New Blog

Hi everyone,

I’m sorry that I haven’t updated in a long time. But I’ve decided to start up a new blog for med school so feel free to check it out here: http://elusions.wordpress.com/

Thanks!

Eric

Making something ordinary extraordinary

I’ve been adjusting to life back in the US but it’s been hectic with interviews and traveling. I was in four different cities last week and this week I have four more interviews. But it’s all good because I get a chance to meet up with people and have a lot of fun hanging out. That’s also one reason I haven’t been posting here much but I hope to post my reflections on med school interviews after I’m done with them next week.

For now, I have some pictures!

Elaine and I went to this restaurant called Park Avenue Winter. The restaurant changes according to the season, so for each season (Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn), they completely revamp their menu and decorations. We were here over the summer and were determined to hit up all of the seasons. So far 2 for 4!

Their hot apple cider...with rum! We took more pictures of the food but they didn't come out so well. But basically the food here is AMAZING. Elaine got the lamb and I got the miso-glazed lobster. We also had really tender mini scallops and a unique calamari carrot salad for appetizers. Highly recommend this place for a nice evening out!

Nine months sure fly by fast!

Winter has finally struck as a flurry of snow coated the Northeast this past weekend. Time to bundle up!

-Eric

“What’s the point of living if you can’t feel alive”

A friend of mine has recently been struggling with finding the right balance between passion and responsibility, in other words getting the most out of life. It’s a very fundamental question that I’m sure all of us struggle with or will struggle with at some point in our lives. I don’t believe that there’s a singular answer out there. I don’t think anyone can answer this for you. It’s something you yourself will need to grapple with. These thoughts simply represent my own struggles with these issues.

What kind of life do you want to live?

When you look back on your life say 10, 20 years from now, what do you want to see?

What’s the point of living if you can’t feel alive?

This last quote can be found in one of the James Bond movies. Now I’m not claiming to be James Bond or anything…

…but I do find the quote appealing.

Someone once posed to me this question: would you rather live a mediocre but long life or would you rather live an interesting but short life. The Greek hero Achilles himself had to choose between a long life without glory or a short life with eternal glory. If I had to choose, I would rather live an interesting AND long life WITH eternal glory. It’s not like the things that I have done or aspire to do will cut into my lifespan. Well, ok maybe except eating 10 hot dogs, drinking 16 glasses of wine, and going skydiving. But at least I didn’t do it all at once right. And if I did I would probably have a lot of glory right now.

My life philosophy isn’t just some fantasy or excuse to be reckless and go wild. It has been defined and finely tuned by my experiences and people I have encountered so far. I’m not going to bore you with my deep, philosophical ruminations (maybe some other day), but I do want to recount some wise words that really impacted me from a good mentor of mine, Dr. Keh-Ming Lin, a distinguished scholar in the field of mental health and substance abuse. I conducted substance abuse research last summer in Taiwan for my senior thesis and had an opportunity to interview Dr. Lin. I asked him what he thought it means to be recovered from substance abuse and this is what he said:

“Nobody knows the meaning of life, so I’m not here to judge anybody. My bias is for your whole life to be worthwhile. You have to do things that are interesting; you have to do things that are useful. Who’s to judge them. Graham Greene abused heroin all his life. Is his life less meaningful? I think his life is more meaningful than most people’s. So if they use drugs but do interesting things or if they contribute to society, then I think they’re better than us. The addicts who still do that are better than us.”

That summer of doing fieldwork, interviewing people, and living with drug addicts opened my eyes to this world and gave me good perspective on how I should be living my life. Of course I’m not saying that I’m going to use drugs now or that I encourage you to use drugs. For the first time ever, I felt free to take the reins. I will pursue a life that is interesting, useful and worthwhile. I will go big or go home.

And what about the glory?

Well, I’ll just leave that for God.

In other news, Happy Thanksgiving! Elaine was here this past week in Plano with me and we had a blast, seeing family and friends, eating, cooking, Black Friday shopping, playing flag football, reminiscing about good ‘ol Plano.

-Eric

Last Days in Taiwan

Hello from Dallas!

Just got in last night and will be heading out to NY on Sunday! It’s kind of weird being back in the US again. First, it takes me a little bit longer to speaking coherent English sentences. Second, my eyes are still getting used to the large number of overweight people. And third, I had breakfast at Chik-Fil-A this morning and it was good, but it can’t beat a delicious combo of dou jiang (soymilk) and dan bing (egg pancakes).

I want to post some pictures from my last few days in Taiwan. As some of you may know, I like to live by the motto “Go Big or Go Home.” Well, that’s exactly what happened this past week. I went big and now I’m finally home.

It was my last weekend in Taiwan and I wanted to make it a good one. Friday night I went out to dinner with my coworkers at the all you can eat mala hotpot places, one of my favorite places in Taipei, well, because it’s all you can eat! Afterwards we wanted to watch 2012 but because it was the first day that it was showing, the earliest time we could get was 1:10am. Whatever, it’s my last weekend, so I persuaded my coworkers to get the tickets. The movie ended around 4:00am, I went to bed by 4:30am, and then I woke up at 6:30am to go mountain climbing for the next >7 hours.

 

I went mountain climbing with Dr. Liao and his wife Yiching. Both of them have been very good to me during my stay in Taiwan. We went to this place called "Cao Ling Gu Dao" near Yilan which is around Northeast Taiwan.

It was pretty cloudy the entire day but at least it didn't rain. It rained the day before so the ground was still kind of wet. On the last downhill I was going too fast and slipped and fell on my butt.

In the beginning of the climb, we ran into like a mini-festival featuring a bunch of games. There was one where we played rock, paper, scizzors and if you lost they got to draw mustaches on your face. Both Dr. Liao and I lost unfortunately. There was another game where you had to beat them at dice rolling. Although we won, they decided to tattoo these blue dragons onto our cheeks anyways so for the rest of the day and our trip back to Taipei we had these tattoos on our face.

After passing thru the mini-festival, that's when the real hike started. We climbed up and down these mountain peaks, going along the path at the very top of the mountain range.

The mountain range was on the Eastern coast of Taiwan so there was a beautiful view of the ocean. A mountain and an ocean. How perfect can it get.

There we are really tiny in the middle. Yiching liked to stay behind and take pictures, so all of these pictures are hers.

At the highest peak, though there were still many hours left to do. We climbed a total of around 7 hours that day. It wasn't very steep but it was quite long...and this was after only getting 2 hours of sleep the night before.

Wild cattle. On the way down we passed by these people who wanted us to help them carry bags of sand down the mountain. Definitely good weight training. When we got down the mountain, we were so ecstatic but then realized that we needed to walk for another 40 minutes to get to the train station. Dr. Liao was not pleased and immediately got a can of beer. haha.

When I got back to Taipei, I immediately took a quick shower and headed out to watch “A Christmas Carol” with my cousin Andy because it was his birthday and I had promised to take him to the movies. When the day was all said and done, it was already past 1am and I was ready to pass out.

The very next day my parents and I had lunch with Dr. Liao, Yiching and their two daughters. Their two daughters ended up performing this Korean-pop dance called Sorry Sorry. Very impressive!

I spent the last couple of days also meeting up with a bunch of people, namely my relatives such as my cousin Vivien and Sabrina and my uncle and aunt. I was also sure to hit up some of my favorite places, such as Shilin Nightmarket, and went cycling one last time, though it was raining, windy and cold.

Last day of work! It was also one of my coworkers birthday so we got a cake.

Last night in Taipei, here with my coworkers Dr. Liao, Yiching and Yuzhu. We really wanted to get Dr. Liao drunk that night and I think we succeeded for the most part. Each one of us took turn toasting to him and we also kept ordering more beer for him. Pretty cruel but it was all fun and good.

I’ve really enjoyed working at the Bali Psychiatric Center and Xindian Drug Detention Treatment Center these past couple of months. I’ve learned a lot about mental health and addiction, talked with interesting patients, and met a lot of cool people like my coworkers. Thank you to everyone who made my time in Taiwan awesome!

I’m not sure yet what I’ll be doing next year from January until the summer, but at least for now other than being in Dallas for Thanksgiving I’ll be in New York for all of December and some of January. Med school interviews are starting up next Monday; wish me luck!

-Eric

 

Day 100

It’s been exactly 100 days since I’ve left the US. Now I find myself just a few hours away from leaving the place where I’ve called home for the past 100 days.

It’s a bittersweet feeling but at the same time I’m excited to return back to the US. It’ll be fun reuniting with familiar faces and of course seeing the girlfriend =)

More posts on the past few days of my stay in Taiwan when I get back to Dallas. For now, goodbye!

I will miss these kids.

I lost to my girlfriend this week in fantasy football. FML.

Souped-up

No this was not my Halloween costume.

Leaving Taiwan in T-minus 11 days.

-Eric

Chengdu: Mala, Panda and Buddhas Oh My!

It’s been awhile huh. I’ve been lazy this past week so I haven’t been able to post pictures from my trip to Chengdu. For those of you who don’t know, Chengdu is located in the Sichuan Province of China. It’s one of the most important economic centers in China and is also a very rapidly developing and bustling city. Now get ready for a flood of pictures!

We were in Chengdu for 5 days. I was there with my parents, my cousins, and my uncle and aunt. My uncle is pretty baller. He owns a large business in Chengdu and apparently knows all the important CEOs and whatnot, so he was our tour guide for the week and hooked us up with some nice restaurants and places to go. This is our private mini tour bus.

As we were walking down the street, we see these random people sitting to the side who get paid to dig out your ear wax. They have some pretty long and sharp scoopers and tweezers. They also use these metal sticks to create vibrations in your ear. Watching the doctor take out my ear wax, my mom remarked that I will finally be able to listen to her.

Chengdu is a very bustling place full of young people. You can definitely sense a confluence of Eastern and Western traditions and cultures.

Like this.

Ah yes. A Sichuan classic. Mala hotpot!

Look at all those delicious pieces of red hot chili. Yes it was spicy and yes it was really delicious. I normally don't eat spicy foods but this was the exception.

Ying Yang Mala Hotpot. I would eat some of the mala stuff and then cool down with food from the white soup.

The calm after the storm.

Of course I would include pictures of food here. This one is "dong puo rou" or fatty pork meat in some special sauce. It was so tender, juicy and melt-in-you-mouth delicious!

That's duck in some hefty duck sauce. Good stuff as well.

We visited a bunch of Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors. These guys are pretty baller. By looking at you, feeling your "mai" (three fingers on your wrist), and looking at your tongue, they can immediately rattle off your health problems. Usually I'm pretty skeptical but the doctors we visited were surprisingly accurate. I've always had an interest in Chinese medicine and wonder if it'll be pretty cool to know both Western and Chinese medicine.

Everyone in awe of this thing called Energy Medicine. Professor Li from Tainan is a big proponent of using computer technology to detect the "waves" or "energy" or "qi" in your body, concepts that equate with Traditional Chinese Medicine. He argues that everything and everyone are made of waves and emit certain frequencies. Thru this sytem and a pair of headphones, the computer is able to detect the frequency of various parts of your brain and its interactions with the different organs in your body. In less than 10 minutes, he is able to map out your entire body and tell you what kind of health problems you may have or potentially have. This kind of system is heavily evidence-based because it takes thousands of samples in order to create a standard, healthy person's data and compares that to your data as read thru the headphones and the computer. I was highly skeptical of such a machine but it turned out to be quite accurate in terms of my health problems. Such a machine, argues Professor Li, can help pinpoint some of the more potentially troublesome areas of your body and allow you to get those areas checked out by a doctor.

Mushrooms used for Traditional Chinese Medicine. My parents decided to sneak some back home. Not sure if that was such a good idea.

At a buddhist temple that apparently holds some of the remains of Buddha. My dad is sitting where Jiang Zhemin apparently sat awhile back ago.

We went to the Panda zoo!

The most action I saw from a panda that day...

Yes that is a real live Red Panda I'm holding. Exciting you think? Wait until you see...

Harro! Wow I got pretty close to this one huh.

Oh wait what's going on here. I can assure you, that is indeed a real panda, opening its real mouth, holding a slice of a real apple. While we were walking around the place, I catch a glimpse thru the doors of the nursery of someone taking pictures with a panda. Curious and excited I walked over and asked what this was all about because there was no sign or anything. For 1000 RMB, quite a heft price, they allowed you to touch and take a picture with a panda. This one's name is Ying Ying and she is 1 year-old.

In the beginning my cousins refused to take pictures with the panda because they thought the price was too high. But then my uncle called and persuaded them to do it because he argued that the price is only going to get higher (it was only 200 RMB two years ago) and that maybe in the future no one will be able to touch pandas any longer. Ying Ying here was a good sport and behaved very well as she enjoyed munching on her apple dipped in honey.

Family portrait! haha.

The entrance to E Mei Shan. To get to the top you have to take a gondola. You walk up some stairs, which doesn't take very long, and then wait for a long time in "line." Towards the end it just becomes a large mob of people pushing and shoving to get thru the doors and into the gondola, which promptly made me go "Oh China." Of course I had a lot of fun with this. While people were pushing, shoving and jumping on top of each other, I too would be yelling "do not push" and start throwing my body mass in all different directions. It gave me quite a bit of amusement.

Wild monkeys roaming around in E Mei Shan. These guys are pretty aggressive and very used to human presence. My cousin was telling me this story of how these monkeys would steal your cell phones and take them to a store owner in exchange for some corn. hmm now I wonder where this monkey got its peanuts from.

At the top of E Mei Shan. Huge statue of Buddha sitting on elephants.

One of the many temples at the top of E Mei Shan. Apparently when people built this hundreds of years ago they had to slowly take large slabs of stone up the mountain. Each day a person can make 3 trips, so 3 stones.

The fog finally lifted!

At the top of E Mei Shan. It has one of those views you can only see in those traditional Chinese paintings.

Yes these cliffs were named "self-sacrifice cliffs." They were quite steep.

Finally, Wang Lao Ji. Favorite drink in China...and I think you can only find it in China. I bought like 3 cans in the airport immediately after we landed.

Overall it was a fun vacation. I learned lots about Traditional Chinese Medicine, ate a lot of good food, and touched a panda!

-Eric

Yang

It was a coincidence that the two people I interviewed today both seemed to have really bad luck. I mean, when you get caught it usually sucks, but for these guys, one of them claims to have used heroin only twice in his life and the other claims to have not used heroin in the past 11 years. Unlucky? Or is there just something wrong with the system?

Today I’ll only talk about the first guy I interviewed. Yang is a 55 year-old man with graying hair who has problems with hearing and seeing. In fact he dropped out of school when he was in 2nd grade of elementary school because his family was too poor to provide him and his siblings with an education. Unlike many kids who don’t go to school, Yang never ran around on the streets, made bad friends, and turned to drugs. He stayed home with his parents and helped them make money. Yang never married and has no children of his own, and he has a hard time finding jobs because he cannot read or write. In 1975 Yang started to suffer from a problem in his right leg. Doctors diagnosed it as a broken bone in his upper right femur but Yang didn’t have enough money for surgery, especially since back then Taiwan’s universal health care insurance didn’t exist yet. Because he had a hard time walking and couldn’t stand for very long, Yang found it very difficult to find a job. It wasn’t until 1995 when he finally had surgery. Unfortunately the surgery wasn’t very successful and his leg started to hurt again. It was then when his friend recommended him to use heroin which would numb the pain. Yang agreed and injected a pinch of heroin so that his leg could feel better. But he was immediately caught by the police and sent to prison for four years. Fast forward to 2006. Yang decided to undergo another surgery on his right leg and again the surgery wasn’t very successful. When the pain became unbearable in 2008, Yang was again offered heroin from his friend to numb the pain in his leg and again he injected a pinch of heroin. This time he wasn’t caught. But shortly thereafter Yang was walking back home at night and a cop pulled him over and discovered that Yang had a bag of heroin on him. Yang now finds himself in prison again, having just used small quantities of heroin twice in his life in order to numb the pain in his leg. Why couldn’t he just get medication from doctors to numb the pain in his leg? Perhaps it was because he hasn’t had good experiences with the medical system. Perhaps it was because he trusted his friend. Perhaps it was because heroin was more effective. On top of all of this Yang has been suffering from depression the past 4 years due to a combination of feeling lonely living by himself at home and of feeling frustrated about life, that he has no work, no steady salary, and no family. Yang is leaving prison in a few days and looks forward to living a peaceful life. I asked him what the first thing he’s going to do when he gets out. Yang replied that he needs to go find a house so that he can have a place to live. I asked him if the prison would help him find one. And he staunchly replied “no, that’s impossible.”

As he limped out of the interview room, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for this guy. He was neither addicted to drugs nor did he abuse them. For Yang heroin was medicine. In fact for many people a century ago, heroin was indeed medicine. Opium addiction in the early 1900s was treated by heroin. Nowadays heroin addiction is treated by a new kind of popular medicine known as methadone, a substance many claim to be just as addictive, if not more so, than heroin.

-Eric

PS – I will be in China for the next several days and I’m pretty sure China blocks WordPress. So I’ll see you guys all next week. Thanks for reading!

Rain or Shine

Went mountain climbing again this morning on Seven Star Mountain (七星山) and unlike last week the weather was terrible. Another typhoon is here and although it’s not raining too hard in the city, in the mountains the rain was coming at us at a horizontal angle.

I had ditched my umbrella at home and brought a poncho but about 10 minutes into the climb I decide to take the poncho off because it was making me feel suffocated and wasn’t really working anyways because I was still getting wet. The climb itself wasn’t so bad because we were sheltered by the trees but once we got near the top that’s when we were viciously attacked by mother nature. We were getting blown off the tracks and the rain was coming at us so hard and so fast that they felt like thousands of needles hitting against our face. Luckily I weigh a lot. If I were say 50 pounds lighter I would’ve been even more mercilessly thrashed around by the wind.

Needless to say I don’t think I could’ve gotten any more wet. There were only a handful of folks who were up in the mountains today, but none were so brave (or crazy) as to not wear a poncho or use an umbrella. Each person we passed started to laugh at us, saying things like “wow it must be great to be young” or “jeez aren’t you cold” or “jeez aren’t you wet,” to which I replied, “nahh I feel pretty dry right now.”

There was this one part towards the end when we were going up some stairs and literally the path suddenly turned into a waterfall. Water was rushing down the stairs and the steps were all submerged under water so it felt like we were walking up a waterfall as water engulfed our legs on both sides. But in the end we had our way with mother nature, often tempting her as we went along with comments like “this is weaksauce” or “is this the best you got” or “thank you for the wind and rain today. It feels great.”

The ride down however was not so fun. We were soaked and cold. My fingers and my toes were numb. Plus it wasn’t even raining when we got back down to the city so we must’ve looked pretty weird walking around completely wet. But in the end we treated ourselves to some all-you-can-eat hotpot and afterwards a nice long shower. It’s all good.

-Eric