“宅男心聲"

"逍遙遊遠道  寂寞守寒窗"

YML is a mystery man.

He is a classmate of mine in the NTUMC1968 class. After completing his residency training at NTUH, he started his solo practice in a southern city of Taiwan. For the following several years, he seemed to continue to have contact with the rest of the classmates despite the fact that he had a busy practice.

Several years later, he became a “missing person”, and had since lost contact with the rest of the classmates (for almost 20 years) until one day, he suddenly “popped up” out of nowhere, and began to phone the classmates both in Taiwan and the U.S. announcing that he had become a religionist, studying Christian Science.

For a while, he was a very active participant in our class website forum, especially when the subject had to do with Christianity. After his retirement, he volunteered his time and service at a Christian Hospital near his home town.

Then, about two years ago, he again suddenly and unexpectedly "disappeared" without telling anybody his whereabouts. A few months ago, according to our class authority, he contributed a good amount of money to help publish our new class book.

Today, much to my surprise, he sent me an e-mail message and made a comment on my recent blog post “Keeping the Memories Alive”.

I recall our last year at NTUMC during our “Internship program”, while many of the classmates were busy dating, he and a few others, me included, joined the club of what we now call “宅男族”. When we were not on call or on duty, we stayed together at the Intern's Quarters either doing study or simply enjoying the pleasure of "古今多少事 都付笑談中".

YML is known to be very interested in Chinese literatures and has a good knowledge of it. One day, he was "心血來潮" and shared with me a 打油詩 he had just written: “逍遙遊遠道  寂寞守寒窗”.  As a matter of fact, the "poem" really reflected our “宅男" 的心境 or spoke their心聲 at the time. It was in the late 1960s.


Yesterday (YouTube music video)

Yeh Tze