The Long Way Home

I am packing, not for going home, but for my cycling trip in New Zealand on my way back to Australia. Going home is the easy part, packing-wise. I am sure I have some clothes left at home to wear, but packing for the cycling trip requires a lot of planning, much more than my cycling trip to Vietnam last year.

Packing for a cycling trip to Vietnam was so easy, I did it in half an hour. In Vietnam, food was good, cheap, and everywhere; cheap accommodation was also found everywhere. So it was like a catered trip. New Zealand, on the other hand, is much more sparsely populated and things are not cheap. So I will have to bring all of my camping gear, making the packing a bit more complicated. So I take out my packing list for a cycling trip and my packing list for a camping trip, get a box from a bike shop, and get to work.

And, with my bike taken apart and put into the box and everything else in a duffel bag, I am ready to go.

Auckland from the air

My flights from Brisbane to L.A. via Auckland are uneventful. After clearing immigration at LAX, I stroll over to baggage claim. My duffel comes tumbling down the carousel, but my bike is nowhere to be seen. I stand and wait by the odd-size baggage area. As the baggage area clears of people from the flight, I know something is not right. A brief chat with the baggage guy confirms my suspicion: they have lost my bike. Well, at least they have lost it now, and hopefully not when I am in New Zealand and needing my bike a month from now. I fill out a form and walk out of the airport terminal unencumbered.

Next, at the train station, I find out that train tickets to Fresno are all sold out for the day. Oh, right, it is the Sunday after Thanksgiving - everyone is traveling. It did not occur to me to book my train ticket ahead of time; I didn't think that many people actually travel by train in the US. Apparently I was wrong. So I crash the night at my cousin's place.

On Monday morning, with train tickets in hand, I board the bus for Bakersfield. I have to travel by bus over the mountains north of L.A. into the Central Valley of California, then pick up the train in Bakersfield where the train line starts.

Twenty miles out of Bakersfield, the train comes to a halt. After a while, the speakers crackle to life. The conductor announce that a freight train in front of us had hit a truck at a crossing, someone was killed, so we have to go back to Bakersfield. In Bakersfield, the bus takes us around the site of the accident to Wasco, where we board another train. Six-and-half hours after leaving L.A., I finally get to Hanford train station, where my mom, my sister, and my little nephew have been waiting.

I am finally home! But my bike is still lost, sitting somewhere in Brisbane, Auckland, or LAX.

Black Friday Frenzy

It is three o'clock in the morning, snow is falling, covering everything in sight in a light blanket of ghostly white powder. The faint moonlight reflects off the snow, casting eerie shadows on the long line of people waiting outside the store. The line of people have been there for a while now. Some are covered in heavy blankets, asleep but mindful of their surroundings lest someone cuts in line, some are huddling together, some are stomping their feet to wake up their frozen toes, some are sipping on cups of fast cooling coffee. Just one more hour before the store opens, inside is what these people have been waiting for, something so essential that people would forgo their dinner the night before just so they can wait at the head of the line. As the clock strikes four, the doors to the store clank open. The people surge forward, eagerly lurch inside, and elbow their way through before everything is sold out.

This may sound like people in the Soviet Union waiting in line for bread, but it is actually how I imagine the scenes of people waiting in line for the Black Friday sale in the United States.

I was reading the news online and came across articles describing the frenzy of shopping the day after Thanksgiving. I couldn't help but notice the parallel between the bread lines of the Soviet Union and the "electronics lines" of the United States. In both cases, line are created when demand outstrips supply. The main difference is our "electronics lines" are formed voluntarily. The demand is not for basic necessities of life, but perceived need created by advertising and our way of life. The lengths people would go to "save" money are astonishing: missing Thanksgiving dinner, braving the cold, risking bodily harm, and generally enduring self-inflicted misery. Is buying something you don't need for half off really saving money?

Later, Hervey Bay

I didn't think I have that much stuff. But after I put everything in boxes, backpacks, and bags, the spread in the living room starts to get me worried. I may not be able to fit everything into my little car. A second trip - an extra eight hours - is looking depressingly likely.

Not one to be discouraged, I fold down the backseat and start putting boxes into the car. One after another, bit by bit, every inch of room gets filled by my stuff. At the end, as if defying the laws of physics, all of my crap is crammed into the car. I can even see out of the left rear-view mirror!

So with the car packed to capacity, I drive out of the Hervey Bay Maryborough Road for the last time.

Whoa, We’re Halfway There!

Woohoo! Exams are over, and I am a free man for the next two months. How I need the break, especially after such brutal exams yesterday.

The exams were in Bundaberg, a little over an hour away from Hervey Bay. They were horrible. I must have looked terrified while I was sitting in the lobby of the hospital waiting to get called in. Nurses, wardies, and everyone else who walked past me stopped to tell me, “It’s not that bad.” After an excruciatingly long wait, I was finally given my patient. Then the rest happened so fast, I hardly noticed that time just flew by. At the end, the examiner said cryptically, “I’m not allowed to give you feedback at this point. But enjoy your break and I’ll see you next year.” Yeah, hopefully not in the same scenario.

I spent the rest of the day stewing over little details that went wrong in the exams and every answer that I got wrong or needed prompting for and the awkward silences when I didn’t know what to say, until the evening when I got together with a few of the doctors from the medical team and had mulled wine. Ah, alcohol, I am so glad we are friends again.

Today’s plan: pack up everything I own into my car.

Tomorrow: drive to Brisbane.

Sunday: fly out to California.

Next Wednesday: off to Washington, DC.

And that’s just the plans for the next seven days.

It’ll be a good summer break.

Waiting for the Execution

Tomorrow I will be taking the exams for medicine rotation, and I am feeling restless, unable to concentrate, and in complete sympathetic overdrive. Studying? So over it. I have been staring at the pages of my books and nothing seemed to have gotten through. This afternoon, feeling like I was getting nowhere with studying, I went to the pool for a swim. After jumping into the pool, I felt like my arms were made of putty and just wouldn’t cooperate to allow me a good swim. After splashing around in the lane for a half hour, moving like I’d just learned to swim, I gave up and walked back home.

I don’t know why I am feeling so nervous. You’d think after having taken so many exams in my life, it wouldn’t be a big deal anymore. Maybe it’s because the whole exam is live, as opposed to written like almost all of the other exams I’d taken before. Maybe it’s because my grade for the whole rotation will be from the exam tomorrow. Or maybe it’s actually excitement from knowing that I am one day away from a two-month holiday.

I take my pulse. Forty-eight per minute – pretty normal for me. Maybe I am not that nervous after all. But my palms are sweaty and have been for the last three days. I feel like I am waiting for my execution tomorrow, watching the clock tick away, dreading the inevitability of it but, at the same time, looking forward to when it’s over.

All right, no more studying. I am going to watch some video clips on Youtube and hopefully I will get tired at some point.

It's Only A Five-Step Job

I see this sign everyday. It is posted in one of the staff toilets on the medical ward at the hospital where I am doing my medicine rotation.

It only takes five-steps!? And with illustrated instructions!! To change a roll of toilet paper? I wonder how many toilet-paper-roll-changing mishaps it took for someone to take the time to make and post these instructions. But it gets better. Someone else must have thought, “Five steps? That’s too complicated. I’ll simplify things a bit,” and wrote down the “Alternative Directions” next to the printed instructions.

Every time I look at it, I feel like I am reading a manual for defusing bombs. Okay, maybe not, but this is definitely the first time I’ve seen a toilet paper roll holder that needs an owner’s manual.

~~~~~~~~~~

Tonight’s dinner: herbed chicken risotto with green beans, and a salad.

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.