This semester I pathetically finished one novel (Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler), only because I read about a third of it while traveling home for break (which, with train ride + subway ride + airtrain + plane flight, all in all takes a crazy 12 hours). Next semester it’ll be short stories, because losing the flow of a book by stealing a few pages here and there when I’m not intellectually or physically or emotionally drained (rarely) pretty much sucks the life out of it. When references were made to little things that came before, I had to neurotically search for the first mention of them because I couldn’t remember. Despite this, the character of Maggie emerged with palpable tenderness, and is now one I hold close. While the story was engaging enough and its feelings nuanced, and there were moments of the kind of writing that surprises with descriptions unusual and perfectly accurate (do you know what I mean? When something you’ve felt is encapsulated exactly right, in a way you’ve never thought before, and you wonder how it can be so far from your vocabulary and thought, and yet so right)…most of that wasn’t too special for me. For me it was Maggie.
Even though she’s a married woman in her late forties, with two grown children and a whole life to look back on and contemplate, in many ways she still lives by a philosophy cultivated before experience set in. To that quality in her I’m attached, if only because I foresee the same for myself, for better or worse. These are the things I love in Maggie, not necessarily because they are good things but because they give shape to strange things I’ve felt, whose tangibility I sometimes question. And more than a relation to myself, the value lies in knowing that they exist, on their own, elsewhere.
disheveled/clumsy: Maggie digs through her purse trying to find the same things that have inhabited it for years, because she’s never formed a system where each thing has its place. I often tell myself that I should just designate a certain coat pocket for my keys, phone, etc., so that I always know where to look, but when it comes down to the moment I reach for whatever feels convenient, which isn’t consistent. Maggie’s husband, Ira, and children sometimes perceive her as bumbling, silly in a way: “She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.” I’m a little more straightlaced than that, but I can relate to having a messy demeanor, to being not-put-together. And while Ira sees it as not taking life seriously enough, I think it’s that Maggie takes so much to heart, it’s hard to find focus.
not too good at cultivating:Along the same lines, Maggie doesn’t have a knack for taking care of things, like her homegrown tomatoes that are always “bulbous” despite years of trying different kinds. She senses that people attribute the failure to Maggie herself, with her “knobby, fumbling way.” I’m awful at taking care of plants and my possessions in general (much to the chagrin of B. who helps me with each of my computer problems and N. who hates the torn insides of my peacoat), and I worry sometimes about whether this will translate to other things that require care, whether it does have to do with something internal.
she takes care of people: I think Maggie’s scared of the same thing because she tries really hard to take care of people. Instead of going to college, she continues her high school job as an aide in a nursing home, where concrete tasks make her feel capable and she knows when to laugh or nod during conversations. She tries to take care of those around her even when it’s not up to her or outside of her capacity…it’s a significant problem, leading to misunderstandings and misplaced feelings. I think it’s natural to try to impact others’ happiness in part because it affects our own, but Maggie can’t let go of the interconnections.
guilt causes overthinking, and vice versa: She feels bad about things, all the time. When placing a long distance call from another person’s home she considers leaving them some change. After playing a prank on a bad driver, she’s worried he’s been overly affected and makes her husband go back and check on him. Allison once said that she thinks guilt is a good thing, a sign of consideration for others. I think this has truth but I think, for me, guilt can be a kind of copout, a way of trying to keep your good after you’ve done something bad. Maggie, I think, is better than that; her regrets don’t stem from initial selfishness but instead from good intentions gone wrong, or from human responses. Even when she consciously sets out to right her ways, she’s horrible at not repeating her mistakes, because her characteristics are so ingrained, and man do I know something about that.
emotionally neurotic and impulsive: Maggie debates every emotional maneuver, and then in the moment her instincts take over, and they’re not always good ones. An image or thought can take hold of her so completely that she will feel that someone she doesn’t actually know is the most wonderful person she’s ever known, and it will be true because she feels it so.
easily affected: She forms incomprehensibly strong, oft impulsive connections to people removed from her, and she’s easily moved. In a hospital waiting room she encounters an elderly couple and across from them a burly man in coveralls. A nurse is asking the near deaf elderly man for a urine sample, and has to shout, “Pee in this cup!” The elderly woman is visibly embarrassed, explaining how deaf her husband has become, and Maggie doesn’t know what to say. The burly man shifts his weight and comments on how funny it is, he can pick up the nurse’s voice, but really, can’t make out her words at all. At this Maggie tears up. He asks her if she’s okay: “She couldn’t tell him it was his kindness that had undone her—such delicacy, in such an unlikely-looking person.”
acutely aware of presence and loss: On the loss of her cat: “His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence….But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards.”
can’t give up even when it could be the right thing to do: She can’t give up on people she loves, to a fault, because she relies on what she knows they feel, and knows that they feel genuinely and kindly; rather than their actions and words, which are often not so kind. Her husband says that she believes the people she loves are better than they are. I’ve been told I do this too, but I don’t think it’s such an altruistic thing. It stems from the fact that I know my own faults but I like to think I’m still passably okay, and to believe this requires understanding others’ faults. At one point Maggie wonders whether she’s been a bad mother, too forgiving of her children because she remembers so strongly what it’s like to be a child. I really believe in understanding other people’s context, to know why flaws exist and persist, probably because I can get so complicated that I need that sort of understanding from other people. Sometimes, though, in allowing so much room for complexity, you miss the basics that are as much a part of people as the layers.
she believes in romance: Not just the pretty things in the right place romance, but the idea that through all the crap and non-ideals, people will love each other enough to make it work and be consciously happy. Even when she doubts this for herself she thinks she’s just missed out and it’s still to be had in this world. Sometimes you might get the sense that Maggie’s trying to find refuge, making it easier on herself by always trying and not accepting the hurtful truth. But who’s to say what’s reality, or that her refuge is any easier than the accepted reality (sometimes it’s damn harder)? In my own experience there’s been no shortage of crap and non-ideals but I’m grateful for the incredible amount of good that comes along in spite of and because of. My past connections, few and not straightforward but valuable and full, have played part in shaping what I can and should give, and what I seek, want, need. And it’s funny, this makes me think both how hard it will be find, and how amazing it will be to someday have.
**
I don’t know if things really work out for Maggie, and whether this is because of all the above. I get the sense that as you’re reading, you might get annoyed with Maggie’s meddling and desire to right things that aren’t meant to be controlled. You might want to tell her that sometimes beauty is past. You might want to stop her from perpetuating her poorly implemented good intentions, to dread the impending disasters that end in large disappointment for her and those she loves. But that doesn’t work, because it’s not about how fixing flaws would make life easier to accept, or to live. It’s about facing the difficult because you’re trying to preserve value, even if it’s stupid and mistaken and fails. I don’t know if it’s right, but for Maggie it’s true.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
cancer, etc.
Hamlet is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. Besides the richness of language, intense drama, and so many characters with sharp life, I can relate to Hamlet’s obsessive contemplation of his own consciousness. The accepted interpretation that Hamlet destroys himself with this introspection—he thinks so much that he can never act—is my own biggest fear. A major reason I want to be a doctor is to stop only thinking about stories and instead start shaping them. But I also feel that this assessment of Hamlet attributes his failure to one misleading cause—that is, he can’t apply his thoughts to real life. As hard and real of a problem that is for many, I don’t think Shakespeare had everyone die at the end merely to say, “just don’t think; just do it already.” It’s true that the tragedy lies in the disconnect between Hamlet’s interior and the outside world. But the source of that disconnect isn’t only his inability to externalize his desires, to physically do what he mentally feels. It’s also his inability to internalize his surroundings, to absorb what he sees and hears and relate it to himself. Because he never understands what the outside world has to do with him and his identity, he can never become a part of it and so can never make any sort of impact on it.
And so after our oncology module, a compressed period where I wished I could just-do-it and thereby not feel helpless, I’m still not doing, still trying to find time and space to internalize all we’ve been exposed to and were supposed to learn. Learning about cancer comprises a slim two weeks in our curriculum, devoted to teaching us the overarching mechanism of how cancerous cells arise, spread and hurt us, and how we fight back. We received a detailed lecture on breast cancer, as a model for other cancers, and a third of each of our three workshops is a case study of a specific cancer. But mostly we just learn about cancer as a whole. After doing leukemia research and interviewing cancer patients weekly during first year of medical school, cancer remains mysterious to me and I learned anew with this module. In class we learn about it scientifically, what distinguishes it from your normal cells, how it survives, and why it’s so bad. Once as we worked through cases someone asked a question I’d wondered often before: “What actually kills you?” A lot of things, any number of things.
In class we also learn about it emotionally, hearing patients speak about their experiences and physicians lecture on palliative care. We learn big topics in forty minute increments (resting dazed for ten minutes between lectures), eat lunch, and spend the afternoon being exposed to (depending on the day) age, illness, dying and death in hospitals and hospices and nursing homes. We dedicate any and all gaps in the day to studying. It’s made slightly easier and more pathetic by the fact that we’re in a group all doing the same things.
For people in their twenties, we hear a lot about death and all that goes along with that: the preceding disease, the lives that were had and how they changed. It makes me feel I’m on the edge of a world that’s eluded my grasp for so long, that I’m growing up and into real life. Then I learn in class that one way to reduce your risk of getting breast cancer is having a child before you’re twenty-four. I’m twenty-four, and I still am a child, and I wonder what exactly I’m supposed to do with the things I know.
The language of cancer is very distinct, not just a matter of science and technical terms but also a firm foundation of key concepts, containing a lot of m’s (metastasis, malignant, mortality) and rife with percentages and units of time. Like in other areas of science, we personify it. A professor called CML a naïve cancer because it involves just one gene, making it easier to target and eradicate. In pharmacology we learn that even though some drugs eliminate mechanisms that both cancer and normal cells use, they preferentially kill cancer cells because cancer cells get addicted to one mechanism. While a normal cell can rely on other means once one is taken away, a cancer cell has lost perspective and doesn’t know what to do with itself.
I think we personify disease to understand and fight it, but we also get addicted to our language. We talk about the effects of cancer and the success of treatment in terms of five-year survival. Which isn’t a very long time to survive. But no one addresses the instinctive thought that this living five years is almost the opposite of continuing to live, since we’re beyond instinct now. We know that if your cancer hasn’t overcome everything in five years, it either wasn’t that bad to begin with or treatment is good. We know our language so well that meaning surpasses words. I think I pay close attention to words and in a little over a week I forgot how to hear them and I learned this from being told so. During a lecture on palliative care, a kind oncologist whose gray hair and matching eyes projected a natural softness told us about his wife who’d had breast cancer and subsequently acute leukemia. After being diagnosed with leukemia, someone offered her comfort in the fact that 75% of people with acute leukemia have a five-year survival. When her husband came home to find her sobbing over this, he asked her what it was that bothered her, assuming that she’d interpreted the statement as a quarter of people not achieving five year survival. Instead, she told him, “I’m 41 years old. And I only have until 46.” She thought “five year survival” meant that she’d live five more years and then it would be over. Despite that being the words’ most intrinsic meaning, I hadn’t even thought of that possibility.
These thoughts slip me because the days are crammed. One went like this. We begin the morning with a workshop on lung cancer (the cancer that takes most lives, with an overall survival rate of 15%) and brain metastases. If cancer has traveled from your lungs to your brain, they will irradiate your entire brain (our notes remind us that these patients will experience cognitive defects). It’s deemed prophylactic, and after treatment you can expect to live for one year. Following workshop, we listen to the lecture on breast cancer, which feels both scarier and less so by nature of being so prevalent in the population and mainstream culture. I know several people with breast cancer (seems like many in comparison to the number of people I know who have other illnesses, which are few) and somehow that commonness made me complacent. I am surprised to find that despite improved screening and detection, the percentage of survival isn’t as high as I expected. A quarter of women diagnosed with breast cancer die from it. We then hear from a breast cancer survivor, someone in our Yale community, who speaks to us for a near hour about her experience. From this I realize the more significant thing I’d forgotten was the visceral challenge of being ill with something that has any chance of killing you, no matter how positive the eventual outcome. In another workshop our teacher mentioned a procedure having a 5% risk of mortality, which is low, but well, “high if it’s your risk.” It’s true that on a daily basis we all face some slight percentage of dying, but cancer means having this overshadowed by something concrete and pseudo-quantifiable and personal and internal.
One thing I appreciate in medicine is individual context amidst the absolute values of care and quality of life, and there are few places wherein relativity is as palpable as cancer survival. While cure is always the ultimate goal, cancer can be so ominous that small advances are noteworthy. For colon cancer that's spread so that it's incurable by surgery, chemotherapy can prolong life significantly, “in some cases, up to two years.” A new treatment for kidney cancer is seen as an enormous breakthrough because it prolongs survival by 50%—increasing it from two months to four. Of course four versus two is a lot when it’s all you have, and who’s to say how much worth lies in any amount of time. Still, here relativity can feel like a copout.
Later that afternoon, as part of our pre-clinical curriculum we speak to a patient whose care is palliative, meaning being treated not for cure but for comfort. Ours is an 83 year old man with the mischievous sparkle of a teenager, coated with a brand of boyish charm that only comes with experience. He’d been diagnosed with lung cancer that he didn’t want to treat. He’d lived long enough, he felt, and if it’s time, it’s time. Then he came down with some sort of abdominal infection that doctors told him would kill him within a day, and still he didn’t want treatment. He hadn’t been seeking to die, but nor did he seek to live. He said goodbye to his family, and then the infection miraculously cleared on its own, leaving him alive, albeit with cancer still. When we see him, one of the first things he says is that the idea of dying in one or two days didn’t bother him. “Does that bother you?” he asks, pointing at me as I’m still maneuvering to find the right position in a narrow chair. I’m confused as to what he’s asking and I interpret it to mean, does his acceptance of his death bother me? Which is not a normal question to ask at all, but I don’t have the two seconds it takes to overthink the question even more than I already have and realize this isn’t what he means. So I respond with a quick no and during the ensuing chorus line of no’s from my classmates that might’ve just been nervous echoes of my response, I realize what he’d actually meant. And no, I do not want to die in the next couple of days. I’m completely happy with the life I’ve led so far but that doesn’t mean it’s done. If it were to happen, I’d be grateful for all that I’ve had in 24 years. But yes, I would be bothered.
In the evening, I have a meeting for the geriatrics interest group, and after talking to Don about the day he asks why I like old people. They’re different from me and I have no idea what it’s like to be them. I think maybe they’re honest not because they have nothing to lose but because they know what honesty gives. They carry everything with them that I am still looking ahead to, and they carry so much. They’re living with what I work for each day: experience, and they take that with them to each next day, because despite all they’ve lived they haven’t stopped living anew. At the meeting we talk about our screening of Rolling, a documentary where three people in wheelchairs tape their daily lives. None of them are “old.” Dr. Berland, the filmmaker, tells us the film is being promoted by the geriatrics group because it’s about facing change with dignity, and independence. I’m struck by how very different each person is, done not purposefully but truthfully. One tells us in an off-center closeup that he has so many blessings, and that nothing can take those from him. But “being blessed doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” Like that Whitman line about how he’s a contradiction, and that makes sense because he’s large and he contains multitudes. That’s what each day feels like, a multitude.
And all I can do is sit with my books, which can feel empty and wrong even if necessary and engaging. After that day I go to the architecture library to study about breast and lung cancer in detail, making semi-meticulous notes from the textbook and lecture notes and workshop we’d had in the morning, putting together the details of screening, diagnosis, subtypes, staging and treatment. That we have this knowledge is beautiful, but cancer is so mysterious and we know really so little. When we first start learning about diseases we learn what begins them and here often we only know the end. All this crammed in one day, and no time at the end to think about what it means and how to use it. For lack of time and energy, I furiously scribble down events and details, with hopes of returning to fill gaps, but so much will be lost. Another day brings more, the feelings will gain different nuances, the way I started writing about my dad’s truck and he sold it before I finished the story. I’ll forget how it all started, what it was like to not know and to be introduced into these big things, encased in a hospital room and a one hour interview, to learn from these people as med students and as people. If I leave it for too long, I may look back and think I’m past the age to absorb it. As if reflection on the beginning only saves you from a blurry end where you can’t look back and remember, if you do it before you’re twenty-four.
And so after our oncology module, a compressed period where I wished I could just-do-it and thereby not feel helpless, I’m still not doing, still trying to find time and space to internalize all we’ve been exposed to and were supposed to learn. Learning about cancer comprises a slim two weeks in our curriculum, devoted to teaching us the overarching mechanism of how cancerous cells arise, spread and hurt us, and how we fight back. We received a detailed lecture on breast cancer, as a model for other cancers, and a third of each of our three workshops is a case study of a specific cancer. But mostly we just learn about cancer as a whole. After doing leukemia research and interviewing cancer patients weekly during first year of medical school, cancer remains mysterious to me and I learned anew with this module. In class we learn about it scientifically, what distinguishes it from your normal cells, how it survives, and why it’s so bad. Once as we worked through cases someone asked a question I’d wondered often before: “What actually kills you?” A lot of things, any number of things.
In class we also learn about it emotionally, hearing patients speak about their experiences and physicians lecture on palliative care. We learn big topics in forty minute increments (resting dazed for ten minutes between lectures), eat lunch, and spend the afternoon being exposed to (depending on the day) age, illness, dying and death in hospitals and hospices and nursing homes. We dedicate any and all gaps in the day to studying. It’s made slightly easier and more pathetic by the fact that we’re in a group all doing the same things.
For people in their twenties, we hear a lot about death and all that goes along with that: the preceding disease, the lives that were had and how they changed. It makes me feel I’m on the edge of a world that’s eluded my grasp for so long, that I’m growing up and into real life. Then I learn in class that one way to reduce your risk of getting breast cancer is having a child before you’re twenty-four. I’m twenty-four, and I still am a child, and I wonder what exactly I’m supposed to do with the things I know.
The language of cancer is very distinct, not just a matter of science and technical terms but also a firm foundation of key concepts, containing a lot of m’s (metastasis, malignant, mortality) and rife with percentages and units of time. Like in other areas of science, we personify it. A professor called CML a naïve cancer because it involves just one gene, making it easier to target and eradicate. In pharmacology we learn that even though some drugs eliminate mechanisms that both cancer and normal cells use, they preferentially kill cancer cells because cancer cells get addicted to one mechanism. While a normal cell can rely on other means once one is taken away, a cancer cell has lost perspective and doesn’t know what to do with itself.
I think we personify disease to understand and fight it, but we also get addicted to our language. We talk about the effects of cancer and the success of treatment in terms of five-year survival. Which isn’t a very long time to survive. But no one addresses the instinctive thought that this living five years is almost the opposite of continuing to live, since we’re beyond instinct now. We know that if your cancer hasn’t overcome everything in five years, it either wasn’t that bad to begin with or treatment is good. We know our language so well that meaning surpasses words. I think I pay close attention to words and in a little over a week I forgot how to hear them and I learned this from being told so. During a lecture on palliative care, a kind oncologist whose gray hair and matching eyes projected a natural softness told us about his wife who’d had breast cancer and subsequently acute leukemia. After being diagnosed with leukemia, someone offered her comfort in the fact that 75% of people with acute leukemia have a five-year survival. When her husband came home to find her sobbing over this, he asked her what it was that bothered her, assuming that she’d interpreted the statement as a quarter of people not achieving five year survival. Instead, she told him, “I’m 41 years old. And I only have until 46.” She thought “five year survival” meant that she’d live five more years and then it would be over. Despite that being the words’ most intrinsic meaning, I hadn’t even thought of that possibility.
These thoughts slip me because the days are crammed. One went like this. We begin the morning with a workshop on lung cancer (the cancer that takes most lives, with an overall survival rate of 15%) and brain metastases. If cancer has traveled from your lungs to your brain, they will irradiate your entire brain (our notes remind us that these patients will experience cognitive defects). It’s deemed prophylactic, and after treatment you can expect to live for one year. Following workshop, we listen to the lecture on breast cancer, which feels both scarier and less so by nature of being so prevalent in the population and mainstream culture. I know several people with breast cancer (seems like many in comparison to the number of people I know who have other illnesses, which are few) and somehow that commonness made me complacent. I am surprised to find that despite improved screening and detection, the percentage of survival isn’t as high as I expected. A quarter of women diagnosed with breast cancer die from it. We then hear from a breast cancer survivor, someone in our Yale community, who speaks to us for a near hour about her experience. From this I realize the more significant thing I’d forgotten was the visceral challenge of being ill with something that has any chance of killing you, no matter how positive the eventual outcome. In another workshop our teacher mentioned a procedure having a 5% risk of mortality, which is low, but well, “high if it’s your risk.” It’s true that on a daily basis we all face some slight percentage of dying, but cancer means having this overshadowed by something concrete and pseudo-quantifiable and personal and internal.
One thing I appreciate in medicine is individual context amidst the absolute values of care and quality of life, and there are few places wherein relativity is as palpable as cancer survival. While cure is always the ultimate goal, cancer can be so ominous that small advances are noteworthy. For colon cancer that's spread so that it's incurable by surgery, chemotherapy can prolong life significantly, “in some cases, up to two years.” A new treatment for kidney cancer is seen as an enormous breakthrough because it prolongs survival by 50%—increasing it from two months to four. Of course four versus two is a lot when it’s all you have, and who’s to say how much worth lies in any amount of time. Still, here relativity can feel like a copout.
Later that afternoon, as part of our pre-clinical curriculum we speak to a patient whose care is palliative, meaning being treated not for cure but for comfort. Ours is an 83 year old man with the mischievous sparkle of a teenager, coated with a brand of boyish charm that only comes with experience. He’d been diagnosed with lung cancer that he didn’t want to treat. He’d lived long enough, he felt, and if it’s time, it’s time. Then he came down with some sort of abdominal infection that doctors told him would kill him within a day, and still he didn’t want treatment. He hadn’t been seeking to die, but nor did he seek to live. He said goodbye to his family, and then the infection miraculously cleared on its own, leaving him alive, albeit with cancer still. When we see him, one of the first things he says is that the idea of dying in one or two days didn’t bother him. “Does that bother you?” he asks, pointing at me as I’m still maneuvering to find the right position in a narrow chair. I’m confused as to what he’s asking and I interpret it to mean, does his acceptance of his death bother me? Which is not a normal question to ask at all, but I don’t have the two seconds it takes to overthink the question even more than I already have and realize this isn’t what he means. So I respond with a quick no and during the ensuing chorus line of no’s from my classmates that might’ve just been nervous echoes of my response, I realize what he’d actually meant. And no, I do not want to die in the next couple of days. I’m completely happy with the life I’ve led so far but that doesn’t mean it’s done. If it were to happen, I’d be grateful for all that I’ve had in 24 years. But yes, I would be bothered.
In the evening, I have a meeting for the geriatrics interest group, and after talking to Don about the day he asks why I like old people. They’re different from me and I have no idea what it’s like to be them. I think maybe they’re honest not because they have nothing to lose but because they know what honesty gives. They carry everything with them that I am still looking ahead to, and they carry so much. They’re living with what I work for each day: experience, and they take that with them to each next day, because despite all they’ve lived they haven’t stopped living anew. At the meeting we talk about our screening of Rolling, a documentary where three people in wheelchairs tape their daily lives. None of them are “old.” Dr. Berland, the filmmaker, tells us the film is being promoted by the geriatrics group because it’s about facing change with dignity, and independence. I’m struck by how very different each person is, done not purposefully but truthfully. One tells us in an off-center closeup that he has so many blessings, and that nothing can take those from him. But “being blessed doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” Like that Whitman line about how he’s a contradiction, and that makes sense because he’s large and he contains multitudes. That’s what each day feels like, a multitude.
And all I can do is sit with my books, which can feel empty and wrong even if necessary and engaging. After that day I go to the architecture library to study about breast and lung cancer in detail, making semi-meticulous notes from the textbook and lecture notes and workshop we’d had in the morning, putting together the details of screening, diagnosis, subtypes, staging and treatment. That we have this knowledge is beautiful, but cancer is so mysterious and we know really so little. When we first start learning about diseases we learn what begins them and here often we only know the end. All this crammed in one day, and no time at the end to think about what it means and how to use it. For lack of time and energy, I furiously scribble down events and details, with hopes of returning to fill gaps, but so much will be lost. Another day brings more, the feelings will gain different nuances, the way I started writing about my dad’s truck and he sold it before I finished the story. I’ll forget how it all started, what it was like to not know and to be introduced into these big things, encased in a hospital room and a one hour interview, to learn from these people as med students and as people. If I leave it for too long, I may look back and think I’m past the age to absorb it. As if reflection on the beginning only saves you from a blurry end where you can’t look back and remember, if you do it before you’re twenty-four.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
changes and happenings
A lot of things have happened. While not everything has been smooth or even pleasantly rocky, I feel the heaviest kind of lucky. It's quite sappy how consciously lucky I feel every day to have everything I do, how much it holds up even the worst days. To inadequately recap. I spent the summer in Vietnam to work on a public health project. I traveled to the center and south, and lived in the north. I stayed in a rural town for a couple weeks, visited my dad's old village, and lived with my uncle, his son and his son's family in the city the rest of the time. My cousin's wife, quite possibly the sweetest person I've ever met, cried at the airport when I was leaving.
I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).
I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.
Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.
School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.
At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.
Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.
I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).
I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.
Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.
School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.
At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.
Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
observations
When a fruit is in season, people eat it everyday with every meal. You eat batches after batches of longans and think it’ll never end, and then one day they’re gone and you understand, and see how defining seasons are. Bowls are never left empty, and if ice cream has melted you eat it as soup. People like to sing. They’ll randomly break out a line when walking across the room. Buses don’t stop at bus stops; they slow down and keep moving. People nap after lunch, no matter where they are. Within few minutes of meeting you strangers will invite you to their homes. It’s not considered rude to push someone out of your way. There’s little sense of individual space. Privacy isn’t important. Vendors hold fast and hard to what they want you to believe about their products even in the face of clear evidence otherwise.
The way people repeat and repeat make me feel like they believe repetition affirms truth, can even will it. What you eat, what you don’t eat, how much you eat, what sauce you choose to dip your food in—all will be noticed. Going out means flooding the streets and hanging out. People aren’t easily bored. They can sit for a long time. Tea is called water. White pants are in style, as are jeans/pants of different colors in general, as are ruffles down the front of your shirt. After walking in post rain streets the backs of my pants and the side of my purse are spotted with large specks of mud. For umbrellas, plaid is their black. People give up their seats for the elderly and pregnant but rarely does a guy give up his seat for a girl in high heels carrying lots of bags. When it rains my aunt rushes out to the balcony to retrieve the laundry.
It rains a lot. When it rains it feels like it will never stop. I haven’t yet experienced rain that you might call a passing shower. It’s always heavy and long, and there is always frequent thunder and lightning. When it rains, things change. People have to stop and find shelter, or are stuck at home. It’s not just an inconvenience; it’s a real thing. People work long hours, but don’t cut short breaks during the day to go home early. If it’s mealtime and someone calls you to eat, you don’t finish what you’re doing, you go; or they’ll keep calling you every other second. Friends are affectionate with one another. They have full conversations via back and forth text messages. People know the names of flowers.
Items are localized in areas. If you want to buy something, there’s a street dedicated to it; things aren't sold mall-style. To lock up your house at night, there’s a lock to the outer gate, an inner gate you pull across your double doors and bunches of little padlocks with different keys. The streets are gritty, and the air is thick with dust and heat. People wear face masks. In the hottest heat girls wear a long sleeve over their T-shirts when going out into the sun. Everyone showers at night. Every day I’m asked whether a dozen different things here are found in America. When a person doesn’t like to eat something, it’s said that he doesn’t “know how to eat” it. In the city it’s assumed you are from somewhere else, so people are always asking each other what their “que,” or countryside village, is.
Distances are significant here. The city feels bigger than it is because of how long it takes to get places. My family’s said that the transition from Hai Ba Trung, the residential district where they live, to My Dinh, the business area of Hanoi, is like going to another country. Rarely anyone has been outside of Vietnam; the majority haven’t traveled to other big cities within the country itself either. People love taking pictures if you pull out a camera and are unabashed about asking to you to take solo pictures of them. People talk to you without introduction. Once a person builds a rapport, which can happen in minutes, they look out for you. Strangers tell you how it is. They scoff when you’ve done something stupid, sound easily annoyed when you don’t do as they think is fitting. It’s not a social disgrace to criticize someone you don’t know because they disagree with you on something like directions or where to put your feet on a bike. Strange things happen, like purple ink splattering my skin through an open window of a taxi. Organization is not consciously valued. With a loose framework things work themselves out.
The way people repeat and repeat make me feel like they believe repetition affirms truth, can even will it. What you eat, what you don’t eat, how much you eat, what sauce you choose to dip your food in—all will be noticed. Going out means flooding the streets and hanging out. People aren’t easily bored. They can sit for a long time. Tea is called water. White pants are in style, as are jeans/pants of different colors in general, as are ruffles down the front of your shirt. After walking in post rain streets the backs of my pants and the side of my purse are spotted with large specks of mud. For umbrellas, plaid is their black. People give up their seats for the elderly and pregnant but rarely does a guy give up his seat for a girl in high heels carrying lots of bags. When it rains my aunt rushes out to the balcony to retrieve the laundry.
It rains a lot. When it rains it feels like it will never stop. I haven’t yet experienced rain that you might call a passing shower. It’s always heavy and long, and there is always frequent thunder and lightning. When it rains, things change. People have to stop and find shelter, or are stuck at home. It’s not just an inconvenience; it’s a real thing. People work long hours, but don’t cut short breaks during the day to go home early. If it’s mealtime and someone calls you to eat, you don’t finish what you’re doing, you go; or they’ll keep calling you every other second. Friends are affectionate with one another. They have full conversations via back and forth text messages. People know the names of flowers.
Items are localized in areas. If you want to buy something, there’s a street dedicated to it; things aren't sold mall-style. To lock up your house at night, there’s a lock to the outer gate, an inner gate you pull across your double doors and bunches of little padlocks with different keys. The streets are gritty, and the air is thick with dust and heat. People wear face masks. In the hottest heat girls wear a long sleeve over their T-shirts when going out into the sun. Everyone showers at night. Every day I’m asked whether a dozen different things here are found in America. When a person doesn’t like to eat something, it’s said that he doesn’t “know how to eat” it. In the city it’s assumed you are from somewhere else, so people are always asking each other what their “que,” or countryside village, is.
Distances are significant here. The city feels bigger than it is because of how long it takes to get places. My family’s said that the transition from Hai Ba Trung, the residential district where they live, to My Dinh, the business area of Hanoi, is like going to another country. Rarely anyone has been outside of Vietnam; the majority haven’t traveled to other big cities within the country itself either. People love taking pictures if you pull out a camera and are unabashed about asking to you to take solo pictures of them. People talk to you without introduction. Once a person builds a rapport, which can happen in minutes, they look out for you. Strangers tell you how it is. They scoff when you’ve done something stupid, sound easily annoyed when you don’t do as they think is fitting. It’s not a social disgrace to criticize someone you don’t know because they disagree with you on something like directions or where to put your feet on a bike. Strange things happen, like purple ink splattering my skin through an open window of a taxi. Organization is not consciously valued. With a loose framework things work themselves out.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
nyaya health
There are a good number of people who want to do good, who make it a concrete goal, whose careers lie upon this idea, who think about it when making life decisions and when living day to day, weaving it into the background of going to school, making friends, finding love, having fun, getting a job. Then there are a rare few for whom doing good isn’t doing good; it’s just doing. It’s the forefront, the bulk, the background. We have a friend like this. Sometimes I read the blog for his organization, Nyaya Health, and I remember how narcissistic my blog is and how he uses this medium for something outside of himself, which is what I think writing should eventually achieve (in a very different, still narcissistic sort of way). His experiences fuel an anger over injustice that drives him, and never has self-fulfillment played a part. Even though most people don’t do good things mainly for self-fulfillment, it can’t help but be had. For him, he is so invested in others that there’s little room for getting anything for himself from it.
There are lots of reasons to support Nyaya Health, which administers primary care to a rural region in Nepal of a quarter million people that had no doctors or facilities, battling incredibly high rates of HIV, maternal mortality, and malnourishment. It’s committed to immediate care as well as long-term health models to care for those without. It’s not just helping out; it’s thinking about everything: management, infrastructure, microfinance, epidemiology.
But personally the reason I give you is that this person makes other people his life, not in addition to his own. Aud and I talk about how we all receive more than we give (not in a deliberate or selfish way, but in a human way). Sometimes people can be mostly givers, and that’s something worth supporting I think. He’d hate this reason for supporting Nyaya, but I think it’s a decent one.
You can read more about it here: http://www.nyayahealth.org
And you can donate here: http://www.nyayahealth.org/donate_now.html
Money can seem trivial because it can be easy, but I can guarantee any amount will be more gift given than received.
There are lots of reasons to support Nyaya Health, which administers primary care to a rural region in Nepal of a quarter million people that had no doctors or facilities, battling incredibly high rates of HIV, maternal mortality, and malnourishment. It’s committed to immediate care as well as long-term health models to care for those without. It’s not just helping out; it’s thinking about everything: management, infrastructure, microfinance, epidemiology.
But personally the reason I give you is that this person makes other people his life, not in addition to his own. Aud and I talk about how we all receive more than we give (not in a deliberate or selfish way, but in a human way). Sometimes people can be mostly givers, and that’s something worth supporting I think. He’d hate this reason for supporting Nyaya, but I think it’s a decent one.
You can read more about it here: http://www.nyayahealth.org
And you can donate here: http://www.nyayahealth.org/donate_now.h
Money can seem trivial because it can be easy, but I can guarantee any amount will be more gift given than received.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
vietnamese-american
I watched Joy Luck Club yesterday morning, and nearly burst into tears about twenty times. My propensity to cry at overtly tear-inducing film scenes depends on my mood, and my general mood these past few weeks has been Being in the Motherland--all the obvious feelings that entails. And hey, that movie is pretty good.
Having many first-generation friends and America being America, in writing my mass emails from Southeast Asia last summer and this one, I got a lot of replies from people about how they related to the cultural aspects of my experiences. From people who felt connected, disconnected, somewhere in between, in relation to their family’s culture. I’m not sure when I started becoming consciously aware of my culture, but I do know that my family has done so well in keeping it a constant presence, whether or not I was aware. And for that I feel such incredible gratitude, it’s tangibly difficult for me to write it accurately. And I feel it’s so important, I so want to get it right.
When I visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon, I sat for a long time in the pews because I was tired from walking all the day in the heat. Mass wasn’t in service but there were a few women in the first row reciting prayers. It immediately brought me back to going to Vietnamese mass with my parents at home, as a kid. I hated going. I hated that it was in the middle of the day, that I had to dress up, that I couldn’t fully understand the sermons, that in the summer it was stifling. But there was one thing I didn’t hate, one thing that with age I actually grew to love, and that was the recitation of prayers in Vietnamese. In English we just say them. In Vietnamese, I wouldn’t say there’s a real melody to the prayers, but the prayers are melodic. There are certain tones that made me enjoy memorizing and reciting them too, purely for the sound and experience, because I’m not religious and not really spiritual either. When I heard the women saying them in Vietnam, they sounded exactly like back home in California, and I found myself saying them too. And I was struck by how this thing, these words and these tones, was carried intact from across the world.
Lately I’ve felt, with a sense of urgency, a need to preserve things about my parents and their history that might fade when they’re gone. To keep through time what they so bravely, carefully transported through place. I want to make my mom’s food, to teach my kids Vietnamese (and have them learn the great amount I don’t know, if they’re not too resistant). And most, to honor all my parents went through to bring me here, by remembering and continuing what they left behind. Because it’s their values from there that made it possible for me to cultivate ones from here. I can feel the question of rationale arising: why does it really matter to remember where you’re from? I don’t have an all-encompassing response, because all my metaphors are too-neat answers. But I think that if one life lived is what provides meaning, and it’s this continuum that makes a single life possible, then there must be some syllogism there.
In America, when people ask you what you are, they mean where your family’s from, because it’s (usually, ideally) accepted that you’re American. In Vietnam, even though my family is Vietnamese, they ask me what I am. They see you by the country you live in, and you’re not considered Vietnamese. And it’s true, because I’m not fully or even mostly Vietnamese. But I’m not just American either. Too often people find themselves choosing between one culture and another, when one of the best things about America is that you can have both (or several). I really dislike the misconceptions of being whitewashed because you’re integrated into American society, or of being super Asian because you have a lot of Asian friends. Because in polarizing things this way, you can forget that you should (or so I personally think) remain connected to both, and can be, despite falling into one of those aforementioned categories. Because that’s what the hyphenation is about. It’s about how one can motivate the other, how you take the best from each, how you incorporate the privilege of perspective into your life, how past and present becomes your future.
D. once talked about the benefits of shared culture, and I saw that in spending a little time with him here, when I felt consciously that the sense of being in between cultures is a culture in itself. One that shouldn’t be separated, because how sad for old things to be lost in a shuffle of migration and opportunity, and how sad for new things to be overlooked by comparison to something else. Culture is such a rich and dynamic thing, and how lucky we are to experience more than one, and to have that combination to claim as ours.
D. also brought up the idea of randomness, that we could’ve easily been brought up in Vietnam if not for certain circumstances and luck and timing. I definitely feel that, especially being here and meeting people my age and comparing where their family was at the time mine left, or others who were born after the narrow window to leave closed. If in 1954 when the Communists uprooted the French, in the small sliver of time that people were allowed to choose communist North or democratic South, my parents hadn’t been able to migrate South, I might’ve been born in Hanoi. If in the years following the fall of Saigon in 1975 my family hadn’t escaped, before nearby countries stopped taking in refugees, I might’ve been born in Saigon. If they hadn’t been picked up by a German boat, sponsored to Germany and then America, I could’ve ended up in so many places. But the one thing that doesn’t change no matter time and place or situation in life, being born to my parents means being born Vietnamese. And if I had to choose only one reason out of the many I feel, it is for that that I love being Vietnamese.
Having many first-generation friends and America being America, in writing my mass emails from Southeast Asia last summer and this one, I got a lot of replies from people about how they related to the cultural aspects of my experiences. From people who felt connected, disconnected, somewhere in between, in relation to their family’s culture. I’m not sure when I started becoming consciously aware of my culture, but I do know that my family has done so well in keeping it a constant presence, whether or not I was aware. And for that I feel such incredible gratitude, it’s tangibly difficult for me to write it accurately. And I feel it’s so important, I so want to get it right.
When I visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon, I sat for a long time in the pews because I was tired from walking all the day in the heat. Mass wasn’t in service but there were a few women in the first row reciting prayers. It immediately brought me back to going to Vietnamese mass with my parents at home, as a kid. I hated going. I hated that it was in the middle of the day, that I had to dress up, that I couldn’t fully understand the sermons, that in the summer it was stifling. But there was one thing I didn’t hate, one thing that with age I actually grew to love, and that was the recitation of prayers in Vietnamese. In English we just say them. In Vietnamese, I wouldn’t say there’s a real melody to the prayers, but the prayers are melodic. There are certain tones that made me enjoy memorizing and reciting them too, purely for the sound and experience, because I’m not religious and not really spiritual either. When I heard the women saying them in Vietnam, they sounded exactly like back home in California, and I found myself saying them too. And I was struck by how this thing, these words and these tones, was carried intact from across the world.
Lately I’ve felt, with a sense of urgency, a need to preserve things about my parents and their history that might fade when they’re gone. To keep through time what they so bravely, carefully transported through place. I want to make my mom’s food, to teach my kids Vietnamese (and have them learn the great amount I don’t know, if they’re not too resistant). And most, to honor all my parents went through to bring me here, by remembering and continuing what they left behind. Because it’s their values from there that made it possible for me to cultivate ones from here. I can feel the question of rationale arising: why does it really matter to remember where you’re from? I don’t have an all-encompassing response, because all my metaphors are too-neat answers. But I think that if one life lived is what provides meaning, and it’s this continuum that makes a single life possible, then there must be some syllogism there.
In America, when people ask you what you are, they mean where your family’s from, because it’s (usually, ideally) accepted that you’re American. In Vietnam, even though my family is Vietnamese, they ask me what I am. They see you by the country you live in, and you’re not considered Vietnamese. And it’s true, because I’m not fully or even mostly Vietnamese. But I’m not just American either. Too often people find themselves choosing between one culture and another, when one of the best things about America is that you can have both (or several). I really dislike the misconceptions of being whitewashed because you’re integrated into American society, or of being super Asian because you have a lot of Asian friends. Because in polarizing things this way, you can forget that you should (or so I personally think) remain connected to both, and can be, despite falling into one of those aforementioned categories. Because that’s what the hyphenation is about. It’s about how one can motivate the other, how you take the best from each, how you incorporate the privilege of perspective into your life, how past and present becomes your future.
D. once talked about the benefits of shared culture, and I saw that in spending a little time with him here, when I felt consciously that the sense of being in between cultures is a culture in itself. One that shouldn’t be separated, because how sad for old things to be lost in a shuffle of migration and opportunity, and how sad for new things to be overlooked by comparison to something else. Culture is such a rich and dynamic thing, and how lucky we are to experience more than one, and to have that combination to claim as ours.
D. also brought up the idea of randomness, that we could’ve easily been brought up in Vietnam if not for certain circumstances and luck and timing. I definitely feel that, especially being here and meeting people my age and comparing where their family was at the time mine left, or others who were born after the narrow window to leave closed. If in 1954 when the Communists uprooted the French, in the small sliver of time that people were allowed to choose communist North or democratic South, my parents hadn’t been able to migrate South, I might’ve been born in Hanoi. If in the years following the fall of Saigon in 1975 my family hadn’t escaped, before nearby countries stopped taking in refugees, I might’ve been born in Saigon. If they hadn’t been picked up by a German boat, sponsored to Germany and then America, I could’ve ended up in so many places. But the one thing that doesn’t change no matter time and place or situation in life, being born to my parents means being born Vietnamese. And if I had to choose only one reason out of the many I feel, it is for that that I love being Vietnamese.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
first day
To get to my uncle’s house you have to walk through a narrow winding road not open to cars. To get here I traveled twenty hours, thirteen of which were on an on the whole unpleasant plane flight from San Francisco to Taipei, and if I had to leave today it would have been worth it.
My cousin (my mom’s brother’s first child of two) brought his little girl (seven years old) to the airport to meet me, and it was wonderful to see them. I’d met my cousin for the first time back in high school when he visited California, before he was married, and he looks the same. I remember my brother told me that he’d taken my cousin to Universal Studios and when he saw King Kong during one of those tram car rides, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed, WOW. Now I feel like him and every thing I see is King Kong.
My uncle (my mom’s eldest brother) looks older than I imagined he would. He’s in his late seventies, but still I imagined him to be sturdy, like my grandparents on my dad’s side. Which makes no sense since they’re not related, but that’s what I thought. Comparing my parents and relatives at home to others here, I see how living here versus America does make a difference in how you age. My uncle is frail, with my mom’s nose and warm eyes with his eyelids folded towards the middle so they look like they slant. He has trouble sleeping, like my mom too. My cousin-in-law is super friendly and sweet, though her Vietnamese has a different accent and can be hard to follow. Their daughter is adorable, already a quietly strong person who refuses to admit she’s motion sick or complain about it. My other cousin (my mom’s brother’s second child of two) has a daughter too, six years old. The two of them make me so glad that I could visit while they’re still young. Even though they keep only slight memories of you (as I assume, from what I remember of visits from people when I was a kid), it’s nice to know that you met during that time in your life, because it passes so quickly. Like how I met my half-German cousins when they were a few years old and now they’re teenagers and it’ll never be the same when I see them again.
I’ve always been so close to my immediate family that for a long time I hadn’t given much thought to my extended family, also because they are really extended, all over the world. Somewhere along the line that changed. A lot of my drive to come here, and what’s already been affirmed in small and substantive ways, is that roots really are roots.
Living in this home is like a friendly version of the Simple Life. Things are less comfortable, but not un-so. There’s no air-conditioning, but several fans. It is as hot and humid as my parents promised (90 degrees with 75% humidity), but surprisingly I don’t find it that bad. I like humidity. My parents were worried about how I’d survive without AC, but if it stays like this the fans are more than adequate. As long as I can shower. As far as that goes, the hot water runs out, but there is hot water. There’s no shower head, just a teeny stream of water so you have to squat and actively place water where you need it. This sounds un-ideal but somehow felt as nice as what we have in America, I think because I was more aware of being dirty and hence more aware of getting clean. The bathrooms are bit gritty but the linoleum is shiny and cool to the touch. We budget on electricity but there it is and the biggest surprise, my cousin wired me to the internet, old-school. Can’t use the phone while on it, but it’s there. All in all, nothing that requires more than once to get used to. I am grateful to our Southeast Asia trip last year, because most things feel nice in comparison to having a mouse crawl up your arm in the middle of the night, trekking outside in pitch dark to use the restroom, and having electricity go out on you at an unknown time of day. And the Cambodian bus ride from hell nearly desensitized me to insistent honking, which is also the norm here.
Also, today I had mangosteen and lychee and dragon fruit. It is good to be here.
My cousin (my mom’s brother’s first child of two) brought his little girl (seven years old) to the airport to meet me, and it was wonderful to see them. I’d met my cousin for the first time back in high school when he visited California, before he was married, and he looks the same. I remember my brother told me that he’d taken my cousin to Universal Studios and when he saw King Kong during one of those tram car rides, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed, WOW. Now I feel like him and every thing I see is King Kong.
My uncle (my mom’s eldest brother) looks older than I imagined he would. He’s in his late seventies, but still I imagined him to be sturdy, like my grandparents on my dad’s side. Which makes no sense since they’re not related, but that’s what I thought. Comparing my parents and relatives at home to others here, I see how living here versus America does make a difference in how you age. My uncle is frail, with my mom’s nose and warm eyes with his eyelids folded towards the middle so they look like they slant. He has trouble sleeping, like my mom too. My cousin-in-law is super friendly and sweet, though her Vietnamese has a different accent and can be hard to follow. Their daughter is adorable, already a quietly strong person who refuses to admit she’s motion sick or complain about it. My other cousin (my mom’s brother’s second child of two) has a daughter too, six years old. The two of them make me so glad that I could visit while they’re still young. Even though they keep only slight memories of you (as I assume, from what I remember of visits from people when I was a kid), it’s nice to know that you met during that time in your life, because it passes so quickly. Like how I met my half-German cousins when they were a few years old and now they’re teenagers and it’ll never be the same when I see them again.
I’ve always been so close to my immediate family that for a long time I hadn’t given much thought to my extended family, also because they are really extended, all over the world. Somewhere along the line that changed. A lot of my drive to come here, and what’s already been affirmed in small and substantive ways, is that roots really are roots.
Living in this home is like a friendly version of the Simple Life. Things are less comfortable, but not un-so. There’s no air-conditioning, but several fans. It is as hot and humid as my parents promised (90 degrees with 75% humidity), but surprisingly I don’t find it that bad. I like humidity. My parents were worried about how I’d survive without AC, but if it stays like this the fans are more than adequate. As long as I can shower. As far as that goes, the hot water runs out, but there is hot water. There’s no shower head, just a teeny stream of water so you have to squat and actively place water where you need it. This sounds un-ideal but somehow felt as nice as what we have in America, I think because I was more aware of being dirty and hence more aware of getting clean. The bathrooms are bit gritty but the linoleum is shiny and cool to the touch. We budget on electricity but there it is and the biggest surprise, my cousin wired me to the internet, old-school. Can’t use the phone while on it, but it’s there. All in all, nothing that requires more than once to get used to. I am grateful to our Southeast Asia trip last year, because most things feel nice in comparison to having a mouse crawl up your arm in the middle of the night, trekking outside in pitch dark to use the restroom, and having electricity go out on you at an unknown time of day. And the Cambodian bus ride from hell nearly desensitized me to insistent honking, which is also the norm here.
Also, today I had mangosteen and lychee and dragon fruit. It is good to be here.
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