Patient History: A Guide to Luminosity

Join Patient History author Tricia Tan (right) and Ethos editor Mok Zining (left) in conversation this Saturday at the Patient History launch.

Dear Reader,

One of my biggest flaws as a person, I believe, is my poor sense of humour. I tend to take myself and my many feelings too seriously and, as a result, often find myself trapped by my own one-dimensional perspective. “You must create an exit for yourself in each book,” Divya Victor had said to me during the editing of The Orchid Folios, back in 2020. It is only now that I’m beginning to understand these words: in both life and in literature, one must create openness and possibility where there seems to be none, for that is where agency truly begins.
 
Unlike me, Tricia Tan has an incredible sense of humour, one that I was impressed by again and again as I edited her debut poetry collection. I don’t mean that she tells ‘haha’ jokes—though I’m sure she could if she wanted to—but that she has a remarkable ability to create lightness in the heaviest situations, wonder in the most hopeless. Levity, whimsy, imagination and delight make their presence known from the very first pages of Patient History with “birth cert for my mother’s cancer”, which imagines cancer as a baby exiting a body “with joy”.
 
As the collection unfolds, Tricia’s voice gains in luminosity, sweeping everything from gachapon machines to Pixar films, from BTS songs to patient history forms, into her treatment of an otherwise grim topic. Unexpectedly, what emerges from her exploration of illness and mortality is the possibility of beauty in everyday life, no matter how drab. Tricia’s insistence on what she calls having “a party in a prison” is neither a fluffy optimism founded on ignorance nor a toxic positivity enabled by avoidance, but a grounded hope that stems directly from both her ability to look straight on at despair and her refusal to be consumed by it. Though only in her early twenties, this young doctor has shown herself to be a poet with a remarkable capacity to feel, and the immense courage to write it all down.

Zining