Glaswegian

Every time I fly, I try to select and bring at least one book to match the theme.

Scottish writing is so prolific that there're abundant choices for my Glasgow trip. Shuggie Bain, the debut Booker Prize-winning novel by Douglas Stuart, is my pick. 

This novel opens in the early 1990s with a teenager Shuggie Bain beginning his shift at a supermarket deli and daydreaming his going to the hairdressing college on the Southside of Glasgow. He got hired for the job because he was underaged, justifying a lower-than-full-adult wage. 

The next few chapters bring us back to 1981, when Shuggie Bain was a boy of ten, barely thriving in a dysfunctional family. He had no toys because his severely alcoholic mother had spent all money on lager. Shuggie collected the empty cans from around the house as his toys.

Shuggie's mother was even more obsessed with the cans. Nobody else in the world is as attached or addicted to lager cans as alcoholic. To calm her shakes, Shuggie's mother would shuffle around the couch looking for hidden quarter bottles or half-finished cans. On her knees, she pulled all the empty grocery bags out from underneath the kitchen sink till she was certain there were no more cans.

There are few things more terrifying than the unshakable urge to drink. 

Credibility

Jessica Chen is the kind of person you read about accolades like Emmy Award winner. She is a globally recognised speaker on communication skills.

With Asian upbringing and traditional quiet culture, Jessica shared her childhood story of building a Lego set with her younger brother Eric. Picture two kids triumphantly drawn to the colourful bricks. The two of them were simply fascinated by the Christmas gift, but thirty minutes in, they hit trouble with the pieces. 

"I think this piece goes here, but Eric said it goes the other way. Mum, can you help us?"

Jessica's mum quickly answered, "I am not really sure, but Eric, listen to whatever your older sister says."

That's simply how hierarchy works. High power-distance culture describes the inclination for a junior person to follow higher-ranking person. For those of us who were raised with high power-distance culture, we may unconsciously fall victim to authority bias and think whoever is older is always right. Jessica's lighthearted story has stuck with me, because I happened to have had similar experience with my ten-year-old daughter. In fact, we were getting stuck with building the Lego set, like what Eric and Jessica were struggling then.   

Interesting as this was, I had hopes of getting the right way to sort out the pieces. And so I kept trying, here and there, to build the Lego.

Except, that isn’t the case. No luck.

My daughter shook her head. "I don't think this is the way. Let me go and find mum."

This, frankly, was a remarkable answer. The voice in my head was telling me that respect was not just something that happens because you're older. It is something that is earned from the things we do and show. My wife really deserves much more credit than me in solving difficult problems. The natural instinct for my daughter to find my wife is the proof of her credibility and reputation. And really, my wife deserves much more respect than me. In a nutshell, children know best.

Glasgow

Glasgow isn't that big and it's possible to get around on foot without sacrificing too much shoe leather. That's what I learned from Lonely Planet Scotland when I planned my accommodation for the conference in this city.

Put simply, Glasgow is the kind of place where we don't have to be picky for hotels very close to the conference venue. Although I have not much sightseeing time, I decided to find one at Glasgow's West End, just a quick subway from downtown. As in so many British cities, the western part – upwind of industrial pollution – was historically the most desirable. 

The key drawcard for the location of my hotel is its green spaces. The much-loved Botanic Gardens with series of stunning Victorian glasshouses are within walking distance. And so is Kelvingrove Park, right next to top-notch Kelvingrove Arty Gallery and Museum. These iconic sites close before five, but the Waterstones bookshop and public library on my doorstep won't close until eight in the evening.

What could be better location than that?      

Baðstofa

The Three Little Pigs has long been one of the classic fables. This week I finished a fiction that's more haunting, Burial Rites. 

The story has also taken place in simple house made of primitive material like turf and stone (not straws, I know). They call such centuries-old farmhourse a badstofa.

The big bad wolf was also killed in this fiction. The three "pigs" in this darker story, however, were also executed for murder. Sadly.

Burned

Many of us know that our kids come first, of course they do. But not all of us.

In some darkest moments and for some less fortunate kids – like Paul Sinton-Hewitt who had been growing up with struggling parents – putting the kids first can be more difficult than asking a cow to recite a poem.

Paul Sinton-Hewitt, the founder of parkrun and being awarded a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II, wasn't so sure his parents had done a damn good job to raise him. At age five, he was sent to boarding school and experienced terrible bullying. Oh, that was a toughie for a kid to go through those adverse childhood experiences like parental separation, multiple school moves, and traumatic bullying. 

Imagine a junior school kid wearing a scarf near Johannesburg. To a nine-year-old, that's ridiculous. Deep down, Paul Sinton-Hewitt knew the humiliation, but he had no choice after being strangled by a looped cord around his neck. The boys kicked the chair away, and let the noose pulling tight under his full weight. He could hardly breathe for ten seconds and ended up with a bloody wound cut deeply into his neck from ear to ear. 

Having grown up with nobody to listen to his worries or step in to sort things out, Paul Sinton-Hewitt had become a closed book. Over time, he became devastated with faulty coping mechanisms. When he became a father, he didn't know any nursery rhymes because nobody had sung them to him as a child. As a result of his upbringing and the heartache, his marriage hit the rocks and he felt torn. 

Paul Sinton-Hewitt got caught in a cycle of repeatedly getting burned, until his finding of connection and purpose in starting a weekly time trial run in his local park. Little did he know that from just thirteen runners on a Saturday, parkrun – a name he coined and with capital letter dropped – would grow into a 10-million-strong community across five continents. 

From a grassroots community into a social movement.

Ocean

From the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, the global population of sea otters fell from 300,000 to less than 2,000 individuals. That's a result of human hunting; these marine animals have the thickest fur of any mammals. I learned these from the recent David Attenborough's landmark series, Ocean.

His book shows us how the world is both desperately fragile yet astonishingly resilient. 

Little did we know the kelp forests are diminishing, albatross populations are crashing, seashells being washed up on the beach are disappearing. Such environmental amnesia or change in the accepted norms is called "shifting baseline syndrome", a societal phenomenon first described by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly. In short, what we see today we tend to think of as normal, simply because we get used to a degraded environment. 

Arguably, humans are less sensitive to the changing ecosystem than other animals. A look at the Southern Ocean and you'll be amazed by how the animals get along with the temperature. Crocodile icefish, among all, is the only vertebrate that doesn't have red blood cells. No one is sure of the evolutionary advantage of this adaptation. Without red cells, it is harder to transport oxygen around their bodies. To compensate, they have evolved oversized hearts and scale-free skin that allows them to absorb oxygen directly from the seawater. To live in water around Antarctica, crocodile icefish have evolved antifreeze proteins in their blood which limit the growth of ice crystals, making the freezing point of their blood slightly below the freezing point of seawater. Now that global warming is raising the water temperature, warmer water has lowered oxygen solubility, putting them at risk of suffocation. 

What a tough life. 

Pachinko

I started reading Pachinko, an epic novel written by Min Jin Lee, before heading to Shaoxing for a conference.

I didn't realise it could have taken me longer than the trip to finish the book. What took so long? That's indeed a long story spanning nearly 100 years of history. A moving novel about identity and struggle with discrimination. 

There are countless examples of fighting for identity in the story. Sunja, the daughter of a crippled fisherman in this novel, was told, "For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life." Many people like Sunja can't reverse a curse, and more so when they believe there is a curse in their blood. In a macabre environment of Japan-versus-Korea thinking, some of the Koreans had to to choose a Japanese surname to hide their blood. 

The worldview that saw people born with a curse is metaphorically a game of pachinko. In this game of pinball, the first strike of the ball against the flipper more or less determines how the game will play out. Sunja thought that there was a curse in her blood, similar to the way the fate of pinball is decided at the moment of plunger hitting the ball.