Select Remnants

Introduction

I truly believed that the book dedicated to our late little poodle would definitely be my last book, since I was getting mentally weary of writing, putting together and editing.  I thought I had finally reached the end of my writing career, but fate was stubborn - it came in the person of our niece Helen Cox who urged me to continue writing for just a little while longer.  She specifically pointed out that I should keep on writing short essays, especially about Macau and Shanghai.

I then looked around in my study and found a bunch of essays and a few poems tucked away in binders.  I thumbed through them and found some suitable ones which I assembled into one binder for my next book.

As I did in my previous book, I tried to select those writings that are not religious nor very political and to my surprise, I managed to assemble about 50 of them, except for the recent essays on the wars around Shanghai and an essay on the Race Course of Shanghai, which were written recently and are added to the older ones.

The topics in this book range from events occurring in Shanghai, Macau and some topics of our present day lives in the U.S.A. involving global warming, healthcare, education, and economy.  They are assembled not in any particular order, as the dates under some titles indicate the period in which the events occurred or were discussed.  Therefore, it would help the readers to scan the table of contents first to select a topic or topics of the readers’ choice and then proceed to the pages as indicated.

As I have mentioned before, having published my previous books on poems and essays, I presumed they represented my last books but to my surprise I found more poems and essays tucked away in my so-called den at home.  My first reaction was to ignore it and consider the idea passé as though it never existed, but my conscience began to work on me until I finally threw up my arms and said, “OK! I will do this once more and this is definitely my final publication.”

The main theme of the book is associated with the Macanese Diaspora of recent times wherein our people had to leave Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai for settlement mainly in the U.S.A. and Canada and to a lesser extent in the U.K., Brazil and Australia.  We only hope, this would be our final settlement wherever we may be at the moment.

Like my previous books, this book also deals in a variety of subjects that would stir up the interest of most people, such as:

Glimpses Of The War Years Around Shanghai: A period where few people everywhere realized that the people of Shanghai were exposed to the dangers of being hit by bullets and bombs launched between the feuding armies of Japan and China.

What Has Become Of Shanghai’s Race Course?, which was once the playground of most foreigners of Shanghai involving sports, horse racing and various club activities.

Macau, Before And After the Transfer of Power: Has it just faded away toward oblivion or has it rebounded to face the world under its new status?

Silicon Valley Has Been The Valley of Renewable Power:  It has somehow re-energized and has reversed the trend of businesses now returning back to the U.S.A.