The 1960s Hong Kong film star Lee Ching (李菁) was famous for her eyes, which sparkled with gaiety and electrified the screen. Less well known was the fact that she wasn’t exactly born with them. To intensify their expressiveness, she regularly put herself under the regime of staring at a lighted candle in a dark room; this way, she discovered, when she was in front of the camera, her eyes could light up with minimal effort.

I find this Lee Ching anecdote instructive because in the realm of writing, there is also a need to train one’s eyes. Before one can become a good writer, one must be a good observer. To become a good observer, one should, among other things, make a daily effort to be conscious of the details in one’s surroundings that the average person is likely to overlook.

I used to rate my powers of observation as above average. After I relocated to Vancouver two years ago and took up hiking, however, I was no longer so sure. I began noticing how often I encountered seasoned hikers who had come to a standstill mid-path to watch wildlife.  “There’s a racoon!” or “There’s a heron!” they would murmur; I would follow the direction of their eyes and see nothing. Only after weeks and months of eye-straining was I able to spot things like the silhouette of a bald eagle perched near the top of a tree.

Earlier this week, after learning of Leung Chai-Yan’s passing, I rewatched that infamous video of her hitting her mum on Halloween night in Lan Kwai Fong. This time round, something other than the slapping grabbed my attention. After the tussle in the taxi, Mrs Leung, still reeling from shock and embarrassment, was asked by a reporter “didn’t your daughter just hit you?” This, of course, was a rhetorical question; everyone present had borne witness to the spat just a few moments ago. Mrs Leung, however, hesitated for a split second before replying “no.” It was this “no”  that now became my prime focus. This “no” suggested Mrs Leung was so used to putting up a front that she had forgotten that in this instance, there was no point in pretending, since the incident she was trying to hide was already known to everyone. What’s more, in continuing on with her everything-is-fine pretence on auto pilo, she was actually revealing something about her that she would have preferred to keep under wraps: her life is full of unpleasantness – it must be so difficult to be married to someone like 689 – and she copes by banishing the unmentionables from her consciousness.

In the future, if I want to create a character whose life circumstances make it necessary for her to practice deception and self deception, you can be sure I’ll be rewatching the Halloween clip for inspiration.