''Sins''

It is fitting that I spend new year's eve listening to my favorite operatic tune; this one is a gem lost more than two years ago, and if not for Youtube I wouldn't be listening to it right now. The music video I'm referring to is the Cantonese operatic tune sang by the late Anita Mui at a charity concert to help the China flood victims in 1991. I had taped the event together with a cantonese opera movie called the `three smiles'. Those days, you, Saw Hong and I used to watch the tape every time you visit because `three smiles' is a comedy opera movie and you like comedies. Before the tape finishes, we would listen to Anita Mui singing the ''Sins'', a lament about paying the sins for a hard life and its accompanying poverty. Some call it the beggar's song. Sang beautifully by Anita Mui, the song evokes a sense of despair and inevitability about fate in life. One day, I threw away the tape not because I grew tired of it but it was destroyed by mold and moss as humidity set in. For the last two years, I was thinking about the tape and recall how much fun we had watching it together. Two weeks ago, Lady Luck smiled on me. A colleague of mine who is also an Anita Mui fan forwarded me the link to Youtube showing the video clip of the charity concert! I was naturally thrilled, but if only momentarily as the reality of you not being here to share it with me sank in. To think that we always hang out together on new year's eve, this moment is the hardest to accept.