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A chicken ran amok in the kitchen. ‘Keep the door shut’ was the constant refrain as we circumvented the clucking feathered creature, enjoying its last day of freedom. In under 24 hours it would end up as a cooked offering on a tray in front of our ancestral shrine. Grandmother bought it from the market and carried it back home strung upside down. She allowed it to roam freely in the kitchen, pecking at the cat’s food bowl, as she cooked the evening meal, but making it almost nigh impossible for us to bathe that evening. I returned from school the next day to see the bird hanging upside down from a bamboo pole, the last drops of blood dripping from its slit throat, into a small enamel bowl beneath. Soon it would be plucked and cooked, ready for the evening offering and the family feast.
Nothing was wasted; especially food and drink that had been offered for bei sun or ancestral worship. The chicken’s head and tail would be enjoyed by my mother and grandmother, the feet were considered a delicacy, and the carcass and giblets would be used for stock the next day. My grandmother was a deft hand at wielding the cleaver, a heavy instrument she regularly sharpened on an abrasive stone. She used the same implement for all her cooking; cutting, chopping and mincing meats, slicing fresh vegetables, onions and ginger root, and crushing ginkgo nuts with its robust metal handle. Her chopping board was a three-inch-thick section of a tree, its rim reinforced by wire bound tightly around the circumference two or three times, and its rings giving credence to the fact it was from a tree trunk. We didn’t have an oven for many years, and cooking was done on a twin-hob gas stove with a regular delivery of fuel, supplemented by a handy electric rice-cooker. Our cat wandered into the kitchen at whim, unperturbed by the hive of activity that peaked twice a day. When the kettle was boiling on the stove she would sit beside it, sometimes so close it singed her whiskers.
On special occasions, my grandmother made her delicious har gow dumplings and char sui buns. I was allowed to help fill the dough with diced, glazed barbecue pork before she steamed the buns on a large bamboo steaming tray. Har gow was a different matter, and I helped when I was much older as the dumplings took more skill to assemble and wrap. Both are eaten for dim sum at restaurants, served as a small bamboo basket of three or four items. But at home, we gorged ourselves until we could hardly move. She was also a dab hand at making steamed turnip cake filled with diced dried shrimps and Chinese pork sausage, sui mai (pork and prawn dumplings), sticky glutinous rice parcels and golden coloured steamed sponge cake.
‘Bong ng bong ah?’ was a query often heard in market streets around Hong Kong. The phrase means ‘do you want this tied or not’? Purchases were wrapped in old newspaper and tied with string. It’s no longer used these days as purchases are carried in paper or plastic bags. When I went to market with my grandmother, I would help carry tied up parcels of food, sometimes one item hanging off each finger. If I was particularly helpful or well behaved, she would offer to let me choose a treat hanging from a wire in a corner street stall – a ten-cent packet of chewy dried soybeans or a small bag of preserved sour plums (hua mei) which tantalized the taste buds all at once. A favourite and very popular Chinese snack, it gives a sharp tangy explosive mouthful of sour, sweet and salty sensations that still make me salivate just thinking about it. Or perhaps along the way we would pick up a long stick of juicy fibrous sugar cane from a hawker and take it home to chop into smaller pieces, or sit to enjoy a bowl of smooth sweet dau fu far (jellied soya milk with ginger syrup) eaten at a dai pai dong (open air street stall). Sometimes I chose a chunk of char sui; a full dollar’s worth of glazed pork belly, not too dry and not too fat, chosen from a selection of cooked meats hung from metal hooks in open fronted eateries. Occasionally, my grandmother bought a small pot of maltose. I don’t think she used it for cooking much, but we happily plunged a heated metal spoon, warmed in hot water, into the thick, sticky syrup and twirled a spoonful of sugar to make our own homemade lollipops.
Playing at home, I spent hours rolling bits of newspaper or tissue into tiny balls, and displaying them in my makeshift market stall. Small sheets of paper were torn into squares and laid beside cups full of different colour, and different sized paper balls. Not many people came to my stall, but I would pretend nevertheless, and proceed to scoop a spoonful or two into an expertly rolled newspaper cone, ask if it needed to be tied, and proceed to do so as I had seen in the local market.
My grandmother was often found to be pedalling away at her sewing machine under the light of a window in the living room. The doors to our little balcony were always kept open unless there was a typhoon, although we would sometimes shut the iron gate. I played a captive prisoner, asking my grandmother to bind me to one of the high-backed blackwood chairs. She wrapped me in a large length of fabric, tying me loosely to the chair. I felt comfortably held but struggled in a feeble attempt to escape. I soon tired of it though, and lost in the soporific rhythm of her pedalling, I would set myself free and curl up under the table, exhausted and adrift on a raft floating in a shark -infested sea. A frightening cry would bring me back to life, the loud, broken voice of a man sounding as if he could cut into me with his raspy cry. A cut -throat pirate. ‘Mei laan yeh!’ he would shout. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew he was coming nearer every time I heard him. ‘Mei laan yeh!’, he would shout again. Later I found out it meant he would take away anything unwanted, and for a brief while I was more terrified. He was of course the local rag-and-bone man.
I gobbled and clucked like a chicken, running in circles around my grandmother’s friend when she came to visit. She was treated like family, and I called her ‘cousin mother’. We never really referred to anyone by name in Cantonese, instead calling them by how they were related to us. Cousin mother was a frequent visitor, having come from the same village in China and living through the horrors of the Occupation with my grandmother. She was my favourite visitor and often arrived with a little packet of sherbet she had picked up from the corner street stall. She was always smiling and I only ever played this game with her. As cousin mother sat on a stool in the middle of the living room, my sister and I ran around her in circles, gingerly closing in as she pretended to be asleep. Suddenly she would reach out in an attempt to snatch one of us, causing much excitement and laughter. If caught, we would be laid on our backs across her lap, our heads dangling as she ‘slaughtered the chicken’ by slicing through our necks with the side of her hand.
One summer, when I was about eight years old, I remember standing on our balcony trying to cool down in the sweltering heat. It was not so much the heat as the humidity that was stifling. Our ceiling fan was working flat out as my grandmother sat by her sewing machine. In spite of the background noise I could hear the rhythm of her foot pedal: the constant reassurance of the maternal heartbeat. Cotton garments hung motionlessly outside our balcony on long bamboo poles, having been scrubbed clean on the washing board an hour before. Our tabby cat came out to join me on the balcony, licking her lips having devoured another bowl of fresh rice and fish, bought daily from the local market. She meowed slightly and arched her back as she rubbed her fur on my legs.
“Hello there. And what can you see?” I asked, crouching down beside her, hardly aware of the gathering crowds in the street below. The sun was almost directly overhead, and I stood mesmerized by the spectrum of colours as they were diffracted onto the concrete floor. A patrol of ants marched up towards my plastic slipper and I lifted my foot for them to pass under. They declined, and chose a different path. How fragile life can be, I thought to myself. Here one minute, and gone the next. My gaze followed their path through the potted Chinese orchids and tangerine shrubs.
Soporifically, the gentle humming of the sewing machine continued, and soon my gaze drifted onto the massive advertising signboard which hung vertically down one side of our balcony. Large white characters upon a background of sea blue – ‘YKK zips’ – and the name of the shop next door. We could see the sign from both ends of the street, and whenever we saw it we knew home was near.
The crowd of onlookers below had begun to talk loudly amongst themselves. They were looking up just a little way to my left, so I leant forward over the balcony railings to get a clearer field of vision beyond the signboard. I saw a woman standing on the rooftop of a semi-demolished block of flats. She paced in an agitated manner, up and down a narrow ledge. She was waving her arms about, at times gesticulating to the onlookers below and shouting at them to be quiet, and at other times she threw her arms around her head and talked to herself. Dressed in unremarkable dark trousers and top, the woman looked in her mid-thirties, but I did not recognise her from the neighbourhood. She was clearly distressed, and I watched with disbelief as she sat down on the ledge, dangling her legs over the side of the bamboo scaffolding that partially surrounded the building. One of her brown plastic slippers dropped from her foot onto the ground below. It might have only been three or four floors up, but it was quite a long way down.
A police van arrived, and two officers cleared a path through the crowd. I noticed a red background on one of the officer’s silver epaulettes, an indication he was able to converse in English too. Strange what detail comes to mind. Moments later, one of the officers was on the rooftop with her. He seemed to be talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and the woman appeared to hardly notice his presence. It all seemed a bit of an anti-climax really after all the curiosity and activity, and I was getting rather bored of it all.
‘I’ve had enough of this’ I thought to myself. ‘If you’re going to do something, do it now, otherwise I’m going back inside’. Magical thinking, or what? Did the woman know what I was thinking? Had she read my mind or heard my inner thoughts, callous if casual? Suddenly, without any fuss, she stood up on the ledge, looked down to the street below, wrapped her arms round her head and jumped, feet first. I looked in disbelief. The next few seconds seemed to go on forever. Her foot caught the scaffolding, and she turned. My whole being plummeted into an abyss of numbed emptiness, and then inflated as if ready to burst in an agonising, guilty, dreadful silence. Nothing seemed real; everything played out before me in slow motion – from that deliberate leap to the fatal dull thud as her head and body hit the street below. But it was real. Her body did not just lie there, still and lifeless as depicted on cinema screens. It bounced like a heavy balloon, and fell back onto the ground. Moments later I saw a trickle of blood seep from her head and pool onto a manhole cover nearby. A fistful of emotions seized the pit of my stomach, and twisted it into a dreadful sickening panic. Was I really so omnipotent that my awful, innocent, secret and darkest thought could be realised? Could this really have happened?
My grandmother came out onto the balcony just in time to see the body being covered with a blanket. She muttered and sighed to herself about a wasted life.
“She just jumped,” I tried to explain, but no more words came.
“Come inside now. There is no more for you to see here.”
As the end of my first year at medical school approached, so did the MBBS Part I examinations. We either passed first time, or we had to work through the summer break and sit the entire set of examinations again. If one failed the second time, it was the end of one’s medical career. In fact, a third of my year did not return after the summer to continue with their studies. Some chose to give up medicine, realising it was not for them. Others were somewhat relieved to have failed, feeling they had been pushed into the career by others, and the rest just did not make the grade. Although pretty devastating at the time, I suppose it was probably better to know earlier rather than later in one’s undergraduate career. The sheer volume of work and the pressures we were each under made the traumas of ‘A’ levels the previous year pale into insignificance.
I worked very hard. I felt I owed it, not only to myself, but also to my family who had given up so much in order to put me through medical school. Over the course of the five years, my parents paid the full tuition fees, my living expenses and, whenever possible, flights home topped up with government travel points my father had somehow accumulated. I didn’t know the details, but I was glad of them. But I was driven with an ambition to succeed in anything I chose to do, for in doing so, like the carp’s persistence as he forces his way upstream against the rapids, I would bring the ultimate honour to my grandmother, my parents and my ancestors.
Disciplined, focused and organised, I worked to a personally-devised schedule of revision, so that every aspect of work was covered. Each day, I timetabled various subjects, slotting in time to rest and relax too, and at weekends I allowed myself to go out for one complete day without study. Sometimes I worked in the medical college’s museum, desks hidden behind cabinets filled with pickled specimens of body parts and bones. In one corner, in a special display cabinet of its own, was the skeleton of John Merrick, better known as the ‘Elephant Man’ because of his grotesque physical deformities caused by the condition neurofibromatosis. He had lived in Victorian London and was exhibited as a human curiosity, the object of public humiliation, ridicule and fear until Sir Frederick Treves, a surgeon at the London Hospital in the 1880s, rescued him and allowed him to take sanctuary at the hospital. Merrick’s grossly-deformed skeleton, a cast of his head and shoulders, the mask he wore, and the model he made of the church nearby were all on display in our museum. Years later, with the release of the film ‘Elephant Man’, featuring John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, the medical college museum was besieged with people curious to see his skeleton. Michael Jackson, the pop star, even offered a substantial sum of money to purchase it for his own personal collection. Merrick’s skeleton and all the artefacts were taken out of the museum, and I am not sure where they are today. But in my medical student years I often found myself looking at his strangely-deformed bones and thinking what a brutal and ill-fated life he had, yet also marvelling at what I had read of his gentle and creative personality.
I was very proud of the skeleton I owned as a medical student. My parents sent me an extra banker’s draft to cover the cost of the purchase, as it had been impressed upon us how helpful it would be to own a skeleton from which we could learn the grooves on each bone and the muscle attachments that went with them. The skull was perfect, and I kept it as a companion on my bedside table. A little macabre, to say the least, but it was my way of confronting the horrors that awaited us during our years of training. I still have the skeleton, in its original box tucked away in the attic.
When not at the museum, I worked in my bedsit, venturing out into the downstairs kitchen from time to time to brew myself a cup of tea. During one such interlude I found my landlady in the kitchen, preparing lunch for her husband. He would be back in an hour or so and I could smell the spices of curry cooking on the hob. As I waited for the kettle to boil we engaged in a superficial conversation. She told me she had a bit of a headache, and asked if it would be appropriate to take tablets from a bottle on the table. It was a bottle of paracetamol tablets from the local chemist. I was sure it would be OK, but reminded her just to take two tablets. It’s funny how people talk about their physical ailments when they find out you are a doctor, or worst still, a medical student. She asked what would happen if she took more than two, and I told her it would be dangerous. And yes, it is possible it could be fatal if one takes too many, I confirmed. She said nothing, but smiled and carried on with her cooking as I went back upstairs to my revision.
An hour later I heard the front door open. Presumably her husband had returned for lunch, but I paid scant attention to the background noise that came from a husband and wife’s discourse. A short while later, I became aware that it was more than the usual chatter. There were people at the door, and unfamiliar clunking noises. I opened my bedroom door and stepped out onto the landing just in time to see my landlady being strapped into a wheelchair and pushed out by a paramedic. Her husband had gone on ahead.
‘What’s going on?’ I enquired.
The paramedic looked at me. All I can remember was his uniform, and that he was playing with a bottle of tablets in his hand. ‘I hope you are satisfied now,’ he said to me, and slammed the door behind him.
I was completely stunned. My sense of shock and disbelief slowly gave way to irritation and anger. I realised what must have happened. My landlady had asked me about the tablets because she was planning to take an overdose. ‘How dare she involve me!’ I thought to myself. That day it began to dawn on me that some patients will cling onto a doctor’s every word and that the message that comes across may not be the message that was intended.