About Me
About Me
There's a story my parents like to tell about me .
I had just moved to the United States from Taiwan, and I was puzzled by the gibberish all my kindergarten friends were saying. Apparently, it wasn't gibberish, but English. One day, after several months of pondering, I announced to my family at the dinner table my answer to why I couldn't speak English. I reasoned--All my friends at school speak English. All my friends at school are either blonde or brunette. Therefore, all English speakers are blonde/brunette. I told my dad that I just had to sit tight until my hair turned blonde and then I'd understand everything my friends were saying.
Here is a picture of me pondering and waiting for my hair to turn blonde:
Remarkably, I'm a few years older, my hair is still black, yet all that gibberish makes sense to me now. I grew up in Sugar Land, Texas after a few stints in New Jersey and California. The motto of my town is "Sugar Land...there is no Equal." Get it? It gets me every time. Every time I was asked where I was from my friends would laugh at me and ask me if I was seriously from a place called Sugar Land. Then they'd ask me if I actually meant "Candy Land." Apparently, there's a board game named Candy Land, that I somehow neglected to play growing up. Maybe I was too busy playing doctor or something (I actually wanted to be an archaeologist, Indiana Jones style...) Anyway, to get the record straight, I don't know King Kandy, I never went out with Princess Frostine, and Mamma Ginger Tree and Gramma Nutt aren't related to me.
I did my undergrad at Harvard, where I majored in History and Science. This, again, is a subject of much confusion to my friends. They ask me if I did history or science or both. I loved my major--I took history/anthro classes, science classes, and history of science classes around a theme. The first two years my coursework revolved around the intersection of art and 19th century evolutionary biology (I was the world's expert on these glass models of marine invertebrates, but that may have been due to the fact that I was the only one to have ever studied them). My last two years focused more on medical anthropology and history of medicine in the developing world. I wrote my thesis on the role of Western and Chinese medicine in translating modernity and forming national identity in Taiwan.
At Harvard I was a coxswain on the crew team, and I had the dubious honor of being the only member of the Harvard Varsity Lights to not have passed the swim test. They were going to make me wear a life jacket, which would have made me the laughing stock of the EARC. Luckily, I never drowned each time I was tossed into the Charles so they kept me around. Here's me safely on the shores of the Charles with my sister Stacey (or the Chuck/Rio Carlos as I'd like to call it...)
So now I'm a second-year medical student at Stanford Med. I've loved every minute of it. Last Spring Break a group of my classmates brought Stanford Med to the open ocean:
Yes, that is me in my white coat sliding down and saving a drowning kid. Nevermind that it was staged for a little promo skit for admit weekend. What matters is that, hey, it's all for the kids.
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