It also shared the Prix Melies with Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows". In 1960 it won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film.

More Land Is the Answer, Or Not?

(Note - My recent idea was to blog about light-hearted topics like music, films and books on this blog, while keeping more serious subjects on my Asia Sentinel blog. But lately the Asia Sentinel has been undergoing a change of server, and links to my A.S. blog posts don't seem to work any longer. So I'm re-posting my two latest A.S. blog posts separately here for interested readers' convenience.)

Here's the second last post "More Land Is the Answer, Or Not?":- 

Amidst Hong Kong’s clamoring for sky-high property prices to be reined in, there have been incessant calls for the SAR government to increase land and property supply. I, for one, was at one time besotted with the thought that releasing more land could eventually dampen prices, if still skeptical over the prudence of dishing out more land to the same cartel that is already sitting on huge land banks (because highest-bidder-wins-policy would ensure that deep-pocket developers would, more often than not, end up the winning bidders).

Having observed this year’s government land tender results, it seems the larger tracts, like always, have fallen into the hands of leading developers or State-owned mainland developer (to quote a few examples: a sizable Yuen Long lot went to Sun Hung Kai Properties; two large Tseung Kwan O lots went to Wheelock Properties, two Kai Tak lots went to China Overseas Construction). Owing to bidders being able to use nominee companies (whose parent companies may also be nominee companies) in land tenders, it is impossible to know from officially announced tender results who actually got the other sizeable plots.

As for the land tender prices, they are, as always, marked closely to the property market, where prices have barely fallen from the historical peak. The palliative buyer stamp duty and special stamp duty – the so called “piquant measures” – have so far only managed to reduce property turnover, but hardly the prices. But already property vested interests are nagging for a repeal of those measures, which have been introduced for only a few months.

It would seem that my earlier tinge of optimism about increased land supply being an effective impetus to eventually bring property prices down to more affordable levels seems misplaced. I unwittingly overlooked the crucial fact that the government and the leading developers have never ceded their firm grip on land and property prices, simply by virtue of their collective ownership of almost all of Hong Kong’s buildable land. They have a common interest in keeping prices high, though for different reasons. The former wants to maximize land sale revenue for its fiscal health, so that it can continue to trumpet to the world that Hong Kong has the unique advantage of a low-tax regime. The latter want to continue to fatten themselves with development profits and rents. They are no different from a clique of bakers who have monopolized the supply of wheat flour – they naturally have the power to manipulate the price of bread.  

It is apparent that, as long as the high land price policy that the Hong Kong government embraces with all its life force remains intact, no matter how much land is released into the market, it’s not going to have the desired impact on property prices, much less on the entrenched status quo. History shows that every market dip in the past was caused by an external event or internal chaos rather than an increase of land supply (of course the property cartel would try to dupe the public into believing the latter being the culprit). On the other hand, past experience has taught many of the older generations (including civil servants) that their best bet is “if you can’t beat them, join them”. Such an attitude towards buying and owning properties has been institutionalized over the years, and is deeply embedded in the social consciousness. Naturally, homeowners would want to see prices stay up, whose expectation can be self-fulfilling. Homeowners would rather use all their savings to buy more flats for their offspring than see property prices fall significantly for the greater and long-term good of society.

The only problem is, at least some clear-thinking and independent youngsters and individuals who have a sense of justice are finding that this game only favors those already with capital (equity in homes) and is grossly unfair to those without at the starting point. They can see that Hong Kong’s addiction to properties is stifling healthy innovation and creativity, the lack of which is taking a toll on its economic development. For those who are grassroots and those who by a stroke of bad luck have slipped onto the lower social echelons, living in decrepit sub-divided flats as well as enduring bitingly high rent is their only option until subsidized flats become within reach, if they ever will. These unfortunate have-nots, along with the haves, all need to pay a lot more than would have been necessary for their daily needs and consumer goods because of obscene rents.

The SAR government’s vacuous vows to increase land supply or to search for more land to build affordable flats are at best a feckless attempt to teach guileless Hong Kongers simple Economic theory about supply/demand equilibrium, and at worst a red herring aimed at diverting the public’s anger away from its perpetual collusion with the property cartel (which should now include powerful mainland developers).

Thus, CY Leung and his administration, knowing full well that the Gordian knot to Hong Kong’s social and economic ills (including the much condemned wealth gap) lies in the government’s high land price policy, its addiction to financing itself with land revenues and the regressive tax system but lacking the courage to touch them, can only put “band-aids on top of band-aids”, as one internet commentator jeered. At the same time, society’s institutionalized belief in the magic wand of properties is providing good excuses for inaction on government’s part.