Cynthia loves to sing. When she sings, the lyrics seems to be very important, or you never know what she is singing about. She has not only the ability to sing different songs in a same tune, but also to sing a single song in different tunes, she never repeats. When she started imitating Jay Chow's unclear style, I never know what she sings about any more.
Someday, her company organized a chorus, to sing "Love My China". Cynthia was in it to sing the verse "56 nationalities are just like 56 flowers", right after she sang the first two words, the director made the decision to adjust her part. After several time of adjustments, Cynthia was to sing the wordless part "Sai Lo Sai Lo Sai Lo Sai". Though she worked hard, every time she could shift it to a children's song "The Little Girl Picking Up Mushrooms", without any difficulty.
After consideration, the company had to exclude Cynthia from the chorus, this made her sad. She was determined to practise that song well, and when we were hanging out, she'd ask me to practise with her as well. Soon I could shift from "Love My China" to "The Little Girl Picking Up Mushrooms" too, seamlessly.
She couldn't sing freely at home. Her dad has a problem of drinking, and his job seems to be beating his wife, child, and playing Mahjong. Her house is full of the sound of mahjong tiles all the time. Once, when it was quiet, Cynthia wanted to practise singing, her dad slapped her because he just lost some money.
She had to gave up singing, but her interest in the showbiz goes on, so she paid her attention to TV and movies. She could always share some findings in this business, like, in a lot of entertainment program on TV, there are always some people leading the clapping, they are there to lead other audience to clap cluelessly, so goes with laughter. In any movie, if there's a rain scene, the rain is always as heavy as hell, you can not find any drizzle in a movie, because the man made rain can only be heavy.
I admire her ability of independent thinking. Later, she found another problem in the movie making industry. In a scene like "leaving on a train", the protagonist waves hand though the window, and the train goes. Cynthia got her question here, what if this scene needs redo, but the actor already headed to the next destination?
This quetion confused us for a long time until someday I came up with a solution: the train doesn't need to move at all, it is the cenemagrapher moving backwards, to make it seem the train is leaving. Cynthia didn't agree with me, she thought this just doesn't work. So we made a bet.
We were in the train stage to tesify my solution. I was the cinemegrapher, shooting the scence with Cynthia's phone which had video recording function. She was the actor to be shot on the still train. The first time I did it isn't good enough, because the camera was not stable enough. But I was sure I could do it if I controled the moving speed well.
When I was moving backward, the train started moving forward, Cynthia was waving to me on the train, the tran left, while her cellphone still in my hand.
I was worried about her, could sleep all night long. The next day I got a phone call from her, she is in a city nearby. She told me, it feld good to wake up in a trange city, where the sunshine is bright, birds are singing, no sounds of mahjong, no interuption to her at all.
"I practised that song several times, now I can make it, do you want to hear?" She asked.
"Sure."
I was holding the phone and waiting, after a while of silence, she was sobbing slightly.
