I grew up in a typical Chinese environment where watching Hong Kong films and TVB series was like a must-do everyday activity, while drooling over Hong Kong film stars was occupying most of my childhood dreams. In those early days, visits to movies rental stores was a everyday routine for me and my cousin. Ah..and we rented only VHS cassettes back then because DVD wasn’t even mass produced yet!

I recalled that my grandma would create excuses to prevent me from watching too much rented TVB series like how the VCR would overheat and thus destroy the movie quality and so on and so forth, you know excuses that a naive young girl would believe.

So you know what I did? I’d fold some newspapers together and fan the VCR until it’s cool enough to play another cassette. My grandma couldn’t believe her eyes that I was really THAT addicted. I still couldn’t believe myself I did that! LOL.

As I moved on to high school, I began to outgrow my addiction to those Hong Kong films and Chinese series. I think I’ve finally grasped the idea that too much of something is not always a good idea after all. Later on I still occasionally watch a movie or two, be it English or Chinese but I won’t say that I’m really an ardent movie fan.

But when I get to know my boyfriend, I learn to share his liking for movies and I develop an interest in watching movies AND also TV series again but this time mostly US and British TV series. To my surprise, he has quite a modest collection of old but good movies and every episodes of The Simpsons on his VHS cassettes collections. Everything taped from the TV back in the 90s.And I thought these cassettes have long since extinct. I was rediscovering the movie world during the first few months we were together, catching up on movies that I’ve missed.

I didn’t realized that the British TV sitcom Coupling or the US sitcom Seinfeld was funny and I love Kramer from Seinfeld . Ah…and on those VHS I found films like Life of Brian and The Usual Suspects that made it to my favorite films of all time.

What a treasure.