Childhood, a time when life was rosy except on report card day and parent-teacher conference day.

Spent the first nine years of my life in Hong Kong, I grew up watching Japanese animes, collecting Japanese anime trading cards, reading mangas, and bugging my mom to get me ever more LEGO sets (when they were real building bricks to excite the young minds to be creative and original, and not merely to recreate scenes from some popular movies...and don't get me started on Bionicle .....)
Oh I so remember the days when the first generation of GameBoy was launched.... Although I wanted one so much, but never bothered to ask for one. I knew my parents would just say no.

Never liked Disney stuff, hated their movies/TV cartoons, etc, found them extremely odd since everybody is always so happy. They used to freak me out, still do. (Anyone interested in analysis and critique of Disney should begin by reading How to read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald) by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. The part dealing with the strange absence of sex in the Disney universe was right on the spot!)

But what really consumed my childhood imagination was after watching Laputa: Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki. I so wished the story to be true or at least a real legend. The most haunting image from the movie was the robot that fell from the sky but later reawaken. As a child I regarded it with fright and intrigue, a robot it might be, but it sure displayed more honorable character then most humans.

My good childhood pretty much ended when my family moved to the US. Aside from the usual hardships and difficulties any new immigrants would face, it was the complete and utter lack of animes to watch and mangas to read that I suffered. It was the era before the internet, the only way to get your hands on animes were on VHS. They were mad expensive and beyond the means of a small kids like me. There were mangas one sale, but they weren't cheap too... Those days were terrible! That is why I am so grateful for the internet and broadband connections we have nowadays.