► Once upon a billion years ago, a dying star forged the iron that flows in our blood right now.
YOU know what’s great about being Malaysian? We’re entitled to things. Medical things. And if you carry a certain little red book, those things get even better.
I call it my little red blood book. If you know, you know. If you don’t – go to General Hospital, roll up your sleeve, and find out what I’m talking about.
Not everyone can have one. To get yours, you need to give at least 500ml of something money cannot buy.
It works like a loyalty card – though it isn’t one. Your donor record. The quiet ledger of every time you showed up and gave something that cannot be manufactured.
Walk-in donors receive iron and magnesium supplements after each session. Give consistently enough and free outpatient treatment enters the picture. Eventually, first-class ward privileges.
I am not telling you this to make giving sound transactional. I am telling you because most people have no idea. And because the best reason to donate remains the simplest: someone will need it, and you can provide it.
But before that argument – and we will get there – I want to linger on something stranger. The blood bank sorts by type. And type, as it turns out, is something people have feelings about.
I am Type B
In the blood type personality system popularised in Japan and never shaken off across East Asia, this means something.
Type B: independent, creative, self-motivated. Passionate when engaged. Completely, infuriatingly indifferent when not. Resists routine. Resists being told what to do. The person in the room thinking about something else entirely – and occasionally that something turns out to be brilliant.
I will not pretend none of this land.
The system, ketsueki-gata, was formalised in 1927, revived in the 1970s, and never left. In Korea it became social currency – the first question at a party, the filter on a dating profile. Here it arrived softly, carried by Japanese dramas and K-pop and human appetite for a framework that explains why people are the way they are.
That is not the cool part.
The cool part is what it reveals: we insist on making sense of people before we commit to them. We sort. We categorise. We reach for any framework that turns the mystery of another person into something we can file away.
And here is the strange irony: blood actually does come in different types. Blood is thicker than water – yet blood arrives in gradients. A, B, AB, O. Positive. Negative. Six hundred known antigens beyond that.
Maybe that is why we find it so satisfying. Biology hands us categories. We turn them into stories.
The Chinese map of you
The Chinese relationship with birth is older. Layered. Operates on a different scale entirely.
Your birth date – year, month, day, hour – produces the bazi, the Eight Characters. Each corresponds to an element: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. Together they form a temperamental blueprint. A map of personality and compatibility that a practitioner reads the way a mechanic reads a diagnostic.
Alongside it sits the zodiac. Twelve animals, twelve years. The Dragon: ambitious, magnetic – the sign parents have historically timed pregnancies to produce. The Goat: creative, gentle, sometimes considered unlucky.
Here is what interests me. The sophistication of the underlying logic. The bazi does not claim the stars control you. It claims you entered a world already in motion, and that motion shaped your arrival. Metaphysics or metaphor – either way, it gives people a precise language for talking about who fits with whom. Precise enough to feel useful.
Both systems do the same work. They sort. They predict. They prepare. They make us feel slightly less at the mercy of other people’s fundamental unpredictability.
The number that changes everything
118.5 million units of blood donated globally each year. Still not enough. A single car accident victim can require 100 units. Blood cannot be manufactured. No synthesis. No workaround. Red cells survive 42 days. Platelets survive five. The bank must be replenished on a cycle that never stops.
Now the rarest end. AB negative: fewer than one percent globally. Beyond the standard eight types, over 600 known antigens differentiate blood. At the extreme sits Rhnull – golden blood – fewer than 50 recorded cases in history. People with Rhnull cannot simply walk into a hospital. Their survival depends on strangers they will never meet, across borders they may never cross.
Most of us are not that rare. Most of us are O positive. A positive. B. Common. Reliable. Always needed.
That ordinariness is a kind of power.
Now imagine your blood were worth 1 bitcoin. Imagine 10 people needed it tonight. What would actually matter about those 10 people?
Hold that.
The itch that doesn’t go away
Underneath all of it – the types, the charts, the zodiac calculations – sits something that is not irrationality.
It is fear. Dressed in the clothes of discernment.
Marcus Aurelius spent his Meditations trying to separate the raw event from the story we layer over it. Your blood type is a fact. What you decide it means about someone’s character – that is the story you added. Stories are useful. They are not truth.
The Laozi warns against forcing. The Dao does not prefer one tributary over another. The Quran says the most honoured person is the most mindful – not the most compatible. Not the right sign. The moment we insist that birth configuration makes someone more worthy, we are trying to manage a river with a spreadsheet.
So here is the uncomfortable question: if we know labels are insufficient, why do we keep reaching for them?
Because not knowing is terrifying. Categories give us the feeling of knowing. Not knowledge itself – just the feeling.
That is not nothing. It is simply not everything.
This week’s practice
No blood type profile tells you whether you will donate. No zodiac reading maps the hour you walk into a clinic and roll up your sleeve. That decision belongs to you. Right now. Not to the year you were born. Not to the letter assigned to your cells.
If you are eligible – most healthy adults between 18 and 60 are – make an appointment this month. Bring your red book. Or get one.
First-timers: no illness in the past week, six hours of sleep, no alcohol or medication in the last 48 hours. Nervous? Imagine yourself on the other end. The one who needs the blood.
The bank does not need you to be the right kind of person.
It needs you to be a person who gives.
We will always keep sorting each other. By type. By year. By element. By animal.
But imagine your blood was worth 1 bitcoin and 10 people needed it.
Would you ask to see their birth chart? Their sign? Would you pause to wonder if they were Type B – passionate, difficult, worth the trouble?
When someone needs a bag of blood, none of those labels are in the room.
Only the decision to show up.-
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
