Food

I know, I know – Japanese food is a treasure trove of possibilities. It should go without saying, writing about Japanese cooking is to enter the world of Japanese aesthetics, philosophy, and way of life.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives series written by Hisashi Kashiwa, The Menu of Happiness, showed me how the chef Nagare Kamogawa and his daughter enjoyed cooking and serving food. The family of Kamogawa work in a weathered two-storey building with walls of faded grey mortar and no signs indicative of a restaurant. That's where Nagare recreates nostalgia-infused dishes to heal the wounds or unmet childhood needs of the clientele. Instead of five-star Michelin cuisine, he makes dishes like omurice, gyoza, yakisoba, curry and rice.

I'm no cooking expert, but the story reminds me of Itosaisai during my recent Itoshima trip. Itosaisai is a farm stop offering a hybrid between a famers' market and a grocery store. Every morning the locals sell goods directly from farms, just-caught fish, and many other Itoshima-harvested fresh products, bypassing the brokers, wholesalers and distributors.

We arrived few minutes after the opening. Little did we know there were already long waits at the car park entrance, not to mention the long queue inside. We brought Kamo aubergine, water spinach, edamame, and loads of meat that filled our shopping bag (and stomachs) to the top. A fantastic way to capture the joy of food.

Characters

I brought the thriller The Secret History with me during the Beijing trip. That's the recommendation from my daughter who has just read Donna Tartt's novel.

In the first chapter, I met a boy of twenty-eight years old from California; he went to study at New England where he joined a Greek course with four other classmates.

Getting to know five characters seemed tough for me. All of them could be smoking cigarettes and using drugs, and most of them are Greek to me. When I showed my daughter how I drew a table to tell one from another, I was reassured that it's not a must. 

"Don't worry," she winked. "Go on reading. You will know each of them soon."

Of course, my daughter knows very well Donna Tartt is a gifted writer. I shouldn't have to worry about the way a murder story unfolded, about who could die, and who would be the pallbearer. It would be difficult to mistake any of the characters crafted by Donna Tartt.

Great Wall

When Machu Picchu stands as the miraculous citadel in South America, the Great Wall of China is the counterpart, if not more imposing, in Asia. Breathtaking it is. With its pristine watchtowers and multi-function walls stretching thousands of kilometre across the historic frontier, the Great Wall is the ultimate bucket-list adventure for many.

My first out-of-town trip was when I visited the capital city of China at the age of nineteen. The Great Wall is so impressive it's worth a return journey. The second visit, it turned out, happened this summer, when my daughter joined a summer physics course in Beijing.

The Great Wall, being a timeless monument, never fails to surprise. Climbing the gravity-defying Great Wall often makes one wonder about how it was built. The builder of the Jiayuguan fort, as the legend goes, calculated the construction materials precisely. So much so that one brick remained by the time the building had finished. 

We could never verify that piece of history. What we are pretty sure is that the ancient wonder is a never-ending story.

Pear

Life is a busy box of chocolates. Some are sweet, and many are nutty. 

You wake on a Monday morning and stare at the never-ending to-do list. The stifling weather and unanswered emails conspire like a tough examiner. You may be consumed by feelings of the damn busy schedule. Before you can make another complaint or curse, you find out you have a brain tumour. That means a long surgery, after which you can no longer breathe on your own without a tube running down your throat. You can't even swallow. The next thing to keep you alive is a tube to fill your stomach with food goo and water. 

That's the one of the worst Kafkaesque situations we can imagine, as was the case for the American writer Jeannie Gaffigan in 2017. She wrote about her pear-sized brain tumour in the memoir When Life Gives You Pears. That tumour took a massive mental and physical toll on her. Much of the days were spent in the ICU, a no-kid-zone, where you can find the worst germs and bacteria in the hospital. To get herself out of the germ-infested hospital as soon as possible, Jeannie immediately nodded when her doctor suggested a tracheostomy. A scar on her neck or throat was nothing compared to the tube-up-the-nose-attached-to-a-machine-in-the-hospital option. That sounded horrible but was a piece of cake for Jeannie after all the challenging back-and-forth uber-gurney journeys inside hospital.

On reflection, Jeannie found out that she had been wrong to sweat the small stuff before the life-changing crisis. Many of us, like Jeannie, are taking so much time to make sure our garden looked perfect that we  ultimately miss our chance to smell the flowers. 

Name

There is a book Clinical Neurology written by someone called Russell Brain? Seriously. There is one, and people call it Brain's Clinical Neurology.

I heard about this book when I read The Names, a New York Times best-selling debut novel by Florence Knapp. The novel has three storylines, each of which depends on how a mother names her son: Bear, Julian, and Gordon. 

The idea that people gravitate toward areas of work that match their name is known as nominative determinism or aptronym. Think about Usain Bolt, and you know what I mean. Or Amy Lloyd, a neuroscientist who studied amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease. Another example is an article about incontinence in the British Journal of Urology written by A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon.    

I have to put my hands up here and say that name can sometimes predict destiny. Call me KM and remember the runner. 

Air Mattress

Not infrequently, we start on the area which we are passionate about, and many of us can be single-minded about our forte.

Finding the right niche isn't easy, though. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia should have thought so. I've heard about their story from the book Don't Trust Your Gut. These two roommates in San Francisco first met in art school and were jobless. Their problem were really simple: they were broke and couldn't afford to pay their bills. To solve the money problem, two of them rented their spare air mattresses to attendees of a major design conference when hotels were fully booked.  

After stumbling on the idea of air mattress rental and serving breakfast, they had created a website: airbedandbreakfast.com. They were dead wrong. The business wasn't impressive at all. Chesky and Gebbia ended up each accumulating more than 20,000 dollars in credit card debt. They tried their luck elsewhere, where the number of conference guests in Austin might be bigger. But the business remained stagnant, and worse. Ditto for Denver.

As much as Chesky and Gebbia might wish to kickstart their business idea to pay back their debt, they had yet to find the breakthrough.

But – and I'm sure you expected a "but" – the proverbial "aha" moment came after David Rozenblatt, a drummer for American singer Barry Manilow, requested that he be allowed to rent out his whole apartment before going on a tour. The airbedandbreakfast.com founders first said no, noting he would be unable to provide breakfast if David wasn't there. But wait: do they really have to keep sticking to air mattresses and breakfast? The two entrepreneurs then realised the idea of dropping the air mattresses, dropping the breakfast. They could simply ask people to rent apartments when they were out of town. 

Airbedandbreakfast.com was rebranded as Airbnb. And the rest is history.

Pooh

Animals are amazing natural healers. So much so that we have a concept called zoopharmacognosy, a term entirely new to me until I picked up the book Doctors by Nature this month.  

Examples are plentiful to show that animals are innately knowledgeable about their body need and self-medication with natural remedies. As mentioned in the book by Jaap de Roode, humans are latecomers to this earth; millions of animal species were practicing medicine before we even evolved. It also means animals have lots of things to teach us.

Offering our patients antibiotics is an easy way to deal with bacterial infection, but the problem of gut microbiome destruction ensues. Once our patients develop inflammation caused by Clostrioides difficile, the highly contagious and nasty bacteria can quickly take over the human colon. Alas, no patients would thank their doctors for the fever, tummy pain, and diarrhoea as a result of the antibiotic use. 

We have spent a good chunk of time finding treatment of Clostrioides difficile. A healthy gut microbiome seems to be the best answer for our body's defence against the infection. Little did we know that elephant calves have long eaten their mother's faeces at the time of weaning. If you aren't sure the benefit of dung cocktail, the elephants will tell you this meaningful tool of restoring the gut microbiome. Once you learn their insight of restoring ecosystem from pooh-pooh sharing, you will realise why we are now learning to use faecal microbiota transplant, a medical term for "poo transplant", for managing C. diff infection.