Word: chen
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...Canadian doctor of Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and uses his firsthand experience of the world of medicine to underpin the dozen stories in this book. The pieces are interrelated, lightly and adroitly, by the recurrence of four common characters, Fitzgerald, Chen, Ming and Sri, all doctors. In some stories, Lam writes about his characters in the third person; for others, he uses the first. In less adept hands, this technique could easily seem affected. But Lam's handling of the quickly shifting perspectives is deft and gives the collection an agreeable dynamism...
...Fitzgerald and Ming, both preparing for entrance to the University of Toronto Medical School. The second installment of their tale - which, in a clever use of pacing, runs not consecutively but as the third story in this volume - charts the melancholy end of their relationship. Ming is now seeing Chen - another student and someone, as we find out later in the collection, whom she will marry - while Fitzgerald is left behind in Ottawa to retake his exams. In the finest story in the book, Night Flight, we see Fitzgerald, now a medevac doctor with an incipient drinking problem...
...Long Migration, the least clinically themed story in the book, is Chen's delicate, mosaiced account of trying to piece together the story of his grandfather's life - a tale of several marriages, migration and diaspora. In Contact Tracing, another piece that ratchets up the tension, Fitzgerald is dying of SARS, having contracted it while evacuating a patient from Shenzhen. In the respiratory isolation room next to his is Chen, also infected because he treated Fitzgerald in the initial stages. The ending rewrites any kind of expectation that we may have held in our minds, given that these...
...rings that brought redemption to the Chinese team. Huang Xu made up for his pommel bobble with a 16.00, while three-time Olympian Yang Wei, who is engaged to another Chinese Olympic medalist gymnast, scored 16.3 on one of his strongest apparatuses. Chen Yibing wrapped up the Chinese rotation with...
...across the tense Taiwan Strait. "I think Hu Jintao will put cross-Strait interests first because that serves Beijing's long-term strategic benefit," says Yang. "On the diplomatic front, I think Beijing will try their best not to upset the Taiwanese and send the wrong message." Indeed, unlike Chen's U.S. visit, which drew strident condemnations from China, Ma's overseas trip has thus far generated only muted reaction...