Hong Kong
I sometimes have trouble putting my thoughts about ideal personal characteristics into words. When I think about people I admire and try to describe them, I often find my verbal pictures are inadequate, somehow incomplete. I can list some of the qualities I see but I usually miss something. Also, we don't always know the whole person; we see the surface characteristics but usually we can't know everything. We can't often know history, meaningful events, even recent events that might be material to our views of people. Similarly, when we describe admirable qualities we sometimes need to refer to real people as examples. I recently found a good example of my concept of a gentleman.
I've just returned from a trip to Hong Kong to attend a film program honoring Anna May Wong. I have many impressions I'll share over the next few months but today I want to write about Law Kar. Law Kar is a film historian and critic specializing in Hong Kong film history. He was, until recently, the Programmer of the Hong Kong Film Archive and has written extensively about various film topics such as the Shaw Brothers and music in Chinese cinema. He is the co-author of Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-cultural View. He remains very busy and interested in a variety of topics. He was the programmer for the Anna May Wong program and participated in a panel entitled "When Race Met Gender: The Film Career of Anna May Wong".
I have eclectic interests and I've not often met people who single-mindedly pursue an interest but I'm always impressed when I do. I'm impressed by their passion, by the knowledge they gain and by their love of sharing their knowledge with others. Law Kar is one of those who pursues his interest passionately and enjoys sharing the knowledge he gains; in fact, I believe he enjoys the sharing as much as the pursuit of knowledge. He is one I think of as a "born teacher". I learned many new things about Anna May Wong from listening to his presentation at the panel.
I was also very impressed by Law Kar personally, by his demeanor, by his courtesy, by his humility, by his restraint in situations where many of us would have thrown up our hands. Law Kar is a true gentleman in every sense of the word. I enjoyed watching him interact with his fellow film-lovers and others. He brought courtesy and respect to the situations I observed. He is the mentor of another gentleman who is employed by the Hong Kong Film Archive and who helped me with interpretation of Law Kar's Chinese remarks. Sometimes you can learn a lot by watching the interaction between mentors and those they counsel and this was such a time. Their mutual respect and admiration obviously helped both.
We all need examples to form our own personae, our own characters. We all need models to emulate, models who help to define our goals for ourselves. When you set a personal goal, try to find a model, try to learn everything you can about him or her. Try to understand that the more complete is the picture you gain of your model, the more likely you will be able to match the model and gain the qualities you seek.
11-28-05
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