尋雲得安？ (I Took a Break for Movie-Watching!)

#2021-0724

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have stayed home most of the time. And because we had much more "free time" than before, we had to find something extra to do, to "kill" the time. We were not really free in our free time; staying at home for such a long time made us uneasy -- in other words, it would be boring if we got little (or nothing) to do!

So I started to write; to do some "creative writing," so to speak. The problem is that I write very slowly. On average, I added only two hundred words to my Story Ideas file a day. Up to the day before yesterday, I had written 9172 words -- English words, counted by Word. That was a lot behind my original schedule; I wish I could have made my first 10,000 words last month as the draft of my new story.

If you asked me what my long story (novel) would be, I would say, "I don't know." In fact, I haven't decided on the theme, the plot, or the length of this new piece of fiction; I just know that it would be fiction, or a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. And I want to keep on writing -- writing until the whole book (or novel) is completed some day!

Hopefully I'll be able to "kill" the time -- to spend this pandemic period in a more "creative" way!

In the meantime, I noticed that my wife had found her new hobby recently. She watched quite a number of films (movies) in the recent weeks. And she loved most of the films she had chosen to watch on YouTube.

She doesn't want me to be obsessed with writing, though. She often tells me not to sit for too long at a time. She would like me to spend more time chatting with her, or going for a walk together, or even watching a movie on iPad together with her.

"Don't you take a rest?" She reminded me the day before yesterday, "Doctors say that we who have just been vaccinated should not work too hard..."

"On, dear, I write slowly -- so very slowly, as you can see."

"Anyway, don't sit up late," she spoke as if she were giving an order.

"Okay, I promise," I said. "I won't sit up late. And as you can see, we'll go hiking every day unless it rains all day long."

"You know what I've discovered?" All at once she became more excited, saying, "I find that the scenery in the borderlands of Mainland China, as well as the ethnic minorities living there, is so attractive that I will look for more films of that type to watch..."

She then told me what she had watched earlier this week:

1. 尋找劉三姐 (Xunzhao Liu Sanjie, or "A Singing Fairy" in English).

2. 雲上太陽 (Yun-shang Taiyang, or "Close to the Sun" in English).

3. 德令哈之戀 (Delingha zhi Lian, or "The Love of Delingha).
    In Classical/Literary Chinese, 德 = 得; these two characters sound and mean the same.

4. 安妮的邛海 (Anni de Qionghai, or "Annie's Lake Qiong" in English).

In each of the above-mentioned films, the setting (or background) of the story is equally attractive: You'll see the beautiful scenery in a remote area (for example, in the Guangxi autonomous region) and you'll find the different cultures of the ethnic minorities (for example, the Zhuang people, 壯族). How amazing they are, the land and the people!

Invited by my wife, I finally finished watching all the four movies yesterday afternoon. And as I put the Chinese titles of them together, I was surprised to see the first Chinese word in each line (four words in all) forming such a meaningful phrase: 尋雲德安 (or 尋雲得安), which literally means "Seek the clouds, and enjoy the peace!"