Burial

It's no accident that crime gets lots of attention. This speaks for the journalism cliché: If it bleeds, it leads.

When I read the story of the Lockdown Ladies' Burial Club recently, I was technically sympathising with five women who had killed their husbands. The novel The Best Way to Bury Your Husband looks like a black comedy – and it is.

After the five women had been caught on the dilemma of disposing the dead bodies, they put their heads together to make plans and brainstorm for disposal-site ideas. By pure, horrific change, two of them came up with the ingenious idea of pouring cat litter to dry the body out and stop it stinking.

Slushy nonsense? Not a bit of it. All the women had good reason and deserved the option to get rid of the abusive relationship. Their choice seems to be the only one to stop men being violent. Instead of hiding blue-green bruises by ivory makeup, shutting up to avoid burns because of wrong words, wrong tone, or even wrong place to set the cup down, the women killed in self-defense.

The way this novel was set in the lockdown period speaks for the spiking of domestic abuse since 2020. The abuser says, "You can't go out; you're not going anywhere." As the pandemic dragged on, one of the women in the novel paused at the newspaper front page showing volunteer gravediggers hard at work, with the headline "funeral and burial services unable to keep up with demand." Surely, nobody would notice if one more dead husband was filled in.  

The sad truth is that far more women were killed by the partners than vice versa. Can anyone notice?

Blossom

Every spring, Hong Kong Instagrammers love to post the deciduous golden trumpet trees in full blossom. Also known as yellow poui trees, these bright yellow trumpet-shaped flowers are the prime photographer draw. 

I arrived at the alma mater early two weeks ago so I could pick a serene spot, and an unmistakably beautiful one, to have a stroll before attending an organ donation ceremony. As soon as I arrived, I saw the vibrant golden flowers, resembling wind chimes or bells. Their blossoming period lasts for less than a month. By the time I returned today, the flowers have gone. 

After the golden blooms, long furry brown seed pods hang from the branches. It's one thing to capture the yellow flowers by camera, quite another to capture the seeds. Nowhere else do you see such a dramatic change in appearance. That’s almost a fairy tale of The Ugly Duckling in reverse order.

Genie

Would the field of education be better without Gemini, GPT-4 or DeepSeek? It is an uncomfortable question.

As quickly as OpenAI released the groundbreaking ChatGPT in 2023, the Los Angeles Unified School District became the first major school system to ban it. Soon, Seattle Public Schools were prohibiting generative artificial intelligence on all campus devices. Within months, schools from France to India to Australia outlawed the AI chatbot. Tools like Grammarly or Copilot are often thought to be evil monsters that violate the natural order, so one might qualify for sainthood without using any one of them.

What would the brave new world of education be like when more artificial intelligence tools become available online? Not all people view the transformation as positive as Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. Khan laughed at the irrational panic triggered by the students' using AI technology. Perhaps never more so than during the pandemic, which we had witnessed spread of rumors from toilet paper crisis to the current plague of ChatGPT infecting students' minds. Educators have been talking about the threat of student cheating, so much so that the entire system of learning appears to be collapsing. 

To many, the threat is overwhelming. As one op-ed for Inside Higher Ed put it, "To their shock and dismay, teachers will find that their classrooms has tested positive for GPT." For the most part, the higher education or university examiners are worrying about AI-powered cheating in writing term papers or assignments. Some think about using AI detection tools, and misconduct panel if students' work has been flagged. Others suggest having students work on their writing and papers in class. 

Of different reaction to the technology of artificial intelligence, Khan's seems the most brave and exciting. Not blind bravery, but educated bravery. "Everyone was talking about AI enabling cheating by writing papers for students," the American educator says. "But what if it didn't write for them at all? What if, instead, it wrote with them?" 

Oh, there is. The genie is out of the bottle. It is time for us to follow the advice of Salman Khan, and throw the bottle away and our outsized fear of generative AI along with it. 

  

Deaf

I know many people who are aching to be public speakers with oratory skills and have no idea how to begin. There seems to be a great gap like an open wound. What about people who are cut off from the others because of deafness? Will they be desperate to have hearing?

For decades, cochlear implants have been promoted to make the hearing world easier. The small electronic device has an external portion sitting behind the ear, and a second portion surgically placed within the skull. Signals from the external transmitter will be converted into electric impulses, to be sent to the auditory nerve via an array of electrodes. For a long while cochlear implant was thought to be a cure for deafness and remedy for deaf children to learn oral language. Or is it? That is more controversial than what I have believed. 

Enter the visionary exponents of Deaf culture. Deaf culture believes in having membership in a beautiful culture. The Deaf culture doesn't feel they lack something. Strange as it may seem for us, the deaf community is proud of their membership. A previous school newspaper poll, as I have read from the book Far From the Tree, asked whether students would take a pill that would give them hearing instantly, and the majority answered that they would not. When I watched a movie on Deaf culture with my family today, I was reminded of the bioethicist Teresa Blankmeyer Burke who said, "It is rare that one grieves for something that one has not lost."

Hearing parents are, therefore, thrown back on their own dichotomy: do they have a deaf child, or do they lack a hearing one?

Consultant

Warren Buffet has reminded us that a barber is the last person you should ask whether you need a haircut.

There is no mystery to getting outside advisers. Those who are eager to get help should go and read Surviving the Daily Grind written by Philip Coggan, the columnist for the Economist. For those who are keen for hiring management consultants, however, there is good reason to remember the old joke that management consultants borrow your watch so they can tell you the time, and then they walk off with the watch.

Therefore, in his book, Philip Coggan laughs at large companies attracting outside advisers in the same way that jam jars attract wasps. I do not think of myself as cynic, and certainly most of us don't. But I must confess that I keep laughing at his jibe about teachers: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

Shirt

When it comes to packing luggage, I tend to pack too little. As opposed to overpacking, my careless way of packing is more laughable. It's embarrassing, for example, to find that I had only one shirt for my trip to Macau this week. One shirt, and nothing else, for three days.

Wearing the same shirt for all occasions is fine, as long as I didn't go running. The way of my wearing shirt goes along with the story book I brought with me to Macau: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop. The barista of the bookshop, Minjun, talked about the way of wearing shirts. 

"In high school, my mum used to say that if the first button is done up properly, the rest of the buttons will line up neatly."

At first glance, it makes good sense. The first button, as it turns out, refers to the expectation to get into a good university; the second and third, fourth buttons are smooth sailing after fastening the first one.

As it happens, this isn't the way for everyone. Some might be better off wearing a buttonless shirt. Some might get stuck because the shirt lined with expensive and beautiful buttons on one side, but there are no holes. 

At the end of the story, remedy for the dangling buttons comes into light. "Easy. I changed my shirt," Minjun said. "This time I cut the holes first before I made the buttons that fit. Now, the shirt is buttoned up nicely."

Macau

I attended the Macau Nephrology Association Annual Scientific Meeting more than a year ago, when I stayed close to Taipa but was unable to locate the Ecological Pond nearby at that time. When I had another chance to visit Macau as examiner today, I decided to use Google Maps to visit the wetland after the examination. This area of ecosystem is smaller than Hong Kong Wetland Park, but it’s excellent for my sunset stroll. 

In the past, there were lots of bitter vine near the mangrove swamp area in Avenida da Praia, Taipa. Said to be one of the ten most harmful imported invasive plant species in the world, Mikania micrantha or bitter vine has once invaded the reed beds there. The Macau government worked hard to protect the vanishing ecosystem and restore its ecological value, clearing the invasive plant and increasing its biodiversity. 

This might not be the case for everyone, but I must say that I like Ecological Pond in Avenida da Praia more than Venetian Macao Casino. And definitely the Everglades more than Las Vegas.