Lee Hom's " Forever 1st Day " Album Diary

89/10/14~89/10/20 @ Part 19

Dear Friends,

This week my friends have gone back to the States and I am now in Hong Kong finishing up shooting for "In The Name of Heroes". Boo Hoo, I miss them already. So things are back to usual, living by myself in the hotel and looking forward to Thanksgiving in New York.

On our last day in Heng Dian, I had dinner with my three college buddies and Coolio. The atmosphere was of genuine friendship and relaxation as we danced around the cozy restaurant to Coolio's new album...which is still unreleased. After dinner, we purchased copious amounts of fireworks and beer and dispensed of them in the middle of one of the behemoth temples of cardboard, which although merely part of a movie set, looked like nothing short of the Taj Mahal under a starlit Heng Dian sky.

There is nothing so enjoyable to me as making a new friend, especially one who feels as passionately about music as I do! But to be completely honest, becoming such good friends with Coolio really caught me by surprise. Why? I suppose because we come from such different backgrounds and walks of life. He grew up as a gang member in Compton, California (notorious for being the poorest and most violent area of America) and used to have to bring knives and other weapons to school just to protect himself from getting beaten up. I could write for an entire month about all the crazy stories Coolio has shared with me about growing up in Compton, but most of them aren't suitable for family audiences...the point is, his home town is quite different from Rochester, NY, where I grew up. And he's quite a remarkable man for surviving all of that and coming out a winner, achieving what he has today.

But there we were, four Williams College graduates, and a rapper from the hood, hanging out in a tiny town in the Zhe Jian province like we'd known each other for years. Like children playing at a neighborhood party, we chased each other in the grassy fields shooting firecrackers in the air and howled to the moon like coyote. That night, the words pop star, record sales, contracts, and tabloids no longer had any meaning or relevance whatsoever. There was no pressure from anywhere, only the realization that we are all so much more the same than we are different.

Love,
Homeboy