Judge Dee at work

The patient

I did not know this patient for long, but there used to be a time he was well versed, witty, and warm and engaging. He loved his books, and loved talking about his books, and, though knowing his end was near, still had future oriented plans and looked forward to going home from the hospital so he could have a read of his Robert van Gulik collections again.
He saw my eyes lit up at the mention of that name, and he was surprised I knew about old-school Judge Dee and could rattle off all the story plots on top of my head. I managed to be good enough to a lovely dying elderly gentleman and not get negatively ocpd about the details (that I read them in
Chinese and the Chinese translations were partly re-written by the translators which made them awesome and the English originals were otherwise odd and shallow in their emotionality and to me merely a white man's oriental fantasies blah blah blah... -_-|||||)
Under the guise of psychiatry appointments we had some good conversation about the goodness of Judge Dee common to both the east and west, fantasies or not.
and then i remembered many things myself.

The plum blossoms

Judge Dee and his crew have been around for many years and were more family than family to me, and Judge Dee the eternal wise paternal figure. The fact that he acquired three wives just for a blissful table of mahjong was always something more to giggle about but never affected my respect for him.
Though something soured in this imaginary relationship in recent years, when I became old enough and shrinky enough, and realised what he did to Mrs Kuo the pharmacist's wife in the Chinese Nail Murder.
I think I was fond of the fact how he finally encountered a woman matching him in wit and sophistication, and the mutual chemistry in the air when they were both capable of quick set shifting in conversation topics - from poetic descriptions of plum blossoms to demises of female prisoners then to the feasibility of killing by driving nails into people's nostrils .
and then he acted out, in the name of justice, and emotionally blackmailed her to jump the cliff to her end.
despite the fact that I do really empathize how deep he was in his loneliness, trapped in the rough distant town of Pei-chow. There were many things his blissful mahjong table couldn't deliver, and all made worse by the sudden loss of Sergeant Hoong who had been his fixed point in a changing age ever since he was a child...
I think he killed a part of himself, with her.
I don't know if the fact that I cannot forgive a book character has taken my pathological imaginary friendships to a whole new level, but maybe, just maybe, I was in fact more angry with myself who for many years believed that though painful he really did the right and noble thing in a position of authority and there was no other way out...
I myself may have reached a time in life when I will soon be acquiring and acting in much more authority than what I have now, and I am just dreading, dreading that despite my best efforts not to join the league of some of my very embarrassing ex-bosses, I may not be able to avoid becoming Judge Dee, in a time vulnerable and hard pressed on every side, acting out under a noble guise and making some very very grave mistakes.
and maybe that will be even harder to swallow than a very unfair coroners report, despite of the worst part of it being over, again knocked me out hard and made my bones very dry.
...and made me fearful that whilst carrying such poison to work and having to pretend all is okay... I will act out sooner or later. 


The golden bell

Judge Dee was the father but Tao Gan was my special friend，though I really couldn't understand why he was so special. He was already middle-aged by the first time he appeared, a dry and hunched man, always looked a bit down and out, anxious and pessimistic in nature, many years ago had a wife who ran away from him so a bit of a woman-hater, who tried to be smart but could never outwit Judge Dee...
End of the day, I think Tao Gan reminded me a lot of myself, and validated the part of me that has always been a bit of an anxious loser, who not very decently loved all kinds of depraved goss from the magistrate files and derived so much happiness from them. There was a time he giggled for a whole night by the candlelight reading some perverted scholar's love poems to his step-mother--and the pervert wrote a lot too so there was plenty to enjoy--
I think I can imagine myself doing that, totally.

There was something i really liked about Murder in Canton, the last story in the canon. There wasn't only the tragedy of Chiao Tai's death, and all these wonderful exciting stuff at last coming to an end, but i think it ingeniously ended on a very hopeful note.
It had nothing to do with happiness and satisfaction in the traditional Eastern value sense - with Judge Dee being acknowledged by the empress rising to power and avoiding a fall from imperial favour, or a new son being born out of his blissful mahjong table, or whatever remaining of his crew all getting well deserved promotions...
It ended with Tao Gan, by then approaching his 7th decade in life, and always finding more enjoyment in his solitary and not-very decent hobbies, who was still recovering from the aftermath of a very difficult case, and grieving the loss of his good friend Chiao Tai---
walked up to blind Miss Lan-lee's attic and inviting her to go with him to the capital.
her cricket the Golden Bell chirped, and gave him a fright.

it was such a nice ending, with all its imperfections and traditional dissatisfaction.
So bright and warm and hopeful that i could hardly open my eyes, I would not have wanted Judge Dee to have ended in any other way.
and then I realised, not only me, but the author, and the translators...
no matter how very uncool they have made this guy out to be, they all totally loved Tao Gan too.


The Final Words

My patient knew he was going to die very soon, when the team that has cared for him for many years did not offer him another follow-up. He was walking out the hospital...abandoned, shocked, listless and unkempt when I called and reminded him about his psychiatry appointment.
So he walked back to see me, in his emotional stupor. 
We didn't end up talking much, apart from me calmly reassuring him that I had little to offer in the face of him dying (which perhaps was even worse than non-reassurance) but just in case he wanted to talk about it? He was too overwhelmed to speak the whole time but made great efforts to gesture with his hands reassuring me that he was in fact okay.

End of the day, I knew there was very very little of anything there was left to say, or there was still appropriate to say for that matter.
So what came out was simply, feebly, non-psychiatric:

"Thank you for talking to me about Judge Dee."