Desperately Seeking Balance

By Yeoh Siew Hoon

This is the week for catching up with old friends – the good thing about being in the industry for so long is you do have a lot of old friends everywhere.

The first old friend is a leading travel agent in Hong Kong whom I talked to on the telephone. I haven’t seen him for 10 years, I reckon. I wanted to know how he was and how the situation in Hong Kong was, and I wanted him to know I was visiting and would he like to catch up?

“Ah, Siew Hon (he always abbreviates my name), it’s been so long. How are you?”

And without waiting for my reply – in Hong Kong, time is money, money is time, always has been, always is, always will be – he continued, “Ah, we are working in an industry that is in so much trouble, so many challenges, a lot of pressures.”

Then he gives a big guffaw, “Yet we survive.”

The conversation then, of course, got around to “The Metropark Shutdown”

“Ah, Siew Hon, Hong Kong government, very funny. They either do too little or they over-react. No balance.”

And just as he was about to get stuck into that thought – this travel agent friend is one of those outspoken folks whom I could always rely on for a comment when I was working as a journalist in Hong Kong – his other telephone rings.

“Ah sorry, Siew Hon. Urgent call. Got to go. You come. We see each other.”

I can’t wait for our catch-up on Monday so I can learn more about what he means by “balance”.

The same afternoon, I ran into another travel agent friend, who runs an outbound company, at a cinema. At first I didn’t recognise him because it was out of context. I have only ever met him at industry functions, never socially.

After an exchange of pleasantries, he says, “I am spending less time in the office these days. Not much work, anyway.”

He adds, “Actually this is the time when travel agents should travel for pleasure, go to new places, really travel. We have time.”

Then, as an afterthought, “We should send our staff too, enrich their product knowledge.”

He then talks about an upcoming trip to Uzbekistan.

I think he may have found the “balance” my Hong Kong friend was referring to.

I don’t know which movie he caught that evening. I just hope it wasn’t the one I saw. “Horsemen” proves you don’t have to have a storyline to hang a movie on. I use the word “hang” judiciously because there’s a lot of hanging that happens in this movie which stars Dennis Quaid and a very weird Zhang Ziyi. Weird because all she does is speak in riddles. I must say though, her English has improved tremendously.

Just goes to show what a healthy bank balance can do – buy elocution lessons, for example.

The movie, which is about a killer gone over the rails (again, I use this word judiciously), made me realise that what the world needs now is a little more balance.

There is too much fear over a seasonal bug, there is too much money in a few pockets and not enough in too many and there are just too many bad movies being made these days.

Catch Yeoh Siew Hoon every week at The Transit Café
.