Taking cue from the great film critic Pauline Kael, who thinks popular entertainment at its best should be both scary and funny, I think reflections on harsh truths should be both sad and funny.
To keep horror at bay, laugh it off. When the British restaurant critic A A Gill was told by his doctors he had only a few weeks left to live, he announced in his next column “I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English,” painting a picture of his cancer spreading to every organ by making reference to a dish consisting of most if not all breakfast foods. When a nurse arrived at the home of the former football star Steve Gleason with a gloved hand – he was by then immoblized by a motor neurone disease and she was there to get his bowels working again – he asked her in jest “Tell me, am I the best looking guy you’ve ass-fingered recently?”
Recently, I had my own gallows humour moment. I had – unwisely, it turned out – said yes to every request to teach, goaded on by the belief that I should rake in as much money as possible, before, say, the Hong Kong currency decouples from the dollar thanks to Xi Jinping’s whim and crashes (some clients will then have difficulty paying me). After months of unrelenting overwork, I began experiencing things like waking up in bed disoriented, thinking I’d already finished coaching a particular batch of students, only to feel cheated a few moments later, when it dawned on me that actually, that marathon teaching session was about to begin in 15 minutes.
“If you continue at this pace, you will crash before the Hong Kong currency does,” a concerned friend counselled.
His words sent me off to do some long overdue soul searching. Strangely enough, a video clip I once stumbled across online kept replaying itself in my mind: a mainland Chinese prostitute is shown opening the door to a client; “RMB400, for no-frills service,” she informs him coldly as she lets him in, her eyes glued to her phone all the time. The one thing that stands out in her sparsely furnished bedroom is a bin filled to the brim with discarded pieces of used tissue.
Numbness is the armour a prostitute must develop in order to service a succession of clients, but when I’m unable to summon up any enthusiasm for the craft of writing while slogging through one student after another, it’s time to scale back.
Michelle Ng
英國牛津大學畢業，前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家，現在身在楓葉國，心繫中國大陸和香港。
聯絡方式： michelleng.coach@proton.me
個人網站： https://michellengwritings.com
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