personal statement

7/2/10

2:45 PM

It occurred to me that most of my friends reading this have no idea why I’m in China in the first place, or what I’m doing here. I’m here in Beijing with the PKU-UCLA Joint Research Institute summer exchange program, which is providing me with a stipend to do research at Peking University. I chose to work with Professor Shăoqing Cài; he is the director of traditional medicine drug investigation at PKU Medical School and Health Sciences. His research involves the analysis of crude traditional Chinese medicines; e.g. the isolation and identification of component molecules, purification and assaying for bioactivity in computer, rat, and human systems, and quality control of traditional medicine administration. My project has more to do with the isolation and identification aspects; I am working with Zang on an herb called Ephedra sinica.

The program has 5 undergraduates from UCLA in diverse fields, and 4 graduate students, all coincidentally CS majors. We are given language instruction starting next week, and are housed together in foreign student dorms.

I am here for several reasons, but the largest reason is that I wanted to go to China and learn Mandarin. I’ve never been to Asia before this trip, and I’m seriously considering MD-PhD programs, meaning I wouldn’t be able to travel for at least 7-8 years. I’m half Taiwanese, and speak some Cantonese and less Mandarin, and it’s one of my personal dreams to be fluent in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. I’m working in a more bio/pharm lab here because I wanted to see more biochemical fields to complement my current organometallic research at UCLA; I am thinking I would like to eventually study bioinorganic chemistry.

Not very many things could have pried me away from my research at Paula’s lab this summer—it’s possible to do a level of work over the summer that is hard to do during the school year, which is important to me—but this project was a culmination of a lot of my dreams. I don’t consider myself the kind of person to keep a diary, but I am writing this blog because I don’t want to ever forget my experiences here.

After the 10 weeks of this program, I’m fulfilling another personal dream by visiting Guangdong and Hong Kong with my father, brother, and aunt. My father was born there and fled to Hawaii with his sister when he was nine; my half-aunt stayed in Hong Kong for many years before moving to the US and becoming an American citizen a number of years ago and has been checking in on me for years.

So the name of this blog has to do with what it feels like to return to a place that has so thoroughly informed who I am without my having ever been there, or in many cases, without my having ever experienced anything like it before. In a way, this blog is about chasing an abstract, home and origin, only to find that much of my home and origin is the product of my hometown, San Jose. Part of my experience here so far has been realizing how fundamentally American I am, even as I identify so strongly with being a 1^st generation child of immigrants.

To close, I’ll comment only that I’m still sitting in seminar, in hour two, and that this very important speaker has successfully put the heads of three internationally recognized labs to sleep. The pertinent piece of new vocabulary describing this situation is the versatile, “làng dé xu míng,” (famous but no talent); this rather global term applies equally effectively to Katy Perry.