Toastmaster Magazine Reading Gathering in September

Today is Sunday, the last day of September. After having been waiting patiently for Kate to come back from her two weeks trip to Norway, seven golden ladies finally had a happy reunion in black at Cafe' Encounter from 4 till 9PM. During the five hours gathering, we talked for less than one hour to cover two issues of Toastmasters magazines, both August and September. The rest of the time, for the first time, we opened our hearts to one another to disclose our feelings about "Lust and Love", "Affairs", and "Marriages".

The five articles we were originally required to study at home are "Put Your Audience in Your Speech" by Kevin Johnston and ennille-Lynn Millo; "Preparing a Speech in 5 minutes" by Sid Gilman, DTM; and "Sounding good in English" by Katherine Meeks in August issue and "Shaping Ourselves, Shaping Our World" by the newly elected International President Chris Ford; "Body Language Myths" by Dave Zielinski in September issue.

Golden ladies are golden, because we are flexible, decisive, and inquisitive. We can always reach the consensus among seven of us at once where there is a call. And we decided that that it's enough once we studied the assigned five articles at home. In stead of five, we ended up touching upon one--the cover story of September issue. We concluded that Z rule of eye contact is worth trying, W and M should be another alternatives to nod our heads at one time, and shake ours at the other. We were more eager to make the better use of our time to talk about something hot and and more significant in life.

No doubt at the moment, the most heated topic is Golden Lion Film "Lust, Caution" by Ang Lee. People talk about it during lunch break, at dinner, mostly among women. Everybody was impressed if not excited about Tony Leung's good body, and Ang Lee's three exquisite love-making acts in bed. Everybody seems all of a sudden at ease to talk about lust and to be in love of lust! What an intriguing coincidence that golden ladies dressed themselves in black to mourn for those in lust and to be cautious not to be caught!

"Lust, Caution" is said to be based upon a true homicide event during the World War II in Shanghai. While most people in Taiwan talk about the three lust scenes in the movie, I am intrigued by the mental state of the prototype of the leading actress Cheng Ping-ru (鄭蘋如) and her Japanese mother.

Ping-ru's mother is Kimura Hanako (木村花子), an educated Japanese woman, who married a Chinese in Japan, moved to China with her husband, passed away in her 80's in Taiwan. Ping-ru speaks fluent Japanese and was brought up in a Japanese environment. She joined Chinese secret service agent in college. Her mission was to kill Ting Muo-tsen (丁默村) who worked for Japanese secret service agent.

I'm curious if Ping-ru and Muo-tsen speak Japanese from time to time in private? What is it like for young Ping-ru to sleep with a middle aged spy (a liar)? Dave Zielinski mentioned in "Body Language Myths", our bodies betray us onstage. Do our bodies betray us in bed, too? No matter how good the secret service agents are at deciphering the body languages of liars, they can't resist the temptation of lust. Young and Pretty Ping-ru was killed at age of 26 for her failure of ambushing Ting. Ting reported her immediately to get her killed to end the lust between them if not love.

If we put the nationalism aside, I am simply intrigued by the complex feelings among Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese for the past century (from 1895 till now). Sherry