Framed for an upskirt offence he did not commit, James was forced out of medical school on his 4th year. He disappeared in 2018 after getting kicked out of JS General Hospital (JSGH). No one knew where he went until he reappeared in 2026
The Ah Beng Doctor is a free to read piece of work. Regular drops starts 10/8/26
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Part 1 – Available as preview
Part 2 – Available as preview
Part 3 – Available for subscribers ( drops for all on 10/8/26)
Part 4 – Available for subscribers ( drops for all on 17/8/26)
The rain had that shitty Singapore evening smell to it.
A mix of hot tar road cooling, wet dust, and the aroma of $130000 COE cars cruising on the road.
James balanced the insulated delivery bag on his back and checked the app again.
Order #4471. Pick up: Golden Wok Delivery. Drop off: JS General — Staff Entrance, Block 7.
He sat on his scooter under the shelter of a flyover about 5 minutes away from his destination. Staring at the address, he wished the delivery didn’t take him to the one place he didn’t want to go.
He tapped the app a few times, trying to refresh it.
What kind of fuck up algorithm matches orders from the north all the way to the west of Singapore?
James dropped the customer a text to inform her that the delivery will be late due to the rain.
The nurse waiting for her food was pleasant enough to tell him to take his time and ride safe.
Ride safe.
It was a simple reminder and perhaps, one of the warmest reply James received in a week.
The rain is starting to let up as he stared out of the sheltered lay by.
Six years. Almost seven, if he counted from the morning they’d walked him out through the back stairwell instead of the lobby, so the patients won’t see.
He could still recite the tribunal’s words as if it was read to him just moments before.
“In light of the material recovered from James’ locker, and pursuant to the Medical Registration Act, the Institution finds it cannot in good conscience continue his housemanship.”
Professor Chua had read it in a voice so flat it might have been a weather report.
James: What the fuck is this. KNN Prof…I don’t know which fucker framed me for this! Do i look like the kind who will take upskirt videos?
Professor Chua adjusted his spectacles
Prof Chua : James, i have to remind you to mind your language…
James: Mind simi lan jiao. CCB! It’s obvious some mother fucker framed me for this shit…look at that fucking upskirt video…that girl is like a dinosaur!
Prof Chua : JAMES!
James : I’ll fucking upskirt a hippo in bikini than this…
Prof Chua slammed his palm on the table and he almost grabbed the telephone off the table to fling it at him.
James took a deep breath and calmed down.
Keeping cool has never been his forte.
James: It’s not me…someone framed me…
Prof Chua : Besides the upskirt video, there are also…erotic stories…browsers with adult forums…and no less than 300 pictures of nursing and medical staff…this is a serious…
James: Wah KNNBCCB! this mother fucker…whoever…
The flashback faded away as the scene of him arguing his innocence gave way to the rain stopping. A couple of fellow bikers sheltering from the rain rode on ahead.
James looked towards the horizon, he could see JSGH up ahead.
Nobody had believed him.
Worse, in some ways, some of them had. He’d seen it in the junior nurses’ faces, the flicker of doubt gone as fast as it came, because believing him would have meant doing something about it, and nobody wanted to be the one who stood up in a room full of consultants and said the golden boy in cardiothoracic was lying.
His phone buzzed. Golden Wok’s order was ready.
He rode towards the restaurant less than 200m away.
The order was waiting for him on a table outside. He grabbed it and got back on the scooter.
Less than 10 minutes later, James pulled up at the parking area of JSGH.
James : sigh…fuck it…
He tried to keep his thoughts away from anything to do with the hospital he was walking into.
He thought about his mother, still in the same flat in Ang Mo Kio, still doing alterations on her sewing machine. His mother was puzzled back then about his sudden departure from the hospital. It was not just having to leave his housemanship, he also left the country, calling only once a month to let her know he’s ok.
The staff entrance at Block 7 was where he’d smoked his first and last cigarette as a houseman. The smoking point was still there, a faded yellow box painted beside the bin centre. He had given up smoking for a few years now, the nicotine craving stopped abruptly. He still lit up the occasional stick every now and then, but it was more for the company rather than the nicotine. Sometimes, he barely took 3 puffs on the cigarette.
The smoking point looked exactly the same. The faded yellow paint seemed untouched, and even the bin used for butts felt like the only thing that has not been upgraded in the hospital.
He walked up with the bags, and there she was.
Nurse Manager, Beatrice, 5kg heavier than the last time he’d seen her, hair gone from black to one peppered with streaks of grey.
Beatrice was standing at the loading bay scrolling her phone while she waited for her order.
She looked up. Looked at his face. Looked at the delivery bag slung over his shoulder. Looked back at his face and she took a moment to register her recognition.
Beatrice : Ja…James? is that you?
He almost turned around and ran. Some cowardly, 26 year old part of him wanted to. But he was 32 now, and 32 year old James had learned and seen things in a country that most people has never been to. And perhaps they never will.
James : Order 4471…for Ms…
Beatrice : Don’t you dare give me that shit James…
James gave an awkward smile and greeted Beatrice properly.
James: Sister Lau…how are you…?
Beatrice : my god James…where have you been?
He gave a sheepish grin but Beatrice was already up in his face.
Beatrice :what is this? har?…har?
James: arr…ahhh…ahh…Sister Lau…arr…
Beatrice tugged his blonde centre parting hair and fringe.
Beatrice : How old already? har? Ah beng ar…still pai kia is it?
James: ahh..Sister Lau…don’t …people watching…
Beatrice began smacking James on his arm as he retreated.
People not in the know watching from a distance came to their own conclusion. A senior nurse manager smacking a man in delivery uniform, he must have deserved worse than a 1 star rating.
Beatrice : You see! Sharp comb ah…har? You know how dangerous this it?
James: ahhh..Sister…sister…that one is momento…someone gave it to me…
Smack!…smack!
Beatrice : You just disappeared! Not even a message! har? Where did you go?
James: I go…Sparks work as bouncer…
Beatrice : sparks? har!
smack!…smack!
Beatrice : don’t talk cock with me…Sparks and Canto not your era one!
smack!
James: Arrh….sister Lau…stop…stop please…
When Beatrice finally calmed down, James was on one leg, the other raised up in front of him while his arms flared to the sides like Wong Fei Hong.
Beatrice : sigh…
James : You want to settle one on one…i…
Beatrice made a show of throwing her dinner in James face and he quickly ducked left and held onto her hand.
James gave her a pout and she gave him a mock slap on his cheek.
Even Beatrice herself could not understand why she even like this stupid boy.
He doesn’t look like a doctor, he looked more like the bouncer at the snooker club. Looks aside, it was also the way he walked, the way he spoke, the cursing, the swearing. He was from a different pedigree from the usual medical cohort.
There was not an inkling of an elite school. James came from a neighbourhood school so notorious for gangs and fights, that they had to permenantly post a patrol car outside during school term. The red bus, carrying riot polices were call in no less than 3 times a year. Once on Chinese New Year celebration, Once for Hari Raya, and Once for early Deepavali.
The police were probably glad Christmas fell during school holidays.
Beatrice didn’t like James initially but it didn’t take her long to realise how genuine this stupid boy was. He played no politics, took no sides and from the bottom of his heart and vulgarities laden words, he cared for the patients and took care of the people working with him.
Beatrice : We heard… after everything back then… nobody knew where you went. Some people said Australia. Some said Malaysia…Somebody said you died.
James : I’m still…alive…just that i…don’t belong here…
Beatrice : James…you…lost weight…
James : I’m on diet leh…
Beatrice : tsk…don’t make me smack you again
James : you didn’t change one bit Sister…
Beatrice : You look different James…something is…different about you…
James: I’m wearing green? not white?
Beatrice smiled at the self depreciating comment.
She noted the scar through his left eyebrow that hadn’t been there before, and one on his forearm, half hidden by his sleeve, shaped like something no accidental household injury made.
His muscles were more defined than before.
Beatrice : You owe me money James…
James: wah KNN Sister Lau, this is one of the reason i don’t dare to come back here…
Beatrice : $4, char siew rice…with 6 years of interest running…haha…
That got a real laugh out of her, startled and loud, and for one second it was like no time had passed, like he was still 26 she was the nurse who’d guided him on
Beatrice wiped tears from her eyes as she looked at James again.
She had been a nurse manager for 8 years before James ever set foot on her ward, and in that time she had trained enough housemen to sort them, within into two piles.
The first pile was bigger. Boys, who had spent their whole lives being told they were the smartest person in whatever room they walked into, and they carried that certainty onto the ward like a badge of honor.
They didn’t ask nurses questions. They didn’t need to. Asking would have meant admitting the room might know something they didn’t, and that wasn’t a possibility their education had ever prepared them to consider.
The second pile was smaller, and James had gone into it on his very first week.
He’d asked her a question.
Beatrice had clocked James immediately, partly because of how he looked. She thought he was auditioning for the next installment of Young and Dangerous.
She noticed he stood at the back during the doctors’ huddle, listening rather than just pretending to listen like a few others.
Bed 14 that morning was an elderly man, Mr Chia, three days post-op, spiking a low-grade fever nobody could quite explain. The registrar had glanced at the chart, said “probably just atelectasis, encourage incentive spirometry, review tomorrow,”
He moved on to the next bed before James had even finished writing it down.
James had lingered by Mr Chia’s bedside a moment longer than the rest of the team, staring at the man’s abdomen, and then instead of simply following the registrar down the ward like everyone else, he’d turned to Beatrice, who was charting nearby.
James: Sister Lau…
He whispered, as if he was afraid others might hear him asking a questino.
Beatrice : mmmh?
James: Can i…kay po and ask you something?
Beatrice: yes?
James: Has he been passing urine normally? I don’t see it charted properly for last night.
Beatrice had looked up, mildly surprised. Most housemen didn’t ask nursing staff anything in their first week beyond where the toilet was.
Beatrice : Actually… output was a bit low last night. I was going to flag it at the next round, but the reg move fast today.
James : Can you show me the chart? i…curious..hehe..
She handed him the chart, and James had stood there for a full minute.
James : I think this might not be atelectasis. I want to rule out a urinary source, maybe even early sepsis. In this instance… Can we do a urine culture? Please don’t hesitate to tell me if i’m approaching this wrong…
Beatrice : you can request for one.
James : ok…let’s do it…
It turned out to be a urinary tract infection tracking toward the kidney. It was caught early enough that it never progressed to anything worse.
It was a small catch, in the grand scheme of a hospital that saw a hundred fevers a week. But Beatrice remembered it precisely because of what James did after he was right.
He hadn’t gone looking for credit. He hadn’t mentioned it to the registrar.
He didn’t fucking care about bragging rights. She saw him by Mr Chia’s bed chatting with him in Hokkien.
James: Ho seh bo Mr Chia? Can discharge and go home soon…
And James had thanked her, actually thanked her, by name, for flagging the output in the first place and moved on to the next bed like it was nothing.
Beatrice : Doctor Ong, you don’t want to tell the Reg it was your catch?
James: Mai siao la Sister…don’t doctor me leh…call me James can already…
Beatrice : We have to keep up professional front in front of patients…
James: Aiyah…i bo ka lan all these one la…
That was the moment Beatrice decided James Ong was worth investing real time in, rather than the standard issue patience she gave every new houseman by default.
She taught him things that weren’t in any textbook, over the following months. How to read a family’s body language, so he’d know whether to lead with reassurance or lead with facts.
How to hold his voice steady during a code even when his hands, underneath the sterile gloves, were shaking.
How to apologize to a nurse when he was wrong without turning the apology into a performance that made everyone else more uncomfortable than the original mistake had.
James: Sister Lau…Ji pai hong gan liao…I charted the wrong dose just now,
He had told her once, barely a month into his houseman year, coming to find her directly rather than waiting to be caught.
James : I caught it myself but I want you to double check I corrected it properly. Wah this one really ball will shrink…
Beatrice : wah lau, you almost gave me heart attack…
She’d checked the chart, he had corrected it properly with the right documentation trail.
Beatrice : Next time, be more careful and through…
These were all small things. But Beatrice had trained enough egotistical young doctors by then to know how rare that particular kind of humility actually was.
He picked up procedures fast, faster than she’d admit to his face, because inflating a houseman’s ego too early was its own kind of malpractice.
When housemen were corrected, some went quiet and resentful when a nurse pointed out an error, filing it away as a grudge to be settled once they’d climbed high enough to stop needing to listen to nurses at all.
James absorbed correction the way dry ground absorbed rain and he never made the same mistake twice.
Beatrice : you know your problem James?
James: simi tai ji?
Beatrice had told him once in a teasing manner, over a rare quiet moment at the nurses’ station.
Beatrice :You too good already. Some of your batchmates going to hate you for it.
James had laughed, that Ah Beng laugh he never bothered changing.
James : because…
He jabbed a thumb to his face and struck a pose.
James : I is…’zai’…
Smack!
That was one of the very first smack Beatrice had given James.
Beatrice: zai? zai your head!
James: oow…oww…
She also remembered, with a clarity that had only sharpened over the years rather than faded, the week everything fell apart.
She remembered James’s face at the tribunal announcement.
It was a kind of stunned stillness.
She remembered Larry Foo’s face in the same corridor, trying very hard to look like sympathy but his eyes. There was something about Larry’s eyes which never quite managed to match the rest of the performance.
She remembered thinking, with the plain, unglamorous certainty of a woman who had spent years learning to read people under pressure.
James did not do this.
Not because she had proof. She’d had none.
But she had watched James Ong correct his own dosing errors before anyone caught them. She had watched him thank a nurse for a catch he could easily have claimed as his own instinct. She had watched him, a hundred small times, choose the harder, more honest path when the easier, more flattering one was sitting right there for the taking.
A man like that did not hide upskirt photographs in his locker. It wasn’t him. It never had been.
She hadn’t said anything at the time. Nobody had asked a nurse manager’s opinion on a doctor’s disciplinary tribunal, and even if they had, she’d have known better than to say something that could cost her own position without changing his outcome by a single vote.
She’d hated herself a little for that in the years since. Not enough to have done anything differently, she had a daughter in polytechnic and a mother in a nursing home, and principled unemployment didn’t pay for either.
And then James simply vanished. No goodbye. No address. Six years of silence so complete that half the ward had assumed the worst, and Beatrice had privately hoped, that wherever he’d gone, it hadn’t broken the thing in him that made him worth training in the first place.
Beatrice: James…for what it’s worth…I never believed you did it…
James: did what?
Beatrice : the upskirt videos…
James snorted and gave a dismissive wave.
Then a voice from behind stopped the brief reunion.
Larry : Beatrice…is that our dinner? I’ve got four minutes before I need to be back on the floor…
James recognized the voice before he saw the face, the way you recognize thunder before you see the flash.
Dr Larry Foo came around the corner in his white coat with the JSGH crest and the little embroidered Dr. L. Foo, Senior Consultant, Cardiothoracic Surgery
Larry hadn’t changed. If anything he’d solidified into a more expensive version of the same man, better haircut, more expensive watch, same fuck face that had once looked at James across a locker room the way you’d look at something that had wandered into the wrong building.
Larry’s eyes found James’s face.
James watched the exact moment recognition landed ,he caught the small flinch.
Larry : Ja…James?
His eyes flicked from James’s face to the delivery bag slung across his back, and something in his expression did an ugly, satisfied thing, the corner of his mouth twitching like he was trying not to smile and failing.
Larry : wow…food delivery…
Larry said, like he was reading the punchline of a joke someone else had already told him.
Larry : That’s… huh. That’s really something. I always wondered what happened to you.
He took the food from Beatrice.
Larry : Guess I got my answer.
James kept his expression neutral.
James : enjoy your meal…
He turned to Beatrice.
James: Sister Lau…take care ya…
Larry’s felt a little pissed at the fact that James had said something ordinary instead of giving him the satisfaction of a reaction. He turned without another word and walked back toward the hospital, already dialing someone on his phone.
James suspect Larry was about to tell somebody a very entertaining story about the Ah beng he used to know.
Beatrice watched him go, then turned back to James, her face gone soft with something between pity and fury on his behalf.
Beatrie : don’t mind him…He’s Senior Consultant now. Practically running half of Cardiothoracic. Everyone hates working with him but nobody says it out loud.
James smiled but said nothing.
Beatrice : where you parked?
James : open air parking…over there…
Beatrice : let me walk with you…
They were halfway back to his scooter when a voice cut across the carpark.
Rachel : Beatrice! who is the next of kin for…
Beatrice turned, saw Rachel coming after her and whispered a hurried goodbye to James.
Beatrice : I got to go…you have my number…call me…you better call me i tell you…
James cast a 2nd look at Rachel who did not even meet his eye. Why would she? He’s just a food delivery guy.
Then, as he got on his scooter, Rachel glanced at him for exactly one second. She registered the uniform, the delivery bag and the helmet, and she looked away immediately.
Nothing in her expression suggested she found anything there worth a second look. She was talking to Beatrice and they walked back into the building.
She looked familiar in the way that faces sometimes do when you’ve seen them in a different context or someone from a different chapter of your life. Like seeing your kindergarden friend who was crying in his nappy suddenly becoming a Commando officer, or the girl sitting beside you in class who was always digging her nose suddenly going viral as a hot influencer.
It takes a moment for things to come together in the head.
James put on his helmet and took a 2nd look at Rachel.
She had the kind of composure that read as coldness from a distance, an ice queen. He started his bike and moved off, and as he did, memories of Rachel started coming back.
…
Six Years Earlier
The small pantry smelled like instant coffee and stress sweat, and James was elbow deep in his bag looking for his stethoscope when Rachel Neo approached him.
Rachel : James…where is Larry?
James: No idea…i’m not lost and found…
Rachel : Tsk…
She rolled her eyes and walked off. That was probably one of the few rare occasions they spoke. Perhpas one of the last he remembered.
He found his stethoscope, slung it around his nec and that was the last ordinary morning of his medical career.
James had never wanted to be a doctor. Not for the career, the money, or the anything that mattered. He wasn’t even interested in medicine in the first place. He simply did it just to prove that someone like himself, can do it if they want to. And he end up falling in love with the subject.
James : Wah KNN, i thought only in the movies then so much blood…really so bloody
He’d said, during his first week in the A&E watching a trauma case come in. One of the senior doctor had actually turned to look at him like he’d said something obscene in church.
It wasn’t just the words that were inappropriate. It was the accent they came wrapped in, the cadence of a neighbourhood school kid who’d fought his way into medicine through sheer bloody mindedness and a stubborn refusal to accept that people like him didn’t end up in white coats.
His father sold fish at the wet market in Ang Mo Kio. His mother did alterations in the HDB flat.
Nobody in his family had ever set foot in a lecture theatre, let alone a medical school, and when James got his acceptance letter he’d had to explain to his own mother what “conditional offer” meant.
He worked part time, took a loan, but did he worked.
While his batch mates went overseas on study breaks, James pulled overnight shifts at a snooker and darts palour. It’s usually quiet at night, so he studied while on duty at 2 am.
Working at night spots, it’s common to see fights and scuffles broke out.
Most will want to avoid situations like these but for James, those were free practical.
He earned a reputation for fixing people up. Cuts, stitches, in fact, he had a good side gig going on.
An entire travel trolley filled with disposable suture pack.
Each pack contained all the essential surgical instruments and preparation materials required to clean and stitch a wound.
Sometimes, certain individuals, just don’t want to head to the hospital or clinics. Especially when they were high on drugs or bleeding like a zombie after a gang fight.
James didn’t have access to local anesthetics though. Those were controlled items but doing a stitch without local anesthetics was also a way to show how ‘man’ the men really were.
Word of his ‘illegal’ clinic spread among the local triads. His boss didn’t mind, as long as they paid the cover charge for entering the snooker parlour and bought a drink.
The gangs could be fighting in another part of Singapore at 2am, but at 4am, they will be at the same snooker parlour queuing up for James with a beer in their hands.
It was either that, or having to explain to the hospital how did they get a cut like this while high on whatever substance they chose to put in their body.
James good friend, Ah hock, didn’t understand his choice.
Hock : Bro…sell durian with me la…we sell 1 season, can rest whole year you know or not?
James: I…don’t like top open durians…i only like to eat…
Hock watched James highlight a page of the Netter’s atlas like it owed him money.
Hock : you learn medicine, is because you want to see pretty girls’ neh neh is it? heheh
James: fuck you la…you always whole head filled with dirty things…
Hock : hehehe…but hospital…wah lan eh…all those top JC kids, elite until cannot elite kind of family. What father doctor, mother doctor, even their maid also retired doctor from another country…
James: You think too much…
Hock : You think they belong there? Look at you…your hand the tattoo and ang kong…people think you debt collector…
James: So?
Hock : Bro…it’s going to be twice as hard to proof you are half as good…
James : Simi lan? What half as good? I’m just as good…
Hock : aiyah…whatever la…you don’t want to admit, there’s also nothing i can do.
James had thought about what Hock said often.
The truthful answer was he did not belong to the group of typical students in medical school.
James : I know my type…don’t usually get in there…but…someone has to be the first…
Hock : KNN, you mean smoking, shaking leg, throw middle finger and hokkien while trying to explain to a patient why he needed a surgery?
James : ahahah….i’ll quit smoking….
By his final year, James’s hands had become something close to famous within the small, gossip-fed ecosystem of the surgical department.
Not officially though.
But word spreads in the sluice rooms and through registrars gossip over coffee.
“That chao ah beng…James? He closed that laceration so clean, didn’t even need a second pass.”
“James found the bleeder in four minutes, the reg was still scrubbing in.”
“His hands are steady, for someone who talks like that.”
Somehow, against every reasonable prediction anyone in his life had ever made about a boy that used to hang out at arcades and who started smoking at 14, he’d made it all the way to his final year of housemanship.
One of the best surgical hands in his cohort too.
That was the problem in the end. Not that he was bad at anything.
It was because he was good at everything, and still sounded like a Chao ah beng who works in Geylang.
Some people could not tolerate that no matter how loudly James’ capabilities spoke for themselves.
Larry Foo was James’ course mate, the son of a hospital board member, groomed since secondary school for exactly this trajectory, and he hated James to the core.
Larry is the kind of man that has been told he was the best every day in his life, from his 4000 a month pre school, to the elite primary schools parents bankrupt themselves to get an address nearby just so their kids can attend, to the elite institutions that minister’s kids go to. Every fucking day, he was reminded that he was an elite, above the rest of the population. He was the best.
Only to realise that was not the truth, and to make things worse, James was the one that made him realise it.
Larry : You know your prolem James?
Larry spoke out one evening at a gathering in the pantry to celebrate a nurse’ birthday.
James cocked his head towards him, his blonde fringe dangling down over his left eye.
Larry : You may be good. But you’ll never be one of us. You know that, right? You can operate like a dream and you’ll still walk into a private practice interview one day and open your mouth and it’ll be over. hhahah…hahaha
Almost everyone in the room laughed except Beatrice who frowned at the comment.
James: Then…i shall avoid private practise then…i’m fine with staying in public healthcare…
His comeback did not sit well with Larry.
He hadn’t understood that some men will forgive you for beating them once. They will not forgive you for making it look easy, over and over, in front of the nurses they’re trying to impress.
The tribunal took place during a historic period in Singapore.
The country was busy preparing for a visit by leaders of 2 counteries.
Trump and Kim are going to meet in Singapore. While everyone is excited about the meet and the prospect of long lasting peace among nations, the tribunal overshadowed it all.
James remembered it in fragments, the way you remember a car accident, not the whole scene, just pieces and out of order.
The folder on the table. The photographs, printed and laid out, the ipad, the phone.
Prof Chua : James, it will make things easier for everyone if you just admit it…
James: I will not admit something i never did…
Prof Chua : They’re from your locker..
James: My locker …like every other, has a $5, 3 number lock…you can break that in minutes…
Prof Chua : It’s unfortunate that you think doctors sharing the same locker room are capable of breaking locks just to do this…
James : Oh fuck off…
Prof Chua :what did you say?
James : I…have never seen those shit before…that’s not even my phone…i use Andriod! That’s a fucking iphone…
Prof Chua : We prefer to keep a lid on this James…involving the police…will open up a can of worms…These were found inside your locker, which you yourself confirmed was locked with a combination only you knew.
James: Then someone else knew it…what kind of pea size brains do you guys have if you can’t come to the conclusion that this whole thing stinks of a setup? There isn’t even a fucking password on all those!
James cursed as he looked at the table.
At all 5 consultants and 2 board members.
Larry was there too, taking minutes of the hearing.
Larry refused to meet his eyes.
Prof Chua : The Institution finds it cannot, in good conscience, continue Dr. Ong’s attachment. Our decision is final. You may pack your belongings and go…
James cleared his locker and stormed out of the hospital, bought a packet of cigarette and lit up at the HDB void deck across the street.
Singapore kept moving, unbothered, because in a few hours President Trump and Chairman Kim were due to shake hands at a hotel across the island and half the city’s attention was pointed at Sentosa.
No one had energy and time for a houseman caught with upskirt materials.
Professor Anthony Lim found him 2 hours later, sitting on the low wall outside the hospital’s staff car park, still in his white coat.
James had gone back for the discounted food in the foodcourt for staff. No point letting the 15% off go to waste on his last day.
Prof Lim : James…
Prof lim sat down beside the young man.
He was sixty-one then, already half-retired from active surgery, mostly doing outpatient clinics and teaching.
Prof Lim : Lim kopi mai?
James: Prof…i don’t think…you should be seen with me…security almost escorted me out earlier after i was done with the mee pok in the foodcourt. I don’t think I’m allowed on hospital premises anymore, Prof.
Prof : This is the car park. Technically ambiguous jurisdiction.
For a while neither of them said anything.
James: I didn’t do it Prof…i like teasing some of the pretty nurses and doctors…but i didn’t do it…
James said softly in resignation.
Prof Lim : I know…i believe you…
James turned to look at him.
James: you do?
Prof Lim : I know your rotations. I know your call schedule for those four months. Two of the dates on those photo metadata timestamps, you were on a twenty eight hour shift with me in the ICU. I remember, because you fell asleep on beside Nurse Sandra, on the same ICU bed…
James : shit…Prof i…
Prof Lim : I knew nothing happened. Everyone was just exhausted…You were snoring, Sandra was just beside you for less than 5 minutes because she could not stand the snoring, but unfortunately for you…someone who likes Sandra, didn’t like the idea of another man sleeping beside her, even if it was to catch a quick snooze.
Prof Lim : I raised it internally…but nobody wanted to hear it.The board had already decided the story they wanted, and you don’t have the right surname or backing to argue with a story like that.
James : CCB…KNNBCCB!
He cursed out loudly and jumped off the wall..
James: Prof…but…
Prof Lim : Because proving who actually did it would take longer than the tribunal was willing to wait, and because some people in that room needed this to be over quickly and needed you gone quietly.
Lim looked out at the car park and saw a car driving against the flow of traffic.
Prof Lim : I am telling you this so you understand something James. This was not justice. This was convenience wearing justice’s clothes. I need you to survive knowing that difference, because if you walk away from this telling yourself the system was right and you were somehow deserving of it, it will kill something in you that I don’t think you can get back.
James fist were clenched. He could feel that teenage fury of charging into a gangfight first start to churn in his stomach.
Prof Lim : James…the world is unfair…even more so…to someone like you…
It took him almost 10 minutes to get his heart rate back to normal.
He looked at the only person in the entire hospital that bothered to come to him.
James: what do i do now Prof?
Lim was quiet for a long moment. Then he took out his phone and made a call in a language James didn’t knew he speak.
James: You speak Korean?
Prof Lim smiled.
Prof Lim : There is a delegation flying out tonight,
Lim said.
Prof Lim : Medical support staff, attached informally to the summit’s diplomatic corps. Officially it does not exist. I know someone on it. He is looking for a pair of hands he can trust completely, in a place where the only currency that matters is whether you can save the patient in front of you.
James: huh? Prof…i don’t understand…
Prof Lim : James…go to North Korea…
James: What?
Prof Lim : You will not be able to tell anyone where you are for some time. You will not be able to come back for… I don’t know. Years, maybe.
James :Is this a joke?
Prof Lim : I cannot promise it will be safe…and i cannot promise it will be comfortable, and I cannot promise you it will fix anything.
He looked at James, and for the first time all day, someone looked at him like he was still worth something.
Prof Lim : But it is a place where nobody will ask what your accent means before they let you hold a scalpel. And I think, James, that you need somewhere in this world that will let you become exactly as good as you actually are, with nothing else in the way.
James stared at Lim, trying to discern if it was a joke. Perhaps an attempt to make him feel better.
Prof Lim : there are patients there too…they also need help…from doctors who don’t care about money, bungalows, fast cars…People who didn’t give a fuck if their insurance plans were on the highest tier before they propose treatment plans…there is much to learn there too…
James’s hands went to his forehead, before swiping up his blonde centre parted hair. He exhaled, and blew air by puffing up his cheeks, trying to digest what he just heard.
Then he just stared at Prof Lim for a long time.
James : ok…
Prof Lim : you’ll go?
James: yes…i’ll go…to North Korea…