Asia·Destination

Three days ago my wife had a surgery,she was transplanted a man's heart. I decided not to scare her anymore, so I did not tell her the news that I was made redundant by the company, and went to work as usual everyday.

At 9 in the morning, I wandered around the city in my Santana. Sometimes, I stopped beside a field that had not been sold, and could stay there for a whole day. When the evening came, I went back to my wife and told her what had happened at work. I imagined the business development of the company everyday and looked for mistakes committed by the decision makers of the managers, and got prepared to go back to work one day. During that period of time, I started to shape a more profound understanding for daily life in this city. I finally realised that I had to hide the fact that I was out of job if I was to borrow money successfully from others.

Nobody suspected that I lost my job.

As I have become more and more familiar with the city, I drove to cities nearby and stayed in cheap hotels to spend time on reading I always carried with me a newspaper of the day and a I-Ching, a book of which you will never see the ending.

Five years has passed. When my wife's heart needed to undergo another surgery, I suggested that I swap my perfectly healthy heart with hers that had loads of problems. I said: The never-ending work in the past a few years has worn me out. All newspapers and TV praised my act and called me an Asian Value Role Model.

On an evening with bright moonlight in June, my wife died suddenly from heart disease and I finally received the insurance compensation. Although it came quite late, it greatly exceeded the sum of the savings I would have accumulated even if I had worked for the company for the rest of my life. I then spent a vacation as long as a whole summer in Bali, Indonesia where I rediscovered the joy of life.

ARTCHINAJAPANKOREART, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Milano, 2006, p.33