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This fictional story reads like a first-person screenplay penned in lithe and cheery tones. Once you begin, the narrative seems intent on keeping you in its grip, with nary a lull in the excitement and drama. The protagonist, an adept woman driven to turn her life around after a divorce by securing a stable job and income, takes a position with a problem-riddled cleaning squad. Although dogged by external pressures, the team’s attitude is fatalistic. “We’d love to find someone to blame, but who?”

The social issues raised in this story are a front to what is really a classic fairy tale that spotlights, not unlike the derision faced by the cleaning squad, the everyday challenges that women face living in a “man’s world”. Fairy tales like this persist because of the difficulties and unfairness of real life. They give hope to those bent on changing reality and offer an escape, however ephemeral, into romantic fantasy.

Being able to love is an ability. But no one ever tells using that allowing ourselves to be loved is also an ability. Love is not a given. It can be lost. It can be forgotten. But, if we’re lucky, we might, in some magical moment, recover love.

Author Chou Mu-Tzu describes many life paths in this book. Some twist and turn. Some are so faint they can scarcely be seen. Some unfold in ways that defy logic. But, just as all rivers return to the sea, all of these paths can be traced back to our need for intimacy, and our willingness to assume the burdens of intimacy.

Whether we speak of intimacy or love, both imply a kind of fatalism. Both have their source in our family of origin. With a kind of genetic logic, we replicate this inheritance, shaping it to the words that are fashionable at the time. Perhaps we call it an avoidant attachment style. Perhaps we use one of the countless phrases coined by gurus and spiritual teachers, calling it “the power of attraction,” or “the cosmic ordering service”, packaging it with a confectionary sweetness. In the end, however, it all comes back to the same thing: you weren’t loved well in childhood, and, as a result, you don’t know what real intimacy is.

Because this pierces the core of the inner emptiness and deficiency we hold so close, we struggle even more to draw close to one another, to depend on each other, hoping to receive a tiny piece of the life’s warmth.

This 75-year-old author is a specialist in neurology, a breast cancer survivor, has undergone surgeries for cataracts, a bulging disc, and a dislocated vertebra, and has consciously chosen to never marry. In this personable and approachable book, this unique woman helps dispel readers’ fears, teaching them the principles of happiness for the final stage of life’s journey, even when the road ahead is rough going.

Eschewing technical jargon and confusing explanations, the book is an easy read, even for seniors who might already be wondering if they are slowing down mentally. The author approaches things in a step-by-step fashion. Her suggestions are intended to have low barrier-to-entry, and don’t require any financial resources to follow. In fact, most of her advice revolves around principles for healthy living that we can follow at any age. If you’re caring for an aging parent, consider reading this book together, and encouraging each other to put these principles into practice.

As the author suggests, being too hard on ourselves won’t accomplish anything. Just as we all must one day face death, so must we all face aging. And even if the process cannot always be graceful, if we can live happily with aging, we will have done enough.

In this book, a third-generation victim of the White Terror traces her family history back through this traumatic period. In 2008, the author stumbled across a reference to her grandfather’s final letter in the national archives, sparking an inquiry into her family’s collective memory, and a quest to have the letter finally returned to her family.

Starting from her personal experiences growing up, she begins to uncover the shadows cast over her family by her maternal grandfather, who was disappeared during the White Terror. Through this challenging process, the author helps to restore this period of cruel devaluation of human life to the historical record, while also easing the longstanding tensions between herself and her mother, and addressing the subtle subject of intergenerational trauma. Challenging routine accounts of the White Terror, the book vividly expands our understanding of history by introducing the possibility for collective healing.

This diary of a medical anthropologist and her mother’s simultaneous illnesses is far more than a daily record of suffering; it is a demonstration of the way disease can become the central axis of life, determining the rhythm and texture of the passing days. Interweaving rational analysis and shifting currents of emotion, the book forms a powerfully persuasive whole. Much of the credit for this goes to author Liu Shao-Hua’s dual status as both a scholar and sufferer of illness.

As the manifestations and negative impacts of disease pour in with the regularity of a news broadcast, the author repeatedly affirms the importance of love and companionship during this time of hardship. In addition to the preparations for treatment, the mental process of coming to grips with serious illness, and intimate portraits of family life, the book also gives a sincere account of the author’s life philosophy on cohabiting with disease. Far more than a reconciliation with the past, this wisdom points us to new ways of dealing with present and future struggles of life.

The author’s perceptiveness is like a thin blade, cutting its sustained and silent course through questions of life and death, suffering and decline, before slowly being ground down to a soft gleam by Buddhist wisdom and philosophy. Like a stone polished smooth in the river’s current, macrocosm and microcosm unfold side by side, the grand scale of universal time flowing through a blade of grass touched by morning dew.

When addressing what is abnormal in his mother’s condition, the author writes with such depth and precision that he transcends any conventional standard of human behavior, leaving us with no objects on which to depend, no words sufficient to further decode what has already been put down. Yes, the human bodies in this text carry disease and madness, but they also seem to have left behind any association with the entanglements of speech in this mundane world.

I wonder how many Buddhist Sutras the author has perhaps recited, or copied out, gentle and fragile as poetry? And, what might be his purpose in writing such a book? Asking questions within questions, seeking the suffering within suffering, he draws himself closer to his own inner truth, even if only to catch a glimpse of the painful answers that lie hidden there.