THE best thing you can do if your penis gets cut off is to put it in a zip-lock bag and then into a four degree Celsius mixture of water and ice. 'That way you reduce the organ's metabolic rate, its need for oxygen, and you preserve the viability of the tissue.' This bit of wisdom comes from Dr Peter Chan, the urologist and surgeon at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin who reattached two of the territory's three severed penises of recent memory. 'Well, actually,' he gently corrects, 'only one was a reattachment.The other was a reconstruction'.
The now infamous Lorena Bobbitt 'incident' - in which a 24-year-old Venezuelan woman sliced off her American husband's organ with an eight-inch paring knife - may have inflamed the battle of the bedroom throughout America, but all over Asia, people have dismissed it with a shrug that says, 'been there, done that'. Because when it comes to settling the score with a philandering husband or lover by lopping off his manhood, Asian women have been doing it for years.
Take Thailand, for example. In the 1970s, more than 100 women severed the penises of their sleeping husbands. Perpetrated mostly by simple, albeit vengeful, country women, the cuttings evolved into a national joke and the source of many folk-tales. Legendhas it that the wife of a poultry farmer fed her husband's shrivelled member to his ducks; that another incensed wife tied her husband's stub to a helium balloon and sent it skyward; and yet another minced the organ in a blender.
Though that '70s fad has gone the way of Afros and Abba, it is not uncommon to see pictures on the mud-flaps of Thai lorries depicting a man fleeing from a woman waving a scythe with a gaggle of ducks following behind.
In Japan, just after World War II, a woman did the same deed to her lover, establishing herself as a national folk heroine and inspiring the Nagisa Oshima film cult classic, In The Realm Of The Senses. In China earlier this year, a woman sliced off her husband's penis after a fortune-teller told her that 'allowing it to grow back' would restore their relationship to its previous happy state.
So you see, in Asia there has always been a need for the skills of a surgeon like Dr Chan. He is a charming man with salt-and-pepper hair and a welcoming smile. He strikes you as the kind of person you could trust if one of your appendages was brutally severed from your body. He greets us in a crumpled lab coat, his eyeglasses slightly askew, and invites us into an office cluttered with the requisite medical books, official forms, and wall charts.
It's not exactly the Penis Hall of Fame we were expecting - with plastic models of phalluses, penis-shaped throw pillows, a Gray's Anatomy diagram of the organ's ins and outs, and perhaps a framed portrait of Sigmund Freud. After all, Dr Chan is the firstsurgeon in the territory to build a human penis from scratch.