Listening to the Body
Super Typhoon Ragasa had come and gone, and fortuitously had apparently not inflicted too much damage, not that I had noticed anyway. Thank God. I had planned to post a blog shortly after Ragasa made landfall, but as usual, inertia got the upper hand and I ended up leafing Volume 3 of Mark Twain’s Autobiography (745 pages) while Su began to dig in her newly acquired Unleashed by Boris Johnson (772 pages). Su was motivated to buy the memoir, not only by the good discount, but also by a previous positive comment I had on The Churchill Factor by the same author, published in 2014, ten years before this memoir.
Unleashed is about the same size of Obama’s A Promised Land published in November 2022. I had acquired the Large Print paperback of Obama’s which runs to 1085 pages. Unlike Obama’s autobiography which had attracted critical but generally positive reviews, Johnson’s Unleashed had received rather mixed reviews. More importantly, A Promised Land the US edition of which was first published on November 17 2020 in hardcover had 4.7 million copies in print in the U.S. and Canada, following an initial printing of 3.4 million copies. It was released simultaneously in 20 languages and had been a # 1 bestseller in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Brazil, among other countries. International editions had a combined 2.85 million copies in print, bringing the book to 7.55 million copies in print worldwide. By December, it had been billed as the best-selling presidential memoir in modern times. Turning to Unleashed, it was the #1 bestseller in the UK for the first week, selling 42,528 copies, but the sale volume slumped by 62% in the second week, and the publisher had been worrying whether they could ever recoup the advance promised to Johnson. Nevertheless, Johnson could gloat over his sales record as having done much better than his successor Liz Truss whose Ten Years to Save the West only sold 2,228 copies in the first week, or another previously resigned predecessor David Cameron whose memoir, For the Record, only sold 21,000 copies, also in the first week.
We had been busy with various chores and going to dinners before and after Ragasa struck. Last Friday, for example, Su suddenly noticed tickets were released at half price for seniors for a dance drama under the City Under the Moon by Shanghai Dance Theatre at Cultural Centre, Azure After the Rain, featuring the life of Song Dynasty Ci Poetess Li Qingzhao, billed as one of the four great talented women of the ages. Su was still in an excitable state when we got back and accidentally broke the stylus of the turntable. She tried to salvage the machine, but couldn’t go very far. Eventually, she had to make a trip on Saturday to the audio shop at Causeway Bay for a replacement, which she re-fixed to the turntable before we went out for another dinner. Meanwhile, we indulged ourselves on food and wine, so that by the time I woke up on Monday, I detected some flu symptoms. It became obvious that the body was telling me to take more rest. I responded by cancelling the appointment at Zetland Hall in the evening and a sailing trip for Tuesday which had been postponed from the previous Wednesday because of Ragasa, so that hopefully I could be back in action by National Day. At the same time, I administered myself with some tried and tested portions of TCM and began to have more bed rest.
Staying in bed doesn’t necessarily mean resting, and often I got up and sat before the desktop looking up some past files. For example, I was thinking how to organize the sequel I had been threatening to issue. I was minded to present it along the format of Mark Twain’s, which was why I was leaving his autobiography. I also looked at what I had written over the years, by going through my own website. I had to remind myself that I began writing in 1999 to my fellow Rotarians in the lead up to my governorship from July 2000 and that all the letters had since been uploaded on the internet, first on the District Website hosted by the District Webmaster, and later on my personal website. The articles I had written and published up to end of June 2001 were all collated in a book called Letters from a Rotarian published in July 2001 with the help of Tony Wong who was a President in my year, but later became a District Governor in July 2006. He also helped me publish The Middle Child – A First Memoir un January 2021, for which I am eternally grateful.
After my governorship, I had continued to have the letters I wrote uploaded on the internet under an omnibus category that I called General until late September 2016 when I started to post them under A New Chapter. I thought at the time that it was a good and appropriate name, but with hindsight, any name that is date sensitive implying new or novel will become obsolete and irrelevant over time. Indeed, for reasons known only to myself, I stopped posting letters on A New Chapter from May 2022 and had reverted to posting blogs under the General category. In between I also created a new category under the title of My Travels, again for obvious reasons.
I had come up with a rather wordy preface to what I was about to say as follows. I came across a blog I uploaded I uploaded on 3 October 2016 on A New Chapter with the title On Forgiveness. I was recovering from a bout of flu – similar to what I am experiencing at present – and working out on the treadmill in a gym when I came across a CNN interview with Eva Mozes Kor (31 January 1934 – 4 July 2019) who was then 82 and very much alive, alert and agile. She responded to the questions from the panel in her life in general and on the subject of forgiveness in particular. By way of background, she was born twins with Miriam in Romania and was an American survivor of the Holocaust. When she was ten, the family was taken to Auschwitz where the twins were separated from the family and from where the family never saw each other. Eva was subjected to repeated and fatal medical experimentation under Dr. Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death. Her parents and two older sisters were killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau.
Fate had it that she survived and went to the United States, where thanks to the media, she not only got reunited with her twin sister, but was also reconnected with a number of Auschwitz children who survived the Holocaust. Her full story was documented in her book, “Surviving the Angel of Death: The Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz.”
Eva Kor founded the organization CANDLES (an acronym for “Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors”) in 1984 with an aim to educate the public about eugenics, the Holocaust, and the power of forgiveness. CANDLES successfully located 122 other survivors of Mengele’s experiments.
Kor had met Hans Munch (14 May 1911 – 6 December 2001) – aka The Good Man of Auschwitz, the German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS physician during World War II in the camp in German occupied Poland. He was acquitted of war crimes at a 1947 trial in Krakow – and had received international attention when she made the controversial decision to publicly forgive the Nazis for what they had done to her. This story was later explored in the 2006 documentary Forgiving Dr. Mengele. She authored or co-authored six books, and took part in numerous memorial services and projects.
During my bed rest, I was thinking whether I should include stuff such as what I had just related in my sequel – again if it ever sees the light. I probably would, or else, even I would not remember them in the future.
