Might Have Been, Could Have Been

I am currently reading Fresh-Air Fiend by Paul Theroux, one of my favorite non-fiction and travel writers. Fresh-Air Fiend is a collection of short stories Theroux has written between 1985 and 2000.

In one of the stories, Theroux recounts his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi in the 1960s. As I am reading it, I suddenly remember that I had toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps seven years ago. It was a year after I finished college; I was living in Washington, DC, and had a full-time job. Having just been rejected by all the medical schools I applied to around the country, I was asking myself, “What next?” At the time, the adventurous side of me and the conventional side of me were fighting a battle.

It might have been a poster I saw on the street, it might have been something I had in the back of my head all along, or it might have been just something I came across on the internet at the time, I decided to look into the Peace Corps as the next step. I even went to one of their information sessions, which, replete with tales from an enthusiastic volunteer who had just returned from Vladivostok, had the quality of an infomercial at 2 a.m. My interest was piqued nonetheless. I continued to gather information and looked online at discussion forums about the Peace Corps. So the adventurous side of me was gaining an upper hand.

The conventional side of me, not to be outdone, took me to look at PhD and masters programs at graduate schools. I contacted a few professors and flew to a couple of the school to check them out. What they were doing were interesting stuff: things like tissue engineering and research on exercise in microgravity; but none of them made me slap my forehead and say, “Ah-hah! That’s what I want to do!” I returned home feeling ambivalent about what I had seen. Then one day, I heard about a part-time masters program at Johns Hopkins University and decided to drive to their open house after work. And here, the conventional side of me caught up to the adventurous side of me, then passed it. I decided to start the part-time masters program in biomedical engineering at Hopkins.

And abruptly, Peace Corps fell to the wayside. The glossy brochures and the application packet sat in a pile, forgotten, and when I moved house, went to the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Not long after that, I’d even forgotten that I gave the Peace Corps serious consideration when I was in the crossroads of life in my early twenties. Looking back, I can see that of course the conventional side of me won – it had society and all the cultural weight behind it. The giant arrow painted on the road of life that says, “This way to happiness” – the non-stop conditioning since childhood by both the Chinese and American cultures – made it easy to follow it and assume it to be correct but difficult to see if there were any alternatives. I had gone back to following the giant arrow after veering ever so slightly down a side trail. This is not to say I regret going to grad school. To the contrary, I am glad I did. I am where I am today partly because I chose that path then.

After two years of grad school and full-time work, I asked myself again, “What next?” I could not find an answer. I had the inevitable burn-out at the time. It did not happen overnight. Rather, the feeling had been brewing steadily toward the end of the two years. Graduation was more like a valve that suddenly let out all the steam. I quit my job, sold or gave away most of my worldly possessions, packed my car, and drove back to California. The adventurous side of me had finally taken revenge. What followed was two years of wandering, on and off, in unfamiliar and remote parts of the world. It was one of those “finding oneself” kind of trip, as clichéd as it sounds. I lived out of a backpack and slept in countless nameless hostels and cheap hotels, I ate street food, I took the cheapest public transport I could find. Materially, it was the poorest I’d been, physically, it was the most uncomfortable I’d felt, but it was the period of time when I felt the most alive. Maybe it was the adventurous side of me saying, “See, you should’ve listen to me last time.”

Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I had listened to the adventurous side of me earlier and joined the Peace Corps instead. I would have learned another language, I would have been sent to some out-of-the-way community in some obscure country to teach or to help set up a community clinic or help in whatever project, I would have been the farthest away from physical comfort and what was familiar. And I would have loved it. That experienced would definitely have changed my life and my life’s trajectory, as it did Theroux’s. I could have settled down somewhere, I could have gone on to other professions, I could have become a constant nomad who incessantly roams the world for the next patch of pasture, I could have…

Instead, I ended up studying medicine in Australia. It was the result of a series of decision-making since high school without looking too far into the future. And it seems to have worked incredibly well for me. Now, the adventurous side of me and the conventional side of me are not fighting a battle, but are playing complementary roles to each other. My rumination on “what if…” is an exercise of imagination on the outcome of a different path I might have taken in life and a reflection of the fact that every choice I make today, no matter how minute it seems at the time, will have an effect on the options I will have in the future. I don’t think I would be any happier now had I chosen to join the Peace Corps seven years ago, nor am I any less happy now for having decided to go to grad school instead. I have absolutely no regrets on any of the life-changing decisions I have made. Dumb luck? Perhaps. But maybe a dash of a sense of adventure, a pinch of embracing the unknown, and a heap of travelers’ optimism all had something to do with it too.