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. 

Patient

Tilly Rose is an author and a patient advocate. She wrote a powerful story about being patient and a patient. 

Be Patient is an eye-opening account of her being a seriously ill patient without a diagnosis. That should be a must-read book for all medical students and doctors. Every year, there are cases with mysterious or unexplained symptoms leading to so-called medical gaslighting – "it's all in your head."

What makes the situation worse is the undefined illness that won't fit in one particular medical specialty. Tilly Rose could be having paroxysms of clammy body and shaking arms. For no reason, her brain could go foggy. One minute her headache was unbearable, the next she would be crying out with weak and wobbly legs. Then she put on extra body fluid enough to fill three gallon jugs. Now that each specialist is often interested in looking at his or her discipline only, Tilly Rose turned out being lost in a barren landscape or no-man's-land. 

"I imagine taking a photograph of my whole body and cutting it up into horizontal strips, separating all the different parts of me," Tilly Rose concluded. "The doctor holding the photo of my heads has no idea what my feet look like. I am trapped in a system that relies on putting people in boxes. Bodies aren't made for boxes."

To stop this vicious cycle of losing sight of our patients, here is my simple rule: Piece the photograph back together and learn to read the whole picture. Not a separate box for each strip.

Bees

In prehistoric times, the jawbones or tooth sockets of extinct rodents and mammals were nests for bees. Fast forward to today, bees are experiencing a massive global crisis; they have been dying off in massive numbers. Dwindling habitats and onslaught of pesticides account for a sharp decline in the colony numbers. Then came parasites and climate changes. Some beekeepers reported that 55 percent of their colonies had perished over the previous year – their worst losses ever.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons National Geographic put up the title "Secrets of the Bees" in the current magazine issue and their new docuseries, now streaming on Disney Plus. 

Sadness aside, we are now getting more fascinated by scientific discovery that bees are far smarter than we ever imagined. Even Karl von Frisch, the Nobel laureate who were famous for deciphering bees' dance language, had once commented that, "The brain of a bee is the size of a grass seed and is not made for thinking."   

When a team of scientists lamented that the parrots in a laboratory had failed a string-pulling test – a classic experience for testing animal's cognitive prowess to pull a string to retrieve a reward – one of them casually commented, "I bet our bumblebees could do that."

Everyone laughed.

But as the team soon learned, the bumblebees aced the examination by successfully pulling the sugar-coated flower using the attached string. 

Hunt

What can be more difficult to find than a white-throated kingfisher in Lantau? You might be scratching your head as you think about the loud chattering "kra-kra-kra-kra" laugh of this kingfisher.

Well, my wife and I were looking for birds who don't really sing. How different things are when we decided to celebrate my wife's birthday with the Flock Project. That means we explored the trails and alleys of Lantau, navigating with intermittent mobile network coverage, to find the paintings of a British artist Rob Aspire, known as "The Birdman" for his captivating murals of birds.  

The red-billed blue magpie and Swinhoe's white-eye aren't too difficult to spot. We were as enthusiastic as kids heading for Easter egg hunts. Imagine the fun for a couple, one of whom bird-obsessed, and another keen on drawing. The spectacle of the mural art makes us dive deep into the "birdwatching" art walk.

I won't post any spoiler here in case you want to explore. Trust me, the white-breasted waterhen is probably the best player of hide and seek.

Horse

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "dark horse" as a candidate about whom little is known, but who unexpectedly wins or succeeds. That's not a bad definition. Of course, we can find a better one. 

Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas, both accomplished in their field of psychology and neuroscience respectively, worked together to write the book Dark Horse. Put simply: they define dark horses as those bravely blazing their own trails through the wilderness. 

Their central concept of dark horse mindset is that the pursuit of fulfilment leads to excellence. This is exactly opposite to the mainstream dictum that the pursuit of excellence leads to fulfilment. For generations, we are being pressured to follow well-defined and rigid ladder rungs. All types of institutions, medical schools included, curate their scheme of admission and compel students to customise their portfolios to suit their tastes. Students are doomed by the Hunger Games system of survival or competition. How can they not be?

As a matter of fact, there is a way. Go and read the book Dark Horse, follow your personal passion, and not the dictated path.

Space

Recent launching of Artemis II marked a pivotal moment of human's traveling furthest from Earth – ever.

It's hard to think of a better movie or book than Project Hail Mary. In this beautiful sci-fi fciton, we were brought on an interstellar field trip like Ms. Frizzle's Magic School Bus to the solar system.

We followed the story of Ryland Grace on his solo space trip adventure, after his crewmates died. For those of us who aren't mathematics buff, we might not enjoy the calculation. There are so many things to calculate: relative velocity, thrust duration and angle, altitude, gravity, and minimum amount of fuel for interplanetary travel.

As we read on, we met a new species, Eridians. Between Eridians and Ryland Grace, we learned the power of real friendship. That's something that can't be measured or calculated. Neither by the frequency of contact, nor the distance between two species. 

Many of us won't remember the numbers or statistics of the fictional microscopic organism Astrophage. But we all will remember how Ryland Grace builds his lifelong friendship with Rocky, a highly intelligent spider-like alien. At heart, they are closer than many of humans on Earth. To me, that's the real wisdom that not everything that counts can be counted.

Caterpillar

Caterpillars are ugly and gross. 

Or are they?

Other than Erie Carle's hungry caterpillar and that of Absalom from Alice in Wonderland, most caterpillars are. They've been viewed as voracious eating machines at best and crop-destroying pests at worst. 

Since my recent reading on butterfly's metamorphosis, I have better understood these fascinating creatures. In my opinion, they should have won as many awards as the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Look closely enough, and you will find these animals cleverer than what we thought. They aren't just overeating chocolate cake, pickle, cupcake, watermelon, and get stomachache. 

Caterpillars are pretty strategic. Some can produce sweet scretion to bribe ants. In exchange, the ants do not attack them. Others, such as caterpillars of pipervine swallowtail and common rose butterfly, feed on certain plants to sequester aristolocholic acid. That would be highly toxic to repel predators. 

They are smart. 

Wildlife

Can you recall the joys or spirits before school field trip? 

You're too excited to fall asleep. Your dreams are brilliant bursts of colour, rather than monochrome. And yet. Next morning, you're up early ahead of the alarm clock. 

Don't think this beautiful experience is for kindergarten students only. Whether you're five years old or fifty years old, field trip often makes us feel good. 

Believe me, I just have had one such happy moment. Imagine my enthusiasm when I got the chance to join an outdoor photography field session led by Robert Ferguson, an international award winning photographer. Every local nature lover could have bought his guide book, Wildcreatures of Hong Kong, and followed his blog with the same name.   

A morning walk with Robert Ferguson is the best way to connect with nature. Animals and photography are two of his life's greatest pleasures. A perfect combination. I am thrilled to join him spotting dragonfly or damselfly, watching intricate animals like lantern bug. There is no better way to learn photography from this guy who never says to himself, "Just put the camera down, Robert." 

Game

Mention tennis or backgammon, and the term "zero-sum game" will come to our mind. That means a situation when I win, you lose; if you win, I lose. 

But that's not the rule in the novel The Wishing Game, in which four contestants compete against each other in a one-of-a-kind competition on a fantastical island. They are working hard to win the only copy of a new book written by a reclusive bestselling author. To win the book that is supposed to sell more than one hundred thousand dollars, a contestant must score ten points. And if no one scores the requisite ten points, the book will go to the publisher. 

That's somewhat like a competition of Rubik's Cube. Everyone is competing against the clock. If nobody can beat the clock, that's it. The end.

Don't think that you can go online and search for a YouTube tutorial. If the contestants are caught using the landlines, smartphones, computers, or any internet-connected device on the island, they will be immediately disqualified.

If we have more games like this in the real world, that would be a true meritocracy.

Departure

Fiction becomes autobiography. Fiction is true. Confusing at first. Then powerful.

Julian Barnes finished his last fiction Departure(s) at the age of 80. That's a story within a story. Around fifteen years ago, he wrote about death in Nothing to be Frightened Of. The new book – the last one – explicitly talks about a man who lost his wife to brain tumour and is living with an incurable yet manageable form of blood cancer. And by "manageable", his doctor meant "unless there is another mutation, of which there is a five per cent chance."

Julian Barnes doesn't believe in cryonics. He isn't optimistic about reversing the process of ageing. He doesn't think the way out of death's trap is to extend the length of human life. Not that it matters. The tide would wash when time is due, like a terminus at the end of a journey according to Julian Barnes.

When Julian Barnes was younger, one of his rules was write each book as if it will be his last. It could have been the reason that his final one is the best.

Hanafubuki

Japan has a reputation of owning unique words, often untranslatable and with deep meaning.

Among them, the older and beautiful ones include shinrinyoku (literally forest bathing) and komorebi (reminding us the picture of sunlight filtering through the trees, dappling the forest floor). Fast forward to modern era and you'll find buzzwords like insuta-bae, referring to something that look good on Instagram.

What about hanafubuki? I learn this magical word about flower snowstorm during my Fukuoka trip. Picture it: the cherry blossom or sakura petals are blown through the air like snow shower. Set adrift in the wonderfully wild breeze, the petals feel like floating fairies. For all the poets and artists, grace and surreality are expressed here.

That's a mesmerising image captured by a word found nowhere else.

Uncertainty

Why are millennials called the "new lost generation"? One reason is the need to navigate a uniquely volatile era of radical uncertainty. They include three major economic recessions including the Great Depression, once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic – you name it.

A look back at older generation, on the other hand, seems to give us déjà vu and a long history of recurrent uncertainty. I recently borrowed a beautiful book Air-Borne, in which Carl Zimmer chronicles a gripping account of airborne infection. History simply repeats itself. Scientists were often completely wrong, until human suffering has been turned into final discovery that many threats are indeed caused by airborne contagious diseases. Measles, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV – you name it.

Zimmer's superb writing is filled with stories of the United States Presidents. John F. Kennedy launched mass immunisation campaign in 1965 to include measles. Even Charles Schulz helped rally children and their parents, dedicating a week of his Peanuts comic strip to the story of Linus getting vaccinated.

"Who ever worries about measles? What's a little 'rosela' among friends?" Linus asked his sister for the reason of getting a measles shot.

"Your stupidity is appalling!" Lucy snapped.

"Most stupidity is," Linus acknowledged with reluctance.

It is.

Physics

Teaching physics to someone who doesn't know mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman, is like explaining music to someone who is deaf.

Unlike Feynman, I have forgotten most of what I'd learnt about the laws of thermodynamics, SUVAT equations, or African drums. Well, I don't really know whether I've ever understood any one of them at all. 

We all know that physicists are one of the cleverest humans. Think about Feynman who gathered with physicists from other universities in the early seventies. Somehow they got the idea that the physicists needed more culture. To bring some culture to their conversations and lectures, Feynman thought about Mayan mathematics. He deciphered the bars and dots after getting a copy of the oldest Maya books, the Dresden Codex. 

Feynman figured out the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, then at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). He noticed certain numbers appear more often: the number 584 was particularly prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. It didn't take him long to find that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent to Feynman: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. Out of the table that had periods of 11,959 days, he further worked out the meaning of the funny number: the number to predict lunar eclipses. 

Geez.

Healing

Life decisions are hard. 

Book decisions are easier. 

Browsing staff picks or front table near the entrance of a bookstore is often what I do. A new release showcased in many bookstores is Why We Suffer and How We Heal, written by a psychiatrist Suzan Song. 

One reason that we should all learn to bounce back from grief or depression is that there are so many stumbling blocks in life. And, if I can add this to-be-read list, this book would be at the very top. 

Does this mean we should focus on self-help books? Not necessarily. Many a time a fiction can give us a kernel of wisdom, or insight. I just finished a fiction about depression and healing: Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan. That's a beautifully told story about a couple who have gone through their divorce in the wake of devastating losses, including their baby, who was stillborn. 

Following their story, like reading updates in their Instagram, tells me how to open up the old wounds and heal the wounds. 

Healing

Recently, I read about the way to navigate life's twists. As Susan David wrote in her book Emotional Agility, life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. 

We're young, until we're not.

We're healthy, until we're not.

We're with those we love, until we're not.

Simply by going over these sentences, I could feel my heart seize. I bet yours did too. Changes are no fun.

The way we grow old (or get sick, for that matter) is often not within our circle of influence. What matters is to focus our energy on what we can control. 

That's what we can decide and have our say. 

Dad

One year ago, my dad suffered from a broken back after an accidental fall. Think about our vertebrae like a stack of rectangular sardine tins. These cans are durable and valued for their long shelf life. Yes, they're perfectly fine until we hit the age of 40, when the cans begin to lose up to 5 percent of density each decade. It turns out the sardine gets stolen with time, and the cans get less strength.  

Imagine stepping on an empty can as hard as you can and you will have a rough sense of how a collapsed or flattened vertebra looks like. 

Another trick to keep the cans steady and sturdy is tying the stack with cord or string. If you stop and think about the string for a moment, it is pretty like the core muscles that stabilise our spine. But there's a good chance that our muscle mass drops with age, starting around age 30.

Not all gone, but enough to give my dad a breath-deprived and panicked feeling. He walks discreetly, taking small steps as if to move across an ice-covered driveway. When he had another fall at home last weekend, he couldn't stand up for nearly an hour. He lied under the bathroom sink, breath growing short and head spinning. A knot of anxiety and terror burgeoned in his head, and panic strangled my dad so tightly he could barely breathe. The kind of terror that made him lose the train of thought and all his marbles. 

"Relax," I managed to get home and help my dad, scanning the scene for blood stain and his body for open wound. I tucked my body under his, slinking my arms around his waist. He felt frailer, smaller than when we last hugged, like time is stealing not only years, but pounds from his trunk and spine. Somehow he looked weak but heavier than what I wish to move.

"How ya been, dad?"

My dad didn't move an inch. My sister, a godsend, arrived half an hour later. 

"Can I go over with you, my steps of bringing dad back on his feet, step by step?" I feigned composure. "First, bring me the blood pressure machine. Next, get both of us two pieces of chocolate." 

Moving our dad from the floor to his wheelchair took us another half hour. My sister and I exchanged looks. She gave me a worried look, and I drew a deep breath, steadying my heartbeat. It's not that my backache made my heart race. I simply worried about another fall and downward spiral. The situation is somehow like watching a Jenga game with collapsible sardine cans stacking one over another. One wrong move and the cans will topple and all fall down.

In the end, I took dad to the hospital that night to check out. Soon after entering hospital, it seemed like his body was starting to fall apart. He got more and more confused. None is more daunting than calming a delirious elderly who has been restrained in an unfamiliar environment. He yelled like a hailstorm, thumping on the hospital bed. 

You don't need a PhD to work out the solution. I tried my best to convince his doctor to send him home. Trust me, going home works like magic. 

Home sweet home. His smile at home soldered into my memory. It's the one I'll never forget. 

Colour

Books about migrant workers and racism are nothing new, but what Amanda Peters has told us in her debut novel The Berry Pickers is colourful. 

The Indigenous Mi'kmaq people, native to Canada's region near Nova Scotia, are primarily having skin colour from light to deep brown. The novel casts light on a Mikmaq family who arrives to Maine every midsummer. Together with a caravan of dark-skinned workers, they work hard picking berries till sunset for white landowners. This family work harder than most workers. They never pretend to have picked more than they had, when other lazier ones try to stuff the bottom of the crates with green leaves and stems.

The family can roll up the passenger-side windows on the truck to keep blackflies out, but they can't stop the bites of blackflies in the field. The white folks claim that Mi'kmaq people make such good berry pickers because something sour in their blood keeps the blackflies away. But everyone knows that isn't true. 

Blackflies don't discriminate. Men do.

Freedom

Worthy is written by the American entrepeneur Jamie Kern Lima who aims to build self-worth in girls and women. 

You don't rise to what you believe is possible, you fall to what you believe you're worthy of.

The sentence summarises Jamie's answer to the question if you were smart enough, or if you were enough. A lot of us could get lost in our setbacks. Jamie Kern Lima had her setbacks too. She wrote this book after she had been rescued from hardship and low self-worth. 

Jamie Kern Lima grew up with an alcoholic father. Her parents divorced when she was six. She then was alone a lot because her mom and stepdad both worked long hours. Eventually, she was handcuffed for riding a freshly stolen car, and ushered into a juvenile detention centre. Between moving schools and homes, she was voted "Biggest Procrasinator" in high school yearbook. She made efforts to unlearn the limiting beliefs that she was unworthy of love. Surprisingly, it has a happy ending. She became the first in her family to graduate college. She graduated at Washington State University with a 4.0 GPA. No one knew then that their valedictorian had worked in a strip club.

Jamie's story struck a chord in the hearts of us who couldn't put words to our knowing that one can break free of destiny. I happened to have watched the movie Tokyo Taxi with my wife this week. I dare say the movie is in tune with that of Jamie Kern Lima's. The central figure in this movie is a woman who first lost her father during the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, and then lost her first husband who repatriated to North Korea. If all that wasn't enough, her second husband was an abusive rascal who gave her hearbreak and anguish. Her way to break generational cycles of abuse is a forceful argument that we're worthy of love. 

As Jamie Kern Lima tells us, where you come from doesn't have to determine where you're going. And that your past can only hold you back if you live there.

Courage

Many of us use the word bravery with romantic promiscuity. Even more young people think of themselves as brave heroes, flying the way Icarus did. And then, too often, they fell and plunged into the sea, drowned.

Fear need not be shameful, nor bravery praiseworthy. But the difference between bravery and courage is crucial to us. Taylor Reid, the author of her ninth novel Atmosphere, tells a wonderful story about these two words. 

Instead of flying to the sun, the characters in this novel are female astronauts working out their way to enter low-Earth orbit and put up a satellite. Going into space is not for the faint of heart. The checklist is long, and the simulations even more lengthy. 

One of the astronauts has figured out the question from her dad: Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway. This quote moves me every time I read it.  

Bravery is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have. Roger that.

Pleaser

If I had to sum up, in one sentence, the key message in The High 5 Habit written by Mel Robbins, it would be something like as follows (call it the first law for an adult).

There is only one person's opinion that matters: your own.

If you're growing up in a community with social code – and who isn't? – it's hard to get out of the habit of looking around for approval. There is nothing stopping me from pleasing other people. Many of us, especially those Enneagram Type 2s, struggle to say "no". We tend to betray our own needs for the fear of other people being upset with us. 

Mel Robbins is one of the people pleasers. Driven by a hobby of buying antique pool table, her father gave her a painstakingly restored Brunswick pool table as a wedding gift. The gorgeous table took up half of her playroom. Mel's family rarely used it to play pool, leaving the pool table sitting like an elephant in the room, covered in Legos. For many years Mel wanted the space back but ended up walking around the pool table to get from one end of the room to the other. 

She couldn't move the pool table because it seemed like a slap in the face to her parents who had given it to her with so much love. She was compromising her own needs of having an office. Mel was too scared to disappoint her dad, and twisted herself in knots. Which, in a way, she had. 

This story has a positive ending. It took Mel Robbins 45 years to learn the lesson that as scared as you are to disappoint someone that you love, it's always worth it to be honest about what you need. One fine day, she picked up the phone and told her dad that she was going to hire professional pool table movers to dismantle his gift. With love and care. And courage.

Memories

A few days ago, I finished The Paper Palace, an irresistible read with heavy theme. In this gripping novel, Miranda Cowley Heller describes a 50-year-old mother who grows up with dysfunctional family dynamic, sexual assault, and an unspeakable story of murder.

Consider this quote from the story: "We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were." This quote comes from the traumatised mother who returns to the summer camp, nicknamed the Paper Palace, where her family has spent every summer for generations. She returns to a cemetery with lawns dotted with the grey teeth of the dead. That cemetery is where her stepbrother had been buried. Back she comes, as ever, to a hidden and painful memory of sexual assault (by him) and murder (of him).

The problem with recovered memories of pain and aches is that no one can decide what it is for. It comes into being as we try to move forward. The need for a forgotten memory is a matter of debate, but the need for soothing the pain of memory is a matter of fact. This morning, I attended a church funeral. That is the second time I visited the historic St Andrew's Church. More than three years ago, one of my patients died of metastatic lung cancer two years after the diagnosis, which was unfortunately delayed. I was there and paid respect to her. This time, another patient of mine died of the same diagnosis, which I made immediately after seeing her less than two years ago. 

Sadly, the disease came too early this time.

Dad

If there were a pie chart that divided up my time over one week, the exploded spice that emphasizes the best moment would be watching movie with my wife.

We watched the British drama film The Thing with Feathers this Friday, before I read the original novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers during weekend. That's a story of a newly widowed father of two boys. A heavy story of grief. 

Regardless of how you feel about the author Max Porter's writing, he does certainly know how to evoke the fear and embarrassment of fathers like me. Once upon a time, the father, before he lost his wife in the book, had to bring his children to go sledging in the park when his wife fell sick with flu. Both sons whinged because their toes were aching. The father felt embarrassed to be exposed as wholly reliant on his wife. He didn't know where their hats were. He couldn't get their mittens. He forgot to ask his sons put on Wellington boots.  

My goodness, the story sounds familiar. Let me be clear. I'm no better. I remember years ago receiving an email from my daughter's primary school teacher reminding the daddy to properly dress a kid when the temperature was lower than 10 degrees. There are few gaffes more embarrassing than a dad's oversight that leads to a kid being "detained" in classroom when other classmates are playing outdoor during recess.

Uh-oh.

Learning

If you told me cheating is not easy during online examination, I most certainly would not have believed you. This is simply impossible to prevent cheating, after the move to virtual class and examination in front of a computer screen.

In the old days, we assessed students' grades according to midterm and final examination results, all of which were administered in persons. After months of lockdown three years ago, educators and students are getting used to online class. 

Should we or should we not allow students to take examination in front of a computer with a webcam and remote monitoring by a proctor? Well, if we trust that error-driven learning has powerful effect on memory, it really doesn't matter. As long as we actively learn by doing rather than passively learn by memorizing, we have made what we learned stick. In other words, even an open-book quiz online can give us opportunity to learn from our mistakes. The point of the quiz is to let us get close to the right answer, or get feedback for a wrong answer. 

That is the key to turbocharge our hippocampus, and retain much more information.

Iron

Armed with encyclopaedic knowledge on genetics and what appears to be a magnetic attraction to storytelling, Sharon Moalem has written a book called Survival of the Sickest, in which he muses on such intriguing questions as the battery life of Apple products.

As always, a mind clear enough to think of the theory of relativity – like Albert Einstein – would be able to explain the theory to anyone. Sharon Moalem has managed to explain evolutionary advantages of "sick" genes in a way layperson can understand.

We might not comprehend the reason of programmed aging, for example. But it isn't that difficult to figure out why we wouldn't buy an extended warranty on an iPod if we were only going to keep it for a week. That's how Sharon Moalem makes use of simple scientific writing and drawing analogy.

One of my favourite chapters, "Ironing it Out", eloquently unravels the mystery of Sharon Moalem's grandfather who loved to donate blood. How does blood donation make one feel good emotionally and physically? And that's not all. How did off-the-charts excess iron levels nearly kill an ultramarathon runner at the Sahara Desert? How did iron boosting or iron-supplemented food kill the anaemic Maori babies who were lacking iron? 

Whatever the evolutionary reason, it is clear that every gene – like haemochromatosis mutation – has flip sides like that of Janus.  

Frog

Few things symbolise tough task as much as swallowing an ugly animal. Isn't it gross to think that the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog?

That's exactly what Brian Tracy, a consultant on personal effectiveness, taught us to do. His first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. That means tackling the hardest and most important task, a discipline we all wish to master when we open the page of a new diary or journal on the first day of January. 

Procrastination being one of the deadly sins, anyone might suppose eating frog demands mighty efforts. It pains me to say that I am also inclined to procrastinate on the top 10 or 20 percent of items or frogs that are most important, and busy myself instead with the least important 80 percent, the "trivial many" that makes little difference to results.  

As I read the book Eat That Frog, I started to think of the best way to deal with this animal. Procrastination to eat the frog can't be tackled without new angle to look at it. If we want to look at the ugly frog differently, we might have to borrow the Disney theme from Tiana. Or else, from the Chinese tradition of frog eating which dates back to the Ming dynasty. The popularity of frog delicacy means we can often change our perception of whatever considered ugly. Even when US President Ronald Reagan visited China in 1984, deep-fried frog's legs were on the menu at the national feast. 

In short, re-invent the frog with new meaning and make use of cognitive reframing. Then you can eat the frog. Bit by bit. Bite by bite.