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: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

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.

Lance

“What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep him back.”

cover.jpg.rendition.460.707cover.jpg.rendition.460.707 (1)I admit, genius though he is, this is my first work by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. After reading these three exquisitely-wrought stories – all from his Dozen and Collected Stories and each depicting obsessions of very different natures – I can only remark how unfair it is that Nabokov can write so expressively in both Russian and English. I, on the other hand, can barely read my ‘mother tongue’.

The Aurelian: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ah yes, the grim Russian short. I’m not sure I have read a single sunny story by a modern Russian writer. Either way, in The Aurelian, Nabokov (an aurelian himself, by the way) captured perfectly the damp, dark, dusty depths of middle-aged despair, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to the purgatory of unrealised youthful ambitions. A truly uplifting tale.

Signs and Symbols: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Upon first finishing this, I confess I was confused. What even was the point? But as I fruitlessly pondered and pondered again the descriptions of this and that offhandedly mentioned detail, I realised what a dull-witted fool I was. In our visceral desire to analyse and assign meaning, are we not, like the son, caught up in mild “referential mania” ourselves? And so, Nabokov sits back and says, checkmate.

“Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.”

Lance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Sheer, unbridled brilliance: his hallmark wordplay and wit were poured so viscously into this titular short story, it took some effort to slop through. While it did get rather pompous towards the end, this science-fiction satire of science fiction was still a dazzling display of literary dexterity.

“The clichés are, of course, disguised; essentially, they are the same throughout all cheap reading matter, whether it spans the universe or the living room. They are like those ‘assorted’ cookies that differ from one another only in shape and shade.”

My other Penguin Modern reviews:
Three Japanese Short Stories
Four Russian Short Stories
Of Dogs and Walls
The Distance of the Moon