So I feel like a kid again, starting this blog and not really knowing what I am doing. It's been more than 50 years since this picture was taken, at the intermediate violin category of the Hong Kong Music Festival (which I won that year). I thought I could play the violin well then, and still thought so until fairly recently when my playing had advanced so much that I finally realized that I couldn't, not really. I did have enough insight to become a heart surgeon and not a musician in the interim, learning to make violins along the way as I loved the sound of the violin so much. As a heart surgeon I felt smugly superior to my fellow human beings, but learning to make violins brought me back to earth and taught me how misguided that perception was. I am literally in awe of the manual skills and aesthetic sensitivities of the craft's top makers, present and past, and hope that one day I will not realize that I cannot make violins afterall, not really.