This Is Going to Hurt

Performing an elective caesarean section, assisted by a hungover medical student … Baby delivered, and just as I was sewing up the uterus, the student fainted, face-planting right into the open abdomen. ‘We should probably give the patient some antibiotics,’ the anaesthetist suggested.

Adam Kay

In medical school, we all think that we’ll be the doctor with a serviceable social life, enough residual zeal, and, all things considered, viable mental health. But as the title implies, even for doctors as optimistic and altruistic and humorous as Mr Kay (to still use his medical prefix, since surgeons go by Mr instead of Dr), sometimes the profession still breaks you.

The anticipated relatability of this was what kept me from articulating a review when I first finished his memoir almost a week ago. Not to mention our insane schedule from next month onwards, à la SARS-CoV-2 (though I’m happy Hong Kong hospitals are able to reopen their doors to us, I really am). Or my persistent OCD, with which I have grappled since secondary school.

Every lesson in the wards is a voluntary voyage between the Scylla and Charybdis of contamination – will my white coat touch a rubbish bin? A sputum sample? A patient’s urine? Barely making it through compulsory sessions is one thing; understanding the necessity of clerking (what we call strutting into the wards to practise our clinical skills on any poor patient naïve and awake enough to let us do so) outside of school hours is another.

Evidently, medicine is one hell of a marathon. But even from across the finish line, Adam Kay somehow administers more salve than salt. If anything, his hysterical insight into the ninth circle of this particular hell inspires (weary) pride and determination, and I already envision myself recalling the most preposterous anecdotes to pull me through the rest of my career. It is a strange contradiction.

Either way, this is a book everyone should read. In fact, especially people outside of the medical field. Looking pointedly at you, politicians. I only wish I had gotten onto the bandwagon earlier, when I was still cruising through my Enrichment Year, blissfully far from medical school. Maybe I wouldn’t have had a quarter-life crisis upon coming back if I had read this then.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages

This academic year has been the junction of mental, physical, financial, sociopolitical and educational tribulations. For the first time in over a year, I fell back into my chosen coping mechanism: reading till the literal dawn. Serendipitously, I’d also discovered that night that Trenton Lee Stewart had quietly published a sequel to my all-time favourite trilogy from childhood last year. The Mysterious Benedict Society was – and is – so pivotal in my life it’s impossible to articulate how uplifting this news was. Or how marvellous the series is. But I’ll give it a go.

The foundation of the books’ brilliance is this: penned for and about preteens, they nonetheless discuss at length logic as a discipline, moral philosophy, political philosophy, educational psychology, the history of science, literature, and cultural representation – on top of having cracker plots and characterisations (concepts many children’s books conveniently condescend to oversimplify, or worse, omit).

Cover illustration by Manuela Montoya Escobar

The spirit of the series is difficult to describe. It’s inimitable. Comforting, nostalgic, a veritable dose of natsukashii*. Wickedly clever and sly. And Trenton Lee Stewart extrapolated all this and more, ten years after the original trilogy began. I cannot recommend his work enough. Go read!

Rating: 5 out of 5.

*懐かしい – the warm sentimentality of fond memories; the aesthetic that sees beauty in something not being quite complete, in longing, in impermanence, wistfulness, melancholy.

Love in a Fallen City

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang 張愛玲

“Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect? Who knows which is which? Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated? Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering … Liusu didn’t feel there was anything subtle about her place in history. She stood up, smiling, and kicked the pan of mosquito-repellant incense under the table.

Those legendary beauties who felled cities and kingdoms were probably all like that.”

Love in a Fallen City, Eileen Chang

Two pages into the first novella, Aloeswood Incense, I was reminded of the Original Feminists panel at the Penguin Classics pop-up in London last spring. Paraphrasing rather poorly, but: it really is a special kind of heartache to love so fiercely books that don’t love you back. Did that make sense? Stay with me.

Moving on to the titular story (and my personal favourite), Love in a Fallen City, my heart was so full it was near bursting. Revealing my address on the Internet is perhaps not the wisest course of action; nevertheless, it was so incredibly surreal to see a Penguin Modern Classic take place just a street over from where I live, and celebrating my home city with such palpable, understated lucidity. 🇭🇰

Going back to that paraphrase, younger me was besotted with Austen, Orinda and Gaskell, but in each author was always confronted with a Single Story disconnect (see: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). I wish she had found this collection sooner.

Thank you, Penguin Books and Karen S. Kingsbury, for this translation. I can’t wait to see our canon continue to broaden.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

I’m Alive!

Hullo!! Whew. It’s been a while. WordPress editing has really upped its game! I had to take a break last exam season and never got around to reworking the writing bits in my brain (which have atrophied by now) till my mandatory gap year ended last week. Not that the Internet is particularly concerned, but this was what I’ve been up to over the past twelve months!

For the fall semester I was lucky enough to snag a spot at the University of Pennsylvania, where I took classes in British and Russian Literature and French. Highlights include seeing Terry Crews live, New York Comic Con (and meeting Tomi Adeyemi!), freezing my ass off in Montréal and being able to read books for my degree. Had multiple existential crises and am still questioning whether I’m suited to / still sufficiently passionate about medicine, but that’s a post for another day. 🙃

Halfway through the fall semester I was bored out of my mind by the East Coast so I applied to a couple schools in London. Thank God because travelling in Europe is much more reasonably priced. Also, stacking all my classes on Wednesdays and Thursdays meant that I always had long weekends to travel on. Highlights include Hamilton, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, being told [je suis] magnifique! in Paris, trying white chocolate foie gras in Barcelona, climbing over five barriers and under two barbed fences and scaling a hill for an ill-advised photo of Neuschwanstein Castle, all the while wearing three-inch heels, seeing the legendary Natalia Osipova as Kitri, singing songs that make white people turnt in the Temple Bar Pub, bottomless brunching on a boat in London and the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

So yup, that’s what I’ve been doing. For more juicy juicy deets (excuse the shameless self-promotion), check out my Gap Yah: EU highlight on Instagram (@cloudninekid)!

A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings

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“It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”

We may be quite a ways from Christmas by now, but I did originally start this on its very last day. Most of the past five months was spent well away from the book in dread of having to finish The Haunted Man before it finally occurred to me that life is too short to suffer through boring stories – classic or not. So I picked this up again last night and read the rest.

Christmas Festivities: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The perfect amuse-bouche for this eight-course collection, Christmas Festivities captured the quintessential Christmas spirit so evocatively, it is no wonder that when Dickens died in 1870, a “London barrow-girl” exclaimed, “Then will Father Christmas die too?”

The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton: ⭐️⭐️

Not having known what a sexton was, I imagined green mini-Grinches stealing naval navigation instruments* and yes, saxophones. Why are they called sextons anyway? This story was – as the author of the introductory essay observed – an early version of what would become the insurmountable Christmas Carol. And being an early version, the miserable, miserly sexton’s redemption was rather rushed, and the goblins inspired more bewilderment than character-changing fear.

A Christmas Episode from Master Humphrey’s Clock: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A cheering chapter on lifelong friendship, forged from shared solitude on Christmas Day.

A Christmas Carol: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ah, the belle of Fezziwig’s ball! Need I say more? Just as delightful as it always was, still is, and ever will be. God bless Us, Every One!

The Haunted Man: ⭐️

The one story I could not finish. The Haunted Man represents best the side of Victorian literature I simply cannot slog through. While Dickens’ ability to spin superlatively detailed descriptions of a single man’s appearance into a five-page-long portrait of the entire British Isles is impressive, to say the least, the slow, brooding nature of this novella was too much for me.

A Christmas Tree: ⭐️⭐️

Rather long-winded reminiscences of Dickens’ childhood Christmases. Intensely vivid, but lacking the vivacity of Christmas Festivities.

What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older: ⭐️⭐️

Another quaint – if quickly forgettable – rumination on the bittersweetness of Christmastime. A season of charity and compassion, unquestionably, but also an annual marker of unaccomplished aspirations, or time passed without loved ones now in “the shadow that darkens the whole globe … the shadow of the City of the Dead”. Dickens emboldens us to admit these remembrances “with tender encouragement” instead.

The Seven Poor Travellers: ⭐️

I dithered between one and two stars for this concluding story. On the one hand, I had no problems finishing it (although it is considerably shorter than the never-ending Haunted Man). On the other, despite the narrator’s impromptu generosity and the conviviality of the seven strangers, I finished it feeling hollow. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if the travellers’ stories were actually told. Or perhaps not; I was getting tired of the plot by the second page.


*In case it’s too obtuse, sextants, I’m referring to sextants.