Comedian

No manual of writing style that I know has a word to say of good humour; and yet, for me, a fiction about a comedian can sometimes be the most awkward theme to have laughable ideas.

It's a difficult subject, and try as you might, there is no way to make this sort of story a reading pleasure.

Not that the author Dolly Alderton thought it that way. She has written Good Material, a modern-day story of love and break-up; one of the main characters, Andy, is a comedian. 

In case you don't know, being a comedian isn't going to guarantee a Get Out of Jail Free card. A comedian is no different from anyone else who can have the blues. Or, even bluer.

The way Dolly Alderton wrote about a couple who broke up after four years makes us see the nightmare after romance. More than two-third of the book is speaking from the voice of a male comedian Andy, who lay awake after the break-up, thinking all the times about his ex-girlfriend Jen. He kept scrolling through the WhatsApp messages over the previous four years. Or else, an obsessive Insta-stalking.

It wasn't until the last few chapters that Dolly Alderton changed the voice to that of Jen. We then heard about the story of Jen trying to catfish Andy after their break-up. She set up an email address and then a believable Instagram account for a woman called Tash. That's how Andy was being tricked into responding to a message request from a girl, @Tash_x_x_x_, followed by all the flirting and funny conversations. The rest is history.

YA Fiction

Picture yourself staying home with your teenage daughter on a rainy day. What would you do? I knew I have to figure out the answer myself, as my wife is out of town. I decided to borrow the fiction book The Fault in Our Stars from my daughter, and watched the film adaptation together. Pretty sweet torture, right? It is. 

I read the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster who suffered from thyroid cancer spreading to her lungs. The cancer treatment gave her ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks; the satellite colony in her lungs made her carry cylinders of oxygen weighing a few pounds. That sucks. Totally.

When Hazel was told, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicked in and she figured that’s one in five … so she looked around the cancer support group and thought: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

It’s disheartening.

Issac was another patient within the cancer support group. He had retinoblastoma. To keep him alive, he had to have his eyes taken out. This is what hell would be like, his whole life without light. He told his surgeon that he’d rather be deaf than blind. If and only if he had the choice. Issac was, unfortunately, left with the only choice, according to his cancer surgeon, that eye cancer wasn’t going to make him deaf. 

Next, there is the story of Augustus walking with a prosthetic leg after osteosarcoma treatment, losing ground sometimes. He was the best friend of Hazel and Issac. Augustus had to learn driving left-footed, and failed the driving test three times. He passed in his fourth driving test, probably thanks to something called cancer perks. That refers to the little things cancer kids get that regular kids don’t: free passes on late homework, basketballs signed by sports heroes, and unearned driver’s licenses.

I admit – this is a fiction written for teenagers. But as it turns out, the story breaks the heart of adults too.

Insult

Digital communciation is one of the most common channels for discussion. Whenever we can't (and often we can't) talk face to face, we make use of the live chat, emails, text messaging or voicemail.

What many people don't realize is that navigating the digital communication – and being successful in getting the message across – is a herculean task. If there's one thing you should know about the pitfall, it's the way to respond to an insult.

I soon came to realize that I am not the only one who had been having difficulty with coming up with a perfect witty reply. An article in this month's issue of Time magazine taught me the way to shut down the dialogue instead of being nervous after sensing a threat. 

Many a time I wished to fight back like a dingo slashing a bloodied wombat and dropping it in front of people. That doesn't work and isn't wise. Don't fight back. Smile.

The two most useful replies I'd learned from the Time magazine include: "I don't get it. Can you explain the joke?" and "What a wild thing to say out aloud."

Either of them is a reply that I'm sure sends shivers down the spine of anyone who dares to insult me.

Try it next time and you will laugh and laugh and laugh and wonder who is happier, the one who insults or you.

Cassava

A commonly quoted reason for working memory failure is overload. We try to hang onto too much, and then push our memory past its limits. No less important than overload is mind-wandering. We're grabbed by some attention-seeking thoughts and our mind gets hijacked.

The question, for me, is how many books I should start reading. One after another? Different books at the same time? Once again, this is a question I don't have the answer but I tend to be promiscuous, for that matter.

Two days ago, I was reading about the intriguing streams of paralyzed patients, most of them on crutches or carried by relatives, arriving at Hans Rosling's clinic in Mozambique. They all told the same story: suddenly, both their legs had become useless. No pain, no fever and no other symptoms. The number of new cases was doubling every week. They felt like a television set with bad reception; nobody knew what was happening, and started to move the antenna around and bang on one side and then the other hoping the picture would improve. Could that be polio? Or biological warfare? None of this seems very likely, does it? 

Hans Rosling was flummoxed.

At the same time, I was in the middle of reading another book Sleeping Beauties written by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner. He taught me the multitalented molecules develped by plants. One of the superpower chemcial defence armaments is cyanogenic molecules. The name says it all. When an animal or human takes a bite out of a plant containing such a molecule, the molecule releases cyanide. That's the same lethal poison used by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – that much I was certain of. I've never heard about cassava or manioc tubers – staple foods in African countries including Mozambique – which contain such molecules. Macabre as it was, the Africans will get poisoned and become paralyzed after eating cassava unless the tubers are cooked or soaked.

When Hans Rosling drew up detailed maps of the geographical spread of the paralysis epidemic, there were several striking findings. First, it emerged that the disease hit children in particular but none under the age of two. Second, the majority of victims got paralysis during the summer period of no rainfall. It didn't take long for Hans Rosling to find out that the indigenous people could have left the cassava in the ground, hoping for rain but in vain. They soon pulled up cassava – neither cooked nor soaked – when they got nothing to eat. 

That's how people get the cyanide-releasing poisons.

A truly eye-opening read.

Poverty

It's hard for us to imagine the life in Mozambique with a shockingly high child mortality rate. It's even harder for me to read the stories haranguing the Swedish doctor Hans Rosling serving an emergency clinic in Mozambique.

Better known for writing another bestselling book Factfulness, Hans Rosling has written a memoir How I Learned to Understand the World. 

I admitted that his stories are indeed opening our eyes to poverty outside our comfort zone. And it is impossible to read without ooh and ahh. 

One late afternoon in the hospital, Hans Rosling met an elderly with a leg fractured, as carried in by her two sons. The ends of the broken bone were protruding through her skin. There were no X-ray machine and he had run out of anaesthetics. Hans Rosling had not much choice; he asked two nurses take hold of the patient under her armpits and the strongest junior nurse to pull the foot in the opposite direction. After much grappling, he managed to line up the fracture surfaces and close the wound, stitch the skin margins and put her entire limb in a plaster cast. 

Next morning, the patient insisted on leaving hospital, when she was not supposed to put any weight on the leg. I could imagine furrowed brows of Hans Rosling, who tried to explain in sign language, in vain. He then discovered that something had gone very wrong: the immobilised foot was pointing sideways instead of forward. He simply forgot to check alignment before putting on a plaster cast. To his chagrin, he could not persuade the patient to let him reset the foot.

"Doctor, my hens might get stolen so I have to leave," the old lady insisted. 

Hans Rosling never saw her again but learned later she had survived. The plaster had cracked and fallen off after a month and her foot was utterly misaligned. That badly shaped foot didn't bother the patient as long as her chickens were all right.

"When you work in a place of extreme poverty, don't try to do things perfectly," said his mentor who had been a mission doctor all her life. "All you will accomplish is wasting time and resources that could be put to better use."

That's a lesson Hans Rosling learned from the old lady too.

Anniversary

One thing that puzzled me during our plan of celebrating the 24th wedding anniversary was all the coinciding with official release of Taylor Swift's 11th studio album. I joked about Taylor Swift choosing to celebrate our big day.

Taylor's new album is likened to a new star in the galaxy, and her music has been a global phenomenon. 

My daughter, like all other Swifties, has been head over heels for her, and more so in the days leading up to the release of "The Tortured Poet Department". Out of loyalty to their favorite singer, Swifties refused to listen to the songs leaked online early. Because of school schedule, my daughter had to wait few hours after the album's arrival to start listening. She made promise not to log into any social media during lunch break in case of spoilers.

As it turns out, one of the celebration events for our wedding anniversary yesterday was to drive to my daughter's school and pick up two Swifties to our home – to make the history. In case you don't know, Taylor's album takes less than 12 hours to break this year's record for most single-day Spotify streams.

Mental

The story of Michael Laudor, as told by acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen, was heartrending. The author, Michael’s closest childhood and lifelong friend, wrote a story spanning 50 years which took me two weeks to finish. 

In terms of language prowess and intelligence, Michael Laudor could take pride in his encyclopaedia recall, like reading a book in one sitting without losing a word. He read faster than Rosen, remembered more, and processed information more quickly. 

The way Michael studied was not for the faint of hearts. His roommate had to move out because Michael never put his reading light out no matter how often he was asked or how late it got. He ended up inheriting a room of his own, which everyone in the college called “psycho singles.” 

During his first semester at Yale with Rosen, Michael had made a dive into a thorny debate with a Harvard professor who wanted Black parents to decide for themselves whether their kids got bused to majority-white schools or stayed close to home where, Michael warned, they would “suffer from the loss of an integrated environment.” Michael published a long letter in The New York Times defending the racial balance in public schools. Michael had superior intellectual ability. We took it for granted that Michael would rise to scholar status. It never occurred to us that he might one day became the man who needed to be judged as whether to be integrated or to be locked. 

He graduated from Yale Law School with summa cum laude honors despite suffering from schizophrenia. “Either you welcomed people with disabilities to the table,” he later wrote, “or you cast them out like lepers shunned in earlier times.” His story made us think again the way to help people with mental health problems. That’s something even bright guy like Michael doesn’t know the answer.

Out of the Box

I happened to be reading Ozan Varol's book two days ago, when I was on call looking after patients with kidney disease. As a rocket scientist turned award-winning author, Ozan Varol championed moving out of our comfort zone. That means taking off the training wheels and moving away from the familiar path.

One of my call duties was to look after and orchestrate kidney transplant from a brain death donor after a tragic traffic accident. My two patients were waiting for the new kidneys. They didn't speak much, and somewhere in the background rose the ticking of the clock in our medical ward, an unwavering rhythm of stability, sharply at odds with the uncertainty on their faces. I was counting my fingers. We weren't sure how long the wait would be. Waiting, for my patients on dialysis, was a bitter cocktail of aching awareness, visceral pain, and mental crush.

The organs had already been taken out of the road crash victim's body for over ten hours. I didn't want to disclose too much to the two taciturn kidney transplant candidates how we are in a race against the clock as soon as a kidney was recovered and placed on ice. Patients should not be bothered with the science that kidneys would start to degrade during the high-stakes window called cold ischaemic time. Yes, prolonged cold storage of kidneys inside the box is no laughing matter – there are starving kidneys at stake – but, hard as we tried, our operating rooms were all occupied with emergency surgery that afternoon.

Ozan Varol reminds me the pitfall of managing uncertainty. In other words, our brain often steers us toward the seemingly safest path – inaction. The brain, to paraphrase psychologist Rick Hanson, is like Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive.

To overcome the uncertainty, my urologist friend and I quickly threw away the training wheels and old rules. We tried out best to generate as many new ideas as we could. So we explored the idea of transporting the kidney organ and patient to another hospital nearby, where we can operate. Before we worked out the plan in more detail, we were told the availability of operation room in our hospital. Not one but two. If we followed our tradition like what we have been doing for the last twenty years, we would have sent the first patient to have the kidney transplant operation, and then the next one. One after another. Such tendency to follow the tradition isn't too wrong, but it means another few hours' wait for the second kidney. We knew the kidneys' quality would be better if we can beat the clock. At the end of the day, we were able to gather more than six hardworking surgeons, not to mention two teams of anaesthetists, to carry out two kidney transplant operations in parellel. Wait. I shouldn’t say “at the end of the day”; our transplant surgery started at one in the very early morning.

I am really grateful. Two days later, I am still telling it.

Dead

Unlike buying cinema tickets, on-demand streaming platform lets us enjoy more movies than we can imagine. The good part about the streaming service is that there's always chance to stop and switch.

When our family first picked the superhero movie Deadpool today, we didn't realise the bloody violence scenes throughout the story based on the Marvel Comics. That unsettled us. So much so that we stopped watching within the first ten minutes.

We were disappointed, but not for long. We went for another movie, Dead Poets Society, which was released in 1989. Looking back, I think we have made a smart choice out of the two movies, both starting with "Dead". The classic Dead Poets Society tells the story of an English teacher, Keating the "O Captain! My Captain!". Keating loved encouraging his students to go with their hearts instead of pursuing conformity. His philosophy of carpe diem, obviously, won't be accepted by the older generations. That's why one of the parents wanted to cut his son's extracurricular activities at all costs. He simply wished his son to study hard for his chemistry or science lessons. Some lesson are harder to learn that others, and the one for his son Neil Perry - that acting is more meaningful than studying medicine - was tragic for all parties.

The movie brought tears to our eyes in the family, and if the story of Keating and Neil doesn’t break your heart, well, I don’t know what will.

Exercise

How many of us have dreamt of living better longer? I know I have.

Today, voluminous research has shown that mortality is an inevitable companion of aging and chipping away one disease at a time is futile, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The good news, though, is that exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug". I was introduced to this strategy by Peter Attia in his eye-opening book Outlive. In short, medicine's biggest failing is in attempting to treat all the conditions at the wrong end of the timescale - after they are entrenched - rather than before they take root.

The beauty of maintaining health by exercise is to make us functionally younger. If anything, we exercise to live longer with good function and without chronic disease, and with a briefer period of morbidity at the end of our lives. The upside of training to improve our VO₂ max during physical exertion is huge. One study found that boosting elderly subjects' VO₂ max by about 25 percent was equivalent to subtracting twelve years from their age.

What better drug can give us such payoff? 

True

For years, we love reading crime stories or psychological thrillers.

Unsettling as they're, these fictions give us irresistible pleasure from the adrenaline swooshing through the bloodstream, not to mention the Hitchcockesque entertainment of decoding mystery.

It would be easy, and oh so helpful, for authors to stick to the theme of telling lies. My daughter finished One of Us is Lying not long ago. I just read None of This is True.  

All these books are destined to end with a maze twisted by the somewhat sickening knots of truths and untruths. All of which is to say, deception is an endless trick to make stories riveting. A bit frightening, perhaps. 

Luckily, we have more truths than lies in our real life. For me, at least.

Ando

I doubt many outside the field of architecture have heard of Tadao Ando. Few inside the field, somehow, know that he was born in poverty, had been raised by his grandmother and was a boxer, before he started teaching himself architecture. I learrned his story from Adam Grant's book Hidden Potential.  

As the only architect ever to win all four of the field's most prestigious prizes, his success has come with an asterisk. Without means to go to college, Ando borrowed architecture books from friends and taught himself enough to earn an architecture license. 

By the time he has become the master of light and concrete, he has identified his goal. "What some other people think of my work is not my prime mover," he says. "It's my desire to satisfy me, and to challenge myself."

That's contrary to what most of us have in mind. One could take the view – and I would bet that many do – that it's important to meet other people's expectation. Like Ando, Adam Grant reminds us it's better to disappoint others than to disappoint ourselves. It's more about living up to our own standards.

To visualise what we're facing, Adam Grant makes use of a soccer pitch diagram to depict the size of people we try to please. For that matter, the penalty area inside the whole pitch are somewhat representing the percentage of people we can actually please. And then, an even smaller square – the goal area – refers to the proportion of people (including yourself, of course) we should focus on pleasing. 

That reminds me of my pacing during my run after work. I seldom join running competition. I run myself. My pace, interestingly, goes up after seeing guys riding bike next to me. That's extrinsic goal to drive me. To beat the odds. And, most importantly, to beat myself.  

Seals

Ed Yong is the author of two New York Times bestsellers and won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the coronavirus pandemic. 

I’d just read his chapter about seals, sea lions and walruses – collectively known as pinnipeds – before our family visit of the Ocean Park yesterrday. Ed Yong gives me even more knowledge of marine animals. 

As I watched the whiskers protruding from the harbor seals’ snout, I remember how the seals are making meticulous efforts to keep the whiskers warm, even when diving in freezing water. That’s to stop the tissues from stiffening and allows free movement of the whiskers. In case you are wondering (I was), their whiskers are key sensory organs. The sensitivity of harbor seals’ whiskers was discovered by a scientist team in 2001 when two harbor seals, Henry and Nick, could follow the underwater path of a mini-submarine. Henry and Nick were able to clung to the trail even when their eyes were blind-folded and their ears were plugged by headphones. It wasn’t until their whiskers were covered by a stocking that they lost the sub. 

Look closer at the harbor seals’ whiskers, Ed Yong can see the magic design of anatomy: they are slightly flattened and angled so that the bladed edge always cuts into the water. Armed with an undulating surface, the whiskers can dramatically reduce the vortices left by the whiskers themselves. That means the seals are able to tone down the signals from their own bodies and enhance those left by their prey. 

How clever.

Death

There is no one way to approach final moments with a loved one.

Ask Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and you will learn authentic language on dying. Listen to the renowned physician BJ Miller's TED Talk, and you might find out what really matters at the end of life. If you're bookworm, go and find the ones by Sherwin Bernard Nuland or Atul Gawande.

But it was only when I came across a little graphic poetry collection by Wendy MacNaughton today that I began to have deep learning on the way to say goodbye at bedside. 

The pencil drawings and painting protrayals of patients at a six-bed hospice facility, accompanied by poems for reflection, from her boook How to Say Goodbye are the best visual storytelling for those of us who live and die.

Love

Falling in love is euphoric. Going to the wedding ceremony and you’ll see – and hear – for yourself. There’re wonderful sparks of marital bliss. But then, according to long-range studies by the American psychologist Dr. Dorothy Tennov, the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. 

Dr. Tennov didn’t include me in the study but I am sure my memory of our wedding is evaporating. So much so that I answered the wrong year of my marriage recently. That has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease. If anything, it's a clarion call for me to fill my "love tank". At a recent marriage seminar or couple course, I learned that running our marriage on an empty love tank may cost us even more than trying to drive our car without petrol.

After the first lesson on five emotional love languages, I decided to borrow Gary Chapman's bestselling The 5 Love Languages Men's Edition from the public library. That's the magic to speak the love language of spouse. In other words, we can't express love in English, when our spouse understands only Chinese. The secret is to find out the love language our spouse speaks: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, or physical touch. 

That's not a long book (who has time for those, these days), but the messages are important for all couples. The issue for me, however, is that I have completely forgotten that I did read this book in 2016. My goodness, that's indeed why we need to check the love tank level every now and then.

I will, I promise.

Dishonesty

I read Mitch Albom's first book Tuesdays with Morrie in 1997. Every reader of the book is touched, and I am no different. I have never missed any book of Mitch Albom after that.

The great thing about reading Mitch Albom's books is that every book read is a life added to my own. So I have already outlived cats (which are said to have nine lives) before I came to read his newest book The Little Liar. Some may quote George Martin, "the American Tolkien": "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

As I sunk deeper into the story of Holocaust from The Little Liar, mourning of one Jewish after another dying at the hands of the Nazis made my stomach turn, snatching the breath from me. I lost count of the lives I have lived. I lost count of the lies told by a little liar Nico Krispis who grew up in Salonkia, or modern day Thessaloniki, Greece. Nico never told a lie before the age of 11.

"Never be the ones to tell lies, Nico," his grandfather taught him when he was only five years old, at the majestic Mount Olympus. "God is always watching. It's easy to be nice when you get something in return. It's harder when nobody knows the good you are doing except yourself."

Nico's grandfather taught him that lesson about doing something for someone that can never be repaid. Like cleaning the graves of the dead. Soon Nico was dipping rags in the water and wiping the facades of strangers' tombstones, after wiping that of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother.

Nico kept his promise of honesty. Not until the invasion of his home by the Nazis. Nico escaped - but he never told the truth again. He made one forged document after another, using lactic acid to erase stamp and made false identity cards, passports, and food ration certificates. The lies of Nico simply went on. And on. 

The Holocaust novel about Nico taught me a life lesson of deceits and truths.  

Animal

If you want to know more about humans and great apes, you should grab the book The Third Chimpanzee by the American scientist author Jared Diamond.

Why do men have the longest penises? Chimps the largest testes? And orangutans (or gorillas) the shortest phallus and smallest testes?

What prevents us from having six sequential sets of teeth like an elephant, rather than just baby teeth and adult teeth? After all, with four more natural sets, we wouldn't need fillings, crowns, and dentures as we get older.

After getting my curiosity on animals hooked, I went on to borrow another book by a British-American science writer Ed Yong: An Immense World. The Pulitzer-winning writer covered insects, primates, bats, birds and dolphins. He told stories about the great sensory gifts of different animals. 

Animal senses are simply amazing. Ed Yong has a wonderful word for this sensory bubble - Umwelt. That's a word borrowed from German, and first used by a German zoologist in 1909 to mean an animal's sensory environment. Every creature has its own Umwelt. Every species has its Umwelt that another cannot sense. The Umwelt, as a matter of fact, can be even peculiar to an animal's embryos. 

On an evening of 1991, after suffering from the clouds of mosquitoes at Costa Rica's Corcovado National Park, a scientist checked on the red-eyed tree frogs' embryos every 15 minutes. Those eggs were encased in jelly and stuck to leaves overhanging the pond water. In the dark, nocturnal cat-eyed snake came to grab an omelette dinner made of the tasty tree frog eggs. But it's not that simple. The frog embyros' sensory bubble, or Umwelt, extends beyond the actual jelly bubble. The embryos are highly capable of detecting the vibration from the attacking snake's bite. The shaking triggers the sensitive hair cells, which send signals to their brains, setting off a cascade of enzyme release and disintegration of the eggs. Within seconds, tadpoles are tumbling down too quickly to count, and the snake, still chewing its first mouthful, is left with a smear of empty jelly.

Hero

I've long believed that introverts like me often gravitate to secret passageway allowing us to leave a party early. If we can't find the secret tunnel, even retreating to a bathroom can do wonders.

On another note, I recently learned about another type of humble partygoers who are worth learning from. William McRaven, a Four-Star Admiral at the United States Navy, once attended a private dinner hosted by a famed exercise cardiologist. He happend to meet his dinner companion with the name Charlie. He didn't catch Charlie's last name and just knew he was in the Air Force before retirement.

"What did you fly?" William asked.

"Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

"A man of many talents, huh?"

"Or a guy who couldn't keep a job." The old man laughed.

Over the course of the evening, the old man Charlie didn't talk much about himself and was much more interested in William. 

William found Charlie pleasant. Little did he know about Charlie's humility until the end of the dinner. After saying bye to Charlie, he was told the full name of his dinner companion: Charlie Duke, the youngest man ever to walk on the moon. William was dumbfounded. To his embarrassment, William didn't realise he had been having an entire dinner conversation with the national hero astronaut who had landed in the Descartes Highlands, the highest point on the moon.   

This is indeed a prime example of hero, and a humble hero.

Aoyama

If necessity is the mother of invention - and it often is - the ones who invented bookstore and library should have been outdated grandma by now. We're living in the world known as Kindle, or a state called Amazon, or a universe governed by tablet. Bookstores and libraries are shrinking, if not vanishing.

In this sense, it may be heartening for book lovers like me to see the survival, however difficult, of bookstores and libraries. That's the reason I paid a visit to the Books Kinokuniya Tokyo on my daughter's Taylor Swift concert night. Kinokuniya is the largest bookstore chain in Japan, famous for the immense size and collection of books including English ones.

That's how I learned about Michiko Aoyama's novel What You Are Looking For is in the Library, and met the enigmatic librarian Sayuri Komachi. Set in the fictional local community library, the five chapters narrate the way people - be they a department store sales assistant, a furniture manufacturer accounts clerk, a former magazine editor, an illustrator-to-be, or a 65-year-old getting use to retirement - contemplate a life change. None of the five characters know what they are searching for - until they meet the librarian.

Each chapter is a bite-sized lesson from the librarian. The last chapter on the mourning about books (that aren't selling as well any more) and bookstores (that are disappearing) strikes a chord with me. The 65-year-old retiree's daughter says it well to her father, "Stop it. When everybody says that, as if they know what they're talking about, it turns out into a trend. Books will always be essential for some people. And bookshops are a place for those people to discover the books that will become important to them. I will never allow bookshops to vanish from this world."

Share

How many books did I pack for my trip to Japan? 

Two only. 

We wouldn’t want to pack a luggage the size of Tokyo Dome. It’s kind of balance between luggage size limit and the clothing packed for a destination with thermometer reading touching zero.

I ended up with less luggage room for my books. That, to say the least, is not the priority. And though I had two books, I did know that, by peeking in the choice of my daughter’s, I had more to read. Her novel, such as We Were Liars, is among the best she ever read, and wishes to read again. That can also be on my reading list.  

Which is a good thing. That means I have a bigger “bookshelf” simply by sharing.

Snow

When I was a kid, Peanuts comic had a story of Charlie Brown who reasoned that the weather wouldn't stop anyone from playing baseball. In any event, Charlie Brown will stand on the mound in a drizzle, and will remain so in a downpour.

"Don't go! We have a game to play! Come back!"

I couldn't have compared myself to Charlie Brown. I quit every now and then. During our recent family trip to Hakuba, I had decided not to join my daughter to ski. This has nothing to do with the weather; we're blessed with pleasant snow. I chickened out after a workplace accident, leaving me a right shin wound. Well, the fact that many race down the slopes worry-free doesn't mean that I am not struggling with ski anxiety and afraid of ski injury.

All right, I'm scared. I am getting nervous about fall. Snow is amazing, I know. As the recent Time magazine article "Why People Love Snow So Much" mentions, snow engages all five senses. We can feel it, we can taste it, we can even find the sound of silence. A couple inches of snow can absorb up to 60% of sound. That means our world really seems quieter, and more peaceful when it's in white.

Mention Snow White, and I imagine myself looking like Bashful of the Seven Dwarfs (hiding behind cloud and trepidation, in my mind, as he often does).

Eras

Growing up with a kid - or bringing up, if you like - is one of the most entertaining journeys. An unspoken rule is to jump in with an open mind, the expectation that you won't expect, and the knowledge that you've never learned.

When our daughter was young, we planned our vacation with simple fun in mind. Legoland or zoo. Hands-on museum. Playground and beach. That's the kind of itinerary I have mastered nicely, the kind that stops being difficult and starts being natural. We just like the way we travel.

Wait. It's not that simple. Fast-forward to the teenager years. I learn to plan our trip according to new milestones. Now that our daugther becomes a Swiftie, we felt a jolt of adrenaline after Taylor Swift kicked off her Eras Tour last year. We never saw our daughter so affectionate with a chance to pay homage to the stadium. Taylor Swift has been packing stadiums from Las Vegas, Nevada to South America. When we learned about her tour to Tokyo, I asked my friends with American Express to do me a favor. Well, it turns out, not as simple as that. They aren't Japanese American Express cardholders and could not help with getting pre-sale tickets.

To plan a trip in Tokyo is one thing; to time the trip to Tokyo Dome with two secure concert tickets, quite another. That's all parenthood is, really: every chance to enjoy the challenge to its fullest. 

Remorse

I was waiting for a kidney biopsy procedure for my patient in hospital. I had prepared everything the day before. That's something simple. I knew every step, and the way to the procedure room was easy. I knew every corner, every turn on the way from one building to another in the hospital I have been working for nearly thirty years.

So off I went, once I knew the patient was ready. I was running, to be honest; it was my habit not to keep people waiting after receiving a call. Like maybe I had been running a race. I stopped abruptly at the corridor intersection before I could see someone pushing a cart. The side collision gave me a chance to practice somersault - if it is the right word - and righting reflex. I managed not to break my bone, but not my skin.

I felt like the urge to curse, to shout, to pick up the cart and chuck it through the corridor, see the cart smashed. I was terribly sorry to have thrown a tantrum, and to that end, I was exceptionally empathetic to my 86-year-old lady who needed a kidney biopsy.

If there's one thing I've learned yesterday, it's the meaning of the word "redemption."

Nancy

A story moves people. 

Tell a story, Nancy Hopkins was told by the faculty chair at the Massachusetts Institute. This is how the molecular geneticist and cancer researcher navigated her way to win the fight for her “women’s work. 

In turn, the Pulitzer Prize winner Kate Zernike retold the heartbreaking story of Nancy. I didn’t need a tape measure or statistics chart to learn the demoralising path of gender equity. After I read the behind-the-scenes account of Francis Crick’s hands on Nancy’s breasts, I knew what is meant by inequities. Ditto for sexual assault by the renowned biologist who had founded the journal Cell. 

I knew the meaning of discrimination when Nancy could not even get an equal share of fish tanks for her zebrafish research. I was furious. And who won’t?

Be the Bus

During my daughter's childhood days, I had been hardwired to borrow books from public library and read to her. With time, I borrowed books and read with her. As she gets older, my daughter picks her own reading materials.

Times have changed. These days, my brother and sister have been taking peek at my daughter's reading list to find books for themselves.

Now that she draws up her reading list, borrowing books has become a solitary endeavor or an activity for myself. Today I happened to find a humorus book by the author who told the story Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! That is Mo Willems, one of our favorite authors. It turns out, bringing the book home has allowed me to relive the experience of bookworm daddy. My daughter had her head buried in the book right after I brought it home.

I could barely contain my delight; it is one of the most rewarding experiences for me.

Empathy

I have spent years with cracking through mysterious diseases. Every time I solve a case - observing, gathering information, and asking questions - I relive the thrill of sleuthing at 221B Baker Street.

This Wednesday morning I received a call from my friend after her father suffered from recalcitrant attacks running amok all over the body. Crippled with dry cough, night sweats, weight loss, and leg swelling, he didn't get any better after staying in hospital for more than a week. Both the patient and his laboratory test results looked bad. So much so that his doctor wanted a costly scan called positron emission tomography.

After the phone conversation, it appeared to me as if this is an "immunological misfiring" instead of a solid organ cancer. Rather than pursuing a diagnostic tool with high dose of radiation, I asked my friend to bring her father to see me. An urine test and a kidney biopsy the next morning made a compelling diagnosis of immune system dysregulation kicking off relentless inflammation in the blood vessels.

The job of a doctor didn't stop here: we have to help the patient handle the bad news and tackle the disease. I have been lucky enough to be healthy most of the time. That being the case, I tend to have difficulty picturing myself in the patients' shoes. It's hard enough for a healthy doctor to imagine the patient's fear, not to mention the pain from a knife and creepiness under the drapes.

During my recent reading of a breast cancer surgeon's memoir, I learned about her own battle with depression, followed by finding a lump on her left breast (which turned out to be just a cyst), and then a large irregular mass on her left breast fiver years later (this time a six centimetre lobular cancer), chemotherapy, radiotherapy surgery and tamoxifen, and yet a locoregional chest wall recurrence. Her ordeal with tears, hair loss, radiotherapy skin burn, incessant night sweats from ovary shutdown, gets stuck in my head. Her story is more than a patient journey. It is a doctor’s reflection on what a patient’s life is like. I know more about patient's suffering, and have told myself to be a better listener.

As it turns out, I took better care of my patient's emotional health, and not just his immune bushfire.

Curse

I’m not the sort of person who knows how to teach. I like to teach, don’t get me wrong, but my colleagues know very well I prefer to get the task done on my own. Instead of guiding my young doctors to find their way, I feel more comfortable with managing the patients myself. 

The older I grow, the less skilful I am to walk others through my route. Yes, that’s the curse of knowledge. The curse makes it hard for me to imagine not knowing what I know. It is often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more appropriate, as the organizational psychologist Adam Grant emphasises, that those who can do, can’t teach the basics.

And that brings me to a study I published over 15 years ago. At that time, I thought it’s important to explore the trainers’ experience in teaching our patients with kidney failure. It bothered me, then, when my patients on peritoneal dialysis got infection because of improper technique. I took a good look at their dialysis training nurses’ level of experience. As I pored over the results, I was in for a surprise. The patients who were trained by nurses with more than 3 years of experience were running a two-fold increased chance of subsequent infection secondary to behavioural lapse such as improper handwashing.

Many were angry with my counterintuitive finding that more experienced nurses weren’t doing better with teaching patients. Oh, the stare I got. “How dare you suggest experts are worse off?”

Now I know the way to explain my findings. Much as an experienced doctor has a harder time teaching the beginners, an experienced nurse who almost stays on autopilot can have a hard time to explain the simple steps of handwashing. If you hear about Einstein's curse in his classroom, you wouldn’t be surprised that Einstein knew too much, and his students knew too little. He had so many ideas in his head that he didn’t know what his students didn’t know. Curse of knowledge. This, I believe, is the reason his thermodynamics course attracted only three students.

To me, the message is clear: we can sometimes be too experienced to teach.

Early Bird

This is the second day of the new year. A Tuesday morning with sunshine behind the cloud, as shy as Bambi hidden behind his mother.

I was heading to Section 2 of the Lantau Trail, all the way from Pak Kung Au to the iconic Stone Chalet. Normally, on a Tuesday like this, rather than walk in the countryside, I would work in the hospital seeing one patient after another without break, grabbing a cup of coffee or two at best. But on this day, I broke the rule and took a day off to climb the slopes of Sunset Peak and Yi Tung Shan.

If there's one thing Lantau has in spades, it's the hiking routes for everyone. As the second loftiest peak in Lantau, Sunset Peak has matched well, if not outshone, the majestic Lantau Peak nearby. The legacy of Sunset Peak, as its name implies, remains the unmissable sunset view, and the best way to soak up the breathtaking view is getting there at the right time.

I didn't stay till sunset today, however. One of my private patients got sick and had to be admitted to hospital. "Never mind," I told my buddy who came with me. "We shall come back on a clear day. Soon."