Faye 4 ever!

The world is full of people and one of her. I found her twelve years ago this month. It was a night like this one, just after midnight, and the Shelfmaster 2 project was almost ready for its debut. I was stuck on a programming point, and desperate. When in doubt, ask the internet. The beauty of working in the language I do is the community of programmers out there who are willing to share their knowledge. Hell, they even show it off. Contrast that with the hot burning Hell of C++ where everything about everything is secret, "professional" and just plain stupid. Someone out there knows how to code VB and getting the answer you need is only a question of finding that person.

I found one Chinese website that had an algorithm that did exactly what I needed to finish that module. Copy, paste, compile, run and success. That guy also had a webpage about his "girlfriend." Who could resist something like that? I clicked the page and this is what I saw:



There were a bunch of pictures of her on that page, and they got better the farther down the page I scrolled. Turned out this girl sang a thing called Canto-pop and had a few albums out. Canto-pop is popular music sung in the Hong Kong Chinese dialect called Cantonese. Her name is Faye Wong. I did a quick search for her music and found a bootleg music file. All these years later, I have all but three of her albums, which number almost 50 now. I'm still a member in good standing of the "Fayenatics", her international fan club :-)

I saw her in person Saturday, February 20th, 1999, in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Hotel. I had a ticket to her concert there that night, and the concert was excellent even though Faye was exhausted and not feeling well after the trip to LV from Hong Kong. She was in town for a one night only show. Before the concert she went into the casino to play some blackjack at the $100 a hand table. I saw her and she smiled at me while she was selecting a table to play. She was so breathtakingly beautiful, I literally couldn't breathe. I couldn't even move. I just stared.

My favorite album is called "The Decadent Sound Of Faye". It was Faye's first album in Mandarin Chinese. The songs on the album are a salute to Teresa Teng, the greatest Chinese singer from the previous generation. All those years ago the communist government in Beijing declared that Teresa's music was "decadent", so Faye winked at that in the title of her album. My friend, Josh keeps a webpage on this album here: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/8598/faye/disc/17.html
If you get a chance to visit, please check out the translation of the lyrics of "Girl of Nanhoi" :-) My email addy has changed since I wrote that translation.

Faye has retired now and has two children. I hope she will make a come back soon. Thanks for the great music Faye. Everytime I work late, I think of you and smile.