Made in Hong Kong 1974

Just recently my company hired a new General Manager for India. He is now spending his first month with the company here in Shanghai and is probably the only person in my office at the moment born in the 70's. He is from Malaysia originally and ciggie breaks are typically nostalgic. Not so much remembering old times, because I've only known him for 2 weeks, but about shared memories of music and television.

I only tell you this because it explains my current frame of mind. I am also reading (well more accurately listening) to The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell and I have reached Part Four of the book. Set in the USA in 1974. Because Littell's story uses a mixture of Fact and Fiction to weave his story, the story makes reference to India's first nuclear test and the Watergate Scandel that got me thinking... What else happened the year I was born.

After Wikipediing and Googling for a little while, I also learned that in 1974, The Terracotta Warriors were discovered, Darwin gets flattened by Cyclone Tracy, ABBA wins the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, Mohammad Ali knocks our George Foreman in the 8th Round of Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire and the Rubik's Cube was invented.

This was the world in which I was born into. Interesting but all these things happened a world away. So a dug a little further to find out what was going on closer to ground zero in Hong Kong and I found that John Woo had directed his first film. The style that we have know to recognise as a John Woo film is already evident in The Young Dragons 铁汉柔情. One of the movies stars is an actor famous for playing opposite Chow Yun-Fat as the villian. His name is Wan ZiLiang (万梓良）.

I only bring this up because my Chinese name is Lin Ziliang (林梓梁）.

Interesting? Maybe! Too much time on my hands? Definitely!