Kayak

A few weeks ago we had a seaside hotel stay with another family who are good friends of mine. We had known each other since school days, the sort of friendship that you can find in Hogwarts School. Our plan to go kayaking had come to naught last time because of tropical cyclone.

We scheduled our kayak trip today.

Choosing to paddle in the open water is not my usual modus operandi. But the aquamarine waters of Sai Kung is attractive in its own way. Braving the hot weather, we brought along our sunscreen, water bottles and snorkel masks. The sea resplendent with multi-coloured kayaks, I'm glad to have captured it photographically. Absurb as it may sound, I did bring along my Nikon camera. And yes, you read that correctly: a full-frame mirrorless camera. The view is truly memorable, but it pays to be careful. What I lack in water sports skill I more than make up for with determination not to capsize.

The journey of chat and splash of paddles, as it turns out, is more fun than I'd imagined. Ask Ratty in Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in the Willows, and he will tell you, "There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." If you were to ask me, I would say, "No. Please, no splash of water to get me wet; my camera doesn't need washing."   

Owls

I came to learn about two types of flower this week. Tulip and jasmine.

One of them is my wife's favorite and another one my daughter. One closes its petals shut at night, another blooms at night.

Day-blooming tulips need daytime pollinators because their pollen is best transferred when dry. In essense, tulips shut the door at the first sign of rain or darkness to maximise the best chance of seeding.

Night-blooming jasmine, on the other hand, has learned to open their petals at night because they are pollinated by nocturnal moths. To attract and be easily seen by moths at night, jasmine flowers tend to be white in colour.

It's hard not to be fascinated by their setting routine to bring out their strengths. The same is true of humans, who have different natural body clocks. What works great for morning larks won't do good to night owls. And vice versa. My daughter, Jasmine, is a night-blooming one who can come up with at least ten probable reasons not to go to bed. Reading Raina Telgemeier's graphic novel, enjoying story of Percy Jackson, cheese feast, writing diary are prime examples. 

Cloud Nine

This week I am supposed to be giving three lectures in a conference held in Singapore. But it's been a pretty difficult time to travel. I realized the question wasn't so much how inconvenient our city's hotel quarantine period can be, but how on earth we can guarantine coming back on time.

I decided offering recorded lectures. Instead of travel outside Hong Kong, I had a family vacation in a theme park with my daughter's classmate. Oh yes, I'm fairly certain I am not a theme park fan, but not in a stubbornly anti-theme-park manner. Life is a rich tapestry of what we do and don't know. More likely than not, I can find delight in our family event.

With that in mind, I packed my swimming suit, a novel and iPad (for the live Q&A after the lectures) for the theme park lodge stay. Before going, we watched the weather forecast (not too reliable, if I'm honest) and looked at the clouds (pretty helpful for the plan next day, I believe). There were cumuloninbus clouds. My goodness, that means rain, thunder and lighting ahead. If I need a reason to feel hopeful about the cumulonimbus, I can think of the classification of clouds by number. Cumulonimbus is number nine on the list of the US Weather Bureau. Remarkably little is known about this. So little, in fact, that it took me a while to reckon that we're on cloud nine.

Very well, there was indeed heavy rainfall. We grabbed umbrellas but couldn't stay dry. There is a silver lining behind all those clouds, if of the somewhat unexpected one. It's practically the shortest queue for the otherwise-busiest-and-crowded roller coaster ride.

Paddleboard

As I was going to take two days off for a family trip, the city logged more than seventy imported cases of malaria. Not an auspicious beginning.

Then, at one point, we had to cancel one of the kayak trips because of thunderstorm. One gratifying part about our holiday, however, is the chance to have a sunny day despite a looming tropical cyclone. We stayed in a lovely ocean-side resort which works out great for us, even when we are not beach people.

Okay, here’s a difference between me and my daughter. I couldn’t for the life of me to comprehend how to swim properly. My wife and I joined a beginner course of stand-up paddleboarding: our first sojourn on the board. Soon, two of us were in a state of physical exhaustion with sweat. Our daughter was chilling out near us, rowing, and had no inkling how we kept stumbling in a bizarre circle instead of heading in a straight line. In short, being clumsy.

Nevertheless, we enjoyed.

Summer

Travel is extremely gratifying on every level. Heading into our third summer of travel restriction, one way or another, we were discovering our means to have school break. Or stepping off the hamster wheel, if I could, to nibble some cheese and watch the world go by (but emails still come in, I know).

No sooner had we completed this thought, than right in our mind, we came up the idea of taking walk at Victoria Peak and Lantau Trail. Those are two of our favourite tracks. We first took the option of traversing a circular nature walk at the Peak: a cleanly maintained, easy-to-navigate path peppered with many banyan trees.

Ngong Ping Cable Car is another tour option to offer jaw-dropping views, best sandwiched with hiking between the two-way ride. We trudged up the trail to the craggy hill section where we could see the Zhuhai Macau Bridge and full view over Ngong Ping. Despite the hot temperature of midsummer, my daughter’s humour has augmented our joy by writing poem during hiking. “How amazing it is to hike with a poet,” I thought. To which I reply, yes, exactly right.

Narrative

Doctors - or medical students, for that matter - wouldn't come close to Barack Obama in terms of reading materials. 

Except novels. 

"It was important to pick up the occasional novel during the presidency," Obama told the interviewer a few days before leaving office in 2017. Reading memos and proposals every day, according to the first African-American president of the United States, makes a lopsided analytical brain that has lost track of the depth of fiction. Fiction should therefore be a way of seeing and hearing the voices, a useful reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.

Substitute Obama's memos and proposals with doctors' x-ray reports and lab values, and you will see how medical professionals can be led astray in the analytical brain. 

This is the good reason for doctors to follow Obama's example, and pick up reading materials other than those from medical journals.  

Remarkably little on fiction reading is mentioned in medical curriculum. So little, in fact, that Dr. Suzanne Koven at Massachusetts General Hospital has come up with a program on narrative medicine. I learned about her session of Literature and Medicine after recent reading of her memoir Letter to a Young Female Physician. Each month, Dr. Koven brought humanities into workplace when the doctors and nurses met to discuss novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poems. 

Understanding the story obscured beneath a series of facts, as Dr. Suzanne Koven taught us, not only make us see a patient, but also ourselves, in a more compassionate and incisive way. 

Anthony

Switching back and forth, as any neuroscientist will tell us, is not efficient. I'm biased and like to multitask, but that doesn't make it less true.

Absurd as it may sound, I'm typically reading four or five books at once. For novel, I tend to read one at a time. Right now I'm reading Love Anthony. That's a two-fold story about two characters whose lives intersect. Two mothers, one of whom raised a boy with autism. A boy named Anthony, who doesn't speak. A boy who loves the number three. Always three. No more or less. Three French toast stick. Three Pig story. Three blind mice.

For people like me who has spent years doing not three things but four or five things at once, the book is not too difficult. I simply adjust my brain to read the stories of two mothers. Now, having said that, when it comes to connecting two characters, I must agree that I'm lucky not to suffer from or struggle with autism. Otherwise, it'll be hardly possible for me to get connected.