Such work-filled weeks these have been... Running, running, running.

But there has been time out. And it's been really good to experience a bit of city life.

-- Nice little mall cafes where you can get delicate little pancakes wrapped around durian and cream...

-- An evening at KLCC: a leisurely cup of coffee; a stroll round the park, where that inimitable light-and-fountains show entranced me all over again; and then a thoroughly enjoyable MPO concert, featuring Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Schumann.

-- And a great evening at Bukit Bintang: dinner with colleagues at the Hong Kong Food Culture Restaurant at Low Yat Plaza (good, strong, vibrant flavours: curried pig skin; udon noodles with seafood and black pepper sauce; fried pork with salt; szechuan pork and tofu; szechuan chicken; greens with oyster sauce); a movie at Pavilion; and a late-night emergence into a lively and sophisticated bit of Bukit Bintang that I'd never experienced.



But that movie deserves more words. It was Zhang Yimou's Coming Home. I love this film-maker. I loved To Live (and still regard it as one of the best movies ever). I loved the sound-and-light show we saw at Yangshuo back in 2007 (pictured above). And I loved this.

It depicts the homecoming of a cultural revolution detainee. Who has to build a new relationship not only with the daughter who betrayed him, but also with the wife whose trauma-induced mental illness means she can't remember him, and regularly goes to the railway station to await her husband's return.

It is a stark reminder that what is broken often may not be put together again.

So don't break things... Societies: Don't have cultural revolutions. Governments: Don't mess with people's private lives. Individuals: Don't put career ambition above family loyalty (and don't trust the promises of political party officials).

It is very much a movie of two parts. The first part is full of sound and movement. Our screen is filled with trains, staircases, and bridges; transitions and ambitions; the roar of the train, the roar of the rain, the corporate roar of the shrill and ubiquitous Communist Party officials of the cultural revolution era.

The second part is quiet. We are invited into living rooms, bedrooms, the places where domesticity should be (if it has not been ripped apart by ideology, or by betrayal -- or even by self-sacrifice). In these quiet, modest, homely places, people try to stitch their families back together as best they can.

And that final scene will live with me always, I think... Snow is falling. And the wife is waiting at the station, for her husband, yet again. The returnee she does not recognize waits with her now, as pedicab driver and companion. Together they wait for the man who will never come home.