David Kiang

This afternoon my father's friend David Kiang came to visit.  Father taught him at Mt. Allison over fifty years ago. (Mother recalled that he did every problem in the textbook!) He was later a mathematics professor at Dalhousie University, and now he's retired.  You know Father is old when even his students have been retiring.

When David was a student he did some babysitting for us.  On one occasion he left a Chinese-language book at our house.  Later on, as I started learning Chinese, I got an ambition to translate the book, and I cracked the first part a few years ago.  It's a cold war romantic thriller about a beautiful Chinese student who gets exploited by the communists and ends up with a Prince Charming in Hong Kong.  I'll have to translate some more of it sometime.

We also talked about another Dalhousie math professor called Edelstein, who briefly taught me in a year at Mt. A. (When I saw the classic Italian movie Umberto D., something about the title character reminded me of Edelstein.) He supervised David's wife's Ph.D. thesis and spoke well of David.

This evening I went to see Night of the Living Dead at the Event Screen. (I've never seen it, though I know the whole plot from reading Roger Ebert's Reader's Digest article "Just Another Scary Movie?" which didn't fail to reveal the ending.) But it turned out the schedule had been changed.  Oh well, maybe I'm better off not seeing it...