A day in Kwai Chung in 1992

A Christmas Memory

The scene: Princess Margaret Hospital, Kwai Chung, Hong Kong

The  time: December 1992

I bought some tofu in Tsuen Wan, took it to my place in Sham Tseng (1/2 hour journey in hot [31C] weather).

Two days later I noticed I hadn't passed any urine in that whole time.   My doctor prescribed intravenous feeding for at least 24 hours.

So here I was, in that hospital in Kwai Chung with a feeding  tube attached to my arm lying on my bed with nothing to do, and hardly anybody (only the doctors and nurses) who spoke much [any] English.

My particular problem was not common.  So I was placed in a large ward of terminal patients, nearly all of them (I was told, couldn't verify it conclusively) suffering from emphysema and related ailments, brought on by smoking and working in smoke-infused factory environments even if they didn't smoke cigarettes.

I was only there a 24 hours or so.  During the night, the patient on one side of me coughed incessantly.  At some point the coughing stopped (2 am, 3am?).  A short time later, orderlies came, and the coughing stopped. 

In the morning, I went to the washroom (on the other side of the ward), and for the first time since the day before saw that bed clearly -- it was unused.

The inescapable conclusion was that I had just heard a man breathe his last.  We didn't have a common language, and in any case he was too sick to talk. The entire room (except for me) was more like a hospice than a place where people got well.

Fortunately I do not smoke.

The next day, the doctors examined me and let me check out.  I caught a flight out of Hong Kong the next day. I returned, but only after a good rest in Vancouver to absorb that experience (and many others in that first year in China).

Modern Sculpture in Ottawa

Back in 1984, I spent a few months working in Ottawa quite near Parliament Hill.  Some nearby buildings were the Elgin Hotel, the Langevin Block (where the Prime Minister's office is located), and the Bell Northern Research (BNR) tower. Given what happened later to BNR, that building may have a different name.  

In any case, given the prominence of Bell Canada in Canada, in addition to the usual things in any office tower, there was a small museum, with a set of glassed in exhibits.  One of them looked like a tangled mass of little wires -- just metal, no insulators.  Lest anyone think this was the work of a sculptor -- there was a little plaque -- to the effect that these were the staples that had been vacuumed out of the building's rugs during the replacement of the rugs at some point.  We're talking about a spherical mass of staples approximately 1 foot in diameter.

So near and yet so far

As mentioned yesterday, thirty years ago I a teaching assistant in the Mathematics Department at the University of Maryland at College Park, MD. I had an office shared with 3 other TA's.  The department had an unusual number of math TA's (about 90), reflecting the fact that mathematics, at the lower levels at least, was a service provided to other departments (physics, chemistry, engineering, business).

In any case, my small windowless office was shared with 3 other guys.   The office next to mine was held by Dr Michael Brin, who worked in dynamic systems.

Unknown to me at the time, Dr Brin had an 11 year old son Sergey Brin, who followed in his father's footsteps, studying mathematics first at the University of Maryland and then Stanford, and then, co-founding Google with Larry Page.

Later, as his son became extremely wealthy, the Brin family created an endowed Brin Chair in the Mathematics department, and also funded five post-doctoral fellowships in dynamic systems, but as far as I can tell, Dr Brin himself has never had any of these honours, nor been head of the mathematics department. The last part is easiest to understand -- being head of a large department can leave you little time for research.

My own mathematical studies were in a different area.  I went to an introductory [to graduate students and faculty] talk Dr Brin gave near the end of my studies there.  I followed the discussion only up to a point.

So this is the story of how I knew, superficially at least, the Brin family.   At the time, I wondered if Michael Brin was related to David Brin, author of the scifi classic book The Postman [he's not].

The Good Samaritan?

Thirty years ago, I was a graduate student/teaching assistant at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD.  One spring day (towards the end of the term, i.e. early May)  I was staying very late in my office grading quizzes which I had given. My practice was to give a quiz every day for the entire term, and that gave me 140 one-page quizzes for each week to grade -- and I  had gotten a week or two behind - giving me a serious stack of paper to go through.  So I was still at it at 1 am - when the cleaning crew came on duty.

The weather was unseasonably hot -- above 100F and so the air-conditioning system was making its noise. So it took me a while to hear the cry for help from the elevator down the hall.  I looked out the door of my office and saw a young woman clinging to the rail [the floor near the elevator was sloped slightly]. She was bare-foot.  One of her legs was bleeding.  The injury came from kicking in the window of a vending machine a few levels down. Apparently the machine ate her dollar bill [this was at a time when this capability was  new] but she didn't get her candy bar. The machine tried - but the item wouldn't/didn't fall -- so she kicked the glass in.  Later it was replaced by plexiglas. She got her candy bar but the cost was glass cuts on her leg.

So when I first saw her I found out soon about the vending machine and the quest for the candy bar.  But I was in a new country and I didn't know what to do next.

The rest of the cleaning crew was "taking a break" in the math lounge down the hall in the other direction. They offered no advice or inclination to help their injured coworker.

Obviously she needed an ambulance but I was in no position to bear the cost of this.  The Washington DC area is a blizzard of various police forces.  I called campus police and they eventually called an ambulance. I lost track of it after that.

My marking didn't get done that night despite staying up very late.

A few days back, I was standing in the pouring rain, waiting for a bus to take me home.

It's summer, or trying to be, here in Vancouver, but at that particular moment it was raining.  They're doing construction along this road, connected in some way to a new Skytrain [rapid transit] line they're building,  This meant I had to walk -- in the rain -- 2 stops up the road from where I normally boarded the bus.  That was no problem really -- a little exercise which I can always use.

Two young men (around 15) walked up to the bus while I was waiting  One of them was using a modified drink can as a meth or crack pipe, and also, before we boarded, complaining to his friend about how they wouldn't let him on busses, with some reference to a lost bus pass.

He somehow managed to ditch the crack pipe (probably in the trash can conveniently attached to the bus stop sign), but I still wondered if his problems with boarding busses had some connection to his smoking habit.