The Interview

DOCTOR ALVIN Chan Yee-shing is a singing paediatrician better known to his youthful fans here as Dr Uncle. He writes jolly songs with educational lyrics such as, 'I love my eyes, wonderful eyes, look at colours near and wide/ I will be clean and love my eyes, I will be happy and wise'. And: 'Who has got a cold and a running nose?/ Skin red and itchy. Sore little tummy. Is it allergy?/ Watch out for asthma. Tell me what is allergy.' He estimates he has sold about 30,000 cassettes and CDs, and his VCDs are now available.

I watched one while waiting for Chan to turn up at his Mongkok surgery; he was attending a feverish child in hospital and had sent a message that he would be delayed, so a nurse kindly put a video on. Chan soon appeared on screen, beaming endlessly in a Smiley-face T-shirt, while children dressed as bumble-bees buzzed around or did exercises in a school playground, all the while singing merrily about their health and love of nature. It was very uplifting.

Eventually, the real Chan arrived and shot into his consulting room, looking mildly frazzled, and after a short pause the nurse ushered me in. It so happened I had risen, pretty reluctantly, from a sick bed to do this interview, and what with the revolting sneezing and coughing he had to endure for the first five minutes, there was some understandable confusion on Chan's part about whether he should be answering questions or doing a quick diagnosis. 'Perhaps you have an allergy as well,' he said, hopefully (as the lyrics quoted indicate, he is pretty hot on allergies and believes about half the population of Hong Kong is suffering from allergy-related illness). I said, feebly, I didn't think so.

He has been singing all his life. A few years ago, the Asian Wall Street Journal ran a story on Chan - he'd pinned it to his waiting-room wall, among other clippings - in which the writer remarked that the good doctor resembles the sort of crooner you might find in a Las Vegas lounge. I have to agree. In fact, if Engelbert Humperdinck had been born in Hong Kong, taken up paediatrics and worn Winnie-the-Pooh ties, the result might look like Chan.

Not that Chan would ever do anything so frivolous as sing for mere entertainment's sake. He is an earnest man, and the sort of meaningful Western singers he admired as a medical student in the early 1970s - Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary - prodded him into writing his own, thought-provoking lyrics. 'We had some awakening as Chinese at this time: in 1972 President Nixon was visiting China, there was ping-pong diplomacy and the first round of the dispute about the Diaoyu Islands, and it made me philosophical. We have our own culture and people, why not share our own feelings?' So he wrote music for Breakthrough, a youth-counselling organisation, and later released Hong Kong's first album of contemporary Christian songs in Cantonese. By this stage, he'd decided to specialise in paediatrics because, as he sincerely put it, 'I like children and it's just like in the song The Greatest Love Of All, you remember the lyrics, 'I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.' ' Chan paused. 'Whitney Houston. Of course, when I chose paediatrics, this song was not yet in the world.' Dr Uncle sprang into life in 1995 as a way of introducing healthy living to increasingly unhealthy Hong Kong children and their parents. Songs about the environment, proper food, safety and happy families now flow from his pen. Considering he has two children of his own, I couldn't imagine when he found time to write all his ditties, but he says he can compose anywhere - in the MTR, in his surgery between appointments, in the shower. 'I can write songs within one or two minutes because music is always in my mind.' Chan began rummaging through his cupboards to produce some recent music sheets. He showed me an item in an Airport Authority newsletter about a song he'd written to coincide with the opening of Chek Lap Kok. It was not, as you may suppose, an elegy to lost luggage ('I like to be positive, I don't like people to be just finger-pointing'), but was about how a place is reflected in its people's behaviour more than its fine buildings. Alongside the piece there was a cartoon of Chan, in a captain's hat, flying a planeload of happy children, and further down the words 'Oh!No!No!'.

I thought it was surely an additional, post-official-inquiry, scandalised verse, but Chan said no, it was actually a refrain from another song called Tissue Paper Killer. 'That song is to tell people not to overuse tissue paper, squandering tissue paper, oh! no! no! we should love nature and the forest.' Absolutely right, I said, withdrawing my hand from the box of tissues on his desk I'd been truffling through for most of the interview. Chan, a courteous man, laughed and said, 'So sorry for that.' He produced another song and remarked, 'This is one I wrote for the Hong Kong Medical Association, the music is very good, I'll sing it to you.' Which he did ('We will ask, we will search/ We'll excel, be alert/ Serve the people of Hong Kong') in a low voice and with none of that throbbing self-consciousness which can make such moments a form of torture. At the end, I told Chan he must be a wow on karaoke evenings, but he looked serious and replied, 'The function of karaoke is threefold. One, social interaction. Two, to release emotions - people can sing very lousily but they enjoy it. Three, it's a popular fashion thing. But I don't need these things. I sing well myself. I sing as a tool to help people understand.' Just in case I hadn't got the message, he rang a few hours later and said, 'I did not finish one particular sentence when I was talking to you. Learn with fun, so that children are motivated. Learn through playing, learn with fun, play to learn, study with fun. This is what I try to do with my songs.'