AlmaTanguera

I've been much saddened by the shocking news of the AF447 that vanished over the Atlantic enroute from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. I've been following the bad news day and night, as if I'd had a friend or relative on board on that fatal flight. For I have been flying backwards and forwards along that route so many times in the past few years. As how my friend David has put it, the Gods were with me!!!

My deepest sorrow for all of you, friends and families of the passengers of AF447 from Rio to Paris, who vanished to void on June 1, 2009.

Many friends commemorated June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre via words, photos, actions. I didn't. I wish I had but it felt difficult.

For I'm in China right now where anything as such was banned, in public that is.

And that I'd already left china, twenty years ago, precisely six months prior to the time when the brutal acts took place in Tiananmen Square where my university friends protested hunger stroke. However for me, when things so tragic so brutal happened in a distant place, it was really hard to imagine that it'd really happened!

Nevertheless, I felt very emotional yesterday, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. While I looked at the photos of the candle vigil from Hongkong and London, I wish I was there among the praying souls!

I left China 'for good' precisely twenty years ago, for West Berlin. Ever since, life has taken me to such a rich, wild and emotional roller-coaster than I could have ever dreamed of.

While twenty years is nothing, according to Gardel in Volver, one of the greatest voices in the history of tango, it is quite something for me, for it is half of my life.