Summer

Travel is extremely gratifying on every level. Heading into our third summer of travel restriction, one way or another, we were discovering our means to have school break. Or stepping off the hamster wheel, if I could, to nibble some cheese and watch the world go by (but emails still come in, I know).

No sooner had we completed this thought, than right in our mind, we came up the idea of taking walk at Victoria Peak and Lantau Trail. Those are two of our favourite tracks. We first took the option of traversing a circular nature walk at the Peak: a cleanly maintained, easy-to-navigate path peppered with many banyan trees.

Ngong Ping Cable Car is another tour option to offer jaw-dropping views, best sandwiched with hiking between the two-way ride. We trudged up the trail to the craggy hill section where we could see the Zhuhai Macau Bridge and full view over Ngong Ping. Despite the hot temperature of midsummer, my daughter’s humour has augmented our joy by writing poem during hiking. “How amazing it is to hike with a poet,” I thought. To which I reply, yes, exactly right.

Narrative

Doctors - or medical students, for that matter - wouldn't come close to Barack Obama in terms of reading materials. 

Except novels. 

"It was important to pick up the occasional novel during the presidency," Obama told the interviewer a few days before leaving office in 2017. Reading memos and proposals every day, according to the first African-American president of the United States, makes a lopsided analytical brain that has lost track of the depth of fiction. Fiction should therefore be a way of seeing and hearing the voices, a useful reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.

Substitute Obama's memos and proposals with doctors' x-ray reports and lab values, and you will see how medical professionals can be led astray in the analytical brain. 

This is the good reason for doctors to follow Obama's example, and pick up reading materials other than those from medical journals.  

Remarkably little on fiction reading is mentioned in medical curriculum. So little, in fact, that Dr. Suzanne Koven at Massachusetts General Hospital has come up with a program on narrative medicine. I learned about her session of Literature and Medicine after recent reading of her memoir Letter to a Young Female Physician. Each month, Dr. Koven brought humanities into workplace when the doctors and nurses met to discuss novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poems. 

Understanding the story obscured beneath a series of facts, as Dr. Suzanne Koven taught us, not only make us see a patient, but also ourselves, in a more compassionate and incisive way. 

Anthony

Switching back and forth, as any neuroscientist will tell us, is not efficient. I'm biased and like to multitask, but that doesn't make it less true.

Absurd as it may sound, I'm typically reading four or five books at once. For novel, I tend to read one at a time. Right now I'm reading Love Anthony. That's a two-fold story about two characters whose lives intersect. Two mothers, one of whom raised a boy with autism. A boy named Anthony, who doesn't speak. A boy who loves the number three. Always three. No more or less. Three French toast stick. Three Pig story. Three blind mice.

For people like me who has spent years doing not three things but four or five things at once, the book is not too difficult. I simply adjust my brain to read the stories of two mothers. Now, having said that, when it comes to connecting two characters, I must agree that I'm lucky not to suffer from or struggle with autism. Otherwise, it'll be hardly possible for me to get connected.