Sascha Qian

Ping-Pong

2012-01-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

Yellow

2011-12-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

"Although Asian Americans are often stereotyped as intellectuals, we are not expected to be public intellectuals. In an influential article in the March 1995 Atlantic Monthly, NYU journalism professor Robert Boynton praises the rebirth of the public intellectual. Boynton argues that the public intellectual has a new guise. He identifies African American public intellectuals as the most prominent of this breed, celebrity thinkers such as the triumvirate of Harvard professors, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, and William Julius Wilson. Asian Americans are conspicuously absent from the television talk shows and the op-ed pages; we have no Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, much less a Gates, West, or Wilson. Whatever we may think of their strategies for activism or the substance of their commentary, we know their names, we expect them to have something to say, they are given a forum, and they are influential. We are even missing fro the conversation when the subject is Asia. We are simultaneously expected to have something to say about Asian and precluded from speaking as authorities about Asia."

-- Frank H. Wu in Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.

The Prodigal Son (sketches, first draft)

2011-12-18T05:37:00.001-08:00

When Song was nine, his country friends taught him how to swim in the local river. They took off their shirts and waded into the rapid frothy water. Song clung to a basketball with the whole weight of his upper body and, to his delight, floated. Oh, to be weightless! He closed his eyes to enjoy the bright sun and the warm water. Suddenly, he heard giggling and felt firm hands wresting the ball away from him. For a second, he was submerged in bubbling indigo. He swallowed, tasting the bitterness of the water, which was also swarming into his eyes and nose. He fought blindly. He kicked his legs. He waved his arms. Anything to battle against the weight of his mortal body. Then just as suddenly, there was a rush of buoyant light and air. When he was able to sustain his head above water and open his eyes again, his friends were already resting on the bank, cleaning their teeth with sharp blades of grass.

“Scoundrels,” he yelled. “You almost killed me.”

“But now you are swimming,” they said. “Just move your arms a little more.”

They joined him in the river again and showed him how to move his limbs like a frog and how to glide on his back. They played till sunset and then he walked home in soaked trousers.

His father had listened to the events of the day and laughed—a sense of humor, which evaporated years later when Song led his younger brother Didi into the same stretch of the river and kicked the ball away. After watching Didi thrashing wildly for a minute with no apparent progress, Song whisked him out of the water. On the bank, Didi doubled over and heaved up spoonfuls of the river water; then, he ran home, crying.

When Song finally straggled back into the courtyard, Didi aimed his trigger finger at him and yelled, “The egghead almost drowned me. I choked for hours. The fishermen said my face was blue.” His father paced around the veranda and shook his head with fury. Song had to kneel over a bench with his trousers bunched up at his ankles and only his drawers for coverage in front of his mother, his sisters, and the housekeeper--they winced with every downward stroke of his father's belt. Didi hovered in the corner, gloating. It was unbearable and unjust, Song thought as tears pooled in the corner of his eyes. Why did his father, a Confucian scholar who lectured his family daily on the importance of rationality, did not practice ‘li’ in real life? Why did his father approve of his friends and the way they treated him but could not tolerate how Song treated Didi? Song crouched for what it seemed like an eternity over that bench, his knees crunching into the cold pebbled ground, before his father threw aside the belt and retreated into the study. Song's buttocks burned for a week afterwards yet it was the inequality of his father’s love that marked him and nettled him for decades.

Rabindranath Tagore

2011-12-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

After reading mostly only American modern fiction (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Bret Easton Ellis), I found myself writing dialogue that meandered, narrators that went rogue, and characters that by the conclusion I just wanted to punch in the face. I think I filled my reading cup to the brim and it splashed over, so to speak. I love American short stories for the quirks and the tragicomedies that no other culture has developed as richly, but I've come to realize this can be to the detriment of the story. The tone tends to be overly-conscious as the writer strives so hard to leave his own mark; the overall intended meaning of the work may suffer at the expense of style.

Recently, I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's newer books The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth. She writes simply; her stories are lovely and perfect. Sometimes, one paragraph alone of hers is enough to cause my insides to crumble slightly. Mark has introduced me to Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. "Surely," he said, "surely, Lahiri read Tagore. Tagore's stories are simple and short. He's devastatingly good. He'll cut your heart in just a sentence."

And so it goes. I limit myself to two Tagore story a day because he is just that devastating. Here's an excerpt from "The Postmaster":

When he rose at dawn, the postmaster saw that his bath-water had been put out already for him (he bathed according to his Calcutta habit, in water brought in a bucket). Ratan had not been able to bring herself to ask him what time he would be leaving; she had carried the bath-water up from the river late at night, in case he needed it early in the morning. As soon as he finished the bath, the postmaster called her. She entered the room softly and looked at him once without speaking, ready for her orders. "Ratan," he said, "I'll tell the man who replaces me that he should look after you as I have; you musn't worry just because I'm going."

No doubt this remark was inspired by kind and generous feelings, but who can fathom the feelings of a woman? Ratan had meekly suffered many scoldings from her master, but these kindly words were more than she could bear. The passion in her heart exploded, and she cried, "No, no, you musn't say anything to anyone- I don't want to stay here." The postmaster was taken aback: he had never seen Ratan behave like that before.

A new postmaster came. After handing over his charge to him, the resigning postmaster got ready to leave. Before going, he called Ratan and said, "Ratan, I've never been able to give you anything. Today before I go, I want to give you something, to last you for a few days." Ecept for the little that he needed for the journey, he took out all the salary that was in his pocket. But Ratan sank to the ground and clung to his feet, saying, "I beg you, Dadababu, I beg you-- don't give me any money. Please, no one need bother about me." Then she fled, running.

The departing ostmaster sighed, picked up his carpet bag, put his umbrella over his shoulder, and, with a coolie carrying his blue-and-white striped tin trunk on his head, slowly made his way towards the boat.

When he was on the boat and it had set sail, when the swollen flood-waters of the river started to heave like the Earth's brimming tears, the postmaster felt a huge anguish: the image of a simple young village-girl's grief-stricken ace seemed to speak a great inarticulate universal sorrow. He felt a sharp desire to go back: should he not fetch that orphaned girl, whom the world had abandoned? But the wind was filling the sails by then, the swollen river was flowing fiercely, the village had been left behind, the riverside burning-ground was in view. Detached by the current of the river, he reflected philosophically that in life there are many separations, many deaths. What point was there in going back? Who belonged to whom in this world?

But Ratan had no such philosophy to console her. All she could do was wander near the post office, weeping copiously. Maybe a faint hope lingered in her mind that Dadababu might return; and this was enough to tie her to the spot, prevent her from going far. O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate. We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end, it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart's blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again.

Fire of Ice (pieces from intro scene, first draft)

2011-12-07T08:25:00.001-08:00

It is a well known fact that people like him happen almost exclusively to people like me. I am the sort who relishes scribing in daily planners, who frowns upon ice cream flavors outside of the Neopolitan spectrum. Stereotype or not, I flourish in forgotten corners; I sit in igloos of anatomy books, tracing on notebook paper the supplies of veins and arteries, the torsion of muscles and bones. He is the sort who walks up to a person he’s never talked to before. It is the first evening of December.

“Hello,” he says, slumping down at my table. He rests a set of metal crutches on the floor.

“Hello, your name’s Julian, right?”

“Something like that,” he says.

“I’ve never seen you before in class.”

“I’ve never been to class,” he says. “It discriminates against nocturnal minorities.”

“What happened to your legs?”

“Fracture of the heart,” he says. “Category, you may ask: open compound.”

“It is Julian, right?” I say.

“Listen,” he replies, leaning in. “Did you know that we’re just particles floating in a lonely white space? That we adopt new atoms and lose old atoms everyday? So that if identity is configuration, then who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow? That who you were yesterday already died?”

The study group across the aisle close their laptops, preparing to relocate; the girls watch us as they walk by and whisper to each other. I try to assess Julian’s pupillary diameter but his dark pupils extended into his dark irises. Yesterday, we learned smaller than normal suggests narcotics; bigger than normal suggests either cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, ecstasy, or marijuana. So I smile, not knowing what to say.

“Try throwing a different smile at me,” Julian says, “I am not a barking dog that you’re trying to silence with a juicy bone. I am a friend. I am a messenger. I am here to prophesize billowing electron clouds and bitter nuclear divorces and abandoned baby neutrinos. I am talking to you even when that ‘you’ and ‘I’ have fictitious borders. That’s right, Madame--if you’re lucky and a believer, you can dip your finger through this desk, that is a gazillion carbon atoms, and feel nothing but air. Try it. I insist.”

The Starling Curve: You Learn Best When You're Close to...

2011-11-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

Illustration from The Residency Survival Manual: Tools & Tips to Help You Make it Through Residency Training by Dr. Robert Bing-You

Welcome

2011-10-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: "Internshipped" is a comic strip about fictional residents in a fictional hospital working taking care of fictional patients.

Irreversible

2011-09-25T05:53:00.001-07:00

On a sleepy Saturday morning, I was typing notes into the electronic medical record when my team was paged. The patient in question seemed less oriented than his baseline. He flinched reflexively to pain but did not respond to any other stimuli. "I think he's just tired," the nurse said. She tried spooning jello into his mouth. We stared as he smacked his lips with primitive rage. His pupils which had been asymmetrical prior to admission seemed grossly more asymmetrical: one was normal sized, the other reached the rim of the eye.

"Neurology consult, CT scan of head STAT," my resident said. One of us left the room to call neurology and in-house radiology & CT tech. The nurse drew a basic metabolic panel, type & cross, and an arterial blood gas. The beepers screamed in rapid succession. Page: patient upstairs vomited bile--his abdomen was tighter than a drum, suggesting that his small bowel was obstructed and ready to perforate bacteria-laden stool into the abdomen. Page: the radiology attending asked that we call neurosurgery because the initial read for the CT scan was worrisome. Page: patient downstairs spiked fevers with low blood pressure, concerning for septic shock. Page: the tubes for the unresponsive patient were incorrectly labeled; the lab allowed no exceptions for labs drawn during a code and these tubes had to be redrawn with the correct labeling. The three of us on the floor ran from task to task without barely a breath in between. Hours later, the neurosurgeons arrived in matching strides. The scan showed a massive subdural hematoma, a dense collection of blood under the thick protective layer beneath the skull--the vital control centers of the brain were now pressing into each other. The attending explained that given the patient's age, his co-morbidities, the magnitude of the bleed, he would not be an appropriate candidate for surgery. We could only manage him medically with watchful waiting.

Diseases progress over time. Cancer cells multiply in the bone; bacteria seed the heart valves; the lung tissues harden and thicken. It is the difficult duty of the physician to declare the moment of irreversibility. We classify human suffering and call it diagnosis; we predict the length of suffering and call it prognosis. I found that these were the moments that suspend themselves in time: A young man with a malicious brain cancer slept in the intensive care unit, losing gradual touch with memory and sensorium. His family knew that he was faring poorly, but they still had faith that somehow these new and strange medications will would help him evade his final end. As the mother caressed his forehead, she still harbored hope that he would stir and recognize her face. She did not know what we knew--the recent brain scan showing further dissemination of cancer refractory to chemotherapy--until the meeting. She did not feel her stoicism vaporize until a doctor uses the word "dying" and she was suddenly overcome with loss. She did not feel weakened until she realized that her only child would leave her.

In many cases, medicine cannot reverse the escalating suffering at hand--at which point, our practices are at best measures of the remaining iotas of life. As our elderly patient laid dying, her heart failing, her kidneys failing, her liver failing, bleeding and clotting all at the same time, dropping blood pressure even on fluid boluses and all of the most powerful vasopressers, we could only stand at the bedside and be with her as she passes onto the next stage. The heart monitors showed initially the high waves of ventricular tachycardia, then the smaller beats of ventricular fibrillation and then nothing--we watched as she exhaled and curled her neck slightly. After confirming the absence of a heartbeat, we silenced the monitors and withdrew the catheters and then, we pulled the curtains to a close for the family.

Hurricane

2011-08-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Target was out of flashlights, small and large. I managed to find the last headlamp in the Camping aisle. Families were lining up at the cash register; the mothers tapped their feet and studied their watches, unusually awake for a Saturday morning. Children jumped up and down as if they were awaiting a holiday. They hauled boxes of Capri Sun and potato crisps onto the conveyor belt. I had an armful of chocolate and DVDs. You gotta wonder, what kind of survivors were we trying to be? If we were on the Titanic, I suppose, we would be the ones on the top deck, swaying to violin music. Or the ones thrashing about in the water, clinging to rubber duckies.

In the evening, the rain poured down so fast that the water splashed up. Everything was suddenly a fountain outside. I sat at the bar with friends. M and C talked about their restaurant in Hawaii. Once during a tropical storm, amidst island-wide power outage, they kept the place open and lit white candles for every table. It was the only restaurant open for miles around on the island. Crowds piled in, attracted by the music and the light. They served wine and beer and appetizers all night long.

"We treat the soul here," M said. "I write prescriptions for IV mojito."

"Speaking of which..."

I told them about a patient of ours with terminal cancer. His lady friend snuck him a bottle of Jack Daniels one night and poured it into his soda. A nurse found them and called for police intervention. They took everything away, gave him a stern talking-to, and said that he will be watched carefully should the lady friend visit again. M and C shook their heads.

Before the night ended, I started to visualize my own ideal end. In the past, I had always fantasized about taking off and disappearing into an unknown city in Europe. You know, the expensive and shiny death fantasy. Nowadays, I think I'd like to sit in a small joint like Soul with one or two people and just talk. Outside, the floods can build. After a while, after we finished talking and eating and drinking, I wouldn't mind if the waves seeped in and carried me away. It would be really nice, actually, to leave on those terms and not on anyone else's.

Ask not for whom the pager beeps, it beeps for you

2011-08-19T03:07:00.000-07:00

This is week #1 of my internal medicine sub-internship. Sub-internship means that I'm now a pseudo-intern or more precisely 50% of an intern. As senior medical students, we can gather information from nurses and consultants and labs/imaging; however, we have no legal authority to enter in orders, so all orders have to be co-signed by a resident. Not being able to have our own orders be recognized as valid immediately is a large part of why I'm only considered half of an intern and why I'm paired with another sub-intern. Together, my other half and I roam the hospital, slightly unhinged by the newness of it all.

I'm at the VA for this 4-week rotation. The walls here are oddly colored mint green or toothpaste blue. The patients range from the stoics who can withstand a tremendous level of pain to the colonels who are frustrated with not being able to command their own medical care. The group rooms for veterans feel like warzone barracks. I pre-round on the patients in the morning, collecting information basically to present at work rounds. During work rounds, we review each patient as we're walking around and I update each of my own patients on the plan of care for that day.

From that point onward, the paging starts. I page in-house cardiology, urology, GI, oncology consultants. The nurses page me. I call the floor for the nurses. The consultants page me about their recommendations for the day. What fall through the cracks often are finishing my progress notes on time, checking for new labs, and seeing the patients. I've started to develop a habit of personal rounds in the afternoon to make sure my patients are updated--it's often a nice break from calling consultants and writing notes. Unless of course, I tell them that they have to actually have to stay even though earlier we said that they can go--I hate that part.

Because we were staying later than other teams, my resident developed a system so that we can be more efficient. Now we make lists of the consultants we have to call for all of our patients and divide up the work. They call it the Assembly line; I think it's more of Mao Tse Tung's collectivism philosophy. "You take care of all of our horses." "You take care of all our hay." At end of the day, everyone benefits from going home earlier and being able to have more than 5 hours of sleep.

The Satisfactory Factory

2011-08-13T18:29:00.000-07:00

For the past month, I've been focusing on a trick for survival: Rather than focusing on happiness, I should define my threshold for satisfaction and then deriving that satisfaction. I've gleaned this from watching certain residents in the hospital who seem more adaptive than others--they are the ones who successfully console themselves with perfectly sorted notes and manicured fingernails and being able to do their laundry on an off-day. To that end, I try to feel fortunate when I can take a long shower and an extended Listerine routine. I pride myself whenever I remember to brush my teeth and turn off the lights before bed. I give myself the five glowing stars of adulthood when I Don't eat only chocolate covered snacks for dinner. While I'm sure there are more profound applications for this practice philosophy, these are the points of self-care that make me unusually satisfied, if not happy.

On "Paper Tigers"

2011-05-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

"Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility." --Wesley Yang

"Paper Tigers" by Wesley Yang is one of the most honest and meaningful articles that I've read in years. This month in New York magazine, seasoned writer Wesley Yang decided to write about the "bamboo ceiling"--the invisible barrier to the personal and professional fulfillment of Asian American individuals. He explores the arenas of education, vocational advancement, and dating. He recounts his own struggle with identity and eventually, the values that he chose and held onto with an iron grip--gladly facing poverty and isolation as consequences for being uncompromising.

Those outside the Asian-Pacific American (APA) community have commented, expressing their bewilderment. Two camps of inquiry: "Why are you guys so unhappy with so many hot women of your own kind around?" and "Didn't the very attitude of model minority allow you to be in more privileged positions?"

Meanwhile, the guttural reaction of the APA community has been centered around bias and denial:

"Why didn't he interview females?"
"How can he speak for the rest of us?"
"When is someone going to finally write that sophisticated, multi-layered article on Asian-Americanism..."

The main problem boils down to this: to those who belong in the APA community, this community does not exist. To them, there is no APA or Asian label, really. They think of themselves as individuals who have transcended the label, and that label 'Asian American' itself is just a Census checkbox. This is a population that is too heterogenous and diverse for those lumped together in it to feel comfortable with each other. Immigrant populations either fall into the highly skilled, highly educated, high income bracket or the struggling, wage earning, low income bracket. South Asians, whose parents even grew up speaking English in English schools, are often lumped together with East Asians in the perception of social hierarchy, and many argue fervently that 'South Asian American' should be divorced from the 'Asian American' label altogether. The second or third generation Asians instinctively resent the presence of the first generation immigrants (Fresh Off the Boat, FOBs)--American Born Chinese (ABCs), in particular, can be just as merciless in making fun of FOBs as Caucasians.

Basically: the well adjusted strongly resent the presence of less well adjusted and feel the need to distance and distinguish themselves socially. Yet in the eyes of the beholder, the outsiders, the label is always there. The label is strong, pervasive, evoking the same prototype again and again: an expressionless, timid, monotonous, mindless, conforming, politically neutral, muscle-atrophied, high-pitched, socially inept, empty ambition driven Chink / Jap / Curry-muncher / Slanted eyes / Pancake face --the women are happy with being fetishized, and the men are willing to do shit-work double-time while being taken for granted.

The "bamboo ceiling" that Wesley Yang writes about exists for Asians regardless of how much they approve of this label. It's not simply a barrier to their socioeconomic advancement; it's a six-walled constraint on the perception of their humanity, their rightful placement as individuals who are and can be creative, brilliant, and compassionate with a great depth of feeling.

Race is one of the most controversial aspects of our society. And rather than shying away from the topic in a fit of political correctness or denial, we should discuss and dissect it. I personally find a lot of the critiques to Wesley Yang's article to be self-defeating--it's not that the critics need him to write ten more pages capturing the heterogeneity of the population, but it's that they're greatly disturbed that he's trying to describe the label "Asian" at all. These people don't want their own cultures to be dissected; they want to make-believe that they live solely in the mainstream culture, that they can cover just as much ground as Caucasians. That is, if they only tried harder in assimilating into mainstream culture.

Race as an issue will not disappear anytime soon. Psychology research shows, using Event-Related Potential (ERP), that the race of a face is processed as early as 120 msecs, placing the calculation of race before the onset of conscious thoughts. This suggests that, when race is a factor, our "reasoning" may simply be post-hoc rationalizations of a gut reaction. Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji devised an ingenius online quiz, proving that the strong association of minority race with unattractive descriptors exists, even if these are associations that people are unwilling to admit (Click here to try it yourself).

A new study further proposes that if we can only hold seven items in our recent memory, racial bias may be a necessary mechanistic result of having race take up one or two item(s) in our memory. That is: when race is a factor, we may actually have less room in our working mind to process a person fairly.

Reading "Paper Tigers" has been a release for me in so many ways. I know, however, the critiques to those who write like him will continue. After all, this is a highly ambivalent population that we're talking about. It will be a long, long time before Asian Americans achieve united political prowess or dignified self-awareness comparable to other minorities in America.

Here's to that dream anyway.

Matching & The Machine Fates

2011-03-18T05:01:00.001-07:00

Match Day

While college ends with graduation, medical school essentially--in most of the minds involved--ends with ‘The Match’. It’s a day for which, you spent four years highlighting, making flashcards, fine-tuning your professional behavior--all at an increasing distance from family and former friends. It’s a day for which, you spent your last year gathering recommendation letters, writing a personal statement, traveling, and interviewing. The week before, you have serial nightmares. The night before, you drink to ease the anxiety and tremors. The day of, you feel positively ill but still have to glide with public grace among your classmates.

It’s a day that historically, or say even years ago, was a public event through and through. The entire graduating class of hundred to two hundred students would gather in the auditorium. The Dean would call out the names separately. As a student, you would walk down the aisle, shake hands with the Dean, and accept a closed envelope at the podium. There would typically be a pause before the ripping of the envelope.

You would read the result to yourself. You would then either burst into tears of happiness, make a Rocky victory sign, shrug with the nonchalance of someone already “in the know” (program directors aren’t subtle when they’re recruiting their Most Valuable Players), or pause for a moment longer--if you’re disappointed, there are only roughly milliseconds to fix your crestfallen expression. Regardless of internal reaction, everyone would read his or her envelope slip out-loud so that the audience will know. The slip does not contain a list of programs like a college acceptance list; instead, there is the name of only one residency program--the program that you’re matched to for the next 3-9 years depending on the specialty, the program which you must accept at face, or forgo medicine all together.

“Johns Hopkins--Internal Medicine!” one might announce to a cheering crowd. Never-mind if you can’t imagine living in Baltimore, have doubts about a future of internal medicine in the U.S., or if your significant other, who you are actually trying to hold on to, is matching into California. Your higher calling is to smile on the spot.

It’s a day that thank god, many institutions now have the students simultaneously open envelopes in the same room, with a class list to be distributed later instead of sharing on a stage.

It’s also a day that’s rarely considered a singular day. It’s The Day that we’ve been led to believe by those before us, by the very culture we breathe in, and by ourselves--to be the culminating point of 8-9 years of medical and premedical education.

Even if we philosophize years in advance that the specific placement doesn’t matter, when presented with the closed envelope, or even the notion thereof, there’s always that quiet fear and panic bubbling inside of us. Fear of distance: will my relationship be forced to a crisis now that we must be geographically separated? Fear of obscurity: what will I amount to if I’m going to a place that I’ve never heard of? Fear of failure: They--my family, my colleagues, my mentors, my friends--will know that I had strived for so much and yet had fallen short.

The Process: Optimal vs Fixed

The Match is decided by a computer algorithm. We picture stacks of preference lists being transferred from the online application website onto The Match computers; the microprocessor chips heating up and glowing, the fans turning on to cool any electric over-churning, and then viola, the results appearing on the screen, featuring the fortunate and the less fortunate. Somehow, the machine-based quality is only slightly more comforting than the Greek Fates randomly cutting off threads that represented the lifespan of all mortals on earth.

Yet stated mathematically, the match algorithm appears benign. Based on the Stable Marriage Problem, the premise is as follows: Picture a set of applicants marrying a set of residency programs.

“Given a certain number of applicants and residency slots, where each person ranks each program with a unique number in the order of preference and each program similarly ranks their applicants, marry the applicant and the program such that there are no pairing who would both rather have each other rather than their current match. If no such pairing exists, then the match is deemed ‘stable’.”

The only problem is, the real match is not stable. The Match cannot make everyone’s pairing ‘stable’ for the context is necessarily unstable. The national applicants’ needs far outstrip residency programs’ capacities: Overall, 37,735 applicants --U.S. nationals and foreign medical graduates--participated in 2011. However, only 23,421 first-year residency (PGY-1) spots and 2,737 second-year (PGY-2) positions were open. This means 11,577 (30.7%) of the applicants did not match this year (1).

That is: 30.7% of individuals, who already successfully jumped through the hoops of medical admission, who additionally committed at least the past four years of their lives to medicine, will not be able to move on to the next stage of training in 2011. It’s a form of professional purgatory--if unmatched, you can volunteer or do research for a pittance before applying in the next annual cycle; however, there’s no guarantee that the process would be any more favorable than the one you went through already.

There are applicants who try The Match again and again and again. And they do so because having a merely a MD without further training is a poor bargaining chip. Without placing into an intern year slot, people cannot take the last part of their licensing exams and hence cannot acquire a license to ever practice. They can land consulting jobs, but the meatier jobs are open only for those who already went and/or is currently attending a ‘branded’ university. It’s a terrible bargaining chip, frankly, especially if prior to medical school, one has not anticipated the need to become conversant in a field outside of Healthcare nor developed the marketable skills in order to inspire confidence on the work site.

Besides the national numbers, the protocol itself is a labyrinth of concerns. You are given only one option, not several as when you’re applying to University or Medical School. This can be limiting professionally and devastating personally. Generally, you want to be living in the same city as your significant other or your family, especially since you’ll be working long hours. Sadly, the only people you will be able to see consistently outside of the hospital are those who live with you. Secondly, the couples who met in medical school and want to match together into the same locale, by linking their preference lists, are at a statistical disadvantage and may often receive worse results than if they matched separately.

Pre-1950s versus Status Quo

As unsatisfactory as the protocol may be, our generation is continually reminded by those before us that the Match is a historical improvement. Initially, applicants approached residency programs as others would approach investment banking jobs. Typically, the programs would recruit the star applicants as early as their second (MS2) year. The chosen applicants felt pressured into signing a contract too early; meanwhile, the remainder waited for an indefinite amount of time for an indefinite result. The intense dissatisfaction felt by all parties incited National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) to institute the Match in 1952--the major sell-point here was “uniform date of appointment” for all starting residents (2).

Since then, the tides of history have changed such that residency programs are no longer scrambling for an inadequate supply of interns. Now there are both qualified national and foreign medical graduates who go through an expensive and extensive process, often for naught. They're waiting for open slots. Hospitals should not be concerned about not having enough interns appointed every June. A more decentralized process--aka the way most colleges, graduate programs, and firms run recruiting--cannot possibly rob the hospitals of even one less worker.

Since our generation was nonexistent when NRMP formed and all the residency programs decided to join, we have the choice of: (1) accepting that the Match will be the major decider of our fates for decades to come, or (2) pondering whether a better system exist--we could be inspired to, at least, think about how we want to improve this fixture in our medical culture.

So, starting questions: Have we sacrificed our personal choice and freedom over our long-term future in favor of the one-choice envelope slip for the sake of “uniform date of appointment”? If so, how necessary is this sacrifice? What if conversations with your peers in other fields reveal that their programs rarely view the same challenges as major hurdles?

1. http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/m/2011/03/14/pse0317.htm
2. http://www.nrmp.org/

In the Study with Sherwin Nuland

2011-03-14T00:37:00.001-07:00

Fireside Chat with Samuel Shem

2011-03-03T10:51:00.001-08:00

The following video segments are from a student workshop in Jan. 2011.

The Bat

2011-02-14T14:12:00.000-08:00

A great conflict was about to come off between the Birds and the Beasts. When the two armies were collected together the Bat hesitated which to join. The Birds that passed his perch said: "Come with us"; but he said: "I am a Beast." Later on, some Beasts who were passing underneath him looked up and said: "Come with us"; but he said: "I am a Bird." Luckily at the last moment peace was made, and no battle took place, so the Bat came to the Birds and wished to join in the rejoicings, but they all turned against him and he had to fly away. He then went to the Beasts, but soon had to beat a retreat, or else they would have torn him to pieces. "Ah," said the Bat, "I see now,

"He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends."

"The Bat, The Birds, and the Beasts" from Aesop's Fables

All-American "Ethnic" Stars in Comedy

2011-02-09T14:51:00.001-08:00

Over the years of scrutinizing stand-up comedy, I've gained a key insight into the core of humor: that the successful jokes are not just about the mechanics of good delivery, the cleverness of the puns, nor the magnitude of sexy, dirty, and painful--but about the personal background of the comedian. Did this person feel hellishly awkward during childhood or pained while trying to survive as a young adult? If yes, please consider this person as a recruit for the comedy troupes. And since being pained arises from self-awareness--which most easily arises from being from a particular race or ethnicity in a particular setting--the funniest comics tend to be bicultural or from a minority group. Since childhood, they have been conscious of the distinctness of their identities and which parts overlap with the greater American culture--when their humor is interpreted through that context of race & ethnicity, is usually their best. If a joke is independent of the comic's personal context, then it is usually just an ordinary joke.

As in: Hah, that's a Laugher, but not a Laugher-tunity to be remembered.

Historically, Jewish Americans, African Americans, and Gay/Lesbian/Transgendered have been on the top of the afflicted hierarchy of America. These days, they're now the stars of entertainment comedy: Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Eddie Murphy, Dave Chapelle, and Ellen Degeneres to name a few.

This decade, however, is already seeing a new wave of entertainers: Asians, the freshest off the immigration boat. They're not just ethnically funny to their adopted countries now; they're stars in their own right, with an added international appeal in this globalization-minded world. Margaret Cho, Korean-American who grew up in San Francisco, came onto the scene in the 1990s: "Hi, my name is Margaret, and no, I do not own a convenience store." America fell in love with Margaret Cho and her rendition of her very Korean mother, her over-explicit frankness on all matters, especially sex, and her activism efforts for women, Asians, and LGBT communities. Cho then branched out from an award-winning stand-up career to the ABC sitcom, All American Girl, the best-selling book I'm the One that I Want, grammy-nominated album Cho Dependent, as well as the recent VH1 comedy show The Cho Show.

Then there was Russell Peters, a son of Indian immigrants, hailing from Toronto, Canada who started his career in the late 1980s. He was so astoundingly skilled and versatile at mimicking accents that he has since built an international audience: Fans from all over North America, Asia, Europe, and Middle East would plead him to make sure of speaking on their ethnic groups during his shows. One of his most devoted fans is King Abdullah of Jordan, who recently prided on an elaborate prank scheme involving scaring Peters with guns and masked men. It's also worth mentioning that Russell Peters grossed about $15 million in 2010 and $10 million in 2009.

What do comics like Margaret Cho and Russell Peters talk about? Are they genuinely funny or are they famous just because they're ethnic and our ethnic market is increasingly expanding these days? These are questions that anyone may have in mind when he or she is critically evaluating humor. But the laugh-o-meter level truly says: Riot--deadly enough to hurt your belly permanently. These are skilled and polished comics. Their facial expressions are just as adroit as their tongue: Hispanic, African American, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Persian, Indian--their accent is so accurate that you can't be offended.

Regardless of race & ethnicity, one can relate somehow relate to their over-the-top stories regarding growing up in conservative families. Margaret Cho has a hilarious skit about "Assbesto"--a porn magazine that her very Korean mother sold in their San Francisco bookstore that they opened together one day as mother and daughter. Russell Peters shares with the audience how he tried to negotiate his father's spankings one day using the tactics of a caucasian friend only to the dooming response of "Somebody gonna get hurt real bad." They understand immigrant culture, but they're also wise observers of American cultures and they readily share how they're just as influenced by culture as we are: Russell Peters talked about the glories of dating a porn star; Cho gives a heartbreaking rendition of sitting in her own shit, a metaphorical and physical anecdote from her days battling eating disorders.

Naturally then, I became curious about the existence of great Chinese American comedians and went through an extensive internet search. The answer was: I couldn't find any. The surprise, however, was that there was one Chinese comedian, a first generation immigrant, named Joe Wong, who is based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Here's Joe Wong's debut on David Letterman's Late Show:

During the first 30 seconds of the set, I felt somehow anxious for the performer. When this skinny gentleman, wearing nerdy glasses that my father wore in the 80s, walked onto the stage and scanned the audience, I misinterpreted his compensatory pause for nervous energy. I pictured one of my parents' heavily-accented friends on national television and feared that he might croak.

"Hi," he says instead, pausing. "I'm Irish." The audience considered that for a split-second and then roared.

It turns out that Wong grasps timing perfectly and he understands precisely the initial impression that he cuts--as a lost and frustrated immigrant--an image which he rides and twists to new levels. As he explains in another one of his interviews, a critical friend advised him to slow down his natural fast-talking style so that people will have time to process.

Nowadays Wong chooses to pause at least 10 seconds longer before and after each punchline compared to what the average stand-up does--it is this signature wait that whets our appetite for irony. He's a Unique in terms of American Comedy right now, as in he's not a typical American comedian, nor is he a typical Chinese immigrant. After coming to United States in his 20s, Joe Wong completed a phD in Microbiology at Rice University and worked at a pharmaceutical company before changing paths and climbing onto the comedic stage.

Comedy is a brutal world for anyone; no one--foreigner or native--is immune to being boo-ed off stage. In the writing world, at least if the reader doesn't connect with the writer, we can chalk up the the text's "highbrow" nature and blame it on the simpleton reader; in comedy, however, if the audience doesn't connect with the comedian, it's painfully apparent: there's no laugh. The comedian slinks off the stage in dead silence or to a series of heckling and boos. For Joe Wong, a newly minted American Immigrant with an undeniable ethnic accent, to push himself up on stage--to engage in this epic battle of eliciting laughs, in this fight to become visible before American eyes, while so many of his background live unnoticed and die unnoticed--that's a remarkable biography already.

Since his Letterman debut, Joe Wong has been performing at universities country-wide as well as working on a possible sit-com about the lives of immigrants. He has performed for Ellen Degeneres's show twice. He has also performed at the annual Radio & Television Correspondent Association (RTCA) Dinner in honor of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on C-SPAN. I was surprised and delighted at how ballsy and sharp his commentary was. How many people from my generation have this much bravado? Very little, I would argue.

Yet, it is my generation who are the ones who consistently underestimate people like Joe Wong. We make snide, underhanded, or not-so-subtle comments about foreign medical graduates or East Asian post-doctorates and translate it as humor. We from different backgrounds make clumsy comments without knowing how much they sting while we from the same backgrounds cringe when characters like Joe Wong speak at public functions--he is too much like our parents for us to laugh at ease. And yet, when Joe Wong speaks, we hush. When Margaret Cho speaks, we hush. When Russell Peters, we hush and pay full attention. Then we laugh. Just as at Jerry Seinfield and Dave Chappelle and all those comic geniuses before--we laugh so hard that we're crying. These are pained geniuses trying to make to make a point. These are characters speaking their own truths, and theirs truths are absurdly funny.

Let us look forward to more comedians from all unexpected arena. Let us also look forward to more of "He may not be your cup of tea, but he can be your cup of Joe" Wong.

Childhood Repainted

2011-01-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

The Cold War of Education

2011-01-23T07:08:00.001-08:00

"The larger issue is that the greatest strength of the Chinese system is the Confucian reverence for education that is steeped into the culture. In Chinese schools, teachers are much respected, and the most admired kid is often the brain rather than the jock or class clown."

   In his most recent op-ed "China's Winning Schools?", Nicholas Kristof poses the question of why are China's schools so winning. He posits that the answer involves cultural attitudes: China prioritizes education. The government, the school administrators, the teachers, and the parents spend more time, energy, and money on education. The students approach their own education with a do-or-die attitude.

   It's reverence that is stepped into the culture, all right, but the reverence is not simply Confucian. Nowadays, all young people think about Confucius may be just a story from their lesson books--a polite man who even as a child saved the larger pears for his elders.

   I think the reverence for education boils down to an even deeper cultural issue: how even do people believe their playing field to be? And by playing field in this context, I am referring to the socioeconomic opportunities that are available given a particular set of intelligences and self-will.

   No one Chinese citizen--or for fairness sake, only a tiny fraction of them--will agree that the playing field is remotely even or fair. This is a complex society with multiple strata, with the bureaucrats at the top. You rely on connections, or 'guan xi', to negotiate even for the most basic position. Think about it this way: If this were China and you want to work at McDonalds, you better make sure that your parents are inviting their second cousins out to elaborate meals. Because if your second cousins are not convinced enough to then persuade their contacts at McDonalds management, you'll never actualize your dreams of passing out fries. Never. It will be passed onto another candidate, no matter how fast and ginger your hands are and how many stellar references you have from Burger King.

   If your family has poor 'guan xi', the one ameliorating factor in assuring your future success is education. Once you bust your ass from K-12 and score high enough on College Qualifying Exam 'gao kao' to enter a first tier university, like Peking University (China's Harvard) or Tsing Hua (China's MIT), only then can you be assured that you will actually acquire A job after college. Otherwise, you'll either spend the rest of your young adult life trying to kiss up to your relatives, those with richer 'guan xi', or you'll be constantly applying to jobs. Creating your own job in China is still relatively unheard of, especially when you have poor 'guan xi'.

   That's why Chinese Teachers are much respected. They're seen as the gatekeepers to wealth; but even more realistically, they're gatekeepers to basic wellness and financial security. They're key to please if you're born to a less well-connected family.

   That's why the brain is the most admired kid. That kid is not guaranteed to go far, but he will go much further than anyone else in the room, with the exception of the bureaucrat's daughter or son.

   A different 'guan xi' system exists in America; however, we're allergic to picturing this society as anything less than a meritocracy. We still hold onto the Horatio Alger myth--protagonists who achieve the American Dream mainly through strength of character and lady luck. We still want to believe that a formal education isn't necessary to becoming a CEO.

   Sometimes, education is even depicted as counter to success. We marvel over the fact that Steven Jobs and Bill Gates never graduated from college; we love the fact that Mark Zuckerberg probably had to skip a lot of classes to build the beginnings of Facebook. It's not just that we worship Hollywood actresses, NBA most valuable players, and rockstars from the pits of Michigan and Washington who didn't do too well in school. We celebrate success overall, and we especially revel in the examples of success that did not involve formal education. We tell our kids to study hard, but deep-down, we also suspect that formal education extinguish the brilliance and the fuck-it-all attitude that it takes for an individual to really advance and to advance with an astonishing speed and astonishing spread of conquered territory.

   Because we believe or at least want to pretend that this is an equal playing field, we do not devise systems that truly motivate our students to pay attention to their own education. The students of this generation are smart; they understand the message and while they go through the motions of 'going to' school, there is an underlying anxiety to differentiate themselves as much as possible from their peers and to distinguish their record through personal projects.

   They don't respect their teachers as much because they perceive that the teacher is only a gatekeeper to good grades. They don't perceive the good grades as crucial to reach a world of useful connections that will advance their own agenda.

   They don't respect the brains of the class. The brains of the class may acquire good grades and advanced degrees, but their ideas will be advanced by others; the former well-adjusted athletes in the business world will be the ones to reap the rewards of the brainiac academics. Therefore, instead, students respect the well-connected kid. They respect the well-dressed kid. They respect the socially adept kid. They respect the shrewd.

   The real cultural barriers in the American beliefs surrounding education are as follows:

Stubborn naivete.

We are not as frank about 'guan xi' required in basic every-day negotiations as the Chinese are. We tell our kids anything is possible. We boost their self-esteem without telling them much later about how much more competent they have to be in order to overcome the unevenness of the playing field. How much more book-smart, street-smart, attractive, creative, socially-able, and wily they have to be compared to the classmate born to a well-connected family, who is from birth implicitly taught through speech and parental examples that he/she can bargain even with the Queen of England.

Education needs to be customized for the individual.

If the incentives to learn were aligned more closely with the student's own incentives, then education would be seen as cool. We are inherently sold on 'cool' and we'll learn 'cool' things automatically. We'll respect our teachers then because it's cool. We'll devote ourselves to classes and achieve those high scores because it's cool. Beyond the basic groundwork, schools should keep in mind that not everyone will, can, and wants to be an academic. Schools should also be flexible enough that the students who want to make their own dot.coms should be able gear their projects towards architectural design and intellectual property; the students who want to be the pioneers in pop culture should be able to devote themselves to the independent study of everyday rhetoric.

   The curious component of these discussions is that so far, it's unclear which country is a contender in education. The educators are just as self-critical about their educational systems as the Americans are, and meanwhile, the parents are just as defensive and proud about their children as the Americans are. Kristof is ingenious in referring to the 'latest test results' from U.S. as our 21-st century Sputnik after the Shanghai-nese rocket-high test results. He's right. This is Sputnik. North Korea and Taiwan may be the current chess-pieces of the American versus Chinese entanglements. However, education is our future--it will determine which mega-power will produce the more robust economy, the stronger currency, the slyer computer worm to shutdown vital operations, the more virulent cultural memes of 'Cool' and 'Ultra-cool' to maintain the ultimate hegemony.

   The battle of our futures has already started, and it's right before our eyes in the classroom.

From David Brooks

2011-01-19T06:05:00.000-08:00

After the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes). Once there, they play with hundred-and-sixty-pound dogs, for it has become fashionable to have canines a third as tall as the height of your ceilings. They will reflect on the genetic miracle they have achieved. (Their grandmothers looked like Gertrude Stein, but their granddaughters look like Uma Thurman.) In the evenings, they will traipse through resort-community pedestrian malls licking interesting gelatos, while passersby burst into spontaneous applause.

Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections, and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety. Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.

Skies of Beijing

2010-12-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

The skies of Beijing are rarely blue. There is a website that we can use to check the city's daily Air Quality Index (AQI). When it rains, the water sweeps the pollutant particles along in the downpour, and then the online AQI would refresh to 50. Below 100 would be considered ‘fresh’ for Beijing while most cities in the U.S. bank on less than 50. Sometimes, I do not have to check the site. When I am unable distinguish the tall, large building, which sits across from my dorm, I know that day is a ‘500’ day, meaning: “Health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is most likely to be affected.”

The skies of Beijing at times remind me of childhood fears. In the old nightmares, a flood, a tornado, and an earthquake would sweep the town simultaneously, and the only forewarning would be the sky, swirling with unusual colors—blood orange, maroon, lime green, and lemon yellow. The first time I woke up in Beijing, the sky looked an uniform, thick egg-custard.

The skies of Beijing feel gritty and gray. We swim daily in a sea of particles. Old women push trash collection cars, boys pedal bicycles with their girlfriends behind them, workers zoom past in their mopeds—we are covered with dust and pushing through dust and if I do not sweep my room once a week, I would also sleep in a bed of dust and huff around in a room of dust.

Pre-Olympics, dust storms in Bejing became infamous and prompted the government to plant trees. I arrived in the city still expecting Saharan-like dust storms. There is none. Instead, the winds deliver coldness horizontally as the dust settles vertically. In the past few weeks, the AQI has been low, hinting that the dust may have retreated. And yet, the skies of Beijing remains gray; they deliver winds to rock our steps and shake us from right to left.

Speaking of Chinese vs American Math Geniuses

2010-12-23T01:40:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, explores why Chinese students have superior math skills compared to their American counterparts. The main reason, he argues, may not be due to the 'innate Asian proclivity for math', compounded with the cultural prioritization of math in Chinese education system--it could be due to something as fundamental and fixed as language.

In Chinese, one is 'yi'; two is 'er'; three is 'san'--every single syllable-digit sounds short and clipped. In contrast, in English, one, two, three, and beyond are drawn out syllables. Reading numbers aloud in English, you have a significantly lower probability of remembering a sequence than if you were reading the same numbers aloud in Chinese--the shorter the sounds, the more you can cram into your memory for digits.

Moreover, counting numbers in Chinese is easier. In English, the sounds of numbers over ten are new, and it's not at all apparent how they came to be--'eleven', 'twelve', 'thirty', 'fifty'. You can argue that sequence contains sounds similar to 'one', 'two', 'three,' 'five' but that's a stretch. In Chinese, the sound of numbers beyond ten is intuitive: eleven is translated to one-ten-one; twelve, one-ten-two; thirty, three-ten; fifty, five-ten.

Linguistically, because counting in Chinese is simpler and quicker to learn, Chinese students can count up to 40 a year earlier on average compared to American students. They are more confident about math in grade school. They like Math more because they are somewhat proficient in it--then they are more willing to learn Math, and this creates a positive feedback circle such that Chinese students tend to test superior in Math because they like it--and they like it because they're better at it.

These linguistic explanations are astounding. That night after I inhaled the entire book in one sitting, I referenced this book to one of the students at Peking University. "Math is just another language," I continued. "No wonder my college TA-s and lecturers in Mathematics were actually the most articulate people I've encountered in life. They can explain anything. They gab about other topics just as smoothly."

"Ha, that's funny," she said. "The people in the department here are the most obscure and the inarticulate I've met." She brought up examples of students who won gold metals in International Math Olympiad and was able to gain admission into Peking University without the dread 'gaokao', the ultimate pre-college national standardized examination. Though some were average in their speaking and writing abilities, a lot were hard to understand, not just when they were speaking about abstract Math.

This conversation inspired me to extrapolate from Gladwell's arguments: Because mathematics is linguistically more complex to understand in English, the American students who succeed at Math may have been the ones with superior language skills at an earlier age. In fact, it wouldn't be at all surprising if American math geniuses are also good at language in general: They read War and Peace in middle school. They play music like a professional. They master C++ and Java just as well as they acquire Spanish and French proficiency.

On the other hand, a grasp of complex linguistics is not required for grasping Mathematics in Chinese--this is a language naturally suited to counting simply and conceptualizing numbers. The language threshold is not high. Barring other selection standards, Chinese math geniuses most likely articulate at an average level for students their age. In contrast, American math geniuses tend to speak well above average. The counting linguistics of English naturally impose a high language threshold. American superstars must be able to hold longer sounds in their memory for numbers; they must be able to manipulate the complicated language of numbers more readily in their heads in order to be who they are.

The more we learn about these trend differences, the more we can conclude that language is a step to learning. And through learning, different languages create different destinies.

Dreams 'neath Feet

2010-12-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

In his 2010 T.E.D. speech, Sir Ken Robinson describes The Learning Revolution, a proposed shift from standardized to customized education, that we absolutely require in order to stop wasting our human resources and killing our students' creative drive. He ends his speech with an emphasis on responsibility through the following William Butler Yeats poem. The metaphor of "dreams beneath your feet" is apt, and he delivers it beautifully.

"The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?"

Florence Nightingale

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams...

William Butler Yeats

A Race in Test Scores and Beyond

2010-12-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

Day after day, at least one of the top 5 articles on NYTimes.com is about China. Still, I was puzzled why the most emailed article today is ‘Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators’. Didn’t the public always have a sense that math and science education in China is more rigorous than the education in the United States, that this is a nation that trains its math and physics Olympiad competitors from an early age just as scientifically as they train their gymnasts? Meanwhile, didn’t we always have a sense that though the system in United States is less structured, it’s better for the development of creativity, individuality, and athletics for all?

Why are we so surprised now?

Or are we freaking out?

Frankly, I think there are two parallel phenomena at play. One is that American public is becoming increasingly aware of the challenges in their education system now that they’re constantly being compared at an international level. Educators are begging for more sophisticated lessons. Parents are also wishing that popular culture shift more of the attention from entertainment to knowledge celebrity. So basically, let us worship Hollywood stars and NBA players a little less and give more hurrahs for NIH researchers and Putnam Competition math-letes.

The other phenomenon, however, is—how can I phrase this carefully, I don’t want to use the word ‘xenophobia’—concern. There is increased concern overall about China, and this is already showing in all major venues. On the international market, there are the currency woes. In terms of green energy, there is at least Thomas Friedman tearing his hair off everyday in the papers. Speaking of politics, we’re worried about North Korea, but we’re actually really worried about China.

Concern is also a great tool for politicians and columnists alike. The more you use China as a ‘they’, the more unity you can inspire among the already heterogeneous Americans. The key movers are frustrated with the pacing of the current system, and it’s not that they’re using China as a scapegoat per se, but they need to constantly point to the runner-up so that American can start running faster.

It’s not terribly hard to figure out what rhetoric you would use as an activist, lobbyist, or think-tank member. You align against The Other in order to emphasize your connection to the group that you need to reach. However, my primary worry is the subliminal message we are sending to the average Joe and Ann in United States, the attitude that the media is brewing in their minds. I think, on the surface, the nation will be defensive. Many will have their own two-cents about the findings, i.e. "The Chinese can be the best code monkeys they want, but our kids are still going to learn teamwork and leadership through a well balanced education and a vigorous athletics program. Then, we’ll kick their ass at a covert economic or outer-space war in 100 years." Deep down, however? The public is becoming just as …concerned, watchful, and anxious as the politicians and the media wants them to be. Consequently, even though the Caucasian kid and the Asian American kid are sitting through the same class at school, there will be added layers of tension to their interactions. There will be more resentment when the Asian American kids excel at math and science, and there will be subtle mockery or genuine surprise when they are not as good as expected. There will be more resentment when they excel at the nontraditional arenas, say they pick up electric guitars instead of violins, or choose to enter journalism instead of medicine.

Not that there isn’t such a trend already. Moreover, I know that logically, these news articles shouldn’t translate to a Chinese American kid in American experiencing the side effects of his parents’ or his grandparents’ motherland rising through the world ranks. But this is pretty much how it works. In this case, it is the underlying psychological current--the internal paranoid ideology--that is the powerful, potentially dangerous ingredient rather than any surface diplomacy or displays of test-scores.

Søren Kierkegaard

2010-12-05T04:54:00.000-08:00

"What I may lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to find the idea for which I can live and die. I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing."

Structure Deficit or Why The World is Not So Flat

2010-12-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

Thomas Friedman’s WikiChina article stands in stark contrast to the reports of need gap in China. For example, in a recent online debate, bi-cultural Economics professors answer why college graduates make only $44 more per month than the average migrant worker. Understanding political economy is key here because then you would realize that more institutional structures need to be mended and even created before the world is actually flat--only then, is our friend Friedman legitimately allowed a freak-out a day.

Why are most Chinese students forced through a rigorous educational system at the expense of developing creativity and individuality? Why are there so many students who cannot find jobs and at the same time, McKinsey report that barely 10% of the college graduates are actually suitable?

Because the educational structure is such that there is a focus on excessive testing rather than honing innate talents. Because the market is such that secondary and tertiary tier colleges admit students to ‘soft’ programs without much concern for how many job slots await their students by the end. Because the Chinese firms are structured like factories for production based on prior instruction instead of directed towards their own product development and creative management. Because the service sector is weak compared to the nation's GDP.

Why is there a lack of popular academic books written for the people written by Chinese business, natural science, social science, and medical professors? Why is there a lack of drive for a broader set of knowledge and skill-set among college graduates here?

Because copyrights and patents are not respected. Talented academics can publish great books, but months later, their books can be reprinted and sold on the black markets for $1 USD each. So then screw books. Screw op-eds and commentaries in the local paper in hopes of promoting their books. Beyond the normal course-load, business and economics professors focus on private classes for CEOs and managers. The natural and social sciences focus on research grants and publishing in Western academic journals. Their significant results are appreciated elsewhere in the world but not by the Chinese public. There is no Chinese equivalent of Robert Sapolsky writing in the Chinese equivalent of NYTimes.com. There is no Chinese equivalent or even distant cousin of Thomas Friedman. There is no Chinese equivalent of the self-help book like 7 Highly Effective Habits; there has been no self-help book really since Confucius and The Little Red Book.

Furthermore, because the job prospects are not as promising as they are for American college graduates, even elite Chinese college graduates are not as motivated to acquire a broad set of knowledge and skills. Because it simply doesn’t pay until they study abroad, so that’s where all their efforts will lie—in scoring high on the GRE and on acquiring enough research experience to apply to graduate programs abroad. That’s why the only self-help books that are truly popular among this crowd is how to be admitted to a prestigious program abroad. They might not be as curious about the effects of globalization and unsustainable development, but they sure as hell know their U.S. rankings for graduate and professional programs.

To point a finger at the nation as a whole or the culture as a whole is grossly inadequate. Ask instead about the institutional structures. Ask instead about the incentives.

Excerpt from Games People Play by Eric Berne

2010-12-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

"What has been said so far may be summarized by the 'colloquialism': "If you are not stroked, your spinal cord will shrivel up." Hence, after the period of close intimacy with the mother is over, the individual for the rest of his life is confronted with a dilemma upon whose horns his destiny and survival are continually being tossed. [...] Under most conditions he will compromise. He learns to do with more subtle, even symbolic, forms of handling, until the merest nod of recognition may serve the purpose to some extent, although his original craving for physical contact may remain unabated.

This process of compromise may be called by various terms, such as sublimation; but whatever it is called, the result is a partial transformation of the infantile stimulus-hunger into something which may be termed recognition-hunger. As the complexities of compromise increase, each person becomes more and more individual in his quest for recognition, and it is these differentials which lend variety to social intercourse and which determine the individual's destiny. A movie actor may require hundreds of strokes each week from anonymous and undifferentiated admirers to keep his spinal cord from shriveling, while a scientist may keep physically and mentally healthy on one stroke a year from a respected master."

Power to the hybrid

2010-11-29T00:59:00.000-08:00

From Dr. Bruce Wexler's book Brain and Culture:

"A multiculturalism within a broader national culture in which the individual cultural entities are maintained in stable traditional form is equally improbable. The youth of each cultural subgroup change too deeply from contact with the other cultures, and with the unifying national culture, to maintain their culture of origin in traditional form. Elements of many different cultures may survive as vital parts of a new culture, but they will be mixed with elements from other cultures in individual lives, as Jewish Americans may practice yoga derived from India, cook Chinese food, and enjoy writing Japanese haiku. Few individuals in the United States will follow a life that is in accord with integrated components from a single cultural source. So too will probably be the case on a global scale. Economic, scientific, medical, and entertainment interests will not leave the cultural behemoths of Euro-America, the Middle East, and Asia living side by side without contact. The angry consternation of their elders will not stop the youth of each culture from assuming characteristics from the others and then changing their cultures from within as they themselves assume leadership roles and act to make the external world consonant with their hybrid selves."

Modeled after The Book of Emotions

2010-11-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

Frustration grew up in middle of suburbia as the middle kid of a five kid family. Frustration was not as book-smart as the older siblings nor was she as athletic and popular as the younger siblings. She always carried around a notebook of poetry. She read it aloud to people, but after no one seemed to listen, she kept her writing projects private. She wears dark clothing and black nail-polish, copies her friend Anger’s talk, and listens to Tool even though she doesn’t really like the band. She mumbles under her breath. Frustration signed up a karate class once, but she was too anemic and devoid of muscle power to kick her opponents really hard.

Anger is the boy whose father is an alcoholic. Everyday until age 16—when his father was sent away—Anger got the shit beaten out of him. People tend to think that Anger as a quiet and calm kid, but even when tapped lightly on the shoulder, he is quick to whip around, his hands balling into little fists. Anger is scrawny too, like Frustration. Unlike Frustration, Anger can kick. He kicks trees in half. He swings at trashcans with baseball bats. Once, Sadness cried and confessed to Anger that she cheated on him, Anger kicked her car until it was dented from all sides. This story is legendary, so may not be factual. However, the reality is, Anger now rarely tolerates the presence of Sadness.

Happiness is the most popular kid at school. She became the captain of the cheerleading squad, after the original captain gained 20 lbs after a period of depressive bulimia and could no longer fit into her costume. Happiness is involved in a lot of activities all the time. She wants to learn at least 5 languages. She plays piano and flute. She is on yearbook and newspaper. When she grows up, she wants to be a TV reporter and spread her winning smile. The truth is, no one likes Happiness all too much. Most people theorize that she’s just faking it. They say that she dyes her hair baby blond every month and lies about it; that she listens to her friends’ problems with wide eyes but doesn’t actually care; and that at home, she is actually a tyrant.

Fire of ice (Scene)

2010-11-26T13:20:00.001-08:00

We ran away. We escaped to the edge of our dirty small town where the mountain sat and the river gurgled, lapping around at the base. This time, however, the waters were quiet. It was so cold that the top layer of the river was frozen, and everywhere around us on the bank rested large shards of icy glass. I picked one up and pressed one hand against it, tracing the intricate spider web ridges that formed naturally on the ice. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s perfect.” I said, fishing only for a simple affirmation, to which you nodded. But then you replied, “Let’s destroy it,” and before I could protest, you grabbed the largest glass and threw it across the bank, laughing maniacally. The ice, though did not travel far, shattered into thousands of pieces—each piece creating a distinct chime as it broke free from the larger sheet, clinking as it bounced up from the surface of the river. And then you turned back and smiled—not blatantly exhilarated or satisfied or teasing but just watchful--next thing I knew, I found myself picking up the other pieces. I was also heaving massive sheets of ice with all the force of my upper body. We gazed straight ahead and traced the fate of our fractalized victims. Instead of speaking, we made music—pausing little between sheets of ice so that the chimes of the first thousand pieces would coincide with the chimes of the second set, and so on and so on, until we uncovered the entire bank, until we were red and panting with pride at our creation, until god, I had never thought destruction more beautiful or serene.

Why Beijing

2010-11-25T14:22:00.001-08:00

I chose my project in Beijing because the question of identity was finally becoming the priority in my life. My awareness of this fact was not in the same manner of a high school student, just starting out in a personal exploration, but in the amazed, resigned, and curious fashion of a person suddenly pausing in middle of a hike: I was amazed at how extensive identity had impacted my life thus far; resigned to the power of its past influences; and curious about the person whom I was to become, the choices that this entity was about to make, and the space in which I could exert free will.

Free will. Yes, of course, I also wanted to doctor everything—identity, character, persona, speech, appearance. And I felt it was extremely necessary to do so before my thirties, a stage beyond which, as Robert Sapolsky argues, we’ll rarely try anything new again, not even Sushi. Thus, I had changed my first name; I shifted my natural setting and support structure; I dyed my hair and analyzed posturing; I purchased books on speech and recorded my own voice; I was ready to make whatever changes that was necessary and adaptive. Moreover, I wanted to know what changes were possible.

Being in China is a golden opportunity at my stage of development. In my lab, we are studying the influence of cultural differences on behavior, affect, and cognition. We are measuring notable differences through EEG and fMRI. We are asking the questions of how culture impacts identity, and how an individual’s identity can shape the surrounding culture. We also have techniques of transiently ‘doctoring’ identity and consequently behavior.

Outside my lab, I am still at work. I walk through the streets and I study people. I watch how people fight in the crowded subways. I listen for when people sound soft and when they sound hard in their speech. I take note of the college and graduate students around me, and I ask myself the perennial question, if my parents had stayed in China, what would I be like? Is that hypothetical person understandable to me? What aspects of her are preferable and what aspects are not?

I think that measurable culture is not just limited to nationalities and ethnicities—even today, the creative and successful ones are able to redraw boundaries and change the culture of the region, the city, the institution, and the 2-5 person groups. The choice of our disciplines is interesting, but to a point, it doesn’t matter. The key of the future is not in just the expertise of any particular discipline; it is in the step beyond discipline--in using whatever tools necessary to understand identity and then with that blueprint of understanding, to effectively enhance any size of culture--from the individual, to a group of individuals, to the institution, and then to the nation and the world at large. That is, at least, my goal and overall method.

Caught

2010-11-08T05:25:00.000-08:00

Mark says from what he has seen of Calcutta, Beijing seems a lot cleaner. Where are the children with jutting ribs? Where are the hands and faces caked in shit watching you from the sidewalk? He gestures towards the streets, and I note too that there is a dearth of apparent poverty. I do not know where they sweep the homeless post-Olympics.

In the US, the vagrants have personalities. From the South to the West Coast to East Coast, I have encountered ex-scientists with mad beards roaming the streets, hipsters in faded Merlin hats, and poets who aggressively court money and pizza per stanza. Some demand. Some exhort. Many approach you with a sense of entitlement, which then again, could be interpreted as American confidence.

In China, no one talks of the vagrants as having personalities. The homeless show their faces only when walking through a subway, wailing folk songs and shaking a coin box. I’ve seen close up deformed faces and figures many times in New York City, but it has been increasingly more difficult for me to look. Mostly, the men and women kowtow so low that their chests are pressed to the pavement. Next to them, there is invariably an old man or woman laid out like a mummy; he is either incredibly sick or near dead or once, as I discovered on a walk to the local malls, already dead.

I am reading a lot more about mirror neurons and empathy. However, even with the need for additional references to check up all the abbreviations, I find neuroscience to be much easier to anatomize than this feeling that grabs me whenever I walk under the bridge. Tonight, it was an old man on the other side of the street. When I offered him something to sell, he looked up at my knees and said thank you, his face lifting to reveal a narrow beak of a nose and a pair of gray eyes--clouded with cataracts just like my grandfather’s. Every feature of his, so sharply reminiscent of my grandfather's, ensnared me.

Folie à famille

2010-02-02T17:10:00.000-08:00

"Folie à famille is a type of induced delusional disorder. It is said to be present when the delusions are shared beyond a simple dyad, i. e. when more than two members of a family are involved [23]. Most often, individuals from several generations are affected (i.e., grandparents, parents and children). Although such families may tend not to seek treatment [23], a considerable number of cases have been reported in the literature, many including children."

"Numerous cases of folie à famille involving children have been reported [73]. The relationship between members in such families are said to be ambivalent, with aggression, guilt, separation anxiety and feelings of mutual dependency prevailing [21]. Disappointment and frustration seem eventually to precipitate the development
of delusional symptoms [15]. The personality of affected children is usually described as insecure, anxious and especially suggestible. Disorders such as developmental delay, mental retardation and physical illness (e.g. epilepsy) do not seem to be overrepresented. In most cases, marked social isolation is present, and a healthy adult who is in a position to offset the effect of the primary patient is often absent. Usually a close and symbiotic relationship exists between the children and their parents, and the children seem to adopt the delusional ideas in order to stabilize or improve the relationship between themselves and their parents."

Patton's Accident

2010-01-24T09:01:00.000-08:00

I still remember watching Patton one night with my father, a few days before my 12th birthday, and my mother had not came home yet even though it was hours past her due. Finally, there was a scene during which Gen. Patton was in a horrific car accident. Metal parts were crushed. And then both my father and I looked up and at each other and we just knew. We just knew. My father tucked me into bed, promised me that he'll be back soon, and then rushed out of the house. And then it was morning. I awoke. I stumbled down the stairs. And I saw the woman sitting in the chair, dried blood over her hands, shoulders, with parts of her nasal septum obliterated. It was a new day. Her eyes were shiny, but then again, so were mine.

Motivational Interviewing

2010-01-09T04:22:00.001-08:00

Borrowed this book Motivational Interviewing from my psych attending yesterday. Even if I decide not to pursue psychiatry as a career, I would still like to learn as many interview techniques as possible. It's like stocking up proverbial guns in an arsenal.

Here's an excerpt of Chapter 1. Motivational Interviewing second ed. by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick. They're clinical psychologists who worked in the field of addiction and rehab, and their techniques have proven quite efficacious, even among these patients, who probably have more bio-psychosocial hurdles to change than any other cohort.

WHAT TRIGGERS CHANGE

A certain folk belief seems to be embedded in some cultures and subcultures: change is motivated primarily by the avoidance of discomfort. If you can just make people feel bad enough, they will change. Punish undesired behavior, and withdraw the pain when the unwanted behavior stops. People would be motivated to change, then, by causing them to feel enough discomfort, shame, guilt, loss, threat, anxiety, or humiliation. It is this view that makes the excesses of confrontational "attack therapy," Synanon, Scared Straight, and "therapeutic" boot camps seem warranted. In this view, people don't change because they haven't suffered enough.

We are suggesting quite a different understanding of this motivation. Most of the clients we see have had no dearth of suffering. Humiliation, shame, guilt, and angst are not the primary engines of change. Ironically, such experiences can even immobilize the person, rendering change more remote. Instead, constructive behavior change seems to arise when the person connects it with something of intrinsic value, something important, something cherished. Intrinsic motivation for change arises in an accepting, empowering atmosphere that makes it safe for the person to explore the possibly painful present in relation to what is wanted and valued. People often get stuck, not because they fail to appreciate the down side of their situation, but they feel at least two ways about it. The way out of that forest has to do with exploring and following what the person is experiencing and what, from his or perspective, truly matters."

Man in the Car

2010-01-07T03:20:00.000-08:00

The night was wet and cold. I had trekked main street, glazed with traffic lights and muddy ice, back from work to the tower. Though it was only a few blocks, I had lost the twentieth umbrella in my life and was drenched—hair plastered against skull, eyelashes against eyeball, cloth against skin. I walked without hurry—yes, I quite enjoy the misery and like to measure it by the spoon—and soaked my shoes in the puddles while others paddled by quickly, wrapped up under raincoats, their chins tucked under umbrellas. I walked until I saw her car. I was not mistaken. It was the red sedan parallel parked by the entrance. I knew the dents like old friends—the chipped paint dip from the accident last year, the crevice from when the crazy kiddie gangs in town must have slammed into the metal with a crowbar.

The driver’s seat was empty, but there was a man sitting in the passenger’s. From the side, his beaked nose and his small lips reminded me of a guy from our class, a friend of mine. A person that I didn’t know that she was that good of a friend with him, but I didn’t care, and naturally, I leaned towards the window and tapped to say my greetings. Only, he wasn’t anyone I knew. These were foreign eyes staring back into mine. It was only seconds at best that we looked at each other—but in that long moment, I knew precisely who he was. I knew he was a Schmuck. He had the high forehead of an athlete, the scornful gaze of an intellectual, the flushed cheeks of a frat-boy after a few beers, whom for most of his college days, probably hated women and tossed them around on his bed, and now because he’s pushing thirty—he already has a career, a stock portfolio, a house with its furniture appropriately arraigned, he wants that last piece—a uterus, and she is it. This girl is beyond lovely. She's more interesting than perfection. But he wouldn’t know why or how. The Schmuck smiled at me, ignoring my glare, and returned playing with his phone.

The Review

2010-01-02T19:02:00.001-08:00

The restaurant sits on Whitney Avenue, on the outer edges of New Haven as it spreads into the more bucolic neighborhoods of East Rock. When I first moved here, the place couldn’t even deserve the term “Restaurant”. It was basically a shit-show in the back of the Hong Kong Grocer, obscured by front store shelves, putrefied by the fresh fish on sale, manned by a weathered woman who spoke Cantonese and a few words of English—she sold four or five dishes, frowned when you couldn’t pay in cash. You had to pay in cash. And, the plastic toy table next to the counter rarely looked clean. But the food was cheap, and it was actually really delicious, the kind that my mom would cook at home—with fresh oil, not the refried kind or with leftover animal fat (from god knows where or what kind of animal): steamed bok choy, scrambled eggs and tomatoes, big fat broccoli sauteed with tender chicken strips, and spicy fried prawns with their heads and whiskers still on. I’d order everything and then walk back to the downtown med student dorm with a full box on my hands, savoring the smell as it seeped from the plastic, and imagine what a great meal I was going to have--how it was all worth the pages that I read that day, how lucky I was to be comfortable with something that the average American student wouldn’t try, how all the cushy seats and Starbucks ambience music couldn’t beat the basics of cheap, good, and fast. Huzzah.

Then, they reconstructed. The next summer, HK Grocer looked like a legitimate ethnic grocery store, and the restaurant moved next door. At first, it was awkward. It was the same lady and the same set of food, except everything was explicitly displayed behind the glass in a long, wide, mostly empty room. The food arrived on neon plastic Frisbee-like plates, and for napkins, there was—I kid you not—a roll of toilet paper on every table. I considered having a heart-to-heart chat with the lady about the toilet paper, but then decided against doing so. I mean, maybe everyone gave her a lot of crap (no pun intended). I ordered my usual to go, but never did I sit down for regular service.

Two years later, my parents were in for the weekend, to see me off, even though I’m almost a New Haven veteran by now. We went to the restaurant. The Restaurant. Our intention was to order food to go, but walking in, everything looked different. Dark wooden walls, carved in an oriental fashion, partitioned the restaurant. There were leather seats. There were tables with white linen cloth and clean glass tops. There was a waitress who was young and pretty and she spoke English. And most importantly, there were no rolls of toilet paper in sight. We decided to sit down for the first time at The Restaurant, and it was definitely worth the three year wait: the vegetables were moist but crisp; the seafood casserole, steaming and fragrant; the roasted BBQ duck, tender, juicy, and five quacks better than the one from Royal Palace, hitherto only decent Chinese joint in town. We weren’t the only ones who were impressed. For the first time, I wasn’t the sole patron. At least ten other tables were filled—Asian families, Caucasian families, teeny boppers from nowhere—all garbling in grease and happiness, which sure, now I think may be the same thing.

And, oh god, be still my undeniably Asian heart, the waitress said, “Hey, we have karaoke upstairs, if you’re interested.”

Okay, okay, okay, so why did I spend three paragraphs shamelessly recommending this restaurant to you? Is this an actual commercial restaurant review? No. I don’t care if you decide to check out The Restaurant which is on the right of Hong Kong Grocer LLC- 71 Whitney Avenue. New Haven CT 06510. Telephone number: (203)-XXX-XXXX. I won’t receive a single cent if you eat there after reading this post (though it IS rather charming and deserving of your pondering and patronage).

I wrote about it because transformations awe me and I believe in so many weird ways, this place represents the immigrant process. My parents, like many others, came to this country with relatively little in terms of financial or social support, and they had to basically build a second life from ether. Sure, you can argue that whatever education people had before is in itself a financial asset, but the educated ones usually had very little cash, and the ones with cash usually had very little education—only the blueprints of businesses that may or may not thrive in this country. Both groups had to struggle from humble unseemly beginnings. I know, at least, how the former group started: the Chinese graduate students in my Southern town bought barely breathing cars for 700 smackeroos—their highs were when the car zoomed; their lows were when the cars needed fixin’ and more fixin’; the ones with bad backs swept the university sidewalks; the middle aged ones chopped vegetables at restaurants for extra cash; and the young and pretty ones were allowed to wait tables—being a waitress was considered a Big deal until their husbands or they themselves graduated and found jobs. And, the general rule had to be that the white people at Church were nice, but you couldn’t trust the others. The cops always stopped us. Our friends had rocks thrown in their homes in the middle of the night. And the children (like me) were teased to tears in elementary and junior high school until another distraction came to town, i.e. a pudgy Russian boy with the tight, tight jeans—he alone saved us from the slanty-eyes comments. As long as the other kids could spot the well-defined bouncing butt-cheeks from the bus window and point their index fingers, laughing, my friend and I, the only Asian girls in this Southern smallville, were free.

Such memories, like the beginnings of the restaurant, are still there, but dimmer—in my mind, in my journals, and in my parents and their friends’ laughter as they reminisce over holiday buffets how exactly run-down their piece of junk second-hand cars were—the ones that they drove while they were pursuing their graduate degrees. The transformation is dazzling if you think about it. From homes furnished with donation pieces to houses in the ritziest areas of San Francisco and DC and New York and Houston, from children dressed for years in jump-suits even as they’ve outgrown the sleeves by two inches to ones enrolled in the best magnet or private schools or Ivy League institutions or pursuing advanced degrees, these people have now become frequent, high-tipping customers at restaurants that they never wouldn’t have been deemed “good enough” to work in. These are the small marks of success that we have to nick the notch by.

Of course, it’s never a simple review. In the overwhelming drive for improvement, much is neglected. Or perhaps, so much can never be improved upon. The elderly generations dream about their motherland, their culture, and their ways of being. They either push themselves so hard to achieve what they sought out, and in that process, they may not allow themselves enough of the daily joys or the time to experience American culture. They won't understand cultural references in TV shows, newspapers, and pop songs; they won't know the important faux pas until they committed them (and their children bury their hands in embarrassment); they won't carry conversations easily with their caucasian co-workers because really, there wouldn't be much in common to chat about besides work. Or perhaps, these people have already simultaneously acculturated and reached the Promise-land, but now that they're there…they've lost the beat. They have forgotten what it was they dreamed so fiercely of. Why did they pushed themselves relentlessly and what for, they'd wonder. They glance around the table at their children--the ones who are secretly or perhaps openly and defiantly experimenting with sex and drugs, you know, what the average American teen is licensed to do—-and they feel afraid. They feel alone. They wonder if they made the right decision in crossing the Pacific, in leaving their cities, their families, and their histories. Some days, when they’re gazing across the endless acres of land (with no crowd of camera-takers in sight), the openness trickles inside and makes them feel that it's worth it. Some days, the land is still big and vast but in a way, the beauty is denied to them and they know that in a way, they will always be aliens in America.

Meanwhile, the younger generations: the children grow up and are no longer children, but not having avoided decades of fighting. At home, they fight with their parents and their expectations, explicit and implicit: String instruments! Swim team! SAT scores! College! No sex before marriage! No touchy-touchy with the opposite sex! Succeed! Admission to college is followed by admission to professional school which must be followed by marriage to someone from the same if not higher socioeconomic class which clearly must be followed by a house and two children. At school, they fight with their peers and their expectations—that they’re doing whatever their parents demanded to do so while the other students are running free, majoring in Art History, dabbling in rock bands, signing up for NGO internships in Africa. Which leads to my generation's asking: “If we are supposed to be the second Jews, why can’t we be like the Jews? Why force a ruler and a compass into our cribs? Where are the Spielbergs and the Saul Bellows? Where are our political activists and media gurus? And why such a deadly aim for success—what about happiness and our souls?” Questions are answered with contradictions. Ultimately, the children have to fight themselves and in learning how to live with and in contradictions. Sometimes, the results can be spectacular—-new routes discovered and fascinating autobiographies. Sometimes, they can be tragic—-caught twenty floors down dead in the schism between two seemingly clashing worlds; these are dysfunctional relationships that should been predicted and treated.

In any case, the Asian immigrant process of being and coming into being can be documented in a number of ways, and any of a number conclusions can be formed and argued from these histories. But for now, I would like to revel in the aftertaste of the restaurant—it really does taste better every year—and dwell upon the fortune cookie that I received. The strip of paper said, “People are with you. Confide.”

The Rich Coast: A Travelogue in Tales

2009-12-14T07:43:00.001-08:00

I. Night before Flight
II. Chinese-face
III. The Villa, The Beach
IV. The Casanova
V. The Very Rich & Important Man
VI. The Evil Eye
VII. Everything is the Same

***
I. Night before Flight

After finishing two grueling months of inpatient medicine, I rode with Eli and Aria from New Haven down to DC to stay a night in the area before our flights to Costa Rica. We drove through the fog and into the snow, discussing mostly joy-joys, the unit of joy we were going to measure the little things in our lives with--like meditation, like sleep, like hangouts with friends. We decided that we would be the ones to open up a smoothie stand after med school. It would be by the sea, and when people have their first drink, they will be transformed forever. They wouldn't even have to come back to stay enlightened. It wouldn't be like the hospital at all. The only possible complication would be euphoria.

Eli dropped us off at a suburb in Virginia, where his friends, who were going on the trip too, just bought a place. The inside, with its boxes and chairs and bare mattresses and damp lights, looked like a once-cozy home abandoned in the recession now staked out by vagrants. Aria asked if they had toilet paper and sniffed as if they didn't. They did. And after welcoming us to it and the meat and beer in the fridge, the boys drove back out into the cold and left us alone in the house. We slinked around, picking at bread and cold-cuts, and laid on our backs on the fungal moist carpet. Aria knew a lot of stories and one crazy story would lead to another. By the time I acquainted myself with a dazzling array of characters and some really, really odd stories, the boys of the house, Stone and Grazer, came back with a tiny Asian girl. Quiet and polite, she made us each a cup of super spicy ramen, so spicy that our eyes misted and our throats burned. She spoke English like my mom would. Was she a girlfriend? For whom and how did they meet? Don't ask, I told myself.

Near midnight, I was shuffled to a different house, to a different group. A scruffy Harry Potter look-alike greeted us and ushered us upstairs to sleep. In the dark, I thought about New Haven and where I've been and where I will be going and I fell asleep, nestling into a trance-like piano music that must have emanated from downstairs. The notes sounded beautiful, tingling, and yet somehow heavy.

***
II. Chinese-Face

"Bienvenidos a Costa Rica!" read the sign. It was a giant sign depicting four tourists standing on top of a tree canopy, each person grinning in sheer ecstasy and pointing at different directions in the rainforest. We had left the ice and snow of DC for the sun and heat of San Jose, and the change was actually kind of overwhelming. Men played tropical tunes on their guitars. Women swished in short and pink dresses. They talked excitedly in rolling Rs and hugged the returning travelers.

My group--Potter, Thomas the self described white-washed Indian American, two other engineers, and one of the engineer's girlfriend--arrived first. We waited at customs but no one came. And so, we walked out of the airport and rode the shuttle to the car rental. The air was thick, and the smoke, reminiscent of my first return to China.

Stone arrived on the next shuttle. Beaming, he told us that he had asked the men at customs if they had seen us. One man had shrugged and said that all he saw were some fatties and a chinese-face. Throwing his head back in a laugh, Stone pointed to the engineers and repeated "Fatties", and then pointing to me, he declared, "Chinese-Face." We all roared. I had been called many a name in my childhood days in the abysmal South, but Chinese Face was definitely one of its kind. I felt nettled, but not insulted, and nowhere as perturbed as hours earlier when I was the one of the two that was patted head to toe at the gate in DC. "Don't touch me," I had wanted to yell at the butch woman who glared at me as she touched. "Do I look like a terrorist? What am I going to do--kung fu the plane?" But the anger had already crystallized into a burn in my stomach, and now it was floating away in the hot air, in this country where so few Asian tourists journey that they were more viewed as curious, slanty-eyed faces rather than a quiet yet threatening en masse.

Another shuttle pulled up. This time it was Eli, Aria, and Grazer. We cheered. Eli was wearing a tie-dye shirt and he held up his cane as a greeting. He grinned and looked around us in awe. Even the car rental was set in a scenic location--in between the mountains and acres of open space. I remembered the stories that he had told about his family traveling. His mother always wore head scarves. Their names sounded characteristically middle-eastern, so course, they've been stopped and stared down and combed over. Through the years of forced silence at airports, grocery stores, and other little places, their frustration must have had already solidified into a complex formation, more complex than I could fathom.

***
III. The Villa, The Beach

We arrived at the villa after a four hour drive high-powering up the mountain. The road was surprisingly well paved, given what the car rental woman had warned us about flat tires and such, and it spiraled up from the base of dusty shacks and metal rooftops to the Spanish porticos and expansive villas, from native to American money.

A man showed us around the property. Our villa was furthest from the main road, tucked on a hill. It was four stories tall, with kitchens on three floors, balconies on two floors, and a swimming pool carved from stone. We were also to have a daytime maid to clean the house and wash and dry our laundries. There were many bedrooms and more than enough beds for the ten of us. Aria and I decided to take a room on the third floor. It had an A/C, a bathroom, and a room phone. The bed frame hosted two separate twin mattresses. Everything was ideal save for the wall made of solid glass, covered with only a thin cloth for curtains--if we forgot to change in the bathroom, our female shapes would be clearly silhouetted even in the dark, for anyone to study should he want to lounge in the large balcony next to our room, alternately gazing at the bodies and the ocean. I cared at first; later, I didn't and forgot.

The next morning, I arose early. The tables held leftover drinks; I vaguely recalled shouting and laughing and drunken babble from the pool sometime during the night. Everyone else was still asleep but it was nine o'clock and the earth looked like it was on fire. I walked outside and onto the main-road, asking every pale "fattie" I saw, assuming that they were American for where the ocean was. After a few conflicting directions, I decided to just run down the hill, and after a few more rolling hills, I came across a concrete walkway that steeped down to a golf course and then the beach. The workers, digging the ditch, looked up at me as I trekked down. I made running motions with my hands, and they smiled and nodded, permitting my passage. I ran across the lawn, the strip of palm trees, and then onto the sand, jogging alongside the waves for a while, hesitating and almost scared, for no good reason at all, to face the sea. And then I turned. I forced myself to look, and breathe it all in--the salty air, the growing sun, the azure sea, the rocky atolls, and the relentless waves, everything looking so strong and free and healthy that I couldn't believe I was just in the hospital a few days ago, that the hospital and the sea could exist on the same existential plane.

***
IV. The Casanova

There were days spent zip-lining and hiking and kayaking and snorkeling and nights spent eating out and shopping and dancing. And then there were days during which we didn't do much at all--just waking up late, scrambling eggs, and then napping again in cycles, and nights during which we did even less, just lounging and drinking and blowing smoke. On one of those nothingness nights, Aria and I, bored, sat on the balcony chairs and started singing freestyle. "Yo, yo, yo/ there once was a boy/ he went to college/ but right before / he had a fever / twas orchitis/ so he lost a ball / moved into the hall," we sang. Grazer walked down the stairs. "Hey," he said. "I heard you guys are trying to rap." "What a terrible thing," we continued, "He used to be king / but then he met a girl/ she had a m'stectomy/ so she only had one boob/ one boob one boob one boob."

"Hah, fitting," Grazer said. "One ball, one boob." He settled into a couch and free-styled with us for an hour. I realized that he hadn't spoken much until then. Not that Grazer wasn't sociable like the rest of the boys, but he kept to himself during the day, hunched over the laptop, valiantly trying to hookup the WiFi through online obstacles only possible in Costa Rica. Much was said about Grazer: Thomas said Grazer was the most chill person he knew; he kept his cool even when Stone broke his leg in a bar fight. Eli said Grazer was the epitome of Camus's The Stranger; he had a lot of lovers and a lot of experiences in psychedelics and his current bang was the Tiny Asian immigrant whom he met at a bar. However, Stone said Grazer, becoming heated about his career and the acquisition of Things, was no longer The Stranger.

"You know, the first time we met Tiny Girl," Aria said, "We thought she was Stone's girlfriend."

"Huh," He said, raising an eyebrow.

"Yep," we nodded. "It wasn't clear until you came back." "I was like," Aria drew the size difference with her hands, from the six feet tall Stone to the four feet tall Tiny, "how do they kiss?"

Grazer was silent for a while. He often seemed to pause to dwell upon the question, no matter how silly. This time, he said, "I can see how we may seem like that. We're normally pretty affectionate around each other though."

"Does she know about the other women?"

"She knows. She's not ecstatic about it," Grazer replied. "I've been very honest with her. I mean, but there's unstated rule though: when you're with a chick, you can't be talking about the other one. That would make her feel bad. This is etiquette."

"Does Tiny know about the other thing...?" I asked. The other thing referred to an incident a few years ago in which Grazer had a very specific request for his friends and his friends had obliged.

"So you know?" Grazer said, blushing.

"How did you get the idea anyway?"

"I was dating a really hot girl at the time. She had a lot of previous experiences, which made me kind of jealous and insecure. That was reason number one: I wanted an experience that she hadn't had so we would be even. Reason number two: I was curious."

"You did it because you were jealous?"

Grazer squinted intensely into the darkness and leaned one cheek on his hand. "Sort of," he answered, "I mean, I was no longer dating her at the time, but I still wanted to prove myself."

"Wow."

"See, even despite the insecurities, you should want to date the hot desirable girl who had a lot of experiences. Because if she's choosing you out of everybody, then that means something. Of course, two people without other options aren't going to cheat on each other. But that doesn't mean anything--that's necessity."

We leaned back into our seats. The heat of the evening was wafted out to the sea and beyond. We were in the company of lush palm trees and hooting monkeys and thirsty mosquitoes that worked in silence. By then, my skin was already itching and smarting. The sky seemed dark and wide; on this screen, I saw a silent film of Grazer the Casanova at the bar. He's contemplating the cute blonde on the dance floor, her hips gyrating around her petit waist, and the moat of sketchy guys building around her. An impregnable castle. He smirks. He pivots. Spotting a quiet brunette at the bar, Grazer begins to recalculate his steps.

"It is a game," Grazer said after the long pause. "I suppose I'll have to settle for one person eventually," he said. "There's a lot to be said for when you find the best person for you. But..." he trailed off, leaning deeper into his hand. "What happens when my wife looks old? I can't just run off with the next youngest thing. That's unsustainable."

His worry sounded genuine. Aria stated her belief that when two people are in love, they will never see each other as much older as when they had first met because through the lenses of love, people never age. I kept silent. I didn't share the old sage saying--when a woman looks into a man's face, she sees someone that she grew old with; when a man looks into a woman's face, he sees death.

We sat in the dark for a while longer, rocking our legs and scratching the bumps behind our knees. The silent film in the sky continued to play: Grazer marries the girl. And because he loves her, he inspires her to workout everyday for a trim figure and to sizzle in a sauna on weekends for taut skin. Despite her best efforts, the wife has wrinkles around her eyes and her navel loosens into multiple folds after childbirth. Grazer tenderly assures her that he will keep his transgressions to a minimum, but she is distraught nonetheless, sniffing his fingers at night, smelling his coats for a trace of unfamiliar perfume. Grazer shrugs. In order to avoid looking at his wife and especially at her face, he works double-time in his office. As a result, he becomes a very wealthy man, substituting the pleasure of sex for the pleasure of the money and power.

Yes, sublimation, that is what the stars have foretold.

***
V. The Very Rich & Important Man

We wanted to taste the night life of Costa Rica. The girls lusted for dance; the boys lusted for local skin. One evening, we ended up at Bamboo Jam, a dance club a few hills down from our villa. They were having ladies night and the music was blasting. Cars were parked all along the highway. The club was made up of two solid walls for the long, long bar, and two partial walls supported by columns to allow the open air for dancing and chatting. Young women and men swirled around, swinging their hips, their feet, and waving their hands over their heads. A band played opposite the bar and the man on the stage jumped up and down yelling Spanish rap while the strobe lights tuned with our eyes such that with every other blink, we were in darkness and then in light.

"God, this is so seizure inducing," Potter said, turning his back to the light and tried to focus on something stationary.

The boys ordered beer and guzzled down their drinks. And then they bobbed side to side, edging slowly through the crowd. Their moves were in Brownian motion, as if blending in with the chaos was their sole agenda. But by the time the band switched to reggaetone, Thomas was already dancing in between two Indian girls, Grazer next to two short and cute blondes, and Stone was surrounded by a throng of sexy and tanned local mujer.

"Whoa," I called to Stone. "What happened?"

"I don't know. Aria said something to one of the girls. I don't know what she said. And then all these girls came up."

I found Aria near the club entrance. "What did you say about Stone?" I asked.

"One of the girls asked 'What kind of man is he?' So I said, he's a very nice one."

When I squeezed back onto the dance floor, the boys were pow-wowing around each other. Stone was in mid-narration. Gesturing towards a pretty and curly-haired chica who winked back at him, he said to the boys, "I think Aria told them that I am a very rich and important man." They snickered. "I suppose we're all rich here," Thomas replied. They laughed harder. "Rich," Stone marveled, "And important."

***
VI. The Evil Eye

"Once upon a time," said Aria, twisting towards me. We had arrived at the habit of speaking for three hours in bed before rising everyday, and by the roundness and distant glint of her beautifully hooded eyes, I felt the tinges of another tale. "There was a blonde-hair blue-eyed Persian girl, whose mother was Caucasian, and her father was one of the money bags of the Middle East. She was so gorgeous, so unusual-looking for Persian, and so gifted that she was a sure bet for the Evil Eye. The Evil Eye is what happens when you have anything that someone else can become jealous of. Even subconscious jealousy can cast a spell. That's why the Persian mothers always have to say that their children are little shits. So no one will get jealous and wish for a broken leg or a harelip upon them.

Sighing, she shook her head at the ceiling. "Anyways, one summer, after her first year at an Ivy college in the states, this girl was invited into the home of her relatives. One cousin, eyeing her with silent envy, had asked for a lock of her hair. She didn't think much of it at the time. It wasn't till hours later, when she was sitting on the bus to the mountains that she told her grandmother about the lock of hair."

"'Stop the bus NOW,' the grandmother yelled. 'But it was just for her collection,' the girl said, bewildered, 'to make a necklace.' 'Foolish girl,' the grandmother said. 'It's the Evil Eye.' A murmur went through the bus. 'It's the Evil Eye,' the passengers said, 'Of course you must stop the bus.' Outside, next to the highway, the grandmother made the girl hop on one foot in a circle, spit, and make a sign with her hands--or some combination of that to ward off the curse. Only then, was she allowed to come back on the bus."

Yet the curse had overpowered the antidote. During the next decade, the girl ended up doing some very strange things: She married a boy during a marijuana high. ("The wedding picture was precious, you have to see it," Aria said. "The bride, high as a rocket, could barely open her eyes. The groomsmen, the Ivy freshmen boys, made gangster signs. Clearly thinking: 'Shit, yo, college's da best--I just got here and I'm at a wedding!'") She gained a hundred pounds. She carried out an affair with an illiterate restaurant owner who already had an under-aged wife. She angered her father. She dropped out of school. She journeyed to far-away lands, consorting with Asian pimps and lawnmower boys. It wasn't until a decade later, she came back to the states and finished her degree. It wasn't until she had been dealt all the wrong hands of love that she had found the right card of a man. And it certainly wasn't until she suffered and cried and have been in terrible, compromising positions on the dirt cold tiles of public bathrooms that she reconciled with her father. There were days and months when the beautiful girl was made to be as ugly as she could be, and in return, the Evil Eye had forgotten about her.

"Damn," I said, pausing for a long moment after the tale had ended. "Do you think..." I thought about our mutual friend Eli, who was perfectly fine until he lost a lot of weight and became handsome. One day during basketball practice, he twisted an ankle. Then his knees started hurting, then his shoulders, and then his wrists. Over the years, joints were added; the pain, escalated. Some people thought Eli had multiple sclerosis, with the characteristic waxing and waning pathology, since sometimes, Eli walks around with a cane, and other times, he's in a wheelchair. But no, we'd reply--no one knows what he has. The doctors haven't been able to figure it out.

"Do you think Eli has the evil eye too?"

"Oh yes," Aria replied. "Most definitely."

Upstairs, we presented our theory to Eli, who was lounging on a chair and staring off into the woods.

"Listen," I said, regurgitating one of his favorite theories. "Modern medicine can explain the How, but it can never explain why a disease happens in the first place and why to you, of all people."

"That's true," he nodded.

"You could have an autoimmune disease AND The Evil Eye," Aria declared. "Think about it."

"Huh," he said. "My mom has mentioned it."

"You've seen medical specialists and alternative medicine gurus," I said, "Maybe this is the one thing that you haven't sought out: an antidote to the Evil Eye."

Eli nodded again. He kept his head down, but there was excitement in his voice--a higher pitch. "How do I get rid of it then?" He typed his question into Google. "Okay, point pinky and fourth finger at orthogonal angles and raise thumb, then point the pose in all directions." He angled his fingers into an unnatural position and directed them at everyone in the room.

"Why us?" Aria cried. "We're your friends. We wouldn't wish you a curse."

"How am I supposed to know?" Eli replied, focusing his hands on Aria's face. "The Evil Eye stems from an subconscious jealousy. You could be giving me the Evil Eye right now and you wouldn't even know it."

"You forgot the ceiling," I said. "And the floor. There could be someone wishing you harm from an opposite position on the globe."

"You're right!" He shouted, directing his hands at the sky. His head accidentally hit the rim of the lounge chair. "Oww, mothercrapper." Laughing, he directed his hands to the floor and then his face deepened in pain. Sudden stretching movements of the limbs were Eli's constant enemy.

"Maybe there are other ways," Aria said. "Gain a hundred pounds, move to the middle of nowhere for a few years. The Evil Eye will forget about you."

Eli rubbed his hands and wrist ligaments thoughtfully. "Yeah. Maybe."

Hours later, we were hiking the trail that Eli has been excited about since the beginning of our trip, only he couldn't make it as far down as the rest of us, past the spice farms and the wild horse, down the steep hill to where the river raged. "Eli would have loved this," his friends mused. "He loves water." They joked about how the only way to find Eli was to find a waterfall. Watching the boys splash in the water and knowing Eli was a distance away, immobilized, I felt a weird sense of pain and wondered how there are so many different layers to it. First, there's the physical pain. Then, there's the supernatural pain of why it had to happen, and why at that stage of one's life. And then, on top of that, there's this existential pain, the mystery of which can never be explained. In that sense, the Evil Eye was preferable--drawing shape and definition to the beautiful and simultaneously bad luck of being alive.

***
VII. Everything is the same

The night before our last day in Costa Rica, Stone, Aria, Potter, and I went out to dinner at Marlin, a restaurant by the beach. We heard that they served great ceviches. The food arrived, colorful, delectable, and were wolfed down rather quickly. When the bill came, Potter took out his credit card and waved our money away. Then he sat back and looked at all of us. "Well, thank you," Aria said, "You're very nice." He shrugged.

"This is the first time you've been outside your room today," I said. No one had seen him since yesterday and towards three o'clock, on our way to Thomas's room, Potter was still lying on his bed, eyes closed, hands crossed on his chest like a mummy, headphones stuck to his ears. It wasn't clear whether he was aware of us. Perhaps, we were to him only a shadow passing briefly over his sun.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "I just wanted time for myself."

"What music were you listening to?"

"Tool," he said. "Psychedelic & heavy metal."

He paused. I couldn't help but stare. "Heavy metal" was what the boy from college listened as well, lounging for weeks alone in his dorm room. (What an eerie time my twenties are: Past the critical mass of people such that every new person I meet reminds me of someone that I already know, I slip perpetually in and out of déjà vu).

"Everything is the same," Potter said. "I expected to be different and to feel different on this trip, but I don't."

"Different as in how?" Aria inquired.

"I don't know," he shrugged. "More connected to people. I used to think that I couldn't connect to large groups of people. That it was social anxiety. Now I think it's that I can't quite connect to anyone at all."

"Would you say you're depressed?"

Potter shrugged.

"Maybe it's because you're too smart," Aria said. "I know plenty of people like you. You're all too smart and you've thought too much about things."

"Maybe," Potter replied.

"And maybe you've always been older than your age, you know?" Aria continued, "Making it harder for you to connect to your peers."

"I used to think that," Potter said. "Yet now everyone feels old to me, if not older, and I still can't connect."

"Well, out of your friends, who do you connect to the most?" Aria asked.

Potter pointed to Stone, who perked up like a proud baby's father.

"Aww shucks," Stone said. "I was depressed in college too." He glanced around the table. "No seriously. One day, it occured to me that it is impossible, utterly impossible to break out of your own head and make someone else see things exactly the way you do. That's what did it: that realization."

"How did you get over it?" I asked.

"With time. No pills. I just don't care to be anything but happy these days."

Fireworks exploded in the sky. We walked from the table and sat down on the concrete ringlet that encircled a palm tree, watching the whistle of the light as it burst into air, shrieking. We were engaged in conversation for so long that I had forgotten that I had a body and that this body instinctively jumped at the sound of fire. It felt awesome to be seeing and feeling and hearing, even in half-fear. I turned to Potter to register if he had a similar sensation. He was looking at the ground.

"Costa Rica, schmosta rica," I said. "We were too comfortable here. There was A/C. We rode around in cars. We did nothing all day. Of course, everything is the same here."

"Where should I go then?" he replied.

"Um, iceland."

"Why?"

"Because they speak beautifully there. Because their language is one of a kind. Because you need to go where you're physically uncomfortable, emotionally uncomfortable, and then you can have a terrifying but life-changing experience. Maybe not iceland, just somewhere." Somehow, I was picturing a war.

"Sure," he said.

He didn't sound convinced. When I went to bed that night, Potter was still sitting on the lounge chairs on the balcony, posed still like a statue, his eyes focused on a point far, far away. Maybe he peered into the abscess of night, of the world, of existence, of his own being, who knows. All I know is that he reminded me so much of the boy in college that they might as well have been the same person to me, an archetype of a frozen mind, one which I wanted to grab by its shoulders and shake until it has melted.

Potter shot me a side-glance. Did I have anything else to add? I didn't. It was late, and I was exhausted. Tomorrow morning, we were leaving for San Jose airport. I had not a single thought left in my body, just the sensation of the sea, and the water flowing from the lion tablets into the swimming pool, and the leaves rustling.

"Listen," I said. "Do you hear that?"

"What?"

"The water," I said feebly.

"What about it?"

"It, uh," I stuttered. "It sounds so lovely. I wish you'd keep listening." Then before I was tempted to say something else, I retreated to my room.

I didn't say much to him the next day, not even when we said goodbye at the baggage claim. There wasn't much to say to anyone else for that matter. The trip was over. I left our villa with a song from Aria, bear hugs from Eli and Stone, and a bite on the ear from Grazer. I left Costa Rica with pin-point pupils from caffeine withdrawal, full body sunburns, mosquito bites, and a harmless, painless lump on my right elbow which grew into a painful, inflamed third-elbow. The doctor diagnosed the lesion as "Superficial Cellulitis," though it might as well be the start of the Evil Eye.

I left with a head full of joyful, wild, sad and thoughtful people and have resolved to record the key events--this is it. Hopefully, no one is angry that I exercised artistic license; if so, too bad, and at the very least, I used pseudonyms. The other problem with meeting real-life tales is that, unlike in a short story when the conflicts and themes rises to a peak and it can just end there, I have no idea what the actual endings will be: Will Aria be sold to a brothel sultan and be forced to relive One Thousand and One Nights? Will Grazer be able to look into the face of his future wife and see someone whom he grew old with? Will Eli move to the middle of nowhere and regain his fattage? And what about Potter? For him, and for everyone, really, I can only hope that everything will be different, a beautiful and strange kind of different.

Oni the Unreadable (Excerpt)

2009-12-07T03:14:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of submitting pieces, so will no longer post first drafts online. If you would like to read more, please email sascha.qian@gmail.com and I can send you a private copy. For full copies of my past short stories, you can read The Crystal Consultant, a futuristic story about a man who is hired to protect U.S. President and the First Family, and Thank You, Sir.

Oni sat in the car and surveyed the parking lot. Five other cars had pulled in, and had the morning not been so heavy with rain, she would have expected more cars. She switched off the radio and wrapped a scarf around her head. Then, she added sunglasses. Studying herself in the side mirror, she pictured a lingerie model, who even while stripped to the skin can look fully armored and unreadable. Oni combed her hair. She lit a second cigarette and stepped out of the car.

“Hey kid!” a man yelled from behind. “Can we talk about this? You don't have to do this.” Oni clutched her purse tightly and kept a straight gaze. She headed for the nearest door. Someone buzzed her in. “I’m the 9 o’clock. Last name is—should I spell it for you?” she said. The woman behind the window shook her head and pointed down the hallway. Oni paused. “Thanks,” she whispered.

The hallway was drafty and well lit. At the end, there was a tall girl, waiting for her with a clipboard. Her lashes were long and her face looked meaningful when she flicked her eyes down and back up at Oni. She led them into a room with open cabinets and had Oni sit down. She tied a cuff around Oni’s arm and placed a clip on her thumb. The numbers appeared on a screen—it looked like a giant international alarm clock with times for Paris and London and New York, and the girl jotted all these down on the clipboard.

“Are they high?” Oni said.

“Not particularly.”

“Sorry, I was just curious.”

The girl smiled and turned off the machine.

“Can you check also my breathing?” Oni said. “Sometimes, I don’t breathe so well.”

“You have asthma?” The girl asked. She frowned at the clipboard. “Oh, it says here you have anxiety.”

“I do?” Oni replied.

“Do you take anything for it?”

“No,” she answered. She coughed and rested one hand into the well at her throat. She tried to clear her airways. She worried that she was exaggerating the breathing, but then again, her chest did feel tight.

“Don’t worry,” the girl said. “We’ll give you something extra.” She helped Oni rise and gather her belongings before leading her to a different room with a small table, two chairs, and a tiny TV. “I’ll leave you here and someone else will come and talk to you.”

“What about you?” Oni said.

“Yes?”

“Will you be in the room with me later?” Oni stared at her lashes. “I’d feel more comfortable if you were. I mean, I don’t feel comfortable around just anyone—“

“We’ll see,” the girl said. “But don’t worry. There will be enough people around.” She touched Oni’s shoulder and then withdrew from the room.

Tattoos II

2009-10-31T03:18:00.000-07:00

I've developed a fixation with tattoos since I started my medicine rotation.

One guy.

"Sir. That's some tattoo there. Is that...a butterfly?"

"No, it's a bumblebee."

"What a cute bumblebee! Why did you get that one?"

"It's a gang symbol. I was in a gang."

"Whoa."

"We didn't steal nothing or kill no one though. We just sat around and drank on Sunday afternoons."

"How is it a gang then?"

"We were the original kind of gang. Nowadays you young people do stuff. Stealing, breaking in, killing. It's quite sad."

"We're not good."

"Don't mess with us bumblebees either."

***

Another guy during drainage of his belly.

"Whose face is that on your thigh? A girl?"

"No, it's Jesus."

"Oh...Jesus."

"Yeah, I got one on my arm too, see?"

"Wow. You have two Jesuses. Jesus-uh-ses. Jesi?"

"And I want to get one on my back. I want Jesus real big on my back."

"You must be one of the few guys around here with Jesus on your body. You're very special."

"Well, that's me. I don't want nothing bad tattooed on me. No guns. No skulls."

"So why did you get the first one?"

"I was twelve and playing with my friends in the fields. Out of nowhere this guy came chasing us with machete."

"You're kidding. Machete?"

"Yeah, like the big knife. We all thought we were gonna go up to heaven. But after a while, he stopped running after us. I think we were trespassing and he was trying to scare us away."

"So then you got this tattoo."
.
"Yeah, to thank Jesus we didn't get whacked."

The Liver Floor

2009-10-24T05:29:00.000-07:00

This essay on my experience with the liver service while on internal medicine rotation is reprinted here: http://www.atrium-magazine.com/2010/10/the-liver-floor/

We drained 11 liters off a man’s belly. Before then, he was distended up to his neck, like a giant balloon waiting to be popped. His circular head and appendages looked insignificant compared to his belly. It was magical and cartoonish, something out James and The Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—wasn’t there a girl who chewed the magical gum, that delivered meals with each chew, and who then exploded? Well, we popped him all right. The attending pressed deep into the side of the abdomen, making a giant pit, to make sure the needle wasn’t going to hit any bowel. He inserted the catheter and let the fluid drain through the tube and into an opaque three-liter container, which looked like an expanded milk carton. Then, it was my responsibility to return every five to ten minutes to check that the man wasn’t screaming, that the catheter was still properly inserted, and that the container wasn’t full. I found an alcove nearby the patient’s room and read fiction, rising at every few pages to slip into a blue protection gown and gloves before entering.

In less than half an hour, the container was brimming with a clear yellowish fluid—ascitic fluid, as my resident liked to call it. I cocked the tube to stop the flow and transferred the tube into another three-liter container. A few drops of liquid trickled onto my glove—it was very yellow, somewhat bubbly–I quickly wiped it off on the table gauze. The man’s eyes were half open. “Aye yah yah yah yah,” he muttered and swatted down at the catheter with his bandaged hand. “Nooo,” I yelled. “Don’t do that.” I moved his hands to his head; I wanted to tape them there. A nurse walked into the room and shook his head at the patient. “How long have you been drinking Guinness, sir?” The man opened his eyes and replied, “Since twelve. I was twelve when I started.” His bandaged hands shifted to cover his eyes. “See?” the nurse glanced at me and said, “All that alcohol since twelve.”

In an hour, he filled the two large milk containers and I had to switch to half-liter glass bottles, the kind that are vacuum sealed, the kind that look like an antiquated milk bottle. This time, I couldn’t leave. As soon as I cocked the tube and reinserted the needle into the container, the liquid sprayed, hissing like a garden hose, and bounced against the bottle walls. The bottle filled. The froth at the top became frothier, and I start a new a bottle. It filled. There are some liquids and some effects you never forget. Milk being the first one, the coolness and the creaminess that coats your tongue; orange juice, the acidic sweetness as it slides down your throat; vodka, the burn of it as it settles in your stomach. And then, there’s this fluid, the way it drains bright yellow into the tube, the way it brims clear over the container and flows into the tub, the way it bubbles to the top of the glass bottle, the way it smells like piss and sweaty bodies and expired mutton.

Ironically enough, it’s not the fluids that I mind in medicine. It’s not rising before the sun and coming home late. It’s not that the only exotic traveling I manage is when my attending is lecturing and I look beyond his shoulder into the sunrise and the domes of buildings and daydream that we’re all somewhere else. St. Petersburg or Moscow, perhaps. And the strips of the bay are actually frozen ponds for skating, where Anna Karenina and Vronksy rendezvous and Pushkin ogles the girls. Okay, perhaps, those are what I grumble about. But what I really mind is that sometimes, or most of the time, the fluids are all that we’re given. We’re collecting the fluids. We’re measuring the amount of the fluids. We’re analyzing the levels of proteins and toxins and bacteria hiding in the fluids. We’re reading manuals on how to interpret the fluids and what fluids to obtain next. The hospital is a factory of sucking fluids out and injecting fluids back in and then delivering people back out into the streets. We are knowledgeable about how fluids are produced, how when the liver starts to fail, it produces fewer proteins, and how when there are fewer and fewer proteins in the blood vessels, the fluids have less of a pull to return, so instead, they settle in the tissue and then they collect in the peritoneal cavity, producing this so-called ascites, or in my patient’s case, 11 liters of fluid that needed to be drawn out before he could roll over in his sleep.

I suppose, this is the most Important thing to do, to draw out the fluids every week and watch the balloon of a belly rebuild, to calculate MELD scores and prognosticate that given his kidney function, this man has 100% mortality within three months if he does not receive a liver transplant, and then to keep drawing the fluids out and wait, and wait, and wait. The Important thing is to go back to the drawing board and develop newer and better technologies for people with liver failure. The Important thing is to take care of the medical tasks first and leave the fear of dying to a chaplain, the unresolved silence to a psychiatrist, the financial entanglements to a social worker, and the stories to the fiction writer, or at least that’s how the priorities seem to someone in my path. However, I can’t help but feel a kind of emptiness as I am walking home in the evening. I can’t help but feel that we have learned a lot but still haven’t learned much. Who are we kidding? We are here to learn about liver the organ, not about the livers of lives.

Seeing people in their most vulnerable moments is enlightening, and sure, do include that in your admission essay to medical school. But dwelling on vulnerabilities is not substantial in and of itself. Too often we, as caretakers, possess greater health, strength, and judgement compared to our patients—however, there are only so many lines that we can write in this vein while there are so many other leads that can be pursued. That woman whom you thought was morbidly obese and irresponsible? She’s a great singer. She sings at Buffalo Wild Wings on Friday nights. When she sings, you’d think that Diana Ross was in town. Her head’s thrown back. Her hands are in the air. Her miraculous voice vibrates through her rib cage, emanates into the visible air, stirring like thunder through the joint. At first, people are too shocked to clap, but after a long pause, they do. And then, they sing with her, as if their troubles from the week are finally over, or as if they’re indifferent to all troubles for a singular evening—immune in the way we can never make people feel with just shots and boosters. And this man? The gentleman with the ascites? He’s a wonderful father when he’s not drunk. His children love him and love to play with him. When he’s napping on the couch on Sundays, they like to poke him in the belly and tweak his nose just so that he can wake up again. These are moments of strength that we rarely consider as we’re busy collecting the bottles. And we, in turn, work in a factory until perceived otherwise.

Rice and beans

2009-10-11T04:41:00.000-07:00

We're such hard-asses in Diabetes clinic, honestly. In the tone that we ask about smoking and drinking and drugs, we ask the patients what they've been eating. A majority of the patients at our clinic are Hispanic with a BMI of 35 and over and they all roll their eyes at our questions. We eat rice and beans, yah, they say. Plantains too. Grandmothers in their 80s pat their belly and laugh and say, Oh, but I don't eat that much. The nurse often gives me a side glance. I can hear her raising her voice on the inside, goddammit, those are all carbohydrates. We talk to them extensively about the dangers of carbohydrates. They nod, of course. They leave. The nurse shakes her head and wonders how much our talk "went through".

No one should be belittled in this battle against insulin insufficiency, and to be fair, the white-coats that I've worked with are knowledgeable and dedicated and they're awesome for wanting to work with "difficult" populations. But the bigger struggle may be one of cultural competence. This is a socio-pathology: How do we tell people that everything that they're consuming may be evil and bad for them? But, rice and beans and plaintains Are delicious. One of the best restaurants in New Haven is Soul de Cuba. Many believe if one dies and go to heaven, one should be able to eat Tres Leches for all of eternity. Yet, we still lecture 80 year old Mexican, Cuban, Dominican grandmothers that they should start eating tossed salads and a Kashi bar for dinner. And in doing so, we're not only subtly devaluing their culture but we're imposing the dominant culture on them. How then can we be so frustrated when they don't want to comply?

The more time consuming task is for someone to go out and do some research on what are more acceptable foods in minority cultures, what's available in the grocery stores in their respective neighborhoods--be as specific as possible, make specific measurements of quantity, and then report back to the clinic. Don't say, eat less rice and beans. Telling patients what specific foods they can eat, the type that they're already familiar with and can afford, is akin to writing a prescription that they can actually fill. And shouldn't we want our prescriptions filled?

From Seasons of a Man's Life by Daniel Levinson

2009-10-04T05:10:00.000-07:00

"The recognition of vulnerability in myself becomes a source of wisdom, empathy, and compassion for others. I can truly understand the suffering of others only if I can identify with them through an awareness of my own weakness and destructiveness. Without this self-awareness, I am capable only of the kind of sympathy, pity and altruism that reduces the other's hardship but leaves him still a victim."

Critically High

2009-10-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

Sir.

You came to us today with a critically high blood sugar. I have to admit this: It was Friday afternoon and I was exhausted. You were Spanish speaking only. And I knew what that entailed. I would have to call Interpreter Services and raise my questions, pause, listen to someone translate it into Spanish, hear you answer in Spanish, pause, then listen to that translated all back to me in English.

When I walked in, you were sitting in that chair: A bony man buried under three layers of clothing, surprisingly awake for someone whose blood sugar is so high that the machine can’t even read how high it is, whose Hemoglobin A1c is 14, an astronomical number, a marker which measures blood sugar over time. Shit, I thought: How are you still alive?

You smiled. Your eyes didn’t cling to mine, the way that some people’s do the moment a white-coat walks in the door, demanding their pains relieved stat. Your eyes were just dark and dry. “How much English do you speak, sir?” “No English,” you said, shaking your head. We sighed at the same time. Reaching for the phone above, I dialed. Once. Twice. Five times in different permutations of the five digit code. Five minutes of a twenty minute visit wasted; hours of a day wasted not on learning or helping but on dead tones and computer error messages and paper-work mishaps; years of fancy education when all I needed was for someone to teach me how to use the phone. My cheeks burning, I excused myself out of the room. The nurse was instructing a group, but I signaled with my hands. I waited. When the group left, he listened to me and said, “Oh. They changed the numbers this morning.” I raced back with the correct number. Another ten minutes in passing. Upon my entrance, you didn’t frown or roll your eyes or tap your feet. You were sitting exactly how you were before I left, head leaned back, eyes slightly closed.

“Sir,” I said. When we reached through the dial tone, I raised two thumbs up in the air like cartoons on a cereal commercial, and you laughed, but god, you looked so tired.

“Interpreter, please translate for me: How are you feeling?” I pressed speakerphone. Over the buzz, a woman spoke in Spanish, that mysterious rolling garble of a language, the one that I kick myself everyday for not choosing in high school. I couldn’t help but stare at the phone. You couldn’t help but stare at the phone. We were both staring at this stupid phone. You replied. She translated. I asked another question. She translated. “Frankly,” the woman said, “I’ve been feeling my usual self. I think I’m fine. It’s just that my throat is dry.” You tugged at your throat and coughed. There’s a desert in your throat. You wonder, can I hear the sandstorms of dryness? But, sir, I’m well-schooled in routine, and I had to do my spiel: “Any fever? Chills? Sore throat? Nausea? Vomiting? Diarrhea?” The woman repeated, “Fiebre…Vomitos… Diarrea…” You shook your head. No infection. Just dryness.

The interpreter spoke for you: “I’m an immigrant from Central America. I work in the fields.” I nodded and scrolled through the electronic records. According to our reports in April, you were here six months ago after your first diagnosis of Diabetes Mellitus, type two. No symptoms of polyuria (many-pee), polydipsia (many-thirst), presyncope (near-fainting), hematuria (blood in pee), diplopia (double-vision), or blurring of vision then. You were here. And someone saw you. And you were given prescriptions for glyburide, an oral drug, to control your blood sugar and set for an appointment with a social worker to establish medical assistance. You were then supposed to return to us in two months.

“What medications are you on now?” I asked. “Do you use a glucometer and keep a logbook of your blood sugars?” You shrugged and replied. The woman over the phone said, “No, doctor, I haven’t taken any medications. They gave me the glucometer, but I couldn’t afford the strips.” “You couldn’t afford the strips?” Pause. She translated. “Yes, doctor, I have no health insurance. I’m self-pay.” “What about SAGA? You know—the Connecticut health insurance? Do you qualify?” Pause for another translation. “No, doctor. I don’t qualify for no health insurance.” You leaned forward and stared at your faded leather shoes. You didn’t look sorry or angry. It was just a fact that you swallowed long ago. “What about the social worker?” Pause for translation. “She got me a box of strips. It lasted a week.” Pause for translation. “And then?” Pause for translation. “Then I go back to the fields and work. I work very far from here.” Pause for translation. “No, and then, did you see any doctor or eye doctor or foot doctor since?” Pause for translation. “No, doctor, I have seen no doctor.”

I patted the examination table and motioned you to rise. When you stood, you were taller than me. Couldn’t tell when you were sitting down—you had been folding your limbs inward. I held the penlight to your eyes. I think they constricted to light; I think your optic nerve still works. When I held the pan-optic against your nose and under your brow, I think I saw the vessels going into your optic disc and I think they were okay and not yet exploded by the high sugars. I think. Your throat wasn’t red and inflamed—I didn’t see Sahara but I didn’t see glistening moisture either. Your heart pulsated fast. Two distinct beats in bebop: Da dum da dum. Perhaps, there was a murmur. I moved my stethoscope downwards and felt a mass jutting out—a tumor? What are the chances, I wondered. But then you shyly raised your shirt, and I realized it was just your rib cage jutting outward—a cage with the ribs as flying spokes while your abdomen below caved inward, like an empty bowl. Did you know? You had lost half your body weight peeing every half hour that you were all dried out. While the rest of us walked the hallways of the clinic, sporting the fat of Western civilization, you became a walking corn husk.

After I examined your feet for ulcers, perhaps you were alarmed at the abruptness in which I gathered my papers and exited the room. In any case, I had to tell my attending about you. I told your story in the same tone of disbelief as the translator had on the phone. The senior resident listened to my report, interjecting the usual thorough-ass questions when I mentioned that you had lost twenty pounds in the last month: “Did you ask about PPD? We have to rule out tuberculosis. He’s an immigrant.” “What about smoking?” “Excuse me?” “Well, if he’s still smoking, we can know for sure that he can afford the strips but he’s just not getting his priorities straight, so we can address that with patient education.” I glared at her. Sir, did you reflect upon that too while you were waiting in the other room—that we can all be so careless in our carefulness? Probably. Well, I just smiled at her and said, “No. He doesn’t.” “Okay,” the resident shrugged. She scribbled in her notebook.

Finally, the attending, who had been staring at us and shaking her head the whole time, spoke up. “So, what’s your plan?”

"Restructure the system.”

The resident said, “No, she means what medications we should put this patient on.”

“Sure, we can write prescriptions, but--” I said slowly. “He can’t fill them. He can file for free care, but that’s going to take another three weeks. At best.”

The attending shook her head. She sighed. “We have to hospitalize him. He doesn’t live here. He is Spanish speaking only. He doesn’t have that much money or family around. He has all the symptoms of uncontrolled diabetes and he’s severely, severely dehydrated. If we send him home, he’s just going back to the fields, with no medications filled. We’re just going to lose him to the system.” She turns to the resident. “When do the floors cap?”

“I think it’s already capped.”

“Call them then. Get him hospitalized stat. Get him fluids. Get him insulin.”

We nodded and hurried back to the room. But it was empty. Your hat was gone. Your three layers of clothing were gone. The papers that you brought with you were gone. The nurse suggested that perhaps you were still in the bathroom for the urine dipstick, which by the way, turned black instantly because all the sugar crystallized on paper. There was also blood in the urine—signs that the high blood sugar had already began to ravage your kidneys. But you weren’t in the bathroom. The triage lady suggested that perhaps you were in the lab, getting your blood drawn. But you weren’t in the lab. I walked-ran in circles around the clinic, searching for you in the waiting room, searching for you in the back room, searching for you, period. I called out your name, sir. Several times, sir. A few faces glanced up, but they looked more curious than knowing. Meanwhile, the attending hurried in the other direction, and then we caught up with each other, but we had not found you. I went back to the exam room, still hoping you would be there. It was empty, of course.

Finally, I sat down in the chair where you had sat.

Post-jump

2009-09-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

Years ago, one of my patients decided that he no longer wished to live. He drove to the top of East Rock mountain and jumped off the cliff--falling 400 feet into the ravine below. At the same time, a woman was walking her dog at the base of the mountain, and this dog, sniffing at the air, broke into a run through the woods, leading her to the broken, bleeding, scratch-ed up body. Ironically, my patient hadn't showered for two weeks prior to the suicide attempt, so it was accumulation the accumulation of sweat and bacteria oozing follicles that attracted the instinctive nose of the dog. No doubt: Stink saved him. Today, the man is fine. He sits in his chair, pats at his belly, and laughs his laugh. And in the same tone as one would relate a crazy Christmas trip to Mexico, this perfectly normal looking man told me about how he jumped off East Rock.

Every day must have a theme. The evening after interviewing that particular patient, my roommate and I were eating our usual nice and relaxed dinner. Until we spotted something out of our window--the man standing on the roof of an up-scale hotel about a block downtown of our penthouse. He was dressed in all black, hovering on the edge of the building, with no handlebars, and gazing rather intently below him. He stood at attention for half an hour. We studied him at first, half-laughing, joking about our own culpability if he suddenly jumped off the building. But he continued to stand on the very edge of building and our jokes began to lose color. We debated whether to call versus not call. Perhaps, as my roommate point out, the man was photographing. Perhaps, as I'd like to think, he's like my friend N who loves to hack into tall buildings and hang out on roofs. But then there was the question of What Ifs, and that's more of a gambling game. Ordinarily, had I not interviewed the East Rock fallen man earlier in the day, I might have just retired to my room without a second thought, trusting that the way in which spread his arms above his head was a way of welcoming the open New Haven air rather than expressing the exclamation mark before the dive. But I didn't. And so I hedged my bets differently, erring on the intuition that no one is immune from the inner urge for self destruction. I called the police. By the time a scraggly voice came through the static, the man had already disappeared.

Death

2009-09-15T20:43:00.000-07:00

Three deaths occurred recently in this little world. First, a medical student from a year below us passed away due to acute myelogenous leukemia. It was rather sudden. She was improving for a year and even survived a harrowing 72 hours of a rare infection until a day later, she coded in the intensive care unit. A week later, a friend from college was crushed in a landslide while he was hiking through China. His body was cremated; the Chinese consulate has sent his ashes back to the US. The next week, a pharmacy student disappeared from one of our research buildings four days before her wedding day. People guess suicide. People guess runaway bride. The police found her body yesterday stuffed in the wall of the basement. Homocide in New Haven, headlines scream.

Sometimes, we have time to grieve. In other times, we have time only for a pause. At morning report in neurology, the resident will mention briefly that a patient passed away and then we pause before moving on with the report about the next patient. At rounds, after we diagnose a baby with Zellweger syndrome and realize that the child that we were just playing around with has only six months left to leave, no one says anything, for a second until the next consult. At town meeting, the dean will discuss the psychiatric services offered, the intensive care physician will discuss how our student died, a friend will read a poem or a personal email, and then we sit in silence before we return to class, to research, to clinic. Pausing our breaths, we stand up and tiptoe out of the auditorium. Our ears burn with the embarrassment of leaving so early.

Twenty Questions (Excerpt)

2009-08-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of submitting pieces, so I can no longer post first drafts online. Please email me at sascha.qian@gmail.com if you are interested in a private copy. For full copies of my past short stories, you can read The Crystal Consultant, a futuristic story about a man who is hired to protect U.S. President and the First Family, and Thank You, Sir.

J.D. was fourteen when his father collapsed besides the pool. It was a bright and sunny day, and he was torturing his sister Zoey, as usual, by dunking her head under water. After Zoey’s third gurgle and choked cry, his father had risen from the lounge chair—one hand on his hips as if in annoyance, the other in the air as to make a point—and stared at him long and hard, so long that J.D. could discern the individual beads of sweat on his forehead and the folds in between his eyebrows. He looked like he was about to say something. And then—and then, nothing—it was as if the limbs were connected by a string and once that string was pulled, all the parts dropped in unison. In a thud. And then, his father, a giant of a man, was lying on concrete with his face down.

Zoey stopped paddling and stood on her toes. For a heartbeat, J.D. felt like her widened dark eyes—shifting from JD to the body and back to JD—were blaming it all on him, as if the very act of his brattiness transformed their father into a cold lump of clay. Standing for a moment longer, JD watched his father’s back, willing his father to get up, settling for even just a stirring of the shoulder or a muscle twitch. He knelt. He touched his father’s hands. It was cold and clammy. He turned his father over and pressed his ear onto the shirt pockets. Left. Right. He forgot where the heart was. All he heard was his own breathing. Clasping a hand over his father's mouth, he hoped for a film of moisture. But there was no moisture, no heat. Zoey sobbed--hysterical clucking sobs. He couldn't look towards her; everything was a blur as he was leaping up the steps to the deck, slipping through the glass door, bumping into the coffee table, tripping over the dog, who then stirred and started to bark. His mother was out—the grocery store or her office—he forgot where. He picked up the phone and stabbed at the buttons with his index finger, the dog barking in the background, Zoey now pounding at the window, demanding to be let in. Something buzzed; his mother’s cell-phone was still on the counter, flashing and vibrating. J.D. tried the only other number he knew by heart, having dialed it many times with all his school pals around him, giggling, but now—now that it was in his real voice, he didn’t know what to say. “Hello?” he asked. “Hello?” Sounding impossibly shrill. And small.

"The Mayfly Glimmer Before the Last Call" by Poe Ballantine

2009-08-12T04:55:00.000-07:00

Not too keen on the story, but there's something about the voice I like:

At the river bar I was feeling so good and strange and wild that I tried to call my girl, who was like Venus — not the goddess of love and beauty, but the planet: nine hundred degrees in the shade, with poisonous clouds and no life. But I loved her or needed her or was trying to change her or was paying dues for a crime in a past life, or she was like the alcohol, just another drug called self-destruction. I leaned into the phone at 2 a.m., finger pressed in one ear, barely hearing the ringing on the other end; then someone answered. The bar was so loud and rollicking I couldn’t hear who it was. Was it a man’s voice? I said a few things, happy loving Brazilian things, but the conversation was like it always was with her: broken in the dark, like a mad mistreated dog. And I wasn’t even sure it was her. And then, because I couldn’t hear and didn’t know who I was talking to anyway, and because she did cruel things as a rule to teach me the horrors of romance (yet I kept going back), I simply hung up. Maybe she was saying, I love you and I miss you, or perhaps, Fester in the hell of my affection. Or maybe it was the guy in her bed, Frank the bartender or Eddie the old lover, telling me to stuff an onion roll. Whoever it was, I hung up the phone and wandered around for a while in a slump, the ceiling shadows drooping like crepe at a funeral, the patio lights leaving warped white neon tracks down the tar black river that flowed all around outside the windows of the magic island bar.

Middlesex revisited

2009-08-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

This essay on an intersex patient and her family's visit to the pediatric endocrinology clinic is reprinted here: http://www.atrium-magazine.com/2010/10/middlesex-revisited/

She was born 46XY, one 'X' chromosome from her mother, one 'Y' chromosome from her father." However, unlike the other 46XYs of the world, the sex-determining genes on the 'Y' failed to produced its usual signaling molecules. Subsequently, the body, born automatically with primitive male and female internal organs, never received the message of to obliterate the female organs and to ripen the male organs, so that at birth, not only did she have the beginnings of a uterus, fallopian tubes, a cervix, and a vagina, she also had the beginnings of a testis, seminal vesicles, ejaculatory duct, and a prostate. After the delivery and washing of the baby, they found the fused vagina. No scrotum. No penis. The primitive testis never produced enough testosterone for the male external organs, but there was enough around to make a giant clitoris.

We gleaned these details from the charts, fumbling through the thick manila folders with a decade of papers. Among the illegible forms and cryptic documentation, there were typed letters from the surgeon to her primary care doctor. They were the only readable pages in the entire chart, starting off in typical dictation style "Dear Dr So and So, it was our pleasure to treat your patient ________. As you recall, she had" and concludes with "Thank you for sharing in the care of this lovely patient. Do not hesitate to call us with any questions." The tone is clinical; the diction is precise and steel. From these letters, we learned about her surgeries--how they surgically remove the primitive ovaries and testis to prevent the occurrence of cancer; how they reconstructed her vagina into an open pouch--but it was hard, if not impossible to find anything else. Medical notes are amazing. Whatever melodramatic scenes Jeffrey Eugenides had exploited in his international bestseller Middlesex about a similar intersex patient, this surgeon can kill in one letter.

"Does she know um," I asked my preceptor, "that she's different?" He had initialed my name next to 'Calliope' on the board since I was supposed to be the one to interview her. It's been years since I read Middlesex, but what I did recall was that the main character Calliope had no idea who she was until puberty hit everyone else. Left as the one stick figure in a class full of blossoming breasts and flaring hips, she began to ask questions.

"Of course," he said. "They're here for estrogen therapy. Her parents must have told her." Pause. "On second thought." He looked down and flipped through the charts again. "Start off slowly, okay?"

Slipping the charts into my arms, I knocked on the next room and walked in. The girl 'Calliope' was on the examiner's table. She had long hair and long thin legs that swished back and forth as she sat on the edge. Her arms were long and slender too, like a waif. The mother glanced up with a smile. The father nodded. Their facial expressions didn't change as we shook hands.

"So," I said, with a big smile. "Tell me what brings you in here today."

Her mother looked me in the eye and spoke very slowly. "Did you read her charts?"

"Yes, I did."

"I want to just emphasize that my daughter hasn't been to this place since she was born."

"Yes, I know."

"Not since she was born," she said again. Her eyes shifted from me back to her daughter and then back to me. I glanced at the father. He was sullen and studying the creases in his palms.

"You know what?" I jumped to my feet and directed my voice to the girl. "Sweetheart, why don't you go out into the waiting room, and we'll talk to you later, okay? Wouldn't want to bore you with this stuff."

'Calliope' shrugged. It wasn't until she left the room that the mother brightened and let out a long sigh. "Thank you," she said. "We haven't told her anything. We don't want to rob her of her--" Her glare was beseeching my judgment. "Her childhood innocence." "What have you told her?" "Nothing," she said. "We don't tell her nothing." The father nodded.

The surgeries were performed at birth. The estrogen stimulation was given at birth and none has been administered ever since. A decade has passed by between medical intervention, and now her charts has been raised from the graves.

"Well, now that she needs estrogen shots for puberty," I said. "What are you going to tell her?" "Nothing," the mother said. "They're just normal shots." "I see," I said, not knowing where to go next. "I don't want to tell her before she's able to understand." The mother continued. "Before she's able to process it. It's a lot to take in." "Certainly." "Thank you for understanding." "What are your concerns?" "God," she said. A long pause, then a choked voice, "What's the English expression for this: you touched my heart with that one."

In Eugenides's book, both Calliope and her parents were ignorant of her genetic identity. But in real life, though 'Calliope' did not know, her parents knew from day one, and it was a certain kind of hell for them. They loved her; they bathed her; they watched her growing up like all parents do, but with constant mental snapshots. While the other parents lavished toys indiscriminately, they held their breath as they observed 'Calliope' reaching for the truck instead of the doll. She grew up a tomboy. Long legs, long hands. She ran as fast as a boy; she played all the games that they did. The mother was disheartened, but then she remembered that she was a child, she had been a tomboy too. Surely, all of this was still within the realm of normality.

"This year's been tough though," she said. "People are starting to say things about my little girl." "What things?" "Like why is her voice so low. Why is she playing like the boys do. They say things and everything goes back straight into my heart." The mother rubbed her chest as if she had heartburn.

"Do you know other people with children of the same condition?" I asked, scratching my head. "It may help. Maybe you guys don't have to meet up, but could exchange emails or something." Shrugging, they said, "Sure. Yeah. Why not."

My preceptor knocked on the door and strode in. We had to make the room vacant for the other patients. I asked for 'Calliope' to come back into the room. Not a word about 46XY. "Just a regular checkup, Miss Thing," my preceptor pinched her cheeks. Shining a light into her eyes, we checked for the red reflex, and swinging the light from eye to eye, we checked that that her pupils constricted equally in reaction to light. We scoped her ear; we scoped her mouth. We listened to her heartbeats; we auscultated her lungs; we pressed on her abdomen. Then covering her with a cloth, we asked her to slide her shorts and underwear down to examine her privates, which for all the world, looked female. Then we washed her hands and asked her to play in the waiting room again.

My preceptor, the endocrinologist, pulled out a chair and sat down. "From now on, your daughter's going to have to be on estrogen therapy for the rest of her life. How are you going to tell her?" They shook their heads. "From my experience," the endocrinologist said. "These kids grow up and they always wish someone had told them sooner. They will feel like they've been lied to all their life." "I know, doctor," the mother said, "but there's no good way to tell her now. We don't want to freak out and do something." Which is a wise fear. In the book once Calliope discovers the truth, she wrote a goodbye letter to her family, cut her hair, called herself 'Cal', and hitchhiked to California on a truck--on the way, she almost gets raped two times and then exploited for a strip club.

(Boy, was I happy that I hadn't recommended the book to her parents).

"I do understand that there is no good way to start this, but there are ways to tell her slowly," the endocrinologist said. One of his patients had a mother who would always say when the kid mentioned babies--"Well, honey, not everyone can have babies." It wasn't the whole truth, but it planted a seed for the later conversations.

"Yes, we do want to tell her," the mother said. "But slowly." "Right, and there are specific ways to do that," the endocrinologist said. As he recommended a psychologist in New York who specializes in managing intersex children, I found myself drifting away from the conversation and asking a hundred other questions about 'Calliope': Is she straining to hear us from the crack in the door? How will she finally know--will it be when she's eating lunch with her friends and she discovers that not everyone receives a patch at the doctor's office every month? Will it be when she's watching an Oprah special on Intersex Children and she discovers that everything finally makes sense? Or when she feels sexually attracted to a girl? How will it occur to her--like lightning flashing across the evening sky or the morning light seeping into a room?

"Appearance wise, your daughter is a beautiful, normal girl, but no one knows," the endocrinologist concluded, "what effect the male hormones had while your child was still in your uterus. How it may have molded her brain. What identities are permanent? What identities can be changed. Who knows? No one does."

Despite not having all the answers, we ended the interview on a positive note. The parents thanked us; they seemed relieved now that they had at least two good sources to contact, with the possibility of developing a step-by-step approach for how to defuse this situation they've been actively avoiding for the past ten years. The mother stood up and kissed her husband on top of his bald spot. "Tell us, doctor," she said. "This 'Y' chromosome that made my daughter--is it from me or my husband?" "Your husband." "Aha," she laughed, kissing him again while he smiled sheepishly. "It was all your fault, I knew it. I'll tell you all one other thing: he was drunk when he made her."

We were almost to shocked to laugh. "Who hasn't done that?" the endocrinologist said, and that was the end of the visit.

***
And what of 'Calliope'? One may ask. What's to become of our beautiful intersex? Medically, she will visit our clinic monthly for pills and patches. In a short amount of time, the estrogen will perform wonders. Breasts will bud; voice box will heighten; hips and rears will come to fruition. When she's in her teens, they will do reconstructive surgery on her vagina such that she can have sex, if so she chooses. And since she has a uterus, though no functioning ovaries, it is very possible that in the future, she can have children via in-vitro fertilization.

The question remains as to what identity 'Calliope' will choose. Her parents chose the first time around. When she becomes of age, she will be the one to make the decision again, whether anyone else likes it or not. In the book, Calliope ultimately chose to become Cal--finishing off in Germany in a stable relationship to a woman-artist. Perhaps, the hormones in utero had shaped her/his gender identity for good, overpowering social conditioning and parental upbringing. Or perhaps, these nature vs. nurture questions are futile in the face of society, where we are always expected to choose. If identities are the round holes on the board, then we, regardless of whether some of us are born squares, will always be made to feel like we have to squirm and round out our edges until we fit.

______________________
* Details have been changed from actual events to minimize personal identifiers.

From David St. John, The Face

2009-08-01T04:22:00.001-07:00

The voice, a woman’s, says, “You self-absorbed prick!” & I swear
Every man in the place looks up, assuming in a heartbeat, & probably not
Without reason, that he’s the one—& I include myself here—that this bullet
Is clearly meant for. But then we can see her, because she stands up beside
The table, looking down at him the way a gargoyle surveys the filth below
& then of course we notice him, wickedly handsome, beautiful really,
Late-forties with jet-black dyed hair slicked back & though of course it’s
Unfair, you hear the whole restaurant decide together, all at once,
Well, she’s probably got a point . . . He’s pure Eurotrash, your standard
Rodeo Drive chauffeur–cum–gigolo–cum–male model, all grown-up
& burnt out, & it’s hard not to feel just a little sorry for him
As she raises her steak knife to her shoulder & buries it in the back of his
Left hand, flattened—now pinned—against the starched white linen tablecloth.
She looks at the knife & slumps into her chair. He looks over at her, with what
Seems enormous tenderness, & it’s easy to believe, in fact, that we’ve got it
All wrong. As the waiter comes over with an ice pack & the first-aid kit;
As the several doctors in the house compete with their cell phones & advice;
As the lake of blood deliberately advances toward her . . . well, looking at the two
Of them looking at each other, it’s hard not to admit they must be in love.
I mean, really really in love—

Planethood

2009-07-31T02:59:00.001-07:00

Of all the gods in New Haven, Pluto kept the lowest profile and bought himself a bookstore on Church Street. It’s not a visible bookstore either--just a shed with painted door tucked behind and in between two brownstones with a crooked sign that reads 'Rare & Used'. On sunny days, passerbys can easily miss it, fancying in their hurried walk that they saw a shadow flickering in the corner of their eyes. On cloudy days, people generally have better luck. But even then, the door didn’t always open, and Pluto would stay behind the counter, shaking his head at the visitor's attempts before turning back to his books--politics, fiction, romance, New Age, existential. He read them indiscriminately, pulling up to five at time off the shelves and breathing in their acidic dust. He stroked their covers. He repaired their spines. The new additions--he catalogued on index cards and filed alphabetically in its appropriate genre. The older ones--he loathed to sell and hid his favorites at random high spots. Sometimes, customers throw fits, unable to understand why they can't buy an item that is in the store, and then Pluto would have to explain how in the previous career, he developed a practice of never giving up souls that he liked. Bad business was his business.

Apert

2009-07-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

Picture the adult cranium as a 3-D jigsaw puzzle with flat bones as pieces. At birth, the bones are soft; each piece is joined together by movable fiber--this baseline is what makes a baby’s head so fragile, but it is also what allows for the growth of the skull while the soft tissue organ inside, the brain, expands. Over time, the bones solidify further, and the fibrous bridges ossify, allowing for the fusing of bones into more expansive plates, to be locked in by rigid articulations known as sutures.

As simple as the process may sound, there is a lot of mysterious coordination between the expansion of the brain and the fusing of the flat bones. If the bones fuse and lock in formation by sutures before they’re of sufficient size, they can hinder the growth of the brain. They can also hinder the proper growth and expansion of the other bones, such that the entire skull becomes malformed—imagine jamming one piece of the jigsaw and then having to jam all the other ones for a proper fit. Such malformation from bad timing can not only result in severe skeletal defects, but also neurological ones as well—dental problems, vision problems, hearing problems, cognitive delays, with mental retardation being not uncommon.

The medical term for this abnormal process is craniosynostosis, and it’s an umbrella for many different syndromes, exotic ones like Muneke and Crouzon, and hyphenated European names like Shprintzen-Goldberg, Jackson-Weiss, Loeys-Dietz and so on—each with a slightly different morphology. One of the more common ones is Apert Syndrome, 1:200,000 births; recently, I’ve seen two patients with this condition.

They’re unforgettable kids. Flat, concave foreheads, low-set ears, eyes that spaced far apart, farther than Jackie Onassis’s—one eye can look forward, but the other fixed towards the nose. The middle three fingers are fused. The head is asymmetrical and lumpier in the back. My kid from yesterday climbed all over the room, pulling at drawers, banging on the trashcan while he repeated two different syllables in various pitches and dribbled spit from his chin. Not to say other kids are well behaved, but definitely not the behavior to be expected at his age.

His father was very patient with him. He held the boy, cooed to him, kissed him, grabbed the boy each time just as he was about to suicide mission into the walls. I am at the age where I can mentally understand the mechanics of difficult human relationships; however, I must admit that I can not even begin to fathom how one stays in them, scene after scene. In addition, as much as I find myself wondering about the patients with these exotic syndromes, I am at loss to reach across to the other side and say something intelligent to the parent. They’re not saints, I know that, but they are of a different class of people altogether. All those visits to the doctors, nights at the hospitals with just your kid and the TV, the fielding of questions from strangers—wouldn’t they have to be?

The potentiality is overwhelming. There are a series of events that can fall under the bell curve of human experiences and then there are ones off to the deep ends. All it takes is one initiating event. Human fibroblast growth factor 2 gene has a defect during the development of the egg. Nine months later, a boy with cranial and mental defects is born to a family. The family, already in a state of financial decline, has to modify its pieces in order to accommodate the improper timing. Sanity and civil obedience unravel. The sequence of one event escalating into another can make the situation appear as if the pieces were locked in even before the sutures fused prematurely. As if the pieces were always meant to lock in a certain position.

Exchange of Numbers

2009-07-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

I met Number 5 today on way back from Gourmet Heaven when a bug-skinny tall black guy walked up behind me asked for the time. I looked down at my watch and then at the number ‘5’ printed all over his blue scrubs. He wore a pair of glasses on his thin bridge of a nose and leaned on a wooden cane.

“Nice number, sir.”

“Thanks,” he says. “I was just at the hospital.”

“What do you have?”

“Prostate cancer,” he says, with a shrug. “And my leg.”

“Whoa--prostate cancer in your leg?”

“No, no,” he huffs. “Prostate cancer and my leg.”

“What’s wrong with the leg?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. As if to say, it doesn’t walk well, you fool. But then he smiled and replied, “Don’t know. Probably from when I was a teenager.” His left hand held out a cup. I half-expected the jingle of coins until he tilted his head back and drank from the cup.

“Oh lord,” he exclaimed.

It was early evening. The clouds were glowing pink while down under, the parking lot was already bathed in the shadows. All was still except for the two of us. We discussed Number 5’s cancer. He explained how after turned away at the shelter, he was temporarily crashing at the emergency room because the guard was nice and let him sleep till morning. As he continued to talk, I realized that he was hobbling awfully close for someone to whom I already gave the time. I slipped my bag onto my other arm.

“Say,” he said, staring rather sternly into my eyes. “You’re not Chinese, are you?”

“What if I am?”

Two arms snapped into a cross; his cane aimed like a knife at my neck. “Hiiiiiiiii-yah!”

I blinked. “Yeah, I don’t do that.”

“What a shame! You guys have the best martial arts in the entire world. The best! You sure you never learned?”

“Yeah…No.” I backed away from him and glanced at the side door to the apartment building, calculating that it would be at least 5 seconds for me to open my bag and to find a key.

Number 5 sighed. “Hey, tell me something else about your people. Don’t you guys have a saying that people like me are full of black dragons?”

“Dragons?”

“Or something. Tell me this, why is it that when I’m walking down the street and I see these Asian people, they always nod their heads and smile but then they run off to the other side of the street?

“I don’t know.”

“Or that one time, it was raining, pouring cats and dogs, like mean cats and dogs, and then there was this little old Chinese lady and her husband walking behind me and I slowed down and offered to walk them under my big umbrella and all. But they just nodded and smiled, just kept nodding and smiling. ‘No, okay, thank you, bye.’ And then they just turned the corner. Tell me this. It was pouring like hell, and they were just completely drenched. Why would they rather walk soaking wet and get sick and all rather than just walk a block with me? Must be the black dragons, I tell yah.”

“Wow," I heard myself say.

“Someone told me that you guys had a saying. There must be a saying.”

“Well, for one,” I answered. “I don’t believe in black dragons.” Even as I said this, I sensed that he was edging closer. Prostate cancer. Bad leg. A story about racial stereotypes. I said to myself, how perfect would it be if he just leaned closer and swiped my bag? And then I'll trip him and knock him down with the cane? My head twirled with the possibilities.

“So this is it,” I said as we circled back to the original set of doors to the building.

“Hey, one more thing,” he said, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose as I opened my bag to find the key. We both paused and stared at each other. It’s funny how time zips and lingers--but in that brief snatch, I felt like he could have said anything. Or done anything. We were both ready for anything.

"Could you," he sighed. "Could you spare fifty cents?"

“Yes,” I said, breathing slower again, and fished a few bills from my pocket. They were crinkled in every corner like origami, but Number 5 didn’t seem to mind. He smoothed the paper against his chest and then slipped it into his trousers.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thank you, child.”

“No, please. Don’t,” I said, waving to him as he limped down the street, the blue scrubs fading into the gray of New Haven. Overhead, it was just beginning to rain. Tiny drops at first, but then oh, how it poured.

The Hunger Apprentice

2009-07-06T20:07:00.001-07:00

I eat and sleep in a tiny room in the corner. Every day, a sitter comes in to check on how much I’ve eaten. She watches my every bite and writes notes whenever I use the restroom—so worried about me, the darling. You’re all darlings and you’re all concerned about me, but oh, you needn’t be. Really. Can’t you see that I’m the same golden girl? More golden, even. My hair is shining again, and I am doing fantastically.

Yesterday was Fourth of July. It was supposed to be my Independence Day according to the doctor. But then a mistake happened. A miscommunication, really. I was all set to go home because I was almost up to the goal weight, but then, someone claimed that it was all water and I hadn't used to the restroom before the weigh-in. And well, how was I supposed to know? Now they’re all rather upset at me and I’m not allowed to go home today. Or tomorrow. However, perhaps the day after? Oh the day after would be lovely. I am crossing my fingers for that one! Knock. On. Wood. If that is wood, alas. Oh to finally go home again and sleep in my own room and consume what I want and run around the neighborhood as long as I want and as much as I please!

And yet I am here still. Don’t worry, old dear; it is just as well though. I had a wonderful holiday. And you? My family came and visited. Oh yes they did. I’ve new Seventeen magazines and books to read. Look at them, all beautiful and pristine and glossy, with the smell of newness. Smell it! That will keep me busy for a while. Otherwise it is just me and my desk and this small window. Bah, who am I to complain? Prisoners are the ones who don’t have any windows, and I at least have the sun pouring through my little window that I can arch my face towards. Also delightful is the balcony. Have you never been? Oh it is a treasure! My sitter takes me there in the afternoon if she believes that I had eaten every item on my tray, which I always do now, except for yesterday. For the duration of an hour, I am allowed to sit and lie on the lounge chair on the balcony, unfolding my long legs and closing my eyes to let the sunlight coat over my legs. I dare not pace around the balcony though. You people are too cautious, I think. What I call a leisurely stroll, you would call it exercise! What an idea. If I happen to feel cagey and circle my room to loosen my legs, say a few dozen or so times, you’d call it exercise. If I press my body against the window a few times to strengthen, no, just to wake up my arms, you’d call it exercise as well. Goodness gracious. Everything is obsessive ambulation and calorie-burning to you.

Sorry, I’m not spewing venom. I know you’re all just trying to do your jobs. And you’re all doing fine jobs, honestly—I can vouch for you if you want. My teachers say I write lovely letters, and I can certainly write a lovely letter for you. But. It’s just that. Can’t you see? Look at this wrist. There is so much flubber around this joint. And look at this collarbone. I used to be able to hold a pen above and below, the lines being so cut and defined; I used to be able to dip my fingers there every time I was nervous; and now I can’t even see it anymore. Where did it go while I was forced to drink Ensure this, Ensure that, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry flavored, eat every last lick of peanut butter, butter up every last spoonful of cream cheese, my restroom sealed with a lock, my pockets checked, my drawers opened to see I’ve misplaced any leftovers? Can’t you see that I’m doing more than just fantastically? Answer me. I feel like I’m disappearing, just like my collarbone.

Silly me. Nothing changes that easily; we’re just bury ourselves under mounds of fat. The doctor knows this. The resident knows this. The medical students and my sitter do too. You all watch me with your intent eyes, asking me what I had for breakfast that day, and for lunch, and for dinner. It’s a strange habit, strangers asking strangers such funny questions, but I’ve gotten used to it, really. After all, you all just want me to disappear. You disapprove of my delicate wrists, my sharp collarbones, my sun-seeking ways, and I’ve no choice but to obey you and vanish.

Presenting

2009-07-03T02:50:00.000-07:00

Presenting in medical lingo can be surprisingly difficult. Before medical school, you have at least twenty-some years of speaking in regular English or what have you, then you take two years of Medicalese and now it is the last language that is expected to be your primary language among white coats for at least ten hours a day. Stubborn tongue, speak not of "it swelled and got bigger", say "erythema, edema, and expanding perimeters." Say not "he can go home when the ankle gets better," rather clear your throat and speak in a lower tone--"Patient can be discharged when the erythema and edema shows improvement after therapy with oral antibiotics." There's no small talk in Medicalese; relay no extraneous information. Skip over numbers, report if disastrous. Always, preempt interruptions to your speech by expecting others' initial hunches as to the cause of the illness and then subtly include the details that would exclude those possibilities. Your goal is to chime in everything that they care to know for the patient's medical management at rapid speed with no minimal interruptions for questions in 5 minutes, tops. Talk like Faulkner writes, but hold the details most precious to you behind your tongue. Details like the white of their eyes enlarging as soon as you enter the room, the tightening of their throat muscles as you place a stethoscope on their chest, the name of the stuffed animals that they clutch in their hands, details that should anyone ask, you'd be more than happy to share, but no one does--not in this monsoon of details.

Don't worry. If you're confused, the senior resident can show you the way. It might be 9 o'clock in the evening and he's supposed to go home to his family, but now that he is there for a little longer anyway, he feels obliged. Holding your admit note with tired hands and tire eyes, he smiles, laughs at your attempts, gives examples, anything to get you to speak more of his language and less of yours. Picturing his daughter waiting at home, wondering aloud about dada in her new babble, you cannot help but feel the sin of your recalcitrant tongue and the expanding perimeters of your erythematous cheeks. Pay attention and learn.

Night off

2009-06-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday our first week in the wards, A, N, and I went to the waterfall in West Rock. It was dusk and the sky was glowing orange through the trees. “Whoa,” A said, “Look at the sky. Look at the sky. Isn’t that crazy?” Kid’s always pausing us mid-step to point out the beauty of a cracked side walk or the ethereality of trash bags in the wind.

We sat for a while in the coolness of the stream, A and I on chairs, N on the bank. I was feeling loose and relaxed for the first time in a week, leaning my head back and feeling the droplets on my forehead, completely and utterly relaxed. That is until, my friends stripped. I saw pale flesh. Thighs. Stomachs. Pale feet stumbling over the rocks and then wading into the water. Their heads bobbling as the streamed flowed fast and over. “Join us,” they called. I looked down at my outfit and complained bitterly that I would get wet. “That’s the point,” N said, giggling, and what can I say? Off goes a few items of clothing and then I was in the water as well.

Hours later, at the grocery store, all of us walking down the aisle in commando, dripping wet, our sandals with souvenirs of rocks and mud, I feel a wave of how nice and strange life can be—one moment, meditating at the cliff of a waterfall, talking in silences and splashes, and then the next, chatting and listening to the beeps as the juice and snacks are checked in at the register. We’re kids who still want to play; we’re adults who are getting better at taking care of ourselves. It's nice and perhaps not that strange. I wanted them to propose to me with a 25 cent plastic ring from one of 'em machines. And we would get married, the three of us, and live happily ever after, occasionally studying and working, but always jumping into the ocean or some other body of water on the weekends.

My roommate last night was a different tale altogether. When I left the apartment for my waterfall adventure, she was lying on the couch like a sick cat. It wasn’t until I came back and we went out in yet another one of our restless prowls around the town looking for the perfect bar for her mood and we settled into the high chairs, sipped our drinks that then she started to speak.

I’m not a psychiatrist but I learned this much about talk therapy: Everyone has a lot of shit going on in their lives, but people never list the most pressing concern first. They say this bothers me, and that has been bother me, but the most bothersome event of all—the trigger event for their ill night—they either tell you this last or they don’t share this bit at all.

And for my roommate last night, it took a while. Six bars, two overpriced drinks later, and a storm of verbal assault on people in our lives, we were back in the apartment again. She slumped onto an armchair, her back to our window of New Haven lights framed East Rock on the right and West Rock on the left where I had bathed in a waterfall earlier and imagined myself so young and immune to life. She sat, looking at her hands, describing to me the death of her first patient. How the baby was not intubated poorly on the flight to the hospital. How he became sicker and sicker because of medical incompetence. How they had to sign the papers to give the liver transplant to someone more deserving of it, i.e. more likely to survive with the transplanted liver. How he was so small, his arms so thin, his hands so tiny. She circled her index finger and thumb together to indicate how little. How he lied there for days before his death, with a green tint, his fist contracted with his thumbs adducted, curled up like roses, a sign of irreversible brain damage. How the resident cried, how the attending yelled at her when she almost protested as he was signing the paperwork to deny the transplant, how she knew how to speak Spanish and could interpret for the team, but she didn’t know how to speak to the parents when they arrived. Even if they spoke English, she would not know how to speak in their language. How yes, she knows people die all the time, but a lot of them have lived full lives, but this was a baby who hasn’t done anything wrong or experienced anything great. How his hands and feet were so tiny, everything so tiny, like uncurled rose buds. How they had all failed him.

My roommate told me all this as she sat looking at her own hands. I had been standing but was slowly easing down to the floor. It was 1 o’clock in the morning already. I had no medicine to give her except to tell her that we should go to sleep. And tomorrow's always another day that we have to be prepared for.

First Week

2009-06-27T04:08:00.000-07:00

Pediatrics inpatient, school age unit, is all about rounds, which is the equivalent of a mega-team meeting. We begin the day at 7:00am with sign-outs, in which the previous night intern and senior resident report what happened with each patient during the night. If it’s your patient, you take careful notes; if it’s not your assigned patient, you should still at least pay mind. This is so that the night senior resident—the one invariably wearing scrubs and raccoon tracks around the eyes—can transfer responsibility back to the day staff and go home with a clear conscience.

Then, we “pre-round” as in we check in on our assigned patients—writing down any new labs from the computer system, copying the vital signs like heart rate and temperature from the nurse’s notes, slapping on some Pure-ll and walking in to wake up our patients for a brief physical exam. The data collected then goes into a Subjective-Objective-Assessment & Plan (SOAP) note, in which we also recommend changes in the medical management of the patient, if need be that is. By the time rounds start at 8:30am, we’re supposed to have finished our SOAPs. Each nurse from the floor is called in one by one to sit with the attending, the senior residents, the interns, and the students and listen in on the report. For rounds, we basically give a one liner about the medical history of the patient, focus in any changes that we noted during the previous day as well as in the morning, and then suggest a plan. Our morning presentation can be basically read verbatim from the SOAP note, but some like to embellish with more concrete details, keeping in mind that you want to present all relevant information, but you don’t want to irritate the senior residents with your ass-thoroughness. The senior resident, the one sitting at the other end, is assigned to be the teaching resident for the week; his job is to go through a repeat motion sequence of nodding, scribbling notes, staring at you with a serious tight-lipped expression, and then eyeing at the clock. If he’s confused, he’ll butt in. If he’s feeling the teaching vibe, he’ll “pimp” you with a medical trivia question. The other senior resident, the one sitting at the computer, is the “shit” resident for the week; his job is to enter in orders, consults, and discharges into the clinical manager program as we report them. And so that’s how rounds go—a nurse comes, we report on her patients, she gives input, orders are entered, teaching points are made, and then we move onto the next block of patients. If we’re lucky, rounds will finish by 10 or 11:00am.

And then, we have “walk-around”. If there are any new interesting patients for that week, we’ll all enter the patients’ room and introduce ourselves. I admit, from the patient’s perspective, it must be incredibly overwhelming to have a swarm of white coats—at least 13 in number—all want to come in and touch, touch, touch. We’re apologetic, but still—it’s intrusive. The kids always oblige us. They’re cute and docile. We take turns listening to their heart with our stethoscope; then we apologize again, exit, and Purell our hands.

There’s another sign-out before noon, same format as the morning meeting, but this time, we’re making sure the night intern go home. The cycle then ends with the afternoon sign-out—in which we, the daytime staff, transfer information and thus responsibility—to the night staff, which is composed of the intern and the senior resident. The attending on-call isn’t technically at the hospital, but they’re readily available when need be. The medical student on-call stays only until they admit patients, but then they can leave for home around 10pm.

As you can see from the schedule, there’s really not a lot of time to spent face to face with the patients. The fact of reference is maybe some residents can spend about on average 5-7 minutes with patients in total every day—such fact that I never really accepted till now. If our mornings are swallowed up by rounds, our afternoons can be swallowed up by teaching conferences, so we have to be super efficient or else no one can go home early. There’s an amazing amount of scut to be done: call interpreter services, arrange for a consult with cardiology or neurology or infectious diseases or social work or psych and so on, discuss with the nurses about what should be done and what they knows that we don’t, write SOAP notes and admission notes, and on, and on, and on.

Our roles are as follows: The attendings have to make the residents are making the right management decisions; the residents have to teach the interns, who just transitioned into the team a week ago, brand new from medical school; the interns have to adjust to the computer system, check in on 5-7 patients, and make decisions that they haven’t had the power to do so before; the medical students have to follow the residents and interns around, hoping for some teaching moments or run around doing scut and if all else fails, we sit in the chart room and try to look busy with our notes and textbooks—-enthusiastic, interested, busy.

Another unspoken role of the medical student is to diffuse anger. We're the unpaid workers that you can potentially yell at anytime without fear of consequences. There's a patient of mine who I honestly dread going into his room sometimes because the grandmother will always yell at me. "Why is it always you student doctors seeing my boy. Why can't the doctors see the boy. I don't want no student always come in and out examining my boy. I just want the doctors cuz they are the ones who treatin the patient. I know y'all just students, learning and stuff. I know how it works."

Yesterday, our team decided since my patient's records were incomplete, I should get in touch with his primary care physician to request for records. The primary care physician referred me to another office who then explained that I couldn't obtain any records without the mother's release form. Unfortunately, the mother is at home, sick with H1N1. The grandmother shook her head at me as I walked in for the 10th time that day. "Why is it you always come in here. First, you want to know the dosing of his pills. I gave you that. Then, you want to know to the number of the pharmacy. I gave you that. Now, you want me to bother my daughter who's sick as hell with the swine flu to sign a form? This form isn't even filled. I don't know how to fill it. She's sick. There's no way she can fill it." Pause, then the torrent again: "I just don't understand why you can't call the office and they just tell you. Why you got to bother us with all this paperwork. Did you hear me? My daughter is also home sick with H1N1. What does this have to do with her? Why can't y'all just do your job by yourselves?"

"Ma'am, I know it's silly," I replied and then explained the law. She sighed, called her daughter who then yelled at her, and then she yelled at me again--the same dialogue on repeat, basically. So then, I apologized again. "Don't worry, I'll take care of it," I said, though I didn't exactly have a clue what to do next. The grandmother looked at me with her tired eyes and then as I exited the room, I think I heard a "thank you." It was in a different tone, a gentler tone. Almost caught me off guard.

Logistically, I’m learning a lot about the flow and organization pattern of the inpatient units. I’m starting to pick up on more med-speak although my presentation style isn’t yet up to par yet. I’m trying to smile more, per N’s advice, but sometimes, it’s a little tiring. Anyways, those are probably the most important tasks anyway for the orientation week. It’s like entering into a new land. First, you want to figure out the structure. Secondly, you want to learn the language. Third, you want to get along with the folks. It’s that simple.

Medical-wise, I’m not learning as much textbook knowledge as before the boards. This frustrates me a lot because I want to know as much as possible not so much because knowledge is power, but knowledge is something that can ward off consequences of incompetence and carelessness. Little things matter more than ever now. My patient was given a dose of intravenous iron to correct her anemia. She would take iron pills but she can’t eat. Within 5 minutes of the nurse administering the iron, she broke out into hives, she had trouble breathing, her hands and feet swelled up, she threw up green vomit. Had this not been a test dose and thus a smaller dosage of iron given, had the residents not expected this in the back of their minds, had the nurse not know exactly what to do, I don’t know if I could have seen the kid again. And that is fucking scary. No shit. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to squeeze in the time. I leave the apartment at 5 to work out, then start at the hospital at 7. On good days, I come back at 5 or 6. On call, I came back once at 10:30pm. Always with too many thoughts in my mind, my heart beating too fast, too many random papers stuffed in the pockets of my white-coat that I have to clean out before forcing some food down my throat and then trying to study again.

Anyways, I don’t write for pity. This is just how it is. And honestly, as demanding as our schedules are right now, it’s nowhere close to the degree that it could be. I’ve yet to be the night resident who’s missing her 5 year anniversary for work. I’ve yet to be the teaching resident who’s transitioning on to better days, but who’s still up and dedicated to making sure the medical students know how to do a history and physical and that the interns don’t make egregious errors. And lastly, I’ve yet to be parent who sleeps by her daughter day and night, missing work, missing clean clothes, missing seeing the sky for a week.

Are You a Mad Scientist Too?

2009-06-21T08:46:00.001-07:00

In the latest This American Life episode, Paul Tough shares with us the story of his eccentric father who has dedicated the latter half of his life to the search for the extraordinary. Prof. Tough is described as a mild-mannered man who lives the usual American dream—a wife, 2 kids, a house in the suburbs until some sort of weird mid-life crisis hits. He experiments with LSD, leaves his family, and moves in with another woman. Other things consume him. The routine of life, the limited set of options on earth, the singularity of being a human on earth in a vast universe, the dimensions of which he cannot even begin to comprehend. After listening to the “dark side of the moon” for repeat, Prof. Tough decides that not only must there be something beyond this life, but also something beyond this universe. Not God, but aliens. And that he must find them.

This is one of the best clips I’ve heard on the show. Paul Tough has an unaffected voice that that glides from scene to scene with the smoothness of vermouth. The seemingly even tone towards his father is a story in itself. Does he resent his father for abandoning the family? Or does he excuse all that because now he recognizes something amazing in all these attempts to find extraterrestrial life? The answers are all carried in the sound bytes, waiting for our translation.

Most unexpected to me was that by the conclusion, of all the characters, I identified with Prof. Tough the most. It helped that this was a radio essay, and I couldn’t see how crazy everyone looked. All I had were the sounds shuffling out of my laptop—Ira Glass the host, Paul Tough the storyteller, and Professor Tough, talking to me in my own apartment about his project IETI, Invitation to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, in the same manner of all gruff octogenarians, but with a keen sense that his sanity was being judged.

Then, the scene enacts. In a house somewhere in the Northeastern suburbs, a man knocks on the garage that has been remodeled into an office. He enters, nods at the middle aged and the elderly men and women sitting around a round table—some professors, physicians, lawyers, some retired, all of whom are the board members of IETI. They had been waiting for this guest with much anticipation for he had emailed Prof. Tough that he had what they had been looking for all along. The extraterrestrials had planted a radio probe in his body, and if he just swallows this radiowave detector in front of them, they will have their proof.

“Hold on,” the man says, opening his brief case. Silence. Prof. Tough looks away from the complicated vectors the man had drawn on the blackboard and tries to steady his hands on his chair; his son, Paul, tracks every ruffle with his microphone, but does not record his own prayers--suddenly, he wants this detector to work just as much as everyone else in the room, if not more; he wants to believe that his father is more than a failed man who once walked away from him and his siblings for a world of wishful thinking and lunatics.

The guest fumbles with the detector. It is a huge compared to his tiny mouth. Looking for a moment like a misshapen chipmunk, the man next takes a huge gulp until the gadget must be resting right next to his windpipe.

“Err-annnie, mooow-ment now,” he warbles, tapping at his throat. Nothing. It doesn’t beep. Prof. Tough grabs the remote control, presses ‘On’ a few times, but the green light is already blinking and yet there’s still not sound. The guest heaves over the chair and spits out the gadget.

“Let’s try that again,” he says. “Maybe the thing wasn’t as sensitive first time around.” No one answers.

The Vice President of IETI slides his chair back. He gets up wordlessly, looks at Prof. Tough, shakes his head, and then exits. The door bounces from the hinges as it was slammed to a close. Patting the guest on the back, who now is rattling off at 90 mph a list of all possible causes for the failed reception, none of which is that he is NOT the very proof of alien life, Prof. Tough says, “Thank you, thank you for coming, but there’s no need to try again.” He sounds almost gentle, like a father consoling a sick child.

Later that, after the guest leave, and all the board members as well all—half irritated and on the verge of quitting and half with overstated optimism for continued efforts, Paul finds his father reclining alone in the garden, smoking and staring at sky. He says, “Hey!” expecting a face to turn around, full of unspoken sorrow, but instead finds a grin. “Aren’t you upset?”

“At that? Nah. Didn’t expect it to work in the first place.”

“Oh, but I—I sort of did.”

“Is that so?” Prof. Tough sighs, “Good for you.” He smiles again and turns back into squinting at the faint stars above them. From the way he swallowed the last few words, Paul senses that his father has more to say, but knows that the conversation has just finished.

Yes, I know I am over-romanticizing Prof. Tough—he is after all a man who sacrificed his relationships and duties of care to those around him for his own personal satisfaction—but I think his bizarre search embodies a need with which we can all identify. I’m not sure how to describe it exactly. A want for something to call his own. A singular search that he can title as his greatest project. A loneliness born out of the sense of being alone in the universe and in life begetting something even more beautiful—this need for a connection, for a line of communication with the unknown. We all feel some variation of this need, and we address it through different means. Some seek God. Some seek art and beauty. Some seek honesty. And some, like Professor Tough, seek aliens. I don’t think it’s bizarre at all, but rather common, all too common.

What the radio clips did not answer, however, is where should we draw the balance between this innate need and our social responsibility? Like Professor Tough, if I didn’t feel beholden to my family and the people whose shoulders I stepped on, my natural instinct would be to run. Run like the Rabbit Run. Sail like Odysseus. Experiment like there’s only the lightness of being. Rebel wherever there’s a regime to rebel against. The efforts could be extremely undirected or all space-time-energy would be channeled into of a narrow focus of entirely my own gratification, something that wouldn’t keep my family and friends afloat if they should sink, something that mankind might not need at all. Perhaps, this is where adulthood sinks in. You realize that the modern world doesn’t need another blind fighter, or thrill seeker, but instead, just someone just to do something small, like elucidate the one molecule in this thousand-piece signal cascade or configure the algorithm in this one program that is needed to transfer credit information from one terminal to the next. And like thus, we would eventually train ourselves to be dedicated in order to get paid and fulfill our duties to one another. We will find delight or we will convince ourselves that we’re delighted—-that we Are on an adventure: to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the extraterrestrial life in the terrestrial one.

Elementary Politics

2009-05-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

First Grade in China can be a perilous year. I was pushed from the center of the universe as an only child into the jungle hierarchy of the elementary school system. My mother dressed me, strapped on a shiny schoolbag shaped like a frog, and gave me money for lunch and ice cream after school. On our way to school, she held onto my hand, not letting go until the teacher made the parents stand off to the other side of the classroom. The students were led to the wooden desks, two to each desk, the short kids in the front, the tall kids in the back. The parents were allowed to observe the first class--a few teared up, others like my mom silently mouthed, "Straighten up."

My mom had given me endless advice that morning, but when the teacher called my table, the only thing I remembered was to be loud as possible. "What's your name?" The woman started a new line in the roll-book peered at me from the front of the classroom. "My name is," I replied, half bellowing, half opera singing my name until the windows vibrated and the workers would look up and towards our school from two city blocks away, and then I flashed a proud smile at my mom as if to say, "See, was that good or what?" The adults roared; the children giggled; I was clueless as to why. "Good voice," the teacher chuckled. "You can be our proctor for the year." I was given an armband with two lines instead of one. Later, I was upgraded to three lines, the equivalent of a class president.

We are born politicians. Which is all the more reason to sell children propaganda--Lenin, Mao, and revolutionary heroes--starting with First Grade. We had a special class on ethics--how to give up your seat for the elderly on the bus, how to always say thank you and I'm sorry when you're wrong. We had unstated ethics lessons in our Chinese class. Our thin pale yellow textbooks were filled with vignettes: Lenin as an orderly and hardworking student, always keeping his desk neat and his back straight as he did hours upon hours of homework; Mao as an effective leader, even at age 10, coming up with the idea of communes and people helping each other; Lei as hero even before the war, at age 9, balancing the sick and the frail on his back as he ran across slippery log bridges on a turbid flooding river. Those lessons pierced into our souls. We coveted the admiring tone in our teachers' voice when she read these stories aloud to us; we modeled ourselves after Lenin and Mao, whoever these people were and while our classroom wasn't flooded with sick people to carry across a river or came with other obstacle courses, we fought to clean the classroom after school, to help another student, to hold our backs perfectly straight as boards with our hands clasped behind at perfect right angles, to be neat with our lesson books, especially when teachers were watching, and even when they were not, we conducted in an orderly manner and treated each other with excessive consideration as if they were.

Our parents taught us that these were important steps to take. If you're good and the teacher likes you, that's political power. You get better grades. Kids envy you, but they can't beat you up because they'll get demoted. Your progress is given individual consideration even though there's forty nine other kids. You're more likely to enter the best middle schools in the city. You're more likely to be excused from class punishment, such as when someone does something asinine and we're all forced to stand like scarecrows in the courtyard, our overextended arms sour with lactic acid and the sun dripping down our blackened face. If the teacher loves you, then oh man, you were golden--you are praised not only as a model student, but as a model junior member of the communist party. This kind of glory-shit, we were told, can carry us far in life.

Gradually, we came to believe that this type of behavior was synonymous with success. If we take ethics to the heart, we would know how to do good and look good. And if we look good, surely someone will notice and we'll be celebrated as a model citizen by all of the people's republic. That was the dream, at least.

***
Two years after I entered First Grade, it was my cousin Ying Ying's turn to initiate into the school system. We were of the same stock, spoiled to the bone, chubby around the edges, always in doofy little sweatpants, both just wanting to please and to be liked. However, Ying Ying's mother wasn't a high schoolteacher like my mother. She was not on first name basis with the teachers. It took her a while to figure out that it was in her daughter's best interest that she would become friends with the teacher. After that, my aunt made sure to personally walk Ying Ying to school and chitchat with the teachers on a weekly basis. During their conversational lulls, she would drop to a whisper and ask if they could keep an extra eye on her daughter--"the girl's a little frailer than the others, after all. Just make sure she's all right."

My aunt's efforts paid off. Ying Ying went through the year swimmingly--that is, until one of her teachers retired suddenly in middle of the year due to poor health and a new teacher arrived. By then, my aunt became too busy with work. She forgot about the weekly school visits or sending presents.

One day, my cousin came back home with swollen eyes and a hand-print on both her cheeks. "What the devil," our grandfather was first to notice and to force out all the details. It turns out that she was seated to a particularly nasty boy and when they were all called to stand up in class and the teacher turned his head, the little tyrant swung around and boxed Ying Ying on both cheeks. Hard. Until her cheeks were stinging even when she came home. The tearwork started immediately. The teacher whipped around in confusion, which quickly turned into disgust, and then amusement. "Ying Ying, why are you sniveling?"

"Ah....ah...that boy," she howled. "He hit me."

"Then why did you not hit him back?"

Ying Ying's eyes grew round. Unlike my household where I was whupped even in high school, no one laid a hand on another person in her family, so she had no concept of hitting back. Her mother and father were gentle people; when they got mad, they adopted the American way--she had to stand in the corner and think about what she did.

"What?" she said, almost not believing any of this was happening. The little boy snickered.

"Hit back. Go ahead."

The boy cleared his throat and tried to look ashamed. "I'm sorry, Ying Ying."

"C'mon, go ahead," the teacher rolled his eyes. "Box him hard."

Ying Ying stared at the boy's extended cheeks and his eyebrows already knotted in preparation for the slap. Dimly, she thought the teacher must still be joking, but when she glanced back at him and the impatient tapping of his fingers on the table, she realized that he was serious. Her hands reached out. The boy, sensing movement, winced.

She drew back. Her enemy looked like a wounded duck; she always had a soft spot for small animals. "I can't," she protested. "He said he was sorry."

"But the boy needs to be taught a lesson," the teacher insisted. "What if he hits you again?"

Ying Ying cried even harder. "I can't. I just can't do it."

Class had been paused for at least ten minutes. The teacher couldn't afford more distractions so he shrugged and moved on with the lesson plan. My aunt tells this story in a distinct fashion, such that the only element of shock she expects from her audience is over her daughter's inability to slap back, not anything having to do with the teacher. If the boy committed mischief overseas, the teacher would have disciplined the boy himself. But this is an alternate universe that my aunt couldn't fathom, nor could anyone else involved in the following events.

Take for example, my grandfather. That afternoon, he threw a fit. He disciplined the child for an entire afternoon until her parents came back. "Why didn't you hit him, silly girl? When someone hits you hard like that and it's clearly wrong, why didn't you just hit him back?"

"But don't you always say we should be nice to each other? And forgive people when they say they're sorry?"

"Yes, but there are exceptions!"

"But how do I know what the exceptions are?"

"You just have to go with your gut feeling," the grandfather sighed. "Girl, you're too earnest."

When Ying Ying went back to school, the boy tripped her as she was playing in the courtyard. The next day, he threw a brick at her leg and missed. Day after day, Ying Ying came home school, depressed, hurting but still hiding the bruises from her parents. When her grandfather caught the sight a newest one, he threw another fit and told my uncle to scold her teachers at school. "I will do no such thing," my uncle answered and then said, "Hou gai," a beautiful phrase in Chinese which translates into something like, "The stupid one deserves this." It was my aunt who had to arrange for a conference with the teachers. They told her that the faculty already knew of this incident and had actually called Ying Ying for an interrogation. Everyone in the teacher's lounge was incredulous when the girl insisted that she couldn't slap the boy, even when given a second chance; they advised her to be firm in the future and grow an iron fist.

"But how could she?" my aunt said, "My child has no concept of violence yet. We don't beat her at home. She's still so young. Can't you just make them sit in the opposite corners of the classroom so that he won't hit her every chance he gets?"

They obliged her request. Then, for mysterious reasons, the boy started to ignore Ying Ying instead of bullying her. As for the teacher, he never really liked my cousin after that. She never got demoted, but her progress was never monitored for rest of the year. You may argue this may have been due to other causes, but my aunt believes that this was the incident which sent Ying Ying off on an inferior path. It all happened because an eight year old girl couldn't return an eye for an eye, a slap for a slap.

***
If you asked her these days, my cousin probably can still recite our grade school ethic lessons. She has an amazing memory. When she acquires an idea, she internalizes it so completely that it's hard for her to accept what comes after because everything new contradicts with everything old. In truth, although she is exactly the model student that People's Republic of China has been trying to mold with its ethical education, this country craves for something else at the forefront of its race in restructuring and progress. In truth, although we were taught with such tight iron fist expounding on certain lessons, all the while, secretly, subconsciously, our teachers were hoping that we would read between the lines and unlearn some of what we were taught and our parents were praying that we would obey them but raise hell with the rest of society, that we would grow stronger and wiser, reshaping the world with our conquests.

My passion for Chinese ethics became extinct soon after we moved to the United States. At first, I helped to organize the classroom, sat with my hands clasped behind my rigid spine, gave up my seat so that other students can sit, offered to buy kids food if they forgot to bring lunch, but it didn't take long for me to realize no one gave a damn. They might even think that you're more of a freak for that kind of persona, chalking it up to the 'commie influence,' so I stopped my practices all togther. Teachers did not mind, even while we slid down the seats and drooled pools of saliva in our sleep, while they were teaching. They praised you even when your answer was wrong and taped an apple sticker on the board for every time you claimed you read another book. There were no demotions since no one wore an arm band, and there certainly wasn't any more fuss about always wearing a red handkerchief on our necks--we mumbled Pledge of Allegiance every morning and that was a sufficient declaration for love of the nation. People ran for class presidents instead of being appointed; they didn't have the best grades or the most booming voice; all they had to do was to toss their blonde curls and sing a funny rap with their name in it while the students picked and choose who they liked. Then, the best-looking or the funniest kid won; the well-dressed candidate became a close second. These elections marked the beginning of my new education.

Notes on consumption

2009-05-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

Fruits
I ate a Pitaya for the first time ever. In Chinese, it's called 火龙果 (Huo Long Guo, translation: Fire Dragon Fruit) and it looks as exotic as it sounds--the size of a melon, the color of tongue, studded with green horns for leaves. When you slice it in half, a surprise awaits you: for as deep fuschia as the outside is, the inside is contrasted in snow white, sprinkled with tiny black seeds, with the consistency of cookies'n creme of ice creme. The first spoonful is the sweetest. Imagine the crisp bite of a watermelon without the tang, the coolness of a melon with the stickiness. It's simply wonderful--this fruit of fire dragons.

True hedonism starts with the flesh. The juicier, the better.

Foreign Labels
"Why are you bringing clothing as presents?" my friends asked. "Isn't everything made there?" True, all the cheap clothing is made in China--a lot of this is exported to the United States and retailed at 20 times the original price. This, however, makes said "quality" clothing all the more expensive. There are so many knockoffs readily available that people only value foreign labels. And with foreign labels in China, there is never a discount. People will spend twice the amount of money on designer jeans as they would in the US. When my mom's friend visited, she went to the shoe department in Macy's and went completely gluttonous. She didn't care about paying for the extra baggage on the flight home.

Don't get me wrong. Americans are as label-conscious as the next country, but I think there's a more hush attitude towards it. Here in mainland China, it's a stated if not blatant fanaticism towards labels. They love Armani jeans. Everyone is clamouring for an iPhone. They're familiar with all the foreign logos--Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfigure, Lacoste, Nike, Adidas. My personal preference in clothing is toward the inexpensive but trendy. I'm inclined to suspect that labels are just another excuse for bad designs. But it's really not like that here. Having a well-known logo over your pocket means so much more; you would wear what you think others would covet. You would like Japanese and Korean labels; you'd love American brands; you'd lust for the Germans'.

This is why I laugh on the inside when people refer to PR China as a communist country. Sure, economics and government and culture are not the same, but it isn't all inextricably linked anyway? The developing world are more capitalistic in spirit than the Western world. If democracy is the best governance to deliver that wealth, then they will be pro-democracy. No one is an idiot. While America is trying to dig itself out of the middle east and the domestic financial crisis, China and India are leading the front lines in expansion and consumption. They are hungry. They want iMacs and iPhones and iTouches. They want cars even if there's too much smoke already and nowhere to park it. They want Italian sunglasses, the American Jeans, the french scarves. They want what the western world has been enjoying for the last fifty years and they want to acquire it in ten years of less.

Jobs
Grocery stores in China are good places to take notes. In a regular sized store in the US, there's probably about thirty people working the floors At Most--ten of whom are working the checkout, five bagging groceries, the rest arranging displays and mopping the aisles. In contrast, I can't even count how many people are employed at a store of similar size in China. There is probably at least one girl in every aisle, one girl greeting the customers at every corner, one girl at each counter for each label. Even in the fruit section, there's a man for each weigh station, maybe an additional one to cut the fruit off the stems. They do little half the time; they do nothing most of the time. At every checkout counter, there is one person to swipe the bar codes and one person to move your basket from one end of the table to another and one person to stand there and watch and another person to stamp your receipt when you leave.

You might ask if they're comparable to Wal-mart greeters in US. Yes, but only if the greeter lost weight and went back to when they were an attractive twenty-something. Don't get me started on airlines or hotels. When my father was last in China for business, the place he stayed at had a park and a row of twenty attractive girls standing besides the track with nothing to do but to stand and smile and hold out towels and water bottles. Was he pleased? I had asked. "No," he said. He felt rather embarassed.

Pretty girls might find their work easy-going, but once they outlast their beauty, they're sacked. And once they are passed their thirties, it's hard if not impossible to find a job. Many people are starting to retire in their mid-40s. They have to make room for the billions of youths who've yet to enter into the job market. This is hard to imagine from an American perspective, one in which work is the sole thing to define yourself after college graduation. To retire at 40 when your life is not even half-lived, to not be able to find another job, to just stay at home and buy groceries every day as the primary social activity, to live for Chinese soap operas, to lose not only your reproductive but economic functions in society would be a certain hell for many. So some beg for jobs. They would accept menial jobs in cleaning, like the migrant workers, because those are the only ones available. Do not be surprised to find that the auntie and uncle who clean your bathroom stalls once upon a time managed an entire factory floor. They busy themselves with soap and water to work, to earn money, to be able to remain as viable consumers of the world economy, indulging in foreign labels and exotic fruits, if not for themselves, then for their grandchildren.

The eternal debate
The culture of consumption has always been greatly confusing to me. I've friends who are self-proclaimed socialists and immaterialist. When I compliment them on an article of clothing, they'd give me funny looks or say something snarky, like "Thanks, I made it." I guess their point is that consumption is by far inferior to the production of things with value. Just because you buy CDs for 14.99$ each doesn't make you a musician; just because you bought art doesn't mean you own it. These critiques are refreshing to think about, I agree, but it's a little stifling sometimes, especially for someone who grew up in a developing country where you want to work hard and buy nice things for pleasure; you want labels to reflect your upwardly mobile status in society; on top of it, you don't want to think about the real cost of all this. There ought to be a civilized conversation someday between consumers and immaterialists alike. If people don't believe in the soul, don't tell them that they're risking the loss of their souls for the sake of a designer life. Tell them what they're giving up in terms that they believe in. They might reply that love wears Armani, but they might also unstick their fingers from their ears.

Landing

2009-05-12T05:22:00.001-07:00

Men in white spacesuits and white gloves and white shoes boarded the plane. The only human resemblance were the eyes squinting behind the orange visors. "Everyone stay in your seats," a voice called over the intercom, first in English, then in Chinese. "We're getting a visit from the quarantine officers." The spacesuits stomped down the aisle and back. The first impression check. "Fuck," someone behind me whispered, "I heard that if there is even just one person with the swine flu, we'll all get quarantined." The men strode back and this time, moved with more deliberation, turning their heads sideways and back and zapping each passenger on the head with a laser gun. "Push up your bangs," the spacesuits said when they came to me. I closed my eyes and did as I was told. When I opened my eyes again, they were already inspecting the boy next to me--the lines of red scanned back and forth over his forehead.

They cleared us in half an hour. What would it be, however, if the gun did measure an abnormal temperature? Or suppose I had allergies and sneezed all over those white space shoes, would I be sent to a camp in middle of nowhere and be forced to overstay my visa?

Also of note are the cameras. Every car is photographed getting on and off the intersection. The time is recorded. The faces are captured in high resolutions. "Where do all these pixels go?" I asked my relatives. They shrugged. "To catch bad people," my aunt replied. "If you do anything wrong, they can track you. And to track the criminals, they need to track everyone."

Time to ask more questions.

To know the moon

2009-04-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

The moon comes in many shapes and sizes, but tonight against the indigo clouds, it came in a pale petticoat outlined by an orange tinged ring. This is not just any ring, but a necessary consequence of how our atmosphere is configured and how our brains perceive certain wavelengths—all the how-s that I used to know in college when I was crazy about physics. Back then, I could point towards an equation and tell you why the sky is blue or why we see mirages on a hot summer day. Now if you ask, I can only laugh in apology.

Where does knowledge migrate to in the seasons between recall? Perhaps, there’s a Florida in our brain for all the retired facts, or perhaps, it has the lifespan of a mayfly—-buzz in through one ear and then extinguish themselves just as quickly. We were so sure we had it—this or that fact, phenomena, theory, period—and understood the connections. Our confidence made us picture it like an actual concrete thing, something that our head swells upon with, something we can acquire and toss around like pennies in a jug. Yet, let the years pass, and then one day, someone asks you a question or you look up at the moon and asks yourself the same question. The words sound familiar. You pause, sigh, tap your foot, scratch your head. There’s the tingling sensation that the mayfly is still within you. In fact, you can recall where and when you first learned it, but of the actual answer, all you see is the possible architecture of what was--a cyst left by the retired fact, an abscess caused by the unrecoverable. And then, you're forced to acknowledge the loss, that to know something is not to possess something permanently--no matter how fascinating you believed it to be or how long you dwelled upon it or how gleefully you announced it to your friends or how hard you strived for the conclusion thereof by yourself. You thought you owned it, but actually, you never did.

Medical school makes me feel this loss every day. As I acquire and process new knowledge, I sense that I'm losing the old lessons by the pound. I am trying to be more accepting of this--that whatever I know today, I won’t, by tomorrow, or it may even be false; that for some concepts and databases of trivia, I will have to go through the ritual of learning again and again and again if only so that the mayfly will stick around for a few more days, to reproduce more mayflies, only to become extinct by the day I'm finished reviewing. Knowledge ebbs and flows (mostly just goes). Once, I had a reason for why there was a ring around the moon; now I may just as well cite the devil's magic.

Frankly speaking, tonight I believe the moon is a pale, pale optic disc and the clouds are the streaky grey iris of a giant eyeball glinting down at us. As for the ring? I call it the Kayser-fleischer ring. It's a term for when patients have liver failure and the unbound copper deposits around the eye in a visible halo.

Perhaps it is just that--we can only know and speak in the language of the moment: first, the Chinese folklore about the beautiful lady on the moon, then the Greek myth about the lunar goddess who stepped on earth nightly for the shepherd boy that she loved, and later still, the deconstruction of fairy tales and myths to make way for science--for the physical accounting of the markings on the moon's face and the mathematical derivation for why there's a ring that borders the penumbra. These stories fade over the years. They ache and peel with disuse, like an abandoned warehouse that should we find again, if ever again, we revisit with both regret and awe. Meanwhile, practicing in our new tongues is all-consuming anyway. We look up at the sky and see the starry pathology of Burkitt's lymphoma. We stare at the curves of trees and see the anastomosing cerebral arteries. It's all there, for now.

National Pillow Fight Day 2009- Wall Street, New York

2009-04-05T11:36:00.000-07:00

There were feathers all around, twirling in cyclones whenever a pillow popped or the wind blew and made everything dance again. People raised their 'weapons' over their heads and hurled their battle cries like medieval knights. Friends chased each other, yelping, and slapped each other in glee. Girls lounged on marble steps and raised their legs suggestively at their friends with snapping cameras while another tossed feathers from the side. Hits came from overhead, sideways, and behind, from red pillows, white pillows, yellow pillows, pillows that were shaped like sponge bob square pants and the power puff girls, so many and all at the same time that it was impossible to keep track of who mauled you and where they slipped to. Cops barked at us through their megaphones and fenced the blocks around Wall Street so as to limit the partakers. At least two people got black-eyes. One girl threw a pillow at a cop and got arrested. Teenagers climbed up construction remnants by the bridge, screaming, pulling their friends up one by one. They stood at the edge, hesitating for a just a second before they turned around and jumped, falling backwards, arms and legs outstretched like they would into an open pool of water on a hot summer day. And one by one, the kids all jumped, diving into the outstretched hands and cheers, without so much as a moment of contemplation, for they were so trusting of us and our ability to catch them, for they were excited and nervous, yes, but not yet afraid, for they were a moving sculpture of untested youth and the sun was still bright and high over the Hudson river.

For the love of mnemonics

2009-03-18T04:53:00.000-07:00

Mnemonics is a life saver for USMLE Step 1 Boards, especially for someone who loves stories (and has a partial reading dyslexia). Examples:

(1)
Phenytoin

My version: Phen-Phen SLE-d (SLE-like symptoms) INTO NY, where she got crunk off a lot of alcohol (and got eye problems, ataxia, induce p450, can't absorb vitamins so get peripheral neuropathy) but since she couldn't make it back home Before 9pm (Vitamin B9= Folate --> megaloblastic anemia), she became hairy & homeless (toothless & gummy--gingival hyperplasia). Sometimes, she helps Liddy sell mexican tacos*, that is, until she gave birth to a dead fetus.

(2)
Demeclocycline

My Version: Demi-cyclops has abnormal bone structure & is sensitive to light because has only one eye. Most importantly, demi-cyclops doesn't want ADH to drain the sea with aquaporins because then Odysseus can just walk on home.

(3)
From my friend A:

Ret oncogene is the oncogene for Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia IIa&b because Rhett Butler was a real MAN and he & Scarlett O'hara were MEN IIb.

C-myc is the oncogene for Burkitt's lymphoma because it's endemic to Africa, and there the men are rumored to have big ____. So, it's See-myC___! And since L-myc is the opposite of C-myc, L-myc is for SMALL cell carcinoma of the lung.

Kiss me, I'm Sort of Irish

2009-03-15T18:58:00.000-07:00

From the porch, we had a grand time watching the St. Patty's day parade while eating chips and sipping beer. And then the gunshots went off.

Men in colonial style blue coats were cocking the rifles on their shoulders and firing them straight up. It made a terrible, terrible noise.

"Yay, it's New Haven!" someone yelled.

A few minutes pass. The next friendly fires came from red coats, which correct me if I'm wrong...are the uniforms of the British brigade.

This is why St. Patrick's Day must be one of the most confusing American holidays. I understand the primary purpose is to imbibe tons of liquor at noon without feeling too guilty, but still, I don't get it... Down the street came marching bands doing jigs that looked more like hip-hop, little tykes and high school cheerleaders waving green pom poms, a recycling truck, Ancient Order of Hiberians, tons of self-advertisers, octogenarian who still remember how to play flute, uni-cyclers, Miss Connecticut in an open convertible, a fire truck refitted to look like a giant green tank, and bag pipers in kilts. The only common theme seemed to be the color green, that is, until characters from Star Wars ran onto the scene, swishing light sabers, at which point, I stopped questioning what was supposed to be Irish and what wasn't Irish.

I suppose the whole point is that everything is Irish is American is whatever. Let's not focus too much on textbook history and cultural distinctions. Deep down, people just want an drunken holiday. People want to wear green foamy statue of liberty crowns on their heads while sporting shamrocks on their painted chest. People want to use their 25% Irish blood as an excuse to take kilt-wearing and bag-piping to the next level. People want to be proud of their heritage, indulge in their heritage, and not think too much of it--keep the background in the background, and let's just make merry.

Of course, it is also not politically correct to have a White Pride Day.

Maybe I've been in this country too long, but I'm starting to feel defensive whenever someone makes one-liner criticisms about America. I do defend French Onion flavored sun-chips from critical Frenchmen espousing the virtues of real French Onion soup. I do believe Costco is an efficient place to shop and it really makes one's life easier to buy a lifetime of soda and vitamin pills in one go. And I do believe it is possible to develop a culture that's real and substantive without thousand years of history (and wars and bloodshed), and I call this the American culture of whatever. Granted, there are so many flaws to our basic societal framework and attitudes, but for now, I feel attached to this school, to this town, to this country, even to this mayhem of a parade down the street. Bullhorns! Green confetti! Drums! Cigars! Dyed hair! Whistles! I love you, Irish New Haven USA. May you be blessed by St. Patty, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Brahma, and all that is lush and green.

Interests

2009-03-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

What I've been observing of the recent efforts in health-care reform (and my personal relationships with others) is that brute force must be the most inefficient path to changing human behavior.

When one party becomes so convinced of their reality that they genuinely believe with enough negotiation and diplomacy, the other party will be eventually persuaded into their mode of thinking. But what is that kind of philosophy though? It is not the kind that really divines right from wrong; it is the kind that strives to justify a particular sense of "right". What's more remarkable is that this blind naivete in our "right" drives us on these rampages to convert the other party. We use threat, guilt-tripping, and all sorts of dirty tricks, but how much is there really gained in this methodology?

Ultimately, if the other party doesn't view the proposed action as favorable, it is just not favorable for them. One cannot expect, even with the prettiest of words, to whip them into believing in another set of abstract ideals. Perhaps, words can have power over time, but major ideological shifts take just that: lifetimes. It is far easier just to re-incentivize. Realign interests such that what is favorable for you is also favorable for them, in a way. Easier said than done, but that said, anything's better than brute force persuasion.

The Invasion from Outer Space by Steven Millhauser

2009-02-11T04:22:00.000-08:00

From the New Yorker:

We have been invaded by nothing, by emptiness, by animate dust. The invader appears to have no characteristic other than the ability to reproduce rapidly. It doesn’t hate us. It doesn’t seek our annihilation, our subjection and humiliation. Nor does it desire to protect us from danger, to save us, to teach us the secret of immortal life. What it wishes to do is replicate. It is possible that we will find a way of limiting the spread of this primitive intruder, or of eliminating it altogether; it’s also possible that we will fail and that our town will gradually disappear under a fatal accumulation. As we follow the reports from day to day, the feeling grows in us that we deserved something else, something bolder, something grander, something more thrilling, something bristling or fiery or fierce, something that might have represented a revelation or a destiny. We imagine ourselves surrounding the tilted spaceship, waiting for the door to open. We imagine ourselves protecting our children, slashing the tentacles that thrust in through the smashed cellar windows. Instead, we sweep our front walks, hose off our porches, shake out our shoes and sneakers. The invader has entered our homes. Despite our drawn shades and closed curtains, it lies in thick layers on our end tables and windowsills. It lies along the tops of our flat-screen televisions and the narrow edges of our shelved DVDs. Through our windows we can see the yellow dust covering everything, forming gentle undulations. We can almost see it rising slowly, like bread. Here and there it catches the sunlight and reminds us, for a moment, of fields of wheat.

It is really quite peaceful, in its way. ♦

Barack Obama, 44th President

2009-01-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."
-- Barack Obama, 44th President of USA

***
"In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light."

-- Elizabeth Alexander

Excerpt from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

2009-01-19T03:26:00.000-08:00

"Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?" Caravaggio, in a belligerent morphine rush, wanted the mood of argument. "This is something that has concerned me most of my sexual life--which began late, I must announce to this select company. In the same way the sexual pleasure of conversation came to me only after I was married. I had never thought words erotic. Sometimes I really do like to talk more than fuck. Sentences. Buckets of this buckets of that and then buckets of this again. The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. Whereas you can't fuck yourself into a corner."

"That's a man talking," muttered Hana.

"Well, I haven't," Caravaggio continued, "maybe you have, Kip, when you came down to Bombay from the hills, when you came to England for military training. Has anyone, I wonder, fucked themselves into a corner. How old are you, Kip?"

"Twenty-sex."

"Older than I am."

"Older than Hana. Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. She can be obsessed by the Englishman because he knows more. We're in a huge field when we talk to that guy. We don't even know if he's English. He's probably not. You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world."

Letters from the Chief

2009-01-11T22:37:00.001-08:00

Members of the Yale community receive regular notifications from Chief Pierotti about crimes in New Haven area. Over the years, The Chief has achieved a legendary status. Because I thought it was time to finally separate the man from the mystique, I want to share the following expose (reprinted here):

To the Members of the Yale Community:

Consistent with federal reporting requirements and in order to increase awareness of personal safety, I write to let you know the New Haven Police responded to a break-in at 69 Ivy St that occurred yesterday evening. Fortunately, no one was in the apartment at the time. A diary and a prized pair of velvet Victoria's Secret panties have been reported missing.

I ask you that you practice good crime prevention and keep your residence and property secure. Remember to lock your doors! If you should witness suspicious activity, please report it immediately to the Yale Police at 432-4400.

Sincerely,
Chief James A. Parroddi.

***
To the Members of the Yale Community:

Consistent with federal reporting requirements and in order to increase awareness of personal safety, I write to let you know the New Haven Police responded to two conflicts. At 1:24am this morning, a male graduate student was walking down the street when a group of three men surrounded him. They confiscated his clothes and shaved away his ponytail and goatee before extracting $20 for their service from his wallet.

Later, at 1:45am this morning, three graduate students were walking down the street when a naked bald man jumped out from behind the bushes and assailed them with half-empty beer cans and milk cartons, yelling obscenities.

I ask you that you practice common sense and when it's late at night, keep yourself at home. Do what I do--kick back with an episode of Married with Children, drink a cup of warm milk, and go to bed before 10. If you should still come under harm’s way, please report it to Yale Police 432-4400.

Sincerely,
Chief James A. Parroddi

***
To the Members of the Yale Community:

Consistent with federal reporting requirements and in order to increase awareness of personal safety, I write to let you know the New Haven Police have noted a series of burglaries in multiple neighborhoods at midnight. An obese, Caucasian man in red jumper suit was seen on the roof. Witnesses report that he was trying to break into the house through the chimney. Others claim he was attempting to expose himself to young children.

I ask you that you keep your good eye out for the aforementioned Caucasian male. Supposedly, his means of transportation is a sled of reindeers—this too is an illegal activity for they’re on the endangered species list. If you see him, please let us know ASAP at 432-4400.

Much obliged,
Chief JA.

***
To the Members of the Yale Community:

Consistent with federal reporting requirements (which, kiddos, if you must know, I’m not making them up, check: www.ahrq.gov/chip/content/monitoring_evaluation/fed_reporting_reqs.htm), I write to let you know the New Haven Police responded to another break-in at 69 Ivy St. One person was in the apartment at the time. She was not hurt nor bound up. However, the burglar threatened to handcuff himself to the bedpost until she would “take him back”. When the girl refused, he stripped, revealing the tattoo of her name in a heart on his chest. He was also wearing the stolen underwear, an item which he claimed that he was now returning to her.

I ask you that you practice good crime prevention and keep your residence and property secure. As always, lock your doors, adopt a German shepherd, and keep a revolver under your pillow. If you should witness suspicious AND dangerous activity, only then report it immediately to the Yale Police (the wife’s been on my case lately with all these late night calls, please, have some consideration).

Sincerely,
Your chief

P.S. Is love a misdemeanor? And if so, should unrequited love be a felony?

P.P.S. To (203)342-2342 who called about the suspicious vehicle on Little Rock Road, our officers determined it was two people getting to know each other better, but thanks anyway.

***
To the members of Yale community,

Consistent with federal reporting requirements, I write to inform you that this afternoon, around 4pm, residents in East Rock were attacked by a group of rabid girl scouts. Negri bodies are found in the cerebral spinal fluid, consistent with Lyssavirus. We’re unsure of the identity and whereabouts of the original zoonotic carrier. However, have no fear, all squirrels and rodents will shortly be decapitated. The girl scouts, unfortunately, have not been caught.

No more shortbreads, thin-mints, and tagalongs,
Just do what I do, chew on crime,
Your chief

***
To the members of Yale community,

APRIL FOOLS.

Sincerely,
Your chief

***
To the members of Yale Community,

After a flurry of responses expressing disapproval and anger at the last email, I must write a letter of apology in order to retain my position as your chief and indeed, I am sincerely sorry for any of those of you who locked yourself in and forgo humanity for a week for fear that the town has been converted into a race of encephalitic zombies. However, I just want to say, likewise, how disappointed I am in the humorlessness of man. There has hitherto been no room for individuality in this job. By chief, you mean, the pudgy middle-aged guy sitting in the corner cubicle eating a doughnut. I wear a pistol holder on my belt, but it’s only a taser gun. I answer your calls. I send you emails in the specific format of the comfort sandwich—insert familiar sentence, horrible crime, and end with a comforting sentence. I could be a computer for all you care.

Please, someone put me back out on the streets. I got more transcendence out of writing parking tickets. Is it so much that life peaks early or that we live in a perpetual lust of our former shinier selves?

Boy howdy, those days were something though, when I was striding through the streets with a real gun and baton and I was contending with the elements of New Haven. Once, I pulled a woman over and had to tell her to place her hands behind her back. She flailed her arms and cried, “Please, take my car, take it, but leave my body alone." When I got home, I repeated this to my wife, and for a while, she would lock her hands behind her and repeat this back to me in bed. Nothing like this happens anymore though. It just doesn’t.

Don't worry. We'll be back to regular format next week.

Sincerely,
Chief

***
To the Members of the Yale Community,

Consistent with federal reporting requirements and in order to increase awareness of personal safety, all I write to ask you is to ask what is personal and what is safety.

Safety may be the probability of getting bitten by a shark, which is around 5 deaths per year in about 3 trillion people who venture into the ocean. It might also be the probability of death by champagne bottle, which is 12 times more likely than that of being struck by lightning--more than your chances of winning the lottery, but still more than the chances of the missus upgrading me from the living room sofa (It's okay. I'm sublimating).

To live in New Haven, or any other desperately aspiring metropolis, is to sign onto a different contract of safety and to redefine the personal.

As my favorite novelist Doctorow writes, “the city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.” The one revision I would make is the city arises not only from our human need to walk among strangers, but also from our secret desire for those strangers to mug us. And under this penumbra of 'mugging', I like to add biting, stripping, seducing, provoking--whatever fine actions that that takes away something from us and replaces it with a question.

What’s your suspicious behavior?

Sincerely always,
Chief Parroddi

Atlanta

2008-12-18T11:18:00.001-08:00

This reflection on the culture and identity of Atlanta as a microcosm for America is reprinted on: http://www.atrium-magazine.com/2009/01/atlanta/

You hear the name and picture Gone with the Wind debutante balls—confederate soldiers swirling girls in stiff, billowy dresses, immaculate gloves pointing out of large white mansions directing Negroes in the backyard, flannel-clad and suspender-wearing hillbillies playing fiddle in the nearby woods, straggly gypsies and country migrants clocking in at the cotton mills and picking blueberries for dinner, and behind every door—no matter what neighborhood—somebody is chomping down on corn on the cob and fried chicken, collard greens on the side, until he or she too will have a double chin and a belly to pat, oh lord have mercy. Women and children swing on rocker chairs, fans fluttering like bee’s wings on the porches, whispering in accents as sweet and slow as the hot summer evening. There’s little philosophizing but there’s one philosophy, which is this: Why copy the northern brethren in everything, even their gruesome factory-laden efficiency and nervousness? Why pronounce a word in one syllable when you can do it in two? Why distinguish consonants when you can skip one or confuse it with the next?

Atlanta. Skip the first ‘t’ and focus on the ‘anta’, drawing that ‘a’ as low and long as you want, end the last ‘a’ shortly after, then smile wide with teeth like you really mean it even though there’s a double barrel gun hiding in your pickup truck and you’re about to shoot my ears clean off my head. Only then, my friend, will you have called this city by its rightful name.

Atlanta. These are the myths we all like to indulge in—that each city in America has a wildly unique history and character and future. You come here and order corn on the cob and expect each kernel to pop with juiciness like nowhere else in the world. You come here and visit Stone Mountain and listen to the tour guides talk about the Ku Klux Klan and walk among the streets, hoping to detect vibrations of racial tension that you don’t normally hunt for in the West or the North. You come here and frequent stores in the city and expect the cashiers to speak in florid Southern accents punctuated with ‘ma’am’ and ‘Oh lordy, lordy.” And then when you don’t find this, you retreat to your hotel room in slight disappointment at the life's lack of true variety. If as Thomas Friedman claims, the world is now flat, then this country must have flattened decades ago. Every town is now a chain-store gas pump and a chain-store grocer's, and every city, a collection of buildings and people conducting commerce.

Sure, we started out as an important railroad and military supply hub in the American civil war, a city of southern belles and gentlemen desperately trying to maintain the old way of life, which Margaret Mitchell captured brilliantly in her tome Gone with the Wind. Sherman’s men destroyed the city in 1864—you remember the famous fire escape scene, right, with Rhett Butler carrying off Scarlet O’hara on his buggy wagon (which, if you must remember one thing, just remember the South is dead sexy)—and the next two decades were spent on Reconstruction era reforms and gradual rebuilding. At some point, the Atlanta Journal Constitution heralded the city as the capital of the New South, a place of promising economy and less reliance on agriculture, and boy, was the editor Henry Grady not lying to the investors. Boom, bloom, Atlanta did. As horrible as her death was in 1949, it seemed fitting and eerily symbolic that Margaret Mitchell, the chronicler of the Old South, was struck by a speeding automobile on Peachtree and 13th street—just another car accident on another street named Peachtree Street in a city full of Peachtree Streets (as if the developers were in such a hurry, they couldn't brainstorm another name). She was a casualty in the city that nursed her, a city whose only objective now is to rapidly expand—seduce commerce, foster technology, forget history. If Mitchell were to be alive now, she would wander Atlanta in an alienated daze. Unlike Charleston and New Orleans, this city has even rejected most of its Old South architecture, adopting instead mid-rises and high-rises and higher-rises of modernity and post-modernity. And dare I say, what little antiquated charm or grand porch that exists in Atlanta has been recreated solely for the sake of attracting more tourists, and with that, capital for more expansion.

If there is one unique feature to be attributed to Atlanta is that this city keeps expanding—it is the fastest growing city in the United States.

It is the place of uncanny urban sprawl. Aside from students at Emory and Georgia Tech and Georgia State, the impoverished and disadvantaged concentrates itself in the heart of the city for they have nowhere else to go. Those who work in the city live in the Greater Atlanta Metropolitan area, in suburban towns with names like Sandy Springs, John’s Creek, Mountain Park, Flowery Branch, Powder Springs, Forrest Park (monikers especially designed to appeal to the stressed out urban dweller). What do these suburban towns consist of besides chain-stores and gas pumps? Subdivisions with names like the cities--Sugar Mill, Glenview, Park Manor, and so on. The houses look alike. Driving home with a slight hang-over and amnesia, you’re screwed. You will not know which one is your house until you totter up the driveway and are greeted by strangers. There’s no sense of bizarre, hippy architecture as found in the hills of the West. There’s no sense of chronology as found in the Northeast or Midwest where you can tell by the wear and tear of the roofs, which house was built first, and then second. There’s only the sense that one construction company raised up all the houses in town and adjacent towns in the span of months, as if by magic, each with the similar floor plan, the only variation is the composition of brick and stucco.

It is the place of monster traffic. Atlanta expands but does not rebuild. The city was not planned to handle its current status as capital of the South, and since the expansion was so rapid, our urban developers had no time for reconstruction. Like the American health-care system, the traffic in Atlanta has been a victim of its origin, but now that it is what it is, there is little to be done without major revamping, and because major revamping takes major finances, it will likely never happen. To work at CNN or CDC or Bank of America, you usually wake up at 5am and go to work early and stay at work later an hour or two to avoid traffic. If you wake up half an hour later than the alarm time or you simply choose not to have an insane work schedule, you must concede that the GA-400 is your second home and that should there be a tractor accident or concrete to be repaved, then on the road is really, where you will eat your meals, do the cross-word puzzles, balance your budgets, paint your nails, and pray to your god(s). Perhaps, your family will call occasionally and on holidays. But what to do--relocate? The lucrative jobs are in the city, the homes with remarkable returns and the public schools with annual promises to the Ivys are all in the suburbs. It is what it is.

It is the place of open wealth and hidden poverty. We’re home to the fastest growing millionaire population in the United States. It’s common to stop at a red-light and realize you’re behind a Mercedes-Benz, with a Jaguar to your right, a BMW to your left, and a Lexus behind you—each car gleaming with its newness, the curves designed to catch the afternoon light and let it roll down the sides until each piece of metal becomes alive with the glow, until you’re rumbling with lust and hunger right before dinner. It is common to amble along the grocery aisles of organic this and organic that and realize you’re surrounded by tanned, smooth-skinned career women who just finished work, a yoga session or two, and now are ready to pick up a few items for dinner. It is common to see the acres of golf courses—so green and smooth and seemingly untouched that it’s surreal—and stone-walled country clubs with guards that will stop you if they think that you’re the wrong color and you’re in a car of the wrong model. Rumor has it that Whitney Houston and one of the backstreet boys live nearby—it is so common, you shrug your shoulders. It is not until you drive to the heart of the city and see the people wearing over-sized coats skulking around the corners and alleys, or past a bridge and happen to glimpse a sleeping man, or until you drive along Buford Highway to Chinatown and almost kill a Hispanic couple and an Asian prostitute as they’re leaping across the road and reporting to work, or until you leave the met and enter the valley of the hicks and abandoned farmhouses, that you acknowledge poverty exists in this locality, and realize it has been existing all along.

It is a place of racial salad-making. Surely, you’ve heard the term melting pot, but that was back in the ‘10s and ‘20s when the Irish and the Italians were called colored and they eventually acculturated and married into the ‘white’ race—perhaps back then it was a pot to melt into—but this the start of the twentieth-first century, the races and ethnicities are tossed into one big salad, forced to deal with each other. While the city is predominantly black (55.7%), the suburbs is more predominantly white. Public schools in North Fulton County have consistently been ranked highest or among the highest in the Great Metropolitan area (mostly in terms of average SAT scores) but is it a coincidence that these schools are located in the most affluent suburbs of Atlanta and consists up to almost a quarter Asians—Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Indian-Americans? Yes, it is the South. It is Atlanta. But where the ‘competitive’ areas are, it bears little difference from any other competitive areas in the United States.

Six or seven years ago, a reporter from Atlanta Journal Constitution visited our high school, Chattahoochee High School (named after the river, not because we were hoochees or anything) and selected Asian students and non-Asian students to interview about racial "atmosphere" in our school. Our principals advised the students to not say too much. When the article was finally published, we almost laughed. It started with something like “The smell of leek-and-pork buns wafted down the school hallway” and ended on an alarming note about the ‘Asian Invasion’—immigrant parents whose second job it is to sniff out what was the number one public high school in the greater metropolitan area and relocate the entire clan to that one suburb. Then behold the great migration of even more Asians to that one acclaimed school district and the immediate rise of average SAT scores. The sentiment that bubbled beneath was: what about our poor white kids and how are they going to compete? The essay was such a fascinating blend of lies and truths: Though none of us dared back in those day to eat something as ethnic as pork buns, mind you, Asian families do sometimes relocate purely so that their kids can attend a higher ranked school--however, to dwell upon this mere fact and magnify this beyond proportion was to pretend that all the other families do not attempt to provide their children similar advantages in education and beyond. We felt slapped. For weeks, students and teachers submitted addendum to the AJC criticizing the racist undertones and the misrepresentation of our school until the editor ultimately retracted the article.

Still though, could the reporter retract the inner fear that it is in all of us—-that other racial and ethnic groups possess more advantages than we do and by training themselves to be even more competitive, then the less competitive we appear to be and the more doomed we become when it comes to garnering limited opportunities? Could he retract the presence of clear divide in the lunch room? Nowadays, though racial slurs are not flung everyday nor are there white-only drinking fountains and crowds barring students of certain colors from entering class, could the reporter really retract the observation of lunch tables segregated still by color--tables where only black kids sit, where only Asians sit, where only white kids who lived in country clubs and played on golf on Sundays sit? Could he retract that very real possibility that such divisions will extend ad infinitum into higher education, into the workplace, the marketplace, into cocktail parties, and so on? Yes, America will see our first black president this coming January, but will one inauguration retract the fact that year by year, these labels such as race, ethnicity, religion, and class are drawing even bolder chalk lines around where each boy and girl can go and who they can become?

Yes, you can speak of the disappearance of the Southern accents, the unpredictable weather, and the pollen cloud that rules over the city, but what’s really at the zeitgeist of Atlanta nowadays isn’t the question of the old South or the new South, but the question that this entire country has been pondering: For how long can you throw odds and ends into a bowl and keep on building this salad? Will the salad implode like our bubble economy? Everyday, people from New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and all nations of the world migrate into this city, establishing new homes, forming new connections, enrolling their children in the local schools, and with them, they will drag trunks of the past and past identities. The march of the urban sprawl cannot continue--one day, the skies will run out of space, and we will have to restructure instead of creating another suburb. There will be more displays of affluence, of course, more golf courses to be constructed, but there will also be more admissions of poverty, people for whom no simple act of charity or auctioned event will be enough. There will be less jobs to throw around. There will be more confrontations at school, and the labels that people wear and see each other will not be so easily brushed over as with retracting an article. That will be Atlanta too one day—a city that will develop within as much as without, a city that will host contentions as to how to pronounce its name and whether there should only be one proper pronunciation.

Dr. Doug Shenson

2008-12-11T08:34:00.001-08:00

"Medicine is an act of social solidarity."

E. L. Doctorow's New York

2008-12-07T03:24:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from City of God:

Here in the neighborhood of St. Tim's, lots of people just getting by. On the corner, young T-shirted girl, braless, tight cutoffs, she is running in place with her Walkman. Gray-haired over-the-hill bohemian, a rummy, he affects a ponytail. Squat, short Latina, steatopygous. Stooped old man in house slippers, Yankees cap, filthy pants held up by a rope. Young black man crossing against the traffic, glaring, imperious, making his statement.

East Village generally still the six-story height of the nineteenth century. The city is supposed to deconstruct and remake itself every five minutes. Maybe midtown, but except for the Verrazano Bridge, the infrastructure was in place by the late thirties. The last of the major subway lines was built in the twenties. All the bridges, tunnels, and most of the roads and parkways, improved or unimproved, were done by the Second World War. And everywhere you look the nineteenth is still here--The Village, East and West, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the row houses in Harlem, the iron-fronts in Soho...

The city grid was laid out in the 1840s, so despite all we still live with the decision of the dead. We walk the streets where generations have trod have trod have trod.

But Jesus, you're out of town a couple of days and it's hypershock. Fire sirens. Police-car hoots. Ritual pneumatic drilling on the avenues. The runners in their running shorts, the Rollerblades, the messengers. Hissing bus doors. Sidewalk pileups for the stars at their screenings. All the restaurants booked. Babies tumbling out of the maternity wards. Building facades falling into the streets. Bursting water mains. Cop crime. Every day a cop shoots a black kid, chokeholds a perp, a bunch of them bust into the wrong apartment, wreck the place, cuff the women and children. Coverups by the Department, mayor making excuses.

New York New York, capital of literature, the arts, social pretension, subway tunnel condos. Napoleonic real estate mongers, grandiose rag merchants. Self-important sportswriters. Statesmen retired in Sutton Place to rewrite their lamentable achievements... New York, the capital of people who make immense amounts of money without working. The capital of people who work all their lives and end up broke and gray New York is the capital of boroughs of vast neighborhoods of nameless drab apartment houses where genius is born every day.

It is the capital of all music. It is the capital of exhausted trees.

The migrant wretched of the world, they think if they can just get here, they can get a foothold. Run a newsstand, a bodega, drive a cab, peddle. Janitor, security guard, run numbers, deal, whatever it takes. You want to tell them this is no place for poor people. The racial fault line going through the heartland goes through our heart. We're color-coded ethnic and social enclavists, multiculturally suspicious, and verbally aggressive, as if the city as an idea is too much to bear even by the people who live in it.

But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with subway rumble underneath my feet... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectaular phenomen in the unnatural world? There is a specie recognition we will never acknowledge. A primatial over-soul. For all the wariness or indifference with which we negotiate our public spaces, we rely on the masses around us to delinate ourselves. The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.

And so each of the passerby on this corner, every scruffy, oversize, undersize, weird, fat, or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, or green-haired punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry, inconsolable person I see... is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this diaspora as I am, and part of our great sputtering experiment in a universalist society proposing a world without nations where anyone can be anything and the ID is planetary.

Not that you shouldn't watch your pocketbook, lady.

Losing

2008-11-18T05:17:00.000-08:00

She walked briskly back up the wooden path, across the bridge, and back onto Livingston Road. She reached the corner around 4:30pm and stared at the “No Parking” sign and then looked beneath it and realized something was fundamentally wrong.

It was the same gray colonial house with the long driveway. It was the same neighborhood with the stripped trees and the wet street. It was even the same sign. It looked like a complete picture already and had the girl arrived at the scene any other time, she would have appreciated it for all it was worth. Only that there was no car—no tan colored Honda civic. There was no car in sight, actually. The very absence of the thing that was and the thing that was clearly no more created such a paradox in our protagonist’s mind that she stood there for perhaps about at least 2 minutes with her mouth open and muttering clichés such as “I can’t believe it” and “Holy mother of fuck.” It was not surreal; it was un-real. It was the rarified element that dreams were made of and of nightmares were sung.

Next came the calling stage. She dialed for her friend A. It was cold and dark; it would have been a miserable walk home, so she opted for a miserable ride home instead. Then she dialed her parents and started a triangulation of calls. Then she dialed the New Haven police and spelled her last name repeatedly for one officer after another. Here the narrator’s memory starts to get hazy. There was the issue of not remembering the driver’s license plate, of which person the car was registered under. The issue of realizing that her wallet with her debit card was in the yellow tote bag. The issue of not remembering exactly what street her car was parked on because A had already picked her up at that point and they were nearing downtown and then having to call A’s roommate to google map. The issue of calling credit companies and of not even remembering which credit card she possessed. There were many issues. However, one of the most irking issue was the woman on the other end of the line at the New Haven police department possessed the most indiscernable voice and icy attitudes--a woman that the girl would have revered on any other day and written sonnets about her unbelievable character.

“I’m not sure if my car was stolen or towed,” the girl said.

She heard mumbling. “What?” More mumbling. “I’m sorry. I cannot hear you.”

“MA’AM. THERE WAS NO STREET SWEEPING TODAY. We called every towing company in town and they do not have your car.”

“Oh. So my car was stolen.”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“Oh,” the girl replied. “So what’s the probability of my getting the car back?” She swallowed. “Is it, um, is it zero?”

“No, it’s 50%”

“What? Why?”

“It's 50/50 cuz,” the woman answered, 'either your car was stolen or it wasn’t.”

The girl started laughing, harder even when the officer replied back “What? You think I'm joking?”

When her friend A. picked her up, the sky was already pitch dark. He looked her expectantly, searching for tears or other signs of distress, but the girl slammed the door and nestled in with a laugh. It was a funny laugh in itself, the kind with an echo of uncertainty.

Later that night, after all the calls were made, explanations were given, and books were borrowed, the girl wakes up in the middle of night, still feeling the steering wheel in her hand, the same way a soldier in war feels his arm even after it's amputated. In her mind, there is a ceaseless slide-show displaying past losses--glasses, sunglasses, books, umbrellas, friends, grandparents, loves, opportunities, time--and though she knows that she’s still lucky to have her body intact, her friends and family, caring, and that people have lost much more than she has in the recent economic downfall, she cannot help but focus on her car going through the body shop, getting hacked into pieces, the windshield installed on another car, the side mirrors loaded for the pawnshop, and the meticulously annotated Goljan Review flung into the trashcan. She wonders if that is the very essence of New Haven that she loves and loathes—the unabashed exhibit of inequality, the Have-Nots coveting the Haves, the Captain of Industry in a Mercedes speeding past an addict hopelessly carving "I want crack" onto the bark of her neighborhood tree. Or is it a lesson on the threat of equality? One day, you can be driving and in control; the next day, you are just a pedestrian.

Excerpt from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

2008-11-02T03:37:00.000-08:00

Iqbal, who is one of the four best poets in the world--the others being Rumi,
Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I've forgotten-
has written a poem where he says this about slaves:

They remain slaves because they can't see what is beautiful in this world.

And that's the truest thing anyone ever said.

Brute force

2008-09-26T18:05:00.001-07:00

This week, we interviewed a patient whom my partner immediately suspected of having HIV. He fit the bill: the stereotyped race, age, socioeconomic strata, weight or shall I say weightlessness? I didn’t make the connection, but I did sense a hidden story under his glassy eyes and that hint of a smirk. So we fired away, volleying question after question like tireless ping-pong balls, all pointed in one direction and with one aim. At last, when asked “Do you have any allergies,” the patient broke into a grin.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve HIV.”

“That’s quite an allergy."

“Well, that’s what you guys were hoping for, isn’t it?” His grin grew even bigger, emitting two rows of white teeth and a string of giggles.

That’s what we were hoping for, isn't it? That’s what we were expecting, isn’t it? That’s what we were fishing for, isn’t it? We ended the interview on good terms, squeezed his hand and earnestly thanked him for his time, but he should have punched us. Quid pro quo would have been so much better: the intrusion of fist through skin cells in exchange for the invasion of our young, aggressive minds into his house of secrets. It would certainly hurt a lot less.

Playhouse

2008-09-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

Girls make house. Guys make camp. Yesterday evening I went over to my friend A.'s apartment and as soon as I walk in, I get the sense that I'm on a different planet. It's a 3-bedroom, 3-guy apartment. The bedrooms are huge, leaving little room for the kitchen, which is small but cozy--there are makeshift wooden chairs and a tiny round breakfast table on which they pile everything--steel juicer, teapot, big pots--and balance their plates on the periphery. Dinner consists of bamboo lentil potato curry, which one of the roommates cooked in a giant pot so as to save time, rice, leftover green gooey which A. claimed was spinach, and massive amounts of plain yogurt. It was 9pm, and the boys had yet to eat dinner. They plopped the food onto the table with nonchalance, chewed, swallowed, complimented themselves on their surprising cooking skills, and were finished in a matter of ten minutes or so.

I don't know what about this was so charming. I suppose, it was just that they shared everything and there was little definition of property. I was offered curry. I was offered fruit, tea, repeatedly. I was even offered the fruits of an absent roommate. "But this is his," I protested. "And it's countable. Isn't the number rule of stealing your roommates food is to not swipe something that's countable?" A. shrugged. He counted. One. Two. Three, four, five, six, seven. Seven plums. "What are you talking about? Seven is not countable. Three on the other hand..." He smiled and helped to him to the juicy prize. The other roommate laughed and told me about how they even broke that rule--earlier in the week, they finished the absent roommate's cereal--one out of three boxes thus disappeared. I was speechless. If this happened in our apartment, my roommate would hang me. But in this alternate universe, breaching property is hardly considered a transgression; even pointing out the issue is a sign of maladjusted capitalism.

If these friends were to drop by our apartment, I'd think they would be shocked as well. There are two rows of cabinets--my roommates and mine. We keep separate silverware, dish-ware, pots & pans, and food. She takes care of the wireless bill. I take care of the electric. We alternate the vacuuming. Aside from that, my castle is my castle, and hers is hers. One visitor's eyebrows shot up when she saw that we even have two color-coded dish detergent and sponges. "What's the point of having a roommate?" She asked. I shrugged. To each, his or her own, I say. Is the sharing of property by nature a virtue and separating a vice? Our histories as only daughters has made us respectful of boundaries and other people's space and at the same time, uncomfortable with breaching that boundary. Deep down, the reason why I wanted a roommate, besides the little I save in rent, was to tiptoe back and forth over the line. I like the drama of clashing cultures and desires and needs, the days that the doors are subtly slammed a little harder than gently, and the truces in the morning. I value realizing that somethings are petty, and that then there are things that seem petty but symbolize a much graver concern to the other person.

This is an interesting time in our lives, I think. Granted, I have concluded that about every moment thus far, but really, truly, deeply, I'd argue that even little things like apartments are just extensions of our personal development, another exercise in the process of growing up. Living in one's own apartment for the first time is light-years above playing with plastic ovens and play-dough cookies, but it's got the same taste. My roommate and I cook almost every night, and though I often verbalize that we're both too cool and too busy for this Martha Stewart shit, deep inside our apron clad hearts I believe we secretly enjoy it. We chop, we scrub, we fry, we grill, we bake, but it's weird--there are times when I look up from the cutting board and have to touch the razor edge of the knife blade to remind myself that this is real, and that I'm not making plastic zucchini or play-dough pie for dinner.

"It's awesome. Don't you think?" I say to my roommate as we sit down to another home-made meal.

"What about it?"

"Just that we made it."

"Uh huh." She laughs at me and we eat in silence, each savoring the bite of food in our mouth, not just for the taste, I fancy, but for the novelty; our youth that has yet to tire of these commonplace chores; the steam that has yet to escape into the air. This is it. We made this. We scrape our plates clean with a fork and spoon until there's not a lick left.

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

2008-08-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Novels are not unquestionable books of art. They themselves are characters, with an excess of the virtuous and the vile. As readers, we have varying preferences for the novels we like to meet: fat v. thin, chatty v. curt, goofy v. somber, Captain Obvious v. subtle, and so on. When I started to read Slaughterhouse Five after many years of not fawning over Kurt Vonnegut, I wanted to slap the covers. It was one of those monosyllabic, shrugging nitwits I always get stuck talking to at a party, and it seemed to have only one line: Every time anyone died, which was quite often, the conclusion was "So it goes." (My friend died. So it goes. My wife died. So it goes. My dog died. So it goes. The champagne was dead. So it goes.) I wanted to sneak away, but I lingered out of politeness and then it dawned on me that underneath the simpleton veneer, the book was gold. The ideas are solid. The style is perfect for what it's trying to do. Even the repetition of "So it goes" was tolerable after a chapter or two.

The Premise

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rock mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Fantasty

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new."

Metaphors

"He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo."
"The Americans had no choice but to leave trails in the snow as unambiguous as diagrams in a book on ballroom dancing--step, slide, rest--step, slide, rest."
"orgasm of victory"
"Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet."
"Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward--like flannel pajamas that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew."

Ambivalence

By no means is Slaughterhouse Five a pro-war book. Though, we must wonder, how anti-war is this book really? How anti-war is it if every death is predestined and concluded with "So it goes" again and again? I understand that's what Vonnegut is trying to do--painting our deaths and deaths of fleas and dogs and cars and champagne bubbles on the same inconsequential plane, and maybe that's what view one would truly have after such an incident like Dresden, but if so, where is the drive to write this novel? To spread your postmodernist views upon a society that's already grieving from losses of two world wars and then some? To say, "So it goes," when what people really want and need is "Why it goes" and "How do we go." Laugh all you want at the jokes Vonnegut cracks between the lines, but they may just be bones to distract the dog from barking.

Salsa and Tango

2008-08-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

Saturday evening, there was a free concert on the green. It was just some loud, brassy, trumpety Mexican band yet the dancers turned it into something extraordinary. The dancers weren't with the band; they were random people from the community out for a good time. There were three couples that I went gaga over--one Caucasian, one Latino, and one African American pair. The Latino couple I loved the most, not because of ethnic profiling (screw you), but because they were the most talented at Salsa. The young man sported a curly almost Afro-ish hair and the girl, a flowing dress and long dark hair with a red flower by her ear. Goddamn they were nice dancers--their hips undulating with the cry of the trombone, the male stepping forward, the female stepping back, then alternating, forward, back, forward, back, but every now and then, the male would turn the female, and they'd both pivot, spiraling in rhyme with the bongo hits, and he'd wait for her to finish and then he'd initiate the next spin. Twirl after twirl, the thick cable of her hair whipped his cheeks and the air around them--almost violent acts, slashing, unstoppable--as she cross-stepped in front of his chest and then slithered with her back to his back--and then wham, he grabs her waist and dips--no, flinging rather--her head a feet away from the ground. And you'd think they'll both topple over, with his upper body over hers arched so dramatically like that, kinda like an over-extended willow tree about to snap, any moment now, but no. They hold still. His feet, anchored; her right foot, frozen, flared out at the height of his knee. They are motionless. Dead. Save for the slight trembling at their throats, they're the antithesis of a sweeping signature finishing a work of art.

I let out a long exhale as a new song started. Funny, I had been holding my breath all through the last refrain. The couple embraced and then pulled themselves up for another song, their legs kicked out diagonally, pausing before shifting back into gear. Another song, another rhythm, another dance. I found that I couldn't watch them for too long for as beautiful and spell-binding as they were, it was kind of repetitive. Take away the tricks, the form boils down to the same basic steps that a trained monkey can perform (given time and a patient trainer and bet me a dollar). How I love Salsa though--the way the frenzy can jazz up anyone's pensive walk through the city, the way the moves can glorify all flesh: thin, overweight, firm, loose--doesn't matter, it's all sexy, desirable. Salsa is sex, better than sex. The man can screw caps on tires day after day, and the woman can scan bar-code after bar-code at the local grocery store, and they can live in a miniscule apartment with two screeching brats and pull their twin beds together only on Friday evenings plus major holidays...but in those brief snatches of time as they're out of the house and Salsa-dancing on the downtown green, they are gods and goddesses, wanton, exciting, novel. They are who you want to sleep with; they are who you want to be.

Tango is a different story. Whereas you can think of Salsa as Sex, Tango is the foreplay, the tension, the static electricity in the room before the two dancers rip each other's cloth off with their molars. Well, sort of. The next evening, I went to a Tango Milonga on Beinecke Plaza, which was al fresco and romantically lit. There were only four or five couples cutting elegant figures into the darkness as opposed to the throng of Salsa dancers, bouncing up and down. Someone took me as a partner. My inexperience was thankfully downplayed since all I had to do was follow rather than lead. Follow, follow, breathe, don't freak out, follow, goddammit. And by follow I mean, he stick his feet out, I pretend I'm his mirror image. I copy, but in reverse. He advances. I retreat. He pauses and raises an eyebrow to show that he's waiting. I step and cross over to the other side--Satisfied, you bastard? It's very. How I shall say. Slow. Exacting. Of course, then there are moments that surprise you when he doesn't stop you, when he grabs you in a bear hug, his breath hovering over your shoulders as you rush from the march to the pivot and the pivot to march, the whole time, gliding, practically running without a set blueprint until, of course, there's the stop. "There's much lyricism to these pauses," he says. "Tango is about the pauses." Demanding that you, Hussy, goddammit, would stop the fidgeting and drink in the silence before he whisks you off again. In a new direction. Pause.

Again, I grew restless after an hour or so and then left without bidding proper adieus. I don't think I have proper skills currently to enjoy a dance from the start to the finish, and certainly not enough to revel in my own prowess, enough to practice certain steps over and over again until they're unblemished. Not one foot stepped upon or elbow out of place! This is what the high art of Tango, and indeed also Salsa, will ultimately demand from all its dancers before they're levitated into Superstar Dancer Heaven. For me right now, maybe this is too much. I prefer to putrefy the silken silence with talk, laughter, exchange of childhood scars, something.

Dave Eggers's Cadavers

2008-08-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

This section from A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius. It's especially interesting to me because often, I've fantasized having to confront the families of the cadavers. Now here's someone that actually fantasized having to confront the medical students:

Toph is in LA with Bill and I am in Chicago. I will rent a car at the airport and will go back to my hometown, and will look up Sarah Mulhern, whose bed I ended up in one night a few weeks after I heard my mother would die, and will visit my father's friends, and the bar where my father (on the sly) used to go, and will maybe go to his office, and will go to the funeral home, and will go to my old house, ghosts in pocket, and will see my parents' oncologist, and will see worried friends, and go to the beach to remember what winter looks like there, and I will look and see if I can find their bodies.

No, no, I know I won't find their bodies--they were cremated, of course, eventually--but I have long dreamed, because I am misshapen and think it might be an interesting story to tell, of coming closer to finding them, at least seeing the building where they were brought, the medical school--you know what I really want to see? I want to see the face of the doctor or doctoral student or nurse or whoever it was who used my parents as cadavers. I have pictures of them, not real pictures but images in my mind of them, in a great, armory-sized room, its floors shiny, dotted with stainless steel tables, all with tools, small machines for picking and drilling and extracting, with long thin cords, and there are medical students, five to a table, the tables spread out in a way that is perhaps too spreead out, not cozy but overly spacious, gridlike, eerie by way of rigidity. God knows what they do with two cancer-ridden bodies like that--if they're used as a tumor case studies or examined for their parts, like rusted cars on blocks, stripped, their colonized areas ignored in favor of their comparatively benign legs, arms, hands--oh God, my dad used to do a trick at Halloween, with a hand. We had a realistic rubber hand, had had it for ten years, it was always around, and at Halloween he would scrinch his own arm into his sleeve, then put the rubber hand where his own hand should be. When a trick-or-treater would come to the door, he would open the child's sack and drop first candy, and then the hand, into the bag. It was great.

Oh my gosh! he would bellow, waving around his handless arm. Oh my gosh! The child would be terrified, speechless. Then my dad would compose himself, and calmly reach into the bag. Let me get that...

So I plan to find out which medical school received them, and then I will go to the medical school, and will find the teacher who at the time was in charge of the use of cadavers, and I will knock on his door. I will.. I Have no courage for such things but in this case I will, I will surmount my--This is what I will say, brightly, when he opens the door, the doctor, when he cracks his door to see who has knocked:

I don't know what I'll say. Something scary. But I won't be angry about it. I want only to take a look at the man. Offer greetings. I want him to be shorter than me, in his late thirties, forties, fifties, frail, bald, with glasses. He will be dumbstruck by my introduction, afraid for his life, my shadow darkening him, and then I will close in on him, all casual confidence, and will ask something, something like:

"So tell me. What did it look like?"

"Excuse me?" he'll say.

"Was it like caviar? Was it like a little city, with one big gleaming eye? A thousand little eyes? Or was it empty, like a dried gourd? See, I have a feeling it might have been like a dried gourd, empty and light, because when I carried her, she was so light, much lighter than I expected. When you're carrying a person, I just thought of this, when you're carrying a person, why is it easier to carry them when they hold tight around your neck? Like, you're supporting their full weight no matter what, correct? But then they grab you around the neck and suddenly it's easier, like they're pulling up on you, but either way you're still carrying them, right? Why should it make a difference that they're they're holding you, too-- The point is that at the time, before when I was carrying her, when she was reclining on the couch and watching TV, in general I was kind of thinking that the thing in her stomach might be terribly heavy. And then I lifted her, and the weird thing was that she was so light! Which would mean that it was something hollow maybe, not the writhing nest of worms, the churning caviar, but just something dry, empty. So which was it? Was it the dired gourd, or the festering cabal of tiny gleaming pods?"

"Well--"

"I have been wondering for many years."

He will tell me. And I will know.

And then I will be at peace.

Oh I'm kidding. I kid you. About being at peace. This trip is about the fact that things have been much too calm in San Francisco--I am making enough money, Toph [his brother] is doing well at school-- and thus completely intolerable. I will return home and look for ugly things and chaos. I want to be shot at, want to fall into a hole, want to be dragged from my car and beaten.

Rebellion

2008-07-16T04:48:00.001-07:00

Last night, I was pacing back and forth in front of Walgreens with a cell-phone in hand and my mother, in her most clacking mandarin dialect, demanded to know what I (really) wanted to do with my life. It was dark. Stragglers casted curious glances in my direction while I garbled. I stuttered. I resorted to salesman speak of “destiny,” “dream,” and “passion”—which, in hindsight, are silly words to drop in front of a woman who is only impressed with the word “security.” In hindsight, I should have kept mum, but I didn’t. I thought she was ready to hear me out. As for her part, I’ll say that my mother listened for a good two seconds before she snapped through my half-baked ambitions.

What to do? If I were the average American, I would have already rebelled long ago in my teens and this would have been an odd visit to the grave. However, I'm Chinese, and in most families like mine, I doubt that rebellion has occured, if at all. One kid, the most un-PC boy known to man, used to cackle at my stereotypical Asian state of unquestioning: “Why is that all of you people want what your parents want, what society wants you to want? Huh? Huh?” He sounded like a miseducated rapper, and I’d sit on his floor, fuming and debating this maniac logic for hours and hours.

These days, I think that in the end, rebellion isn’t that simple. Rebellion isn’t about fighting for rights to a car on a Saturday night or the courage to speak your mind in front of an authority figure—ultimately, rebellion is about deciding What reality is, What your rights are, and Where your innermost desires truly lie. Growing up in an immigrant Asian family is almost like living on an island on top of United States—it’s an insular world with its own reality. Forced to confront challenges that regular Americans don’t even have to bother with, my parents view opportunities in a more cautious light and form survival mechanisms based on the gruel of numbers—budgets, quotas, engineering, computer science—hard facts that they subsequently try to pass onto me. And by passing on values, I don’t mean that my parents simply then handed me a burning torch; rather, they built four walls and a ceiling of their world-views and values around me without considering room for a door, a window or two.

“That is such crap,” one may say. “It’s not like white parents don’t try to influence their children." But really, does one know the extent of influence Asian parents have over their children? Asian parents are geniuses when it comes to forging lines between seemingly contradictory ideas--reality versus art, reason versus passion, career versus hobby. If one grows up in such a polarized environment, where there isn’t a gray area in sight, where no one presents the intersection as a possible option, tell me, how are we supposed to make the choice for the unbeaten path as easily as our Caucasian peers? Not only in the eyes of our parents, but really, in our very own minds’ eye, to pursue a future with less-than-predictable returns is akin sailing off the seven seas in search of an unexplored continent, where cartographers' imagination fail and they doodle in sea monsters and sirens instead. Meanwhile, others cross over onto this land, sometimes without a second thought, and then they'd stand on the other side and stare at us like we're nuts. To them, it wasn't a treacherous journey; it was just a jump, a very small jump.

Even the term “rebellion” isn’t forceful enough to address this phenomena. For someone to rebel against another force implies that he or she has a higher moral ground and knows “what is more right.” That’s not the case here. For the longest time, my parents’ world-view was my world-view. Their right was my right. Even as I am breaking out of their world, shards of my parents still remain behind, leaving me to constantly question what is and what is not reality. That’s why it’s not as simple for people like me. Every day is a mini Cultural-Revolution in a bottle. A fizz of ideologies.

In the end, who is right? (A) My mother—who doesn’t want me to make a decision that I will regret later on in life while the rest of my do-gooder Asian peers become dermatologists or radiologists and buy a house in Cape Cod. (B) Me—the “ingrate” who basically banged her fist on the table and declared a life-long ambition that has no expected financial returns and microscopic probabilities of success. (C) The questioner who’s so hesitant about outside authorities dictating a life for him that he’s more comfortable washing dishes for a living. (D) None of the above. (E) Cannot be determined.

The more I dwell upon these veins of doubt, the more amazed I am about people’s disconnect from fiction. We are, after all, but characters, to each his or his own, shaken, stirred, and plopped into the same story where from the first page to the climax, we'll be battling to steer the plot-line with our own forces. How strange! How wonderful! How horrible! How can my parents be convinced that fiction is useless when it speaks to the very core of our daily turmoil? Yes, while at age 22, I've already lost the hormonal edge to slam doors and throw tantrums, I'm still interested in dissecting rebellion on the page. Strangely in my family, however, that makes me a rebel anyway, perhaps even more so.

Transactions

2008-06-11T18:27:00.001-07:00

The man at Sam's Grocers swiped my credit card. Then, instead of handing it back to me, he studied the ribbed letters and tried to pronounce my last name. "Kwan? Chen? Chiang?" Attempting a Chinese name in English through a Pakastani accent isn't easy. I smiled and, holding out my hand--alas, he didn't get the hint--I tapped my foot and fidgeted with the straps of my bookbag. "Where are you from?" He persisted. "Korea? Japan? China? Aha." The corners of his eyes angled into a gaze so intense and laserlike that he could have only gotten it from studying Robert Redford and the good old films. You see, he was practicing to be the leading man and I was the leading lady of the hour. It never took much but the way he said "Thank you for coming" always made me feel dirty. Welcomed, but dirty.

My neighbor had the same problem with Gourmet Heaven. Every day she wandered into the deli and paid for a wedge of "organic" watermelon with what would sustain a Saharan family for a week. Lulled by her large dark eyes, soft lunar lips, and Indian features, the lonely cashier spoke to her of "their" homeland across the Pacific. He wanted to know more about her. What was her business in town? How old was she? How long has she been living in the States? The questions were nowhere as invasive as what a boy would whisper down a girl's neck on a Friday night out in town, but generally, she didn't expected to be scrutinized. All she wanted was a piece of fruit, a clean act of commerce without phone numbers attached.

My neighbor and I are simple girls leading parallel lives, drifting in and out of stores with our books and, always, something sweet--a popsicle, a bottle of pop. We consume things and we throw the skeletons away. Why would these characters single us out of all people for their fixation? Even our youth is young; we're still immortals who don't want to touch and be touched.

"Sketchy middle-aged men" is one term, one which we can comfortably utter while our limbs are still limber and our hairs, intact. Yet I'd see something embarassingly sad about these types--the type whose highlight of the day is a cigarette break by the parking meters at midnight or whose morning boost is your stride through the door for a can of diet coke, the type who flirts with the sinking grace of a sumo wrestler and knows it. What could these men possibly expect out of those intense beseeching stares? We're not from the old village. We're not their brides from the motherland. Or perhaps they think we're American mysteries, sweet little things to be had, a taste of the new. No, sir. All I want is my change and my receipt back. Thank you.

Covert

2008-04-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

It was the way that his elbow bumped against my aunt’s. The kiss of skin upon skin lasted only seconds, but rather than shirking away, her arm lingered in the vicinity as his hands meandered to the automatic gear. When I had stepped into the car, I thought he was just a chauffeur—one of many she and my uncle kept around after my arrival in Shanghai—but there was something about the touch that shifted my gaze from the rising dust and the stir of mirages ahead. From the backseat, I noted his hair, the gray strands carefully placed over thinner parts, and his shirt, an expensive silk that didn’t cling to his sweat like mine did.

Why Writing

2008-02-10T07:38:00.001-08:00

When I'm writing, I can forgo water and food and bathroom breaks for days and live in this alternate reality that is the word document of my story. The clock ceases to exist; instead, the closest measurement of time is the birth of a new paragraph, the click of a mouse. Other dimensions are distorted too. In the world of Microsoft Word, happiness is not dependent on the state of other people or the attainment of material goods, but rather on the ability to type and rearrange sentences until they can adequately capture the amorphous thoughts and emotions firing in my cerebral cortex. Conversely, depression is when the ability fails. And let’s be honest. Lately, frustration is every other page for the likes of me. I can claim only a year of legitimate attempts, yet I’ve already realized why writers are generally overweight, smoking, boozing, smack-sniffing bundles of neuroses that die before the prime of their life. I’ve never smoked, but god knows how many times I yearned for that minty glaze of a cigarette--inhale, exhale.

Argument: The experience of writing is by far inferior to the experience of life. Is this a sweeping statement?

During Novel Salon, one Stegner Fellow was fond of saying, “the goal of writing is to translate the manifold experience of life into exportable 2D form.” If one accepts this conjecture, writing is almost by definition the less comely sister of reality. You can write about a peach, the sensuality of biting through its skin and into the juicy core, but in a sense, you can never give the reader the full experience. Readers have to sacrifice moments of their lives in exchange for that of a text. Similarly for writers, they have to sacrifice a decade of their lives for a novel. On the days and nights they’re typing away in the attic, they are not eating, but writing about Parisian meals; not chatting up strangers, but adding characters and scribing dialogue; not having sex, not falling in love, not climbing mountains and jumping in rivers, but rather imagining these scenes. And if, after all these years of work, they’d produce a manuscript that bears half of a resemblance to all these true things of the world, then by definition, they were successful.

Why do writers write? This isn’t a trivial question to answer—given the risky income and the built-in ulcers, why would one knowingly commit to such a profession? Somehow, I doubt that anyone consciously listed out the merits of writing when they started. Either they were born with a pen in the mouth, having composed sonnets on their mothers' placentas, or they started out of the blue, having heard the devil whisper in their ears. Truly. Haruki Murakami was 29 and in middle of a baseball game when he suddenly realized he could write a novel. I don’t think he started with a “Why.”

Recently, a classmate of mine, K, articulated her motivation for writing. The concluding sentences were: “I want to write to connect, not to isolate. I’m naturally quiet and I naturally find it quiet. I don’t want to subdue the noise. I want to mold it into a communicable shape and give it away in a way that makes it louder to you and to me too.” This was a lovely piece. The keyword here being “connect.” I like how she portrays writing as a way to link all these seemingly separate spheres of our existence, to make the reader understand the writer, the writer understand the reader, and the characters understand each other. It’s admirable goal. However, I wonder if there’s an aspect that she hasn’t addressed—something more selfish.

I would argue that writers do not have such a glorified goal in mind, at least, in the beginning. It’s beautiful, but that’s not how people work. They do not forgo parties and lock the door to their room and start typing because they want to communicate. They write because communication in the real world breaks down. They write because they tried to say what they mean to people that matter to them, but all that comes out of their mouths is everything but the truth. They write because no one understands what the truth is and even if they did, they were certainly incapable of imparting that to each other. They write because sometimes, the sunsets scare them, because the stars in the skies are mute, because they alone seem to have visions, because after coming back from three-course meals, they still sink onto couches, hungering for another conversation, a human voice. Finally, they write because that is all that they can do. Because despite the fifteen-pound weight gain and the hours isolated in front of the screen, they write to embody a special kind of power—to impart their uninhibited version of the story without cries of dissent, to speak to an imaginary audience who can read in between the lines and cry and laugh at the right parts. They write without hope that their words can change the lives outside their rooms; they write only with the prayer that they can tidy up the jumble in their own souls. It’s hardly communication. In the beginning, it’s always a fuse with nowhere else to burn. A disguised rant.

10,000 pages and a full-grown beard later, the words flung with fury collect into an unwieldy parcel. The writer hands this object to a literary agent. Most of the time, this parcel is thrown away into the garbage and the author has an added fuse for the next project. The rest of the time, the intrigued literary agent hands the manuscript to an editor. Then, if the editor somehow deems the rant marketable material, he'll pressure the author to make a series of revisions. 20 revisions. The beast will be whittled to a sleek and sexy 350 pages. Adjectives and adverbs, be damned! All that remains of the volcano of angst is a snippet of sarcasm on page 64. The author will shrugs. What do artistic principles matter? There’ll be a paycheck at hand. The author will shave, join a gym, and start the next project.

My point is that none of this mumbo jumbo is any more glorious than the next aspiration. Although we’ve been secretly dreaming about the day when we too can become the next Hemingway, Morrison, Roth, or what have you (good enough so that our last names alone can identify us), in certain ways, writing begins as an alternative to confronting the real world. A healing mechanism, perhaps? And while I would like to be a writer at some point, figure out where to properly place punctuations or structure my stories or keep my tone consistent, I want to figure out life first. I want to learn: How do I share my opinions and emotions without damaging someone else’s trajectory? How do I inspire and point out reasons for happiness instead of just singing sad tunes and painting the mood of the Lost Generation? And as strange and painful and messy as other people’s perspectives are, I want to understand, rather than judge them—why one person can be spiritually whole and the other just as blank as the window that they stare through at night, why one person has to live with the dire poverty and gunshots in middle of the night while the other lies on top of a guarded mansion and still cannot sleep in soundness. I want to live and wake in new territories and only then, do I want to write seriously. When writing truly becomes communication, a connection, between two or more people in this world, then that’s just …perfect. It’s more than I can ask for, but it's what I want and have to work towards.

Best Lines from "Howl"

2008-02-01T02:54:00.000-08:00

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
...
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's float out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom of the hydrogen jukebox,
...
who studied Poltinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
...
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
...
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
...
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
...
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
...
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
...
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways, & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
...
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
...
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second
..."

On the Homeless Van

2008-01-30T19:36:00.000-08:00

The Van
“Don’t tell people where the campsites are,” Jon said. “Otherwise, the cops will come and make them move.” He started the ignition and glanced sideways to make sure I was paying attention.

“Okay,” I replied. Jon’s a nurse who’s being doing the homeless outreach routine in New Haven for 20+ years. I wasn’t about to mess with his clients.

“No names, no nothing.”

“Okay,” I nodded, wide-eyed. We were in a large white van, which a few inches would have upgraded to a commercial truck. In the backseat sat Sarah, the social worker/intern, and behind her were piles upon piles of jackets, boots, socks, jeans, and gloves--goodies that we're supposed to hand out.

“Okay,” Jon said. He stubbed out his cigarette and we rolled onto the road.

The woods
A classmate of mine claimed that some of these shacks in the woods are quite sophisticated. Once, he saw a shack with a full library. However, my guess is that the majority of the homeless do not invest that much energy into their shacks for they have to move every two or three weeks. Why? Robbers.

Two weeks ago, I met a young man who built road bikes from scratch. For his best bike, it took a year to collect all the parts. One night, he heard rustling outside his tent. The next morning, the bike, worth over $5000, was gone. Isn’t that ironic? Of all those who get robbed the most often, it isn’t the wealthy country clubs or some Parisian art museum; it’s the homeless without walls and security systems.

I still remember the Vietnam veteran who came to speak to our Student Initiated Course. After the war, he lived in the woods for over ten years because he wanted a shelter away from humanity. So I suppose, if one’s jaded enough, if one’s prepared for robberies in the middle of the night or when the bears wake up in the spring, then living in the woods is not a bad option.

“You know what’s funny though?” Jon said. “Some people who live in the woods don’t consider themselves homeless. They’d come to me and say, ‘Oh yeah, Jon, don’t you worry. I got a place. I got a home.’ And then, they go back to their sleeping bag under the bushes.” Jon paused and took a drag at his cigarette. A dry laugh. “I just can’t grasp that.”

The park
There is a pasture of green behind the stores, which from afar appears to be littered with trash. Only upon a closer inspection, I realize these are carefully placed pieces of cardboard, the corners pressed onto the ground with rocks. A roll of dirty blankets sat on top.

“My god,” I hear myself say. “Beds?”

“Cardboard’s an insulator,” Jon said, lighting another cigarette. Sarah took out her camera and started taking pictures. As we walk around the pasture, I realize the cardboards were mostly along stonewalls—perhaps, this too helps with the cold.

“Still,” I said. Nights in New Haven fall to temperature in the low 20s. Even in the afternoon, even in 2 layers of clothing and one thick coat, I’m shivering to the depth of my bones and tempted to quit outreach early in favor of Starbucks.

I used to think that if you pile up enough cloth upon yourself, then you can build an igloo of heat and that will suffice. Now, I wonder why more people aren't found dead every day.

“Come here. Look at this,” Jon said. He pulled me over and we both peered over the stonewall. There’s a width of 2 feet before a thirty feet drop and within this narrow space, there lies the same arrangement of cardboard. Last summer, Jon found a guy sleepin gout here. He woke the guy up and asked, "What the hell? If you tossed once, you'd die sleeping." But the guy replied, "I don't trust the other folks here. I have to sleep over the edge."

The Shelter
We went to the Immanuel Baptist and the Overflow Shelter. Both have similar arrangements: You check in at 4pm. A guard pats down on your sides to make sure you didn’t bring in any booze or weapons. You find a bed and cover your valuables. Immanuel Baptist is the premier shelter because they serve dinner. But often during winter, they’ll run out of beds—then those people have to be directed to the Overflow Shelter, hence the name. Both buildings are simple constructions. Basically, there are two gigantic rooms with fifty or so bunk beds. The clientele in New Haven is mostly black, a few Hispanic and Caucasian.

A man recognized Sarah from elsewhere and they struck up a conversation. Mostly, he complained to her about the Connecticut Mental Health Center—how one can only qualify for disability if they’re mentally insane or severely physically marred. “God, I’m tempted to go in one of these days and just say, ‘Hey, I’m kinda loopy in the head. Can yah help me out?”

“Those tests aren’t easy,” Sarah said. “It’s really hard to fool the psychiatrists.”

“But see, I’d do it right. I’d do research,” the man replied. “I’d just find one of my friends who are depressed and ask them about what they’d feel. Then I’d go into one of these tests and try to duplicate that.”

“Well, there you go.”

“It just isn’t fair, yah know? I work a lot. Dunkin’ Donuts. Six days a week. And then these people claim that they’re depressed and they get off easy. I mean, aren’t we all a little depressed? Why should I be punished because I’m more chemically balanced?”

“I didn’t say you can’t try,” Sarah shrugged.

The man sighed. Finally, he realized that I was standing right next to Sarah and gave me a smile of recognition. Sarah made introductions.

Here was my chance. “Do things happen during the night?” I asked.

“What do you mean…things?” He said. He looked over his shoulder at the grungy men climbing into and out of the soiled sheets. I think he muttered something about rape, but I’m not sure. “Well, things do happen, but no one messes with me. You just got to be careful here. Don’t flash cash. That type of thing.”

“And then obviously, if you’re drunk,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, obviously if you’re high or drunk,” he said. “People will take your stuff. You got to be careful.”

Rape. Robbery. All the etceras. As we walk out of the shelter past the staring sullen men, I realize that while a few of them are old and thin, most are able-bodied men with tattoos and Don’t-Fuck-With-Me faces. Anyone else here would be a hazard.

Food
A good portion of the homeless fit the classical profile—thin arms, thin legs, sunken cheeks. But nowadays with junk food so cheap, I daresay half of them are overweight, which only makes diabetes a more pressing issue. On three days a week, the churches in New Haven give out free dinners and there’s always a long line. We went by one of those dinners because Sarah had a client whose medicare issues she had to sort through. These dinners are mostly in the basement and on the night we visited, there were at least a hundred and more straggling in.

What do they serve here? Large muffins, bread, and Oreos. The most nutritious thing that they have is steamed carrots and beans. Not that I expected free steak dinners, but Oreos? Come on.

Jon explained that most of the food comes from the Food Bank, which ultimately come from Stop & Shop, the grocery store chain. However, in the recent years, Stop & Shop haven’t been doing so well economically, and as result, the food donations have grown increasingly dismal, sugary carbohydrates replacing more hearty, substantial meals like meat and vegetables.

Worldly Possessions
There’s an old lady in New Haven who’s famous for her possessions. I didn’t see her in the soup kitchen, but I saw her bags—four in total, each bigger than a suitcase. I’m told that since she can’t bear to leave them behind, she moves one-bag forward five steps at a time, comes back for the next bag and moves them. In this fashion, she moves, at most, a mile per hour.

“Why doesn’t she use one bag,” I said to Jon. “God, I would just carry one bag.”

“But that’s all she has.”

I fell in to silence. Jon turned from me to his clients and he surreptitiously slips them a cigarette and they thank him profusely. On some days, this would strike me as hypocrisy since smoking causes cancer and Jon being a nurse and all that. But for that moment, the exchange of nicotine from one hand to another made sense. Or maybe I was thinking too hard about my grandmother in China who packs away everything under her bed in large basket containers. How far would she move down the street if one morning, someone turned her apartment inside out?

Listerine
When you’re poor and you still need alcohol, you buy Listerine.

Post-"Graduated"

2008-01-27T06:44:00.000-08:00

[Follow up to my June 2007 post]

A year ago, I was pedaling lazily under palm trees and sunlight in my flip-flops. Meditating on boy this, boy that, and getting into medical school. Meanwhile, back in the dorms, my friends nursed hangovers and wounds of their own, punching at their alarm clocks. Once 11 am hits, they too are out and about. And we’d stay out until 12 or 3 or whatever ungodly hour. Now whenever I’m outside in New Haven, it’s dark. And I’m always shivering. Even darkness is different here, not the pale softening of broad sky, but clear and fine lines etched against rooftops and clock towers. Often accompanied by Gothic chimes.

And I’d stop. Frequently. Because York Street is so much narrower of a passage than what I’m used to, the people edgier and more chic, or the homeless bums more persistent and confrontational, I have to recount the past steps that lead me to this point. To brushing past the boy in tight pants and thick intelligentsia glasses, to waving away the toothless woman selling flowers. To this strange new town on this strange new coast.

Everything is different. No longer can I bike across campus and find my group of girls. I have to walk a mile to Union Station, sit on the rails for an hour and half while cramming physiology. After arriving at Grand Central, I have to find a connector and call and coordinate. Another hour later, instead of sitting on someone’s prized futon, we’re cornered in a trendy restaurant, where a bowl of ramen is not 75 cents from the snack machine and eaten raw, but $15 and raved about in a gourmet magazine. If we want to talk further, we have to buy coffee. Spill the beans, literally, so to speak.

So this was what the past weekends were about: New York, Boston, New York again. I met up with 7 of my college friends on separate occasions. In the end, it isn’t the inconvenience of the trips that I protest, but it’s the inaccessibility--the hesitation when you see someone before you stretch out your arms; the lull in the talk after you plowed through the basics of living arrangement, job situation, and relationship status; the disorientation when you glance at a face that you used to see every day now speaking in a language that you don’t understand, tucked over scarves and jackets that you’d both would have laughed about a year ago.

This is not to say, I didn’t enjoy these visits. A meal and a warm drink later, our tongues do moisten again, reviving with old jokes, the same bad jokes. I loved it all. I loved seeing the light catching in their eyes when they’re describing a new project that they’re working on. And yet, and yet, something is and has been missing—an absence as concrete as the wintry winds that chap our faces and chomp at our fingers. The night would die young. I'd embrace the friend and walk in the opposite direction through the city, both of us fingering this absence.

When past life and current differ in so many different aspects, it’s hard to single out the one pivotal thing that I miss. But while walking along the Charles River with an old acquaintance, it became clearer to me what it was. He was talking about his research, career plan, pointing at the drug company across the river that he could work at one day, and I was watching him talk. Not really listening for the details, but just watching his hands wave at that massively tall gray building and his breath march from his nostrils in orderly puffs. It was then that I arrived at a vision of him swiveling in his office chair over his neatly arranged desk and frames of his wife and three children. You don't know him, but he's the kind that used to burn car tires for fun, rage against working for The Man, and rally for moral relativism.

“Damn it, what is this?” I piped up, butting into his career spiel. "I don't want to grow up."

He turned to me with a smirk. Then a laugh. And another laugh. “Oh, but you will,” he replied. We walked over the bridge and headed back towards Harvard Square. I was annoyed. He has always been an acceptable person, but for some reason, his new-found manners irked me to no end. “Oh, but you will.” What a statement: oh, but we will grow up and become like our parents and our parents’ parents and become reasonable, productive members of this society.

So maybe that is what I miss the most. Of all the things that I could possibly miss, it is the imbalance of the college days. We had excessive convictions, un-shakeable beliefs. No sleep, just Red Bull. No love, just sex. No God, just choice. No objective reality, just constructions.

I don't resent this fast-forward to years later and my commitment to garner useful skills, but I miss the days of unapologetic selfishness, of thinking and learning and experiencing for their own sakes. I miss the long haired boys who plunked down plates of greasy pizza and chocolate brownies day after day and who delayed homework in favor of playing video-games and swapping homespun philosophies in the hallway from night to dawn. I don't particularly want to know that now, they're going to the gym three days a week and eating salads for dinner. I want to recall slurping over-sized cookie dough milkshakes until our stomachs flip over. Attacking an innocent with whipped cream and oil because he made my best friend cry. Listening to my friends talk about the people that they want to make love to, the books that they want to write, the places that they want to see, the impossible lives that they want to lead. We were rarely wise, but those moments of imbalances are the times I felt the most genius. My head contorted with insomnia and too much caffeine. Despite the discomfort, there was that delicious air of excitement. The feeling that a plan was hatching, and that we were all involved.

Of course, it was just a lot of talk. A lot of radicalism. A lot of idealism. A lot of –isms. And of course, we were not going to do all the things that we said that we were going to do and instead, we'll become increasingly like what we said we never will: our parents. The "sell-out" generation. And of course, we won’t be in the same dorm again until we’re in a retirement home. But god, how nice it was. That evasion of reality, that creation and theorizing of a world until we stumbled upon the real one. I will hold these moments close. I will remember how we shined flashlights at the plastic stars on my wall and how we pretended that we alone could make the sky twinkle. I will remember the kiss in front of Rodin's Gates of Hell and the sun as it climbed out of the bay. I will remember the songs that we sang. How strong our voices were, how assured of our dreams we were, that somewhere in the open frontier, there must be a revolution brewing. For us.

Sneakers

2008-01-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, all it takes is the strike of my sole against pavement. The concrete boosting me forward. The carousel of traffic and trees and passerby. The cold wind whipping into my shirt, my hair. Sometimes, all it takes is the rush of rhythm & blues, the deep trumpet wail about lost love and better days. And then I know I'm all right. That I'm better than all right.

You'd cite endorphins. Science. Schmience. Neurons in my head: synapsing, forging connections, creating sparks. But I don't even have to run for miles. Sometimes, all it takes is that first leap--one leg reaching forward, kicking, the other staggered, set in flight. My heart contracting like a spring. And then that burst into an afternoon flight. The promise of an open road.

Bhutto's Return

2007-12-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

Home is a cocoon, a bundle of warmth that one crawls into and never wants out of. The problems of the world appear distant, and the people, more so. Even bad news—violence and upset curdling in Pakistan, a beautiful woman slain as she waves to her people—deliver from the TV across the living room into the ears like a sluggish distance runner, muffled and out of breath. We stare with cool interest. Somewhere inside of us, I suppose, something must have been touched, stirred, though only faintly—a crackle. Our passion and heat we reserve for other things, small things, things which we can fathom and control like assembling appetizers for a Christmas party, choosing a life insurance package, or snagging deals at the mall. And then we call it a day.

What’s in a day? How should a day be lived? 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 8640 tick tocks. Many suburbanites believe so much in the rhythm of their days that the procedure alone could shine as their purpose. Rise to the sun, exercise, eat breakfast, work, eat lunch, work, prepare dinner and then eat dinner, read or watch TV, and then sleep. “Middle of the way,” my parents would often say. “Not too much, not too little--that’s the best way.” If moderation is a bore, then so be it. They’d choose boring, like there was a choice in the matter, over being responsible for mounds of wealth, which only invites robberies, or being responsible for a nation, which only induces coup de tats and murder plots against one’s own family. No, thank you. They’ve seen enough of the Cultural Revolution, heard enough of do-gooder journalists, missionaries, and doctors killed by the very same people they strived to aid; they’ve arrived upon the belief that moderation is the golden law of life.

Not every one lives by this so-called “golden law,” which is why the last day of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto so tickles the imagination. It’s so foreign to everything we hold dear in Suburban American. She was quite alluring, wasn’t she? Hooded dark eyes and a chiseled nose on a face ironically suggestive of a movie star if it were not for the conservative cast of her veil. Her family was wealthy. She was educated at Oxford and Harvard. She could have gone anywhere and done anything. She could have lived a quiet life in an Italian villa, dabbled in painting, and had many children—“the good old life”—but she didn’t, choosing to become embroiled in her father’s politics.

“That was a stupid move.” My father sips his tea and rolls his eyes at the laptop. “When she was first driven out of Pakistan, it was clear she was going to be assassinated. Why did she have to go back?”

“It’s not that simple, is it?”

“There were all these threats.”

“But every decision involves costs and benefits,” I reply. Pause. “She probably thought she could regain power. It’s not that simple.”

He huffs and waves me away with one hand. He clicks out of the window without bothering to finish the article and musses his hair while he finishes the tea. As I watch this, I realize it is just that simple to him. When the line of life and death is questioned, when the continuation of the daily rhythm is threatened, it is never even a question. Life and all the customs that prolong life should be chosen over the ways in which to maximize the experience of life. It makes sense. Politics is schmoliticks if someone kills you in the next second.

I walk downstairs and my mother, humming, is folding laundry and listening to the radio, the same news we’ve been reading upstairs. Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it will be another place. Members of Bhutto’s Party, when interviewed, sound more indignant than sad; their fury scratches like gruff beards bearing down on the microphone. There’s background noise. I can’t tell whether it’s static or riots. Buses are plunked over in retaliation.

“Promise me,” my mother says. She pats the folded socks and files them away in the basket. “Don’t even think of becoming a martyr.” It’s her favorite phrase to say after anyone dies in the public arena.

I nod. It's a rather useless argument because for one, I wouldn’t even know where to start in terms of changing my vocation to martyrdom. Nowadays, wars are fought abroad, and it's been eons since someone was nailed to the cross or sniped down as he leaned against a balcony, trying to think the soft thoughts of evening. Most people I know live like my parents. They sip their tea and fold their socks and buy groceries. They live not unreasonable lives in this prairie of Suburban look-alike houses, and no one wants to extinguish them except perhaps themselves. It’s uncanny to think that this is what the rest of the world may want—to trade all their noise and intensity for the monotone buzz of a lawnmower, and yet, it is. To many, the concept of home is actually as warm as cardboard covered lean-to in an abandoned alley and as comforting as a street of protesters with torches and rocks suspending in midair. A day is as moderate as a bomb thrown at open sunroof cars and as quiet as grown men ramming their outstretched throats into the sky.

This is the often missed point: Moderation is not the golden law by which everyone can live their lives. It is a luxury accorded to the unassuming, the ones sleeping or puttering away in the den of their homes, but not granted to the struggling. For Bhutto, given her familial history, her upbringing, her own attempts at steering the national transition, she probably felt compelled to fly back to Pakistan and reshape the motherland. It’s her home, after all. It's the cocoon to which she must return. Only there, the problems of the world are too tangible, too real, hate and frustration plunging like bullets from overhead into flesh. And then, what is in a life is what is in a day.