Fixing Broken Hearts, Meet My Mother

“Hearts aren’t meant to be drawn. They’re meant to be fixed.” My mother would scold me in Mandarin when I was six years old, as I drew hearts all over the medical textbook she gave me, as an act of rebellion.

To make up for it, I drew an extremely detailed picture of the heart, including atria, ventricles, and valves. I included the aorta and vena cava for fun. And all of the veins. And the arteries. And some capillaries, just to put a cherry on top.

“Good.” She replied, suppressing a smile at my childish act.

Good. Never great. Never with my mother, unless I became a surgeon just like her.

She was a famous cardiothoracic surgeon in Shanghai. In the news for performing open heart surgeries, she graduated top of her class in her medical school. She performed surgery after surgery, a workaholic to the very letter.

Work was her strength. It was also her weakness.

Determined to become a doctor in the US after immigrating, she neglected to take care of me. The kids in my class noticed that my clothes were mismatched, all wrong, my hair unbrushed, and my food were leftovers. They said,

“Her own mother doesn’t love her.”

My mother did love me. She showed it through acts, acts of service, and disciplinarian acts as well. She wanted me to succeed, to be a surgeon like her.

She made me dissect mice that were caught in the traps of the home we lived in. We were immigrants, we were poor, it was the late 1990s.

I told my classmates, and they wrinkled their nose and said,

“Did you eat them after, you poor thing?”

I laughed about it with my mom later. My mom didn’t, she was furious.

“They look down at us? How dare they? How DARE they?”

Against the resistance of socioeconomic limitations for immigrants, she persisted and gained entrance into Harvard Medical School.

Stronger than anyone I know. My mother. The overachiever, the perfectionist, the workaholic.

She wanted me to be like her. She imbibed work in me. She told me again and again what success meant.

She taught me how to peel an apple so perfectly that there was no trace of the fruit on the peel. She taught me how to slice through a mouse’s skin with a scalpel and open it up to reveal the still-beating heart inside.

“Open heart surgery on a mice, Mom? Nice.”

She smiled to herself as she accepted my compliment.

Discipline, she taught me. Control. Abnegation. Stamina. Endurance. Resilience. Grit.

The qualities of a surgeon.

She took me along with her to Boston, and there she excelled academically. I chilled and hanged out with the med students, while my mom studied alone in her cramped apartment, poring over pages and pages of giant medical textbooks, ignoring her classmates, ignoring the social protocols that were also necessary for success in the US.

“It was like this in England too, Mom. We need to socialize and make nice with everybody.”

She ignored me and went back to studying. Which was typical of her, of any competent surgeon, gifted with skills taught through legacy and schooling.

The qualities of a surgeon.

Conscientious to a fault. Arrogant with a complex.

People did not know my mother the way I knew her. Intuitive, kind, loving, caring. She really cared about people. She really cared about morality and ethics and integrity.

Because they didn’t know her, they shunned her. Made fun of her. They only knew her fame, through newspaper articles they stole from her personal records, through word of mouth.

These acts, trivial according to the dean when I reported them, culminated in a gang of white men raping my mother.

They wanted to take her down. Literally, metaphorically, in all ways.

The act of rape in order to subvert another, through fits of jealousy and a competitive spirit gone drastically wrong.

 But that didn’t stop my mother.

My mother graduated with her MD degree from Harvard Medical school in 2002 when I was 10 years old.

She attended general surgery residency at Weill Cornell Medical College. She finished early, and moved us to became a surgical attending for the NHS in the UK when I was in seventh grade. She later moved us back to be a surgeon at a hospital in Queens.

Meet my mother, everyone. Her brilliance and perfectionism inspired me, her workaholism and integrity imbibed in me.

She was a star of human nature, and my hero to this very day.

 I love you, Mom. You are the best surgeon I’ve ever known, the best mom I could ever have, no matter what anyone says.