I would often get hoarse through the sheer physical strain of having to talk so much, and when I was rasping one night at Tiong Bahru, he handed me a packet of neatly sliced ginseng in the paper wrapping of a nearby Chinese medicine shop. I stopped sucking lozenges and, on his advice, put a slice between my cheek and gums and kept it there. It worked like magic. There was something in it that stimulated the flow of saliva and soothed my throat. Thereafter, I never went out on a tour without a packet of ginseng in my pocket.
