Saga

The unpredictable and arbitrary rages of a novel coronavirus make any society, no matter how peaceful, into a potential minefield. Ours has been in bedlam even before the landing of this virus. This sounds like an extra blow of tornado during a heavy snowstorm.

The city shook.

I started my family trip two days after the news of two patients diagnosed with the China coronavirus in Hong Kong. It felt frustrating and spoke to some truth I couldn’t express: survivor’s guilt. It reminded me the most recent social upheavals coinciding with my summer Croatia vacation. And then my overseas training in Montreal when SARS struck the city more than a decade ago.
That memory of paralysing SARS could have repeatedly retuned to my colleagues over the years. I wasn’t in the battlefield and that makes the misery burn less intensely in my memory.

But our homeland is close to the heart of mine. I’m away and will be back one week later.

It will be, I knew, my turn.

Werewolf

Everyone has to talk to strangers and deal with uncertainty, and I am no different. Even if you don't frequent pubs or parties, you might have been invited to play a game Werewolf recently.

That's a popular social deduction game in which you're being assigned different identities. Everyone else becomes a stranger. Then, little by little, night by night, you will have to figure out who is who. It's when, and only when, the villagers find out the werewolves without being killed, the game ends.

The tricky part of the game is, more often than not, you won't be able to decipher the identity of strangers. And that's no small thing. Werewolf kills. Ultimately, each player is killed by the werewolf. The villagers all die, and nobody is left alive.

Nobody, that is, but werewolves. Uh-oh.

Which brings me, somewhat uncomfortably, to Malcolm Gladwell's new book Talking to Strangers.

In no way am I suggesting that I made a mistake in choosing his book. I don't, and you won't. Gladwell is razor sharp. What made me uncomfortable is Gladwell's narrative of Sandra Bland, a young African American who drove from Chicago to start a new job, but was then pulled over by a police officer Brian Encinia. The white police officer first told her that she had failed to signal a lane change, and then challenged her to put out her cigarette. It's only a cigarette. But Encinia got angry and forced her to step out of the car, without good reason. He yanked her out, slapped her, and then arrested her.

I know: that's ridiculous to arrest someone who failed to signal a lane change and was smoking inside her own car. Seriously, what kind of bully is this? But hear me out. The truth is, Sandra Bland was taken into custody on felony assault charges. Three days later she was found dead in her cell, hanging from a noose fashioned from a plastic bag.

That is what happened to one of the tragic citizens who died because the police was making no sense of a stranger.

Lifespan

Many friends of mine blew out the candles on their fiftieth birthday cakes this year. It'll be my turn soon.

Now that I've lived for nearly half a century, one of my birthday wishes would be having one less candle on the cake each year. I am not the only one who dreams about longevity, of course. There are lots of us aiming to stop the ticking clock.

For heaven’s sake, how?

One grows old, but never grows tired of looking up elixir or recipes of youth.

For David Sinclair, an acclaimed Harvard Medical School geneticist, we don't have to think of aging as an inevitable part of life. He remained young like Peter Pan when he wrote the masterpiece Lifespan at the age of 50.

After years of researching aging, Dr. Sinclair was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people. If there is one piece of advice he can offer, one surefire way to stay healthy longer and get younger is this: eat less.

Oh, this reminds me of a big fan of fasting. That's me. I love the recent New England Journal of Medicine review article on the link between periodic fasting (or eating in a 6-hour period daily) and extended lifespan. I thought, Wow, it's good news. Now there's a strong reason why I skip lunch proudly.

Busy

The other day, my wife and I were discussing if it's good to get days off work during our daughter's term break. Without guilt, I mean.

For a moment, we hesitated. All around were many hardworking colleagues, patients to be seen, plus tasks to be ticked off. We felt as if we'd been caught trying to loaf about.

All right. I should say we won't starve if we put out feet up for a couple of days. And taking a break is something forgivable, and more so when we have been working our butts off.

On top of that, carving out time for the family should have been the priority. Something we all deserve and shouldn't sacrifice. Something we can't wait for retirement to do. What better way to spend time with my daughter at the recently reopened Hong Kong Museum of Art? Or, hiking the waterfront trails near Cape D'Aguilar or Luk Keng? There should not be any excuse except the one we all use: I was "busy" - in the way bestselling author Mitch Albom had previously used. And, as it turns out when I read his memoir Finding Chika, this is the excuse Mitch Albom regrets the most. At one time, work was his focus. He was busy, chasing success, taking every assignment he could get, and delayed starting a family.

And soon, all that was left for Mitch Albom and his wife was to rush, to meet doctors and try extra things to have babies. In vain. Yes, years passed when we told ourselves we were busy.