numbers

same feather
click for flickr view

Ma J gets back into the hospital for the 3rd time this year. The doctors are asking if they should send some kind of micro-camera into her body, but they are too busy to explain any further what it all means except that it costs $2k - and there's a 1% chance it may get lost somehwere in her gut!

This time Ma J is in a 6-bed ward (sb - yes, some kind of cattle class). Like the doctors who are too busy for the patients' bothersome families, it would seem that we also are too busy with our professional lives for the patients. So of the 5 beds that are occupied, 4 of the patients are accompanied by the families' domestic help. 4 ladies from Indonesia. They sit daily by the beds, assist the nurses with the changing of the patients' diapers and sheets, chitchat with the bedridden old women, give each compatriot smiles, and doze off. 3 of them actually stay over at the hospital - lying across an arrangement of peach-coloured plastic chairs. This being December, we are all glad a gentle wind sends relief constantly through the room's open windows, having found its way to the hospital in between the highrise condominiums and office blocks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

miracle man

Image
I can never quite tell if Ma J is asleep or just pretending The old lady in the bed next to Ma J's is in hospital because of a second stroke. When we were visiting Ma J this afternoon, the old lady's middle-aged son was also there. He was in his usual round-neck tee tucked into a pair of blue jeans with a belt made of buffalo hide. His limbs are slim, but his belly is round. His bald head, too, is round and abnormally large for his small frame. Let's call him Ah Biao , or if you prefer an English name, you can think of him as Bill (after his buffalo hide belt). When J and I walked out of the ward, Ah Biao or Bill followed us. Three of us stood around the counter by the nurses' work area. J and I were quiet, enjoying the break. Then Ah Biao wanted to show us something special. "Eh, I show you something." Ah Biao unzipped his black waist pouch and took out a small yellow cloth pouch. He untied the colourful string that secured the opening of the pouch. He weigh
Read the rest of this post

on a Hou Hsiao Hsien movie set

Image
By the tracks of the Jiji Station, the oldest train station in Taiwan OK, not quite. We did not even manage to go all the way south to Hou Hsiao Hsien's KaoShiung or even Tainan, but we did venture out from Taipei for 3 days to Taichung. But the real takeaway was actually this supposed feature of Hou Hsiao Hsien's films - trains! Trains are about the best thing about traveling. Unlike cars and taxis, trains are a social mode of transport. Train stations allow for reunions and departures, points to assess and affirm relationships. I admit that all this fades away when you are tired or in a great hurry (or both). But seriously, cars (oh, 4-wheelers!) have only brought about pollution and wasteful consumption, traffic jams, asphalt, mindless obsession with speed and countless quarrels in the stressful, enclosed interiors of cars. Friends, take it slow. Take the train. Read a book. Hold your partner's hand. Be there with the people around you. With Taiwan's highspeed rail
Read the rest of this post

fear not history

Image
Fiction on this island has never quite flourished. Perhaps because we've never quite made peace with our histories. But two genres of fiction hold special place in Singapore as a result. Ghost stories - the art of unresolved pasts. And that even stranger fruit of fact-as-fiction/fiction-as-history. Part speculative history. Part documentary fiction. A romance of obscurity. The Lan Fang Chronicles , Choy Ka Fai's work supported by the Arts Council's Arts Creation Fund and commissioned for this year's Arts Festival, is maybe of this latter genre. Choy Ka Fai chances upon the Lan Fang Republic, supposedly the first democratic republic in SEAsia, set up by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo. His research in West Borneo, China and Holland takes him through archival material, abandoned sites, photocopied photographs, a supposed descendent of Luo Fang Bo (founder of Lan Fang) and accounts of Dutch missionaries and colonists. These materials allow him to re-construct a sk
Read the rest of this post