Reset

Does there come a day in every man's life when he finds a transition from the upslope straight line to a peak and then decline? I can't be alone in this, can I?

The pattern is universal, according to the social scientist Arthur Brooks who wrote From Strength to Strength. After the age of fifty, you might find your reaching peak performance. Your decisions might not be as crisp as they once were. Your instincts are less reliable. Your productivity isn't as high.

Maybe you can relate to the decline mentioned by Arthur Brooks. I can (yes, it hurts). And I realised that I have also experienced a diminishing skill to recall names. Is it true that, by the time we're fifty, our brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library? The answer is: Yes. Mind you, your personal research librarian is also getting creaky, slow, and easily distracted. This is part of the story of growing old, and I wish it was not, but it is.

I won't kick myself for forgetting the name of any acquaintance, or even the name of my patient for that matter. Years ago, I could precisely name each and every patient of mine. I can't now. I know I shouldn't regret. This is what Arthur Brooks has taught me. As we age, we should not cry for the decline in our fluid intelligence (such as the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems); we are simply entering a life reset to gain our crystallized intelligence (referring to the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past).

To go back to the metaphor of a vast library, we won't have to regret how slow the librarian is. This does not matter. What matters is that we marvel at the size of the book collection our librarian is wandering around in.

Chocolate

When my friend returned from her Swiss trip, she brought us chocolate resembling the iconic Matterhorn Glacier. That's pyramid-shaped chocolate with a dash of white colour at the top.

That reminds me of the memoir of Trevor Noah, who was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother. As a kid, Trevor didn't know what race was. To him, people were like different types of chocolate. His dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and he was the the milk chocolate.

True, life is a box of chocolate. I like the way Trevor thinks we're all just chocolate. 

Simple and fair. 

Carrie

For the past few years, the American author Taylor Jenkins Reid has been carving out a unique literary space, mostly novels of women characters. And it's almost impossible to read them without wondering if you're reading a biography or a fictional story. Nowhere is this better illustrated than byThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. The story character is so real. So much so that I think it has come from the journalist work of Walter Isaacson.

Taylor Jenkins Reid's recent novel Carrie Soto is Back is even more authentic. Carrie Soto is a fictional tennis superstar who simply wanted to be the greatest tennis player in the world. When her friend suggested that joy was more important, she laughed. "Winning is joy," she said.

Carrie Soto, once the leading figure in women's tennis with a record of winning Grand Slam titles for twenty times, retired at 31. She decided on a comeback at 37, when another upcoming tennis player had tied that record. To reclaim the world record for most Grand Slam singles titles, Carrie returned to play all four Grand Slam events, including the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Over the course of her lifetime, she was living in the dream that her body or skills didn't have an expiration date.

At the end of each chapter, I'd have to remind myself that being the very best is antithetical to being happy, but in the next chapter Carrie would convince us otherwise. Such debate, to and fro, is like moving our head right and left, left and right, chasing the tennis ball. By itself, it's downright satisfying. This is the reward for reading Taylor Jenkins Reid's book. 

The pearl didn't all come from Carrie's obsession; the rebuttal from her friend or opponent is entertaining. Competing against people half her age, as her friend mentioned, is going to face people with brand-new knees, brand-new everything including brand-new hearts. I love the metaphor about old hearts: It's like an old mattress that's been bounced on so many times that now, if you put your hand on it, it leaves a permanent imprint. Just a big old mattress showing every dent.

DPC

Historical fiction is often the most gripping witness to war. My recent favorite is Kristin Hannah's The Women, which takes me to the Vietnam War around 1967.

One of the women in this fiction is a twenty-year-old nurse Frances McGrath who joined the Army Nurse Corps. Let us not forget, indeed, that women can be heroes. 

The story of this green nurse Frances McGrath in Vietnam is all blood and sweats. Her workplace was an operating table on wheels, and she lived in the middle of nowhere. There were bits of shrapnel embedded everywhere, cyring casualties, moaning and shouting medics. Frances had never performed a tracheotomy before, but she'd watched and assisted on dozens within one year of joining the hospital. One day, she was facing a dying soldier who could barely breathe. He looked sucked dry, hollowed-out, with sunken eyes and sunken cheeks characteristic of the prisoners of war. The gasping soldier struggled and probably couldn't make it. Frag wounds had torn up his arms and neck, and there was probably something swollen or lodged in his airway. 

"What are you doing, McGrath?" the doctor asked.

"Letting him say goodbye to his friends and die in peace." 

"Be quick. I've got a sucking chest wound that needed you ten minutes ago."

Frances McGrath felt sad, and decided to change into clean gloves and wiped the soldier's neck with antiseptic solution. Holding her scalpel, she took a breath to steady herself, then made a cut between the thyroid and cricoid cartilage.

The dying man took a deep, wheezing breath, with relief coming into his eyes. Frances took hold of his hand, held it in hers, and leaned close, whispering, "You must be a good man. Your friends are here."

The soldier took his last breath, and went still.

That was her way of facing a never-ending fight of wartime Whac-A-Mole. Once a wounded soldier was settled (or sent to morgue), another would be brought in. That was a fact of life.

During the Vietnam War, Frances McGrath saw everything from amputations to rat bites to what's left of a soldier after a land mine (many of which were planted with sharpened sticks and coated with human feces to assure both deep wound and infection when stepped on). Most wounds require delayed primary closure – DPC – which means the medic clear and debride wounds but don't close. The wait – at least four to five days – before wound closure offers time for the human host defense system to decrease the bacterial load. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything, be they words or healing sessions, that could bring closure to the wound suffered by Frances McGrath.

GUP

I kept being amused by Steven Rowley’s novel The Guncle this week. 

Funny as it may sound, the fiction character name refers to a 43-year-old former sitcom star Patrick. Or else, you can call him Gay Uncle Patrick. Or, GUP, for short. 

Patrick had to be a guardian of two children, a niece and a nephew, who kept acting out. They were either using outdoor voices inside or asking for YouTube, even on an airplane. 

After the nine-year-old niece Maisie refused to order off the kid’s menu – because she said she’s not a kid – Patrick set his own menu down and reminded Maisie of something wise. 

"Don’t be in such a hurry to be older. You’re going to spend the rest of your life wishing you were younger."

Although the last sentence doesn’t count as one of "Guncle Rules", that’s certainly a truism. So true. You don’t know what you’re missing till it’s gone.

Patrick, as a matter of fact, learned that the hard way, when he wrote a letter to his partner only after he was killed by a drunk driver.

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.