I am an ordinary person in an extraordinary
life, as many of us are.
I am promoting myself more openly lately,
not because I am vain, egocentric, or even self-interested: I don't care for writing styles of some that dwell endlessly
on the minute details of their daily lives, forgetting the larger issues of poverty, war, and disease sweeping around us.
(I am back in Hong Kong, starting a small press,
and reading books on Branding, Niche Marketing, etc.!)
I began with this travel site in Mainland China
about 5 years ago, though my first successful email was created in New Delhi, India. And of course, though I am forever indebted
to many wonderful people in that beautiful land of China, it was not really the best place to do Major Internetting.
My childhood in Canada was both secure and eventful.
My grand-parents came from Dublin, Manchester, Edinburgh,
and Catford, Kent, and I am purely British Isles by racial ancestry. Three of them were Protestants and my grandmother from
Dublin was an excommunicated Roman Catholic.
The family story goes that upon hearing the local
priest was hitting schoolboys, including my Dad, with a ruler, she raced right down to the schoolyard and gave the violent
man a piece of her mind!
Though many of my Asian students think Canadians
are a soft, spoilted people, though they may not express this thought directly, my family had its trials.
My father entered Air Canada at the age of eighteen,
and gave himself his own university education by attending night school. My mom too did not have money for higher education,
and worked as a secretary in Montreal before she married Dad.
Those were boom times in America and Canada, and
Dad rose fast, and we travelled extensively on our Free Air Canada tickets.
Those wonderful perks came four for each family
member, every January, a belated Christmas gift.
I was a good middle-class girl, and cleaned, babysat,
shopped for food, cooked breakfast for Dad on Saturday, and even enjoyed all these adult activities, for once people wanted
to be older, and not juvenile. Truthfully, I hated the cleaning!
I stood first at school, and then the bomb hit our
family life: my father left my mother for another woman, andmy parents entered what was to be arguably the Longest Divorce
Case in the history of Canada: 20 years of litigation.
To those astute enough to quickly ask: was there
money?
I can only answer this: Yes, there was
money.
Since this is only a Faux Tell All, as only trusting
people write out every last droplet of daily life, I will cut to the next major life cycle.
Youthful Adventures
I left home, which was full of friction
residual from the divorce and other men and women who entered my parents' lives, to travel.
With free tickets, this was not a
particularly unusual choice.
I favoured England, home of my ancestors.
After ten trips to Europe, and academic studies in English literature,
I moved to London.
I showed my paintings and drawings
on New Bond Street, and made many friends.
This was a most wonderful period in my life, though
I was overly serious, and
took the problems of the world
upon the shoulders;
I believed that young people banding together
could change the world.
Already doing too much, with writing poetry and
stories and spending too much time sending them out, I was drawn into a third interest: astrology, and began studying with
a famous astrologer, Jeff Mayo.
I see I am glossing my life story over, for I do
not add the sorrow my family suffered from my poor mother's long entanglement
with a physically violent ex-military type.
Mom was from a military family, and drawn to soldiers
all her life, and encouraged my sister to go into the military as well.
My siblings and I tried and tried to intervene in
this unhappy and prolonged situation,
yet it did no good.
As my website becomes more well known,
I realize potential Career People
will read it, which makes me want to put
the high gloss to it, and yet I feel the heartaches
in our lives -
if we are honest about how we cope with them - may
help others out there.
Even then as this new man entered our lives,
the problems with my dad and his second wife still
continued.
World Travels For Free
Oh, yes, the bright bright spot of my early years
- all those free Air Canada passes!
"My last girlfriend was a stewardess," confided a local business
friend, "She was the second airlines staff I went out with - and they are the most flaky people in the world - Just hop on
a plane and go off somewhere!"
I felt admonished for a moment, then interested to recognize
this flightiness in my father, and perhaps others in my family - They do tend to hop on and off planes to avoid other problems!
I always knew the planes to London and Paris left
at the crack of dawn, and you arrived tired, full of food, and full of airplane non-air.
I remember the excitement of the moments building to getting
onto the plane, then fidning your seat, the magazines, the drinks, the grooming in the toilet cubicles before you landed -
all with space around you.
The space around you is disappearing now, with nothing to be
excited about the flights to Hong Kong, unable to move your elbows even to read.
Where did I go?
I went mostly to Europe, the Caribbean, and quite a bit around
Canada and the USA. Air line travel was in its idyllic days, all sorts of cheap rates, change your plans at
the last moment, no extra charges here and there.
If you played your card right when travelling on free airlines
employees tickets, you could also get "bumped" into First Class, easier than winning than the lottery, with that same rush
of feeling irrationally blessed by life.
You would proceed graciously before all the hard working, full
paying customers, mindful not to tell them your dad was a federal government employee, and trying not to scream with joy.
Airplanes were different then.
Now I would love to fly first class so I feel like a person,
and not a sardine in a tin.
It's just the seats I envy, not the food which has declined
in all seating classes. The meals then in First Class could take up almost all of the five or six hours from Eastern
North America to Europe.
Barbados
Bermuda
Antigua
San Francisco
Paris
Zurich
Athens
Belgrade
London
Cardiff
Liverpool
Manchester
I just remembered a fortune teller, a good one, who said you
will be travelling aroundtheworld your entire life, so I may be lucky again, as I have stopped staying
in hostels and appreciating the fun of budget transport. I hate cramped seating - I don't mind the ethnic costumes, and the
live chickens!
The great love of my life, a life both
happy and tragic at times, then entered my world when I returned to Vancouver, Canada.
His name was Chard Chenier and he was
older than me, and from a huge and friendly French Canadian who still lived in the French village of St. Boniface, Winnipeg,
Manitoba.
He was as calm and tranquil as my family
was turbulent.
He was a talented artist and musician
with many arts shows to his credit, and worked with great discipline and devotion to the arts in Canada.
We were not competitive with one another,
contrary to myths about artists, and shared all our money, problems, challenges, and small triumphs.
A week before he entered my life, a Tarot card reader
of great skill and reknown sat at the house in Burnaby I shared with my Cousin Barbara, and told me
I see a fair haired man,
The Page of Cups,
this will be a long love for you both
Well, I think I will tell my story.
i think Internet writing really changes how we write,
think, communicaate - with deep social meanings.
People become both more secretive, and yet more
honest as well.
The better stuff going on the Internet is an immense
impersonal sharing and immediate helpfulness, especially with - of course - computer-related problems and learnings.
I cover my writing over somehow, as iknow itwill
be read immediately, yet the whole old process of literary writing seems so stale. So tediously long-winded.
Why am I thinking about artistic creativity - because
I am at the part of my life story where my life intertwined with Chard.
We were naive, idealistic, industrious young artists,
andvastly social. half of the nights of the week, we were out at movies, art gallery openings, piano lounges, jazz clubs.
One of our first joint projects was to make video
films of our lives as artists for local Canadian cablevision television. Chard pushed us towards this, as he fixated
on psychic readings that dictated his future in art videos.
Apart from our television films, he worked on a
super-8 full-length movie that told a story about an actress called Zoey that he himself wrote.
I thought less of his literary skills than of his
visual art and musical talents, which were immense. We respected one another and I consider this partnership one of
the more happier ones in my life.
We lived in a one-bedroom in an older apartment
building downtown, though with parking and heated swimming pool included, and hustled around town organizing art shows and
selling paintings, and also making poems and short stories and novels.
The writing always went worse than the art and the
music, and in my lives to come, i will give it a miss, as it never brought me much happiness or cash.
Our lives were peaceful, as we rarely argued, though
we were not really a passionate couple -others romanticize Art Couples, imagine them full of competitive egos, and romantic
sensuality.
I was fallig ill, iller and iller from my car accident
on the Lion's Gate Bridge. Chard and I were both somewhat secretive, stoicical signs, and only now how I see how illness
spreads outward and affects a love affair.
In Chard's childhood, his sister Paulette suffered
from a rare and nearly fatal childhood illlness, shaping the whole family, requiring a freely given patience and tenderness
from Chard as a brother, and he was so good tome at this time in my life, he can do no wrong in my eyes.
We were so ambitious in our art careers, andmy own
family so lacking in the human trait ofsympathy, that I denied even until now the powers of physical illness to mutate a life.
Did I think that human beings are like animals in
a jungle, and that to show weakness is never acceptable, surrounded as we are by possible carnivores?
The name of my illness: TMJ, or temporomandibular
joint dysfunction. It is excruciatingly painful. It was to last for 76 months to the precise month.
The China Adventures
Of Arielle Gabriel
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