DOCTOR COMIC - PART 6

Her name was the eponym for pain, in another language of course, and hereby HIPAA compliantly introduced to you, dear reader. She didn’t feel like eating before the increasing lethargy sent her off to our ER where she coded for an unspecified amount of time and came back to life miraculously with not even a single rib broken from chest compression. As a result, multiple organs within her cachectic body went on a coordinated strike and demanded further negotiation with life and death in the ICU.

The effort to wean her off the ventilator was eventful with multiple attempts of breathing tube self-removal requiring a multitude of sedation and complicated adjustment. Not a sigh of relief was there when the drama of the ventilator machine completed and she could breathe on her own from a nasal cannula, since the oxygen in her blood quickly dropped to an alarmingly low level whenever she yanked the oxygen off and hoarsely declared that she wanted to jump off a bridge.

So essentially, she was dependent on the nasal cannula and she became extra saucy whenever her oxygen turned low with her frequent dislodging of the device. Provided that she had the oxygen flowing at above 6 liter a minute, she would be more reasonable; however, she remained as feisty as possible. We had to put padded mittens on her hands to prevent her from digging into her thighs out of frustration since the wrist restraint stopped her from removing the cannula. Whenever I tried to put the mittens back after her uncanny successes to pull them off, I noticed her fingernails with chipped polish in the shade of red wine imprinting angry indentation over the thin translucence of her bony palms.

HUMAN ACTS

Han Kang

The Gwangju Uprising was a bloody stepping stone on the struggling path toward democracy for South Korea. While the true number of casualties was forever occluded from history, the fictional death of a middle-school boy haunted the narratives of the novel, lamented and condemned the inhuman acts of unspeakable brutality. Some readers may find the distant, impersonal tone dominant almost throughout the novel disconcerting; however, dissociation may be the only survival method in the face of overwhelming traumas.

I noticed that the adjective “cold” appeared in the novel roughly three dozen times in all seven chapters with a multitude of connotation. The infamous uprising not only obliterated the death but also extinguished the flame of survivors’ hope for personal justice in the aftermath. The numbing effect therefore doomed the ones left behind with a lifetime of picking up the broken pieces of their shattered and perpetually tormented souls by the curse of memories and debilitating grief.

Have you heard about the Milgram experiment in which people abandoned their personal conscience to blindly obey authority? This chilling trait of human nature was responsible for recurring horrific crimes against humanity throughout our brief chronicle of mankind. Blessed be the heart of the courageous ones who choose to stand on the right-side history in opposition of mass obedience for oppression.

WONG KAR-WAI TRILOGY

Maggie Cheung

Years ago when my life was carried away on an unyielding wave of melancholy, I sometimes abandoned myself into the ethereal world of Mr. Wong's cinematography. I watched some of his movies multiple times alone and with different people, but I always pretended that it was my first time with each viewing experience. As time progresses, specific details of each movie blur away, and only vague remnants of feelings associated with certain scenes follow me until this day. By chance, I discovered a collection of dialogues that I wrote down for Days of Being Wild (1990), In The Mood For Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). I tried to remember why I took these notes, but the past is something I could barely see and completely out of my touch. As I reviewed the notes and struggled to find the reasons, fragments of scenes from each movie and the mood they induced within my psyche came rushing back as if promptly awakened from soporific oblivion.