Seals

Ed Yong is the author of two New York Times bestsellers and won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the coronavirus pandemic. 

I’d just read his chapter about seals, sea lions and walruses – collectively known as pinnipeds – before our family visit of the Ocean Park yesterrday. Ed Yong gives me even more knowledge of marine animals. 

As I watched the whiskers protruding from the harbor seals’ snout, I remember how the seals are making meticulous efforts to keep the whiskers warm, even when diving in freezing water. That’s to stop the tissues from stiffening and allows free movement of the whiskers. In case you are wondering (I was), their whiskers are key sensory organs. The sensitivity of harbor seals’ whiskers was discovered by a scientist team in 2001 when two harbor seals, Henry and Nick, could follow the underwater path of a mini-submarine. Henry and Nick were able to clung to the trail even when their eyes were blind-folded and their ears were plugged by headphones. It wasn’t until their whiskers were covered by a stocking that they lost the sub. 

Look closer at the harbor seals’ whiskers, Ed Yong can see the magic design of anatomy: they are slightly flattened and angled so that the bladed edge always cuts into the water. Armed with an undulating surface, the whiskers can dramatically reduce the vortices left by the whiskers themselves. That means the seals are able to tone down the signals from their own bodies and enhance those left by their prey. 

How clever.

Death

There is no one way to approach final moments with a loved one.

Ask Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and you will learn authentic language on dying. Listen to the renowned physician BJ Miller's TED Talk, and you might find out what really matters at the end of life. If you're bookworm, go and find the ones by Sherwin Bernard Nuland or Atul Gawande.

But it was only when I came across a little graphic poetry collection by Wendy MacNaughton today that I began to have deep learning on the way to say goodbye at bedside. 

The pencil drawings and painting protrayals of patients at a six-bed hospice facility, accompanied by poems for reflection, from her boook How to Say Goodbye are the best visual storytelling for those of us who live and die.

Love

Falling in love is euphoric. Going to the wedding ceremony and you’ll see – and hear – for yourself. There’re wonderful sparks of marital bliss. But then, according to long-range studies by the American psychologist Dr. Dorothy Tennov, the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. 

Dr. Tennov didn’t include me in the study but I am sure my memory of our wedding is evaporating. So much so that I answered the wrong year of my marriage recently. That has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease. If anything, it's a clarion call for me to fill my "love tank". At a recent marriage seminar or couple course, I learned that running our marriage on an empty love tank may cost us even more than trying to drive our car without petrol.

After the first lesson on five emotional love languages, I decided to borrow Gary Chapman's bestselling The 5 Love Languages Men's Edition from the public library. That's the magic to speak the love language of spouse. In other words, we can't express love in English, when our spouse understands only Chinese. The secret is to find out the love language our spouse speaks: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, or physical touch. 

That's not a long book (who has time for those, these days), but the messages are important for all couples. The issue for me, however, is that I have completely forgotten that I did read this book in 2016. My goodness, that's indeed why we need to check the love tank level every now and then.

I will, I promise.

Dishonesty

I read Mitch Albom's first book Tuesdays with Morrie in 1997. Every reader of the book is touched, and I am no different. I have never missed any book of Mitch Albom after that.

The great thing about reading Mitch Albom's books is that every book read is a life added to my own. So I have already outlived cats (which are said to have nine lives) before I came to read his newest book The Little Liar. Some may quote George Martin, "the American Tolkien": "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

As I sunk deeper into the story of Holocaust from The Little Liar, mourning of one Jewish after another dying at the hands of the Nazis made my stomach turn, snatching the breath from me. I lost count of the lives I have lived. I lost count of the lies told by a little liar Nico Krispis who grew up in Salonkia, or modern day Thessaloniki, Greece. Nico never told a lie before the age of 11.

"Never be the ones to tell lies, Nico," his grandfather taught him when he was only five years old, at the majestic Mount Olympus. "God is always watching. It's easy to be nice when you get something in return. It's harder when nobody knows the good you are doing except yourself."

Nico's grandfather taught him that lesson about doing something for someone that can never be repaid. Like cleaning the graves of the dead. Soon Nico was dipping rags in the water and wiping the facades of strangers' tombstones, after wiping that of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother.

Nico kept his promise of honesty. Not until the invasion of his home by the Nazis. Nico escaped - but he never told the truth again. He made one forged document after another, using lactic acid to erase stamp and made false identity cards, passports, and food ration certificates. The lies of Nico simply went on. And on. 

The Holocaust novel about Nico taught me a life lesson of deceits and truths.  

Animal

If you want to know more about humans and great apes, you should grab the book The Third Chimpanzee by the American scientist author Jared Diamond.

Why do men have the longest penises? Chimps the largest testes? And orangutans (or gorillas) the shortest phallus and smallest testes?

What prevents us from having six sequential sets of teeth like an elephant, rather than just baby teeth and adult teeth? After all, with four more natural sets, we wouldn't need fillings, crowns, and dentures as we get older.

After getting my curiosity on animals hooked, I went on to borrow another book by a British-American science writer Ed Yong: An Immense World. The Pulitzer-winning writer covered insects, primates, bats, birds and dolphins. He told stories about the great sensory gifts of different animals. 

Animal senses are simply amazing. Ed Yong has a wonderful word for this sensory bubble - Umwelt. That's a word borrowed from German, and first used by a German zoologist in 1909 to mean an animal's sensory environment. Every creature has its own Umwelt. Every species has its Umwelt that another cannot sense. The Umwelt, as a matter of fact, can be even peculiar to an animal's embryos. 

On an evening of 1991, after suffering from the clouds of mosquitoes at Costa Rica's Corcovado National Park, a scientist checked on the red-eyed tree frogs' embryos every 15 minutes. Those eggs were encased in jelly and stuck to leaves overhanging the pond water. In the dark, nocturnal cat-eyed snake came to grab an omelette dinner made of the tasty tree frog eggs. But it's not that simple. The frog embyros' sensory bubble, or Umwelt, extends beyond the actual jelly bubble. The embryos are highly capable of detecting the vibration from the attacking snake's bite. The shaking triggers the sensitive hair cells, which send signals to their brains, setting off a cascade of enzyme release and disintegration of the eggs. Within seconds, tadpoles are tumbling down too quickly to count, and the snake, still chewing its first mouthful, is left with a smear of empty jelly.

Hero

I've long believed that introverts like me often gravitate to secret passageway allowing us to leave a party early. If we can't find the secret tunnel, even retreating to a bathroom can do wonders.

On another note, I recently learned about another type of humble partygoers who are worth learning from. William McRaven, a Four-Star Admiral at the United States Navy, once attended a private dinner hosted by a famed exercise cardiologist. He happend to meet his dinner companion with the name Charlie. He didn't catch Charlie's last name and just knew he was in the Air Force before retirement.

"What did you fly?" William asked.

"Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

"A man of many talents, huh?"

"Or a guy who couldn't keep a job." The old man laughed.

Over the course of the evening, the old man Charlie didn't talk much about himself and was much more interested in William. 

William found Charlie pleasant. Little did he know about Charlie's humility until the end of the dinner. After saying bye to Charlie, he was told the full name of his dinner companion: Charlie Duke, the youngest man ever to walk on the moon. William was dumbfounded. To his embarrassment, William didn't realise he had been having an entire dinner conversation with the national hero astronaut who had landed in the Descartes Highlands, the highest point on the moon.   

This is indeed a prime example of hero, and a humble hero.

Aoyama

If necessity is the mother of invention - and it often is - the ones who invented bookstore and library should have been outdated grandma by now. We're living in the world known as Kindle, or a state called Amazon, or a universe governed by tablet. Bookstores and libraries are shrinking, if not vanishing.

In this sense, it may be heartening for book lovers like me to see the survival, however difficult, of bookstores and libraries. That's the reason I paid a visit to the Books Kinokuniya Tokyo on my daughter's Taylor Swift concert night. Kinokuniya is the largest bookstore chain in Japan, famous for the immense size and collection of books including English ones.

That's how I learned about Michiko Aoyama's novel What You Are Looking For is in the Library, and met the enigmatic librarian Sayuri Komachi. Set in the fictional local community library, the five chapters narrate the way people - be they a department store sales assistant, a furniture manufacturer accounts clerk, a former magazine editor, an illustrator-to-be, or a 65-year-old getting use to retirement - contemplate a life change. None of the five characters know what they are searching for - until they meet the librarian.

Each chapter is a bite-sized lesson from the librarian. The last chapter on the mourning about books (that aren't selling as well any more) and bookstores (that are disappearing) strikes a chord with me. The 65-year-old retiree's daughter says it well to her father, "Stop it. When everybody says that, as if they know what they're talking about, it turns out into a trend. Books will always be essential for some people. And bookshops are a place for those people to discover the books that will become important to them. I will never allow bookshops to vanish from this world."