Library

On the next day after we finished with the All Fool’s Day exercise, I went back to the campus to give a lecture.

I arrived a bit early and, just to kill time and find a comfortable place to sit down for a moment, I went to the university library.

The place has changed a lot since I graduated (and I saw the change that much because I did come back once every two or three years). During the first three years of my university study, I spent a lot of time in the library – I had no hostel for two years and lived rather far away in Kowloon, so much so that I used to study everyday till late in the evening before I left for home.

In those days, libraries were a simple place: a collection of books and journals, plus some desks and chairs for you to read. Now, the place is full of computers; almost everyone was doing literature search or their homework electronically, and I was probably the only one who was sitting on a comfy chair and reading a journal – which I brought by my own.

PS. One eternal mystery in my life is, in one evening, after I was back from dinner, I found a book left on my desk, with a piece of paper on which a poem of Nalan Xingde (納蘭性德) was carefully scripted. I knew neither who left it nor who really was supposed to be the recipient.