A HEAD FULL OF DREAMS TOUR TICKET GIVEAWAY HOW TO
In time I figured out how to locate Security myself and arrived twenty minutes to a half hour early, sparing my students the existential crisis. To wait, as I did on the evening of the first session, along with the seven students, was a nod to Godot. If the program leader was around, she’d locate Security with his master key. No one in the department office ever appeared to even know there was a class. Dust layered unlit classrooms, which were generally in disarray, and the scheduled room was often locked when I arrived. Hallways were stacked and stairwells blocked by extra chairs and supplies. In spring of 2006, I began commuting there by bus from Kowloon Tong across the harbor to Pokfulam to teach fiction to postgraduate diploma students in creative writing for four to six weeks each semester. It was also lonely and surprisingly uncollegial, as the other faculty rarely spoke to me. While most of the offices I worked in were reasonably kempt, the University of Hong Kong’s Department of English was the filthiest and most careless space I was ever paid to occupy.
But such clean work spaces will become increasingly less accessible to me now that I am older, although not yet quite as old as the old man. I was seldom lonely or drunk in those clean places, whether well or badly lighted, because familiar strangers usually surrounded me. I, on the other hand, was employed at numerous businesses or multinational corporations, primarily in Hong Kong or New York but also in other cities, for the first twenty-four years, and for the latter twenty-four as a teacher of creative writing at universities or colleges around the world. We know little for certain about the old man, except that he is old and drunk and lonely. We don’t know if the old man, whom one waiter believes has money, ever earned a salary. Like Hemingway’s old man, I could stay for as long as those responsible for keeping the lights on would let me. They generally were clean, and lighted, though not necessarily well, the places I occupied in exchange for a salary during the past forty-eight years of my life. A clean, well-lighted café was a very different thing.
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