Calpurnia

The stories of au pair taking care of kids have formed a genre of their own in Hong Kong.

Too often, the working parents – me included – are hiring domestic maids to look after children at a very young age. As is often the case, the children spend more time with the maid than the parents, whether we admit it or not. While much has been written about the proper way to wean a child from the breast or bottles, neither Dr. Spock nor the parenting guidebook What to Expect the Toddler Years covered what to do when we try to "wean" the children from the maid. Admit it: we don't know, and we don't want to.

Growing up with a maid is simply a new whole way of life, a way of seeing, learning, being. Here's a case in point. My friend's maid is going to leave after living together for six years. Her eight-year-old son wrote a touching piece that leaves everybody in tears. I can see that it's a deep, deep attachment much harder to cut than the umbilical cord.

Lest I be misunderstood: I do not want to suggest we parents are to "outsource" the job of childcare. Nor do I think it always proper to feel guilty about hiring a maid. Remember the father of Jem and Scout in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird? Atticus Finch is doing a good job, and so is the black housekeeper Calpurnia. There's no better lesson for parents to remember.

Mockingbird

In the Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the middle-aged lawyer Atticus Finch taught his daughter a simple trick to get along better with all kinds of folks.

"You never understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," he inspired, "or, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

But the real problem is that we have to make sure we've completely shaken off our feelings and dogma before we can really climb into someone's skin. Try as we might, we just can't, most of the time.

And is that all? Not really. We can try Atticus' trick for same-sex marriage and – well, yes – many of us, I suspect, simply find it hard to feel connected.

To the teaching of Atticus we must now add a "fly on the wall" position, a position where we are a neutral observer. From there, we can look at both ourselves and others, and find out what's going on between us. That would then give us a new perspective, somewhat like Gregor's metamorphosis in the story by Franz Kafka.

I think.

Round

My favorite essay from the recent Annals of Internal Medicine is "Attending Round," named after the doctors' job description.

The narrated events took place one morning in 1963, when the doctors seized the moment of looking after their patients themselves, with little assistance from others, drawing blood, preparing the slides of the urine sediment, the peripheral blood smear, and the sputum Gram stain. After conducting rounds with the nurse, the doctors rushed to look at the bone marrow biopsy. It was followed by tidying the laboratory result folders and shepherding the patients back to the ward, before the attending physician started the senior medical round.

I began to see parallels when I told my intern to poke a needle into a swollen knee and rushed to examine the joint fluid under the microscope. My intern's eye grew wide and stared at me as if I'd forgot that we could simply send out the knee joint fluid for our pathologist to trace the suspects.

"There is so much to learn by looking after our patients on our own," I reminded my intern. I mean that. The nub of the problem is we're spending less and less time in really looking after the patients. It should be obvious from all these years (but I'll say it anyway) that doctors are often destined to sit in front of the computer screen, with the dollar sign hanging sternly atop. We need to enter the diagnostic coding meticulously, prepare one protocol after another protocol, and document everything to secure the hospital accreditation. I won't argue whether these exercises would benefit the patients, but I'm pretty sure that they steal time away from hands-on personalized care of our patients.

My intern took off his glasses and squinted at the eyepiece when I rotated the polarizer. "Glittering crystals," he exclaimed. "That's gout."

Cockroach

Few years back, I learned from Time magazine that a KitKat bar isn't the same all over the planet; a Russian KitKat is smaller than a Bulgarian one, and the chocolate isn't as sweet as in a German one. The Nescafé instant coffee won't taste the same everywhere, too. There are around 200 different types of Nescafé, including the "three-in-one" sachets that we buy locally.

If the ice cream, tomato soup, chocolate – and what not – require modification to find the balance of local taste, it shouldn't be surprising that the most successful foodstuff for the cockroaches need to be prepared for the indigenous population. That's a simple truth that I learned recently. Before that, I'd been buying Japanese product to attract the cockroaches in my house – to no avail.

Just before giving up the ambition to clear the cockroaches, I thought of buying the genuinely local cockroach food that caters for the culture of our own cockroaches. The level of food consumption – or food poisoning if truth be told – by the cockroaches in my house is much higher than the days when I supplied them the imported Japanese meals. A colossal success, I must say.

In any event, this is probably the best personal experience from the products linked with the three words MADE IN CHINA, despite all those stories of tainted baby milk, recalled pet foods, oversulfated chondroitin sulfate contaminated heparin.

I'm not sure of the moral of my personal story, except that if you trust none of Chinese products it would be erroneous not to pay tribute to the Chinese cockroach bait.