Life in a big city full of people can be a paradoxically lonely existence. It’s a Friday night and I find myself holed up in my hotel room 33 storeys above from the ground. I had dinner alone and then headed to the Central Library near the hotel I’m staying at in Tin Hau, borrowed a book and then headed back to the hotel to surf the net and then write this.
To be honest, I’m quite the nerd/geek or in Chinese they’d call me a 宅女. I like holing myself up at home with my books or just watching some show on my laptop after a day’s work. I’m so not the party animal who goes clubbing and drinking every other night. I’m the kind of person who likes to be in bed by 12 midnight.
So I’ve gotten used to being alone, doing my own thing and just finding stuff to keep myself busy. But getting used to something doesn’t equate to liking it. Guess I should get out there a bit more to know more people. My good friends say I should make more effort in finding someone I can build a future with, but I just don’t know why it’s so difficult even in cities where there are lots of people.
I have so many single girlfriends whom I would date and marry if I were a guy. Where the men have gone I don’t know. The other day a friend I had lunch with said she’s jealous of couples who have more than one child as she’s been trying to have a second child. This from a woman who has a beautiful and cute daughter, has a loving husband and happy extended family and does not have to work because her husband and her family are loaded. And I’m thinking, please, think of what you have rather than what you don’t!
Anyway, I can cope on my own as long as I have an Internet connection and a book. I think one of the best things my parents did for me was to instill in me a love for reading. I remember my mum reading to my sister and me every night and every other week we would go to the library to borrow books. Books, to me, are the world’s best inanimate companions. I love being taken away into another world when I read a book. I suppose it’s this love of reading that has given me the ability to earn a living from editing and writing.
A few days ago my colleague, a translator, who sits next to me asked me how I thought she could improve in her writing. All the translators in my department aren’t native speakers of English, so their writing tends to sound like Chinglish and some times they aren’t aware of certain expressions which might sound grammatically wrong to them but is in fact commonly used in that way in English. It’s hard having to explain why I word some things the way I do. Intuitively I just know it’s correct but I don’t know how to explain it. Anyway, I told my colleague to read, read and read. That’s the only way to go about it. Your language ability just improves by assimilation of the language when you read. At least I find that’s so for me when it comes to Chinese.
Well, my first two weeks in the job have been relatively stress free. My official working hours are from 8.30am-5.30pm and I haven’t had to work late so far. Everyone seems to leave on the dot at 5.30pm so there’s no need to hang around and make a show of being a hard worker. Fantastic!
The work hasn’t been too difficult for the most part. The only challenging bit is having to rephrase or make out the meaning of awkwardly translated sentences that sound very much like Chinglish. My job is to make it sound like natural English. Sometimes it helps that I can read and understand the original Chinese text.
It hasn’t been that busy at work and I haven’t been fully occupied at work. This then makes it hard for me to clock in my hours in my timesheet. We have to submit our timesheets every Friday and today was the first time in my whole working life that I submitted one. I felt like such a farce when I put down a lot of time under ‘General Administration’ and typing in details like ‘familiarising myself with accounting terms’. Haha. But hey, it’s not my fault that there isn’t any work for me. I even asked the other editor if she needed any help but she said she didn’t. So I was twiddling my thumbs for the whole of today after spending er, just 30min, clearing some admin stuff. So today I replied to friends’ emails and looked at some websites explaining accounting terms which very quickly went right over my head.
But anyway, it’s all good and I like this company much more than I do the previous one in HK. The work’s not too stressful and is relatively easy. I know, I know, I’m one helluva of an underachiever. But you know what? Not everyone’s cut out or wants to be a CEO.
Alright, time for bed. Getting my Hong Kong ID made at immigration department tomorrow morning and moving into my rented flat on both days of the weekend. Ciao.