A Person’s True Vocation

By Vincent Li

In 2009, the world is reeling from the impact of a global financial storm. For a series of young professionals in Hong Kong and Indonesia—places somewhat immune to the crash—life isn’t as easy as they had hoped. Now, when nothing is certain, they must find a way to rise above the challenges of life in a soulless corporate world.

Michael’s trying to come to terms with being told he has to leave Hong Kong, thanks to a transfer to Indonesia. Who would have thought the general manager of a recreation club could be this stressed out? Simon has a job that should be relaxing and rewarding, but he has to find a way to outwit a board that wants him impeached. Chris, the ambitious (and slightly overwhelmed) marketing director of a fashion brand-management company, is hoping to launch an extravagant fashion show against all odds of economic downturn and corporate politics. And poor Roy and Joey wish they still had jobs to worry about. But they’ve just been told that they are redundant in their respective (former) workplaces—on the same day.

Success in this world is not only about who you are; it’s also about who you know. Sometimes you are what you do, and sometimes you just do the job. Together, these friends explore their absurd and delicious encounters, and taste the existential anguish of the quest to discover what life truly has in store for each of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482899153

Vincent Li

Vincent Li has lived in the UK, Japan, Korea, the UAE, Canada, and Indonesia. A veteran of the aviation and travel industry, he is a blogger for the education post of South China Morning Post (*), among other online publications. He was born in Hong Kong and now lives in Shanghai.

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Copyright © 2014 by Vincent Li.

ISBN:          Hardcover          978-1-4828-9914-6

                   Softcover            978-1-4828-9913-9

                   eBook                978-1-4828-9915-3

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Table of Content

May 2009

Chapter 1: Card-box

Chapter 2: My Angel

Chapter 3: Double-think

June 2009

Chapter 4: Hot Pot

Chapter 5: Avatar

Chapter 6: Godfather

July 2009

Chapter 7: Vanity and the Filth of Power

Chapter 8: The Hidden Jewel in Asia

Chapter 9: Bombardment with Poverty

August 2009

Chapter 10: You have got the look!

September 2009

Chapter 11: True Vocation

For my deceased parents in Heavens and my beloved family on earth—my wife, Sally, my children, Kristie and Christopher, and my brothers, Victor and Jerry.

Preface

Sometimes I wonder whether my hometown, Hong Kong, is really a desert in culture, as many people say it is. I am puzzled about what it really means. It may be alluding to the impression that people there are primarily occupied with the economic activities of making money that they do not have much time left for anything else. I find this observation debatable. If, however, the culture of a particular place has to be interpreted and appreciated against its history of civilization, perhaps, there may be some rationality behind the generally negative perception about Hong Kong. I guess nowadays hardly anybody has any idea about its pre-colonial history, i.e., prior to 1842 when it was officially ceded in perpetuity to the United Kingdom under the treaty of Nanking. As such, its better-known contemporary history is relatively short, compared to, say, that of the rest of China.

But sometimes I am even more confused about my national status, in particular, every time when I have to fill in the landing form to be presented to the customs or immigration officer of an overseas country I am visiting. Prior to 1July, 1997, I would claim myself as British by nationality, albeit with a sense of peculiar emptiness rather than pride. After the handover of sovereignty of the last British colony on earth back to China, I always waver between Hong Kong and Chinese every time when I have to state my national identity. Succumbing to nostalgia about who I really am, I usually put down the former. But when I try to show and feel for nationalism for a change, I begin to put down the latter—which I am also conscious as being one letter and one space short, therefore, helps a little when I try to write faster. Yet, at some other times, I may try to be thorough and precise about my existence and put down Hong Kong Chinese. In so doing, I am showing my association with Motherland, but at the same time, subconsciously, perhaps wrongfully, also believing that being from Hong Kong is still somehow more different than from the rest of China nowadays—beyond what the different passport may have already conferred on its holder. I wonder whether my fellow citizens of Hong Kong, those born and grown up there crossing the two eras of sovereignty, share the same misgivings in national identity.

Despite the contention about its cultural resourcefulness, its relatively short (known) contemporary history and the possibly confusing identity of its people, I often feel that there are many interesting stories unique about my hometown to tell the rest of the world—other than for sharing with my fellow comrades from Hong Kong and the rest of our motherland. Of course every place on earth must have something unique about it, as I have learnt from all the wonderful experiences of living and travelling in many different countries for the past twenty-seven years, by virtue of my education and occupation. So in trying to tell these stories, it is not just the peculiarities about where I am from but the possible commonalities with any other related stories from anywhere around the world that I am looking for, particularly in the area of work—like how today’s organization men struggle for progress, indeed even just survival, in the testing corporate environments of our contemporary age. In fact, it was when I was living in Indonesia, not Hong Kong, exactly five years ago where I started to make up my mind to seriously write about some of these stories.

But weaving these stories together with a common theme has been a daunting task for me—a family man with a full-time occupation and, at times, further education to attend to. However, my eureka moment came when Hermann Hesse’s writing in his Demian (first published in 1919 and with a prologue added in 1960) came back to my consciousness one day. I recall having two copies of the book at home, though forgetting since when, where did I get them from, and exactly at which places when I first saw them—as I have almost lost track of how many times, perhaps around thirty, I have moved between homes in my life time so far. I also remember having read the book twice over the years, and even written down how I felt about it in my blog (*). Funny enough, it was only until recently that what the then German Nobel laureate wrote about, and which I found so much resonance in, came back to enlighten my mind.

"An enlightened man has but one duty—to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it leads . . ."

Though not offering an absolute answer as such, I also find it providing a bridge of awakening from my earliest quest for the meaning of life during my adolescent ages—some thirty years ago—to my continual search for enlightenment for the unknown days ahead. Besides, the emphasis on the two realms of living in the stories of Demian, as epitomized in the god’s name of Abraxas who is at once God and Satan and contains both the luminous and dark world, is readily reminiscent of the Chinese Tai-Ji Yin-Yang’s perspective of all things in life. More often than not, amidst life ambiguities, it is indeed up to our own enlightened mind to define clarity and make sense of the outside reality from within.

While the background of the stories in this book was set in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and the timing was between May and September 2009—when the world was still being plagued by the major financial crisis of the century in one way or another—they were all but incidental and arbitrary. It is my wish that readers will enjoy and find resonance in these stories somehow; and be inspired or reassured to believe that, though everybody’s path is different, no one is alone in his journey of struggle for grappling with life paradoxes and seeking the way to himself.

Vincent Li

18 Mar, 2014

This is a fiction.

May 2009

1.jpg

Chapter 1: Card-box

R oy worked for a publisher of local magazines, which mostly featured the local paparazzi and lifestyles in Hong Kong. He categorically belonged to the professional community of gossip-trailblazers, the hounds, who basically made their living out of tracing the celebrities’ footprints and making the most spectacular drama possible out of every single exposed incident—or even just vague hint to an incident—concerning their targets, like prey. He enjoyed and took pride in his job. If he was ever asked to pass any judgment on the trade, it was with a sense of honour—without any tinge of iniquity—that he considered it contributing substantially to the value chain of vanity making, which he believed was what the show business all about.

Don’t the artists want exposure and fame after all? What extra miles many of them would not go to for getting featured under the spotlight? Roy was totally convicted of the mission of his trade. Of course, more often than not, it tends to be patronizing, if not ruinous, rather than glorifying in reality. Besides the celebrities’ stories of fame and success—and decadence, sleaze, or downfall—as a media journalist, however, Roy also covered other topical stories for suiting the public tastes, sating their gossip-hungry appetite. Other than the chief editor’s judgment, basically, he had to follow his own instincts for picking the right trends and hitting the right spots—though a published post turning out as a hit or a miss is anybody’s guess.

Incidentally, the mission of his news-hunting excursion on this particular day was to follow a breaking episode of an alternative nature. It was about a bankrupted business closing its shop. Why Roy judged the breaking news to be relevant to his publication, and what made it particularly media-worthy in his view, was the bankrupted company itself: Tou Pao, another paparazzi publisher, literally translated as "First Canon". Intuitively, it should be a melancholic kind of story to be covered, as yet another incident of a business going down seemingly as a victim of the prevalent economic recession. But Roy was ambivalent about the approach with which to report and feature the story.

As Roy received the phone call of tip-off from his clandestine informant about the commotion breaking loose at the publishing office of First Canon upon the sudden arrival of official receivers and security guards in abundance, he did feel a mixed sensation of sympathy and schadenfreude. Indeed he was also consciously aware of his own self-serving smirk. As he was listening, he even began to conceive various sardonic angles of feature from which to make an attractive story out of the otherwise deplorable incident, with spontaneous choices of catchy headline for captivating the potential readers’ attention toiling in his head, readily translated as First Canon no more; First Canon goes under; First Canon’s bolted. He was convinced that the story would sell, never mind being by way of a cheesy headline—and its apparent lack of sympathy.

Feeling excited with his own creative initiatives, Roy spontaneously pumped up his fist, doing so in such an aggressive manner that even his surrounding colleagues were startled. But without giving away any hint as to what was the matter to anyone, while still holding his Blackberry phone to his ear with one hand, he swiftly picked up his camera and gear of the other photography tools from his messy desk with another and dashed for the exit from his stuffy office. Notwithstanding the contemporary digital age when data and information were long supposed to be conveniently managed and stored in their soft formats, it was still a typical printing office—one packed with piles of all sorts of papers—where Roy worked in. More often than not, anyone dashing for the door through the narrow lanes between closely-parked journalists’ desks fluttered up flying papers from the vicinity on his/her trail, as Roy did on this particular occasion.

Rumours had been spreading about the demise of First Canon for quite some time—which it narrowly escaped once. Its core weekly magazine was forced to have its name changed in the wake of a scandalous blunder a few years back. A cover story which exposed the life-struggling history of a popular movie star, and victimized her with repugnant pictures of nudity, was immediately proven to be crossing the threshold of the society’s tolerance of crassness and vulgarity upon its publishing. The publisher was immediately labeled as villainous out of the sheer outrage of the general public and, of course, the show-business artists in particular. With the celebrities’ missionary and cohesive calling for the common cause of fighting against the devilish infringement of privacy, and with their natural attraction of star’s power, large-scale assemblies and parades of protest under their advocacy were swiftly formed across the city and extensively reported through all local media channels. Publishing of the weekly magazine was immediately terminated, until it was re-launched under a new name some months later after the antagonistic sentiment died down.

Crueler than the industry’s relentless urge to expose and sell the third persons’ privacy to arouse and satisfy the sate of public curiosity, it was not any ravaging scandal but the destructive force of economic reality—if not the digitalization and commoditization of cheap gossips—which gored the infamous publisher this time. It was a cold and hard accounting matter of hemorrhaging cash flow that eventually brought it down. So its day of inevitable reckoning perhaps came as no surprise to anyone, it was just a matter of timing. Yet, Roy was excited about the breaking news for his own reason.

Although, in a split second, it crossed his mind that he should first check with his boss whether he should follow this breaking story up, Roy was too excited to slow himself down. It was only two years ago when his application for a position of journalist at First Canon was coldly turned down. What made the experience of failure particularly hurting was the condescending interview given by the publisher’s chief editor. Roy successfully joined Xin Lang Chao, literally translated as New Wave—his current employer—afterwards. Not entirely out of any vindictive intent but simply by virtue of the trade, he had always been in the heat of loggerhead competition with First Canon for readership