In chronological order, with a word or two about each.

February
Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo - I always make an effort to read the work of fellow Yale writers, especially those who sadly must write no longer.

March
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin - Perhaps my favorite book, in no small part because it contains a plurality of my favorite quotes in English literature. Planning to reread this in 2018 because it’s just that good. It always leaves me with a newfound appreciation for love and life.

June
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong - I once wrote Ocean an (unrequited) email after his first poem was published in The New Yorker several years ago. I’ve been a fan ever since, and this book is among my all-time favorite books of poetry. Somehow it recalls a beet: raw, bloody, beautiful. (Ocean would devise a far better metaphor.)

August
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese -...

If I close my eyes, I can picture you in your white coat: slender, starched, slightly worn.

If I had asked you to hem my white coat, you would have done it and then resented me for it. So I took it to a tailor on Lexington Avenue who, with one glance, knew exactly where I didn’t fit. When he gave it back, I felt for the first time that I looked the part. I wondered if I looked like you.

If there weren’t three thousand miles between us, I’d take us out for brunch. You would spend too long browsing the menu then order something you didn’t want. It would remind me of the times when you told me I was something you didn’t want. You would stick to small talk while I struggle for sentences longer than the span of a breath. You would say this is neither the time nor place.

If not now, then when?

If there were a language for the two of us, it would be neither Chinese nor English but medicine...

Not long ago, I was asked to write poetry for an art competition. I am, by most accounts, not a poet. My degree was in English literature and nonfiction creative writing. I last wrote poetry circa 2002.¹

One may find poetry challenging because of its many rules. I find the opposite to be true. I can type out a sonnet faster than a tweet, but free verse leaves me paralyzed. My cursor blinks steadily into the distance with no footprints to follow. Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room, yet in an open field, I lose myself.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I am a lover of rules. Free verse² terrifies me in its disregard for authority. I have a hard enough time getting down my thoughts—how can I do it without forms to guide me, not to mention grammar, the most fundamental forms of all? When I write free verse, I speak into a void with neither beat nor echo—nothing to convince myself of...

Reading for pleasure after a drought feels, I imagine, like a marine animal breaching. Nowadays, an essay stands for indulgence; its serif fonts recall a time when my life was consumed by books (or rather, spent in their consumption). I catch glimpses of a world above, where epic meant poetry, meant story, meant the telling of tales til break of dawn, rather than the late-night perusal of electronic medical records in preparation for morning rounds. A haiku was not written finger-to-phone.

In her essay, “Love in Translation,” Lauren Collins writes: “A foreign language adumbrates a vision of a parallel life. The fantasy is that learning one activates a latent alter ego, righting a linguistic version of having been switched at birth.” I wonder if the language of medicine has activated my latent alter ego, as much as I wonder whether each rotation will activate my inner surgeon...

Each of Anne Fadiman’s writing classes began with a quote and reflection. Am I a vomit-drafter or a diamond-polisher? In other words, a writer who lets loose and cleans up later, or one who measures twice and cuts once, unharried? What is my David?

From Anne, I learned of a saying, often attributed to Michelangelo: How do you carve a statue of David? You take a block of marble and cut out everything that isn’t David.

David was a metaphor for the essence of an essay, its thrice-distilled spirit that, like all spirits, warms not so much as it burns. A supposedly one-sentence summary, yet for all its worth, inadequate to capture the breadth of our song—why else would we write?—a motive that hints at the symphony to come. (Or in the words of a friend, “An annoying-ass ear-dwelling jingle.”)

Mallet and chisel in hand, what emerged from my marble tended to resemble neither David nor Goliath...

I recently read powerful and important pieces by two current Yale English majors, Adriana Miele and Dhikshitha Bajali. Rather than attempt to summarize their stories, I encourage you to read for yourselves. And I hope you’ll allow me to share some stories of my own.

Perhaps I got lucky; perhaps I am blind. A lot can change in two years, but my experience of the English major was quite different from that of others. In fact, I wrote this sentence in a blog post two years ago, before my last semester at Yale: “Being an English major has dispelled certain misconceptions I once had about literature: that it was written by a bunch of crusty dead white guys, that it has no bearing on contemporary situations.” I came to Yale with this mentality—that Literature with a capital L was written by white men—but Yale somehow convinced me to leave those notions behind.

Perhaps I was lucky enough to...

A few months ago, I attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Manhattan with my friend Alice. We were studying opioid addiction in our Neurology course, and we remembered a patient from one of our first year classes who had encouraged us to sit in on a drug addiction support group to better understand what our patients go through. Having taken his words to heart, we searched online for Narcotics Anonymous meetings open to non-addicts. The groups sometimes had tacky, overly optimistic titles such as Circle of Miracles, Free to Be Me, Miracle on 33rd Street, and High on Life, which left me skeptical of what I was in for.

On a Monday evening, Alice and I found ourselves in a large hall on the ground floor of a settlement house. Having arrived late, we scrambled to find a seat along the back wall as a woman at the front told her story to an audience of 40 people. I shrank in my seat...

The other morning, my friend David complained that he had spent a whole hour replying to emails before he was able to get on with his day. When I made my first email account in middle school, I was surprised to get any emails at all—I mostly received spam and chain mail that threatened death in the middle of the night should I fail to forward the message to at least 5 people (and an amorous confession from my crush should I forward it to 10). I still wrote letters to pen pals; I still fantasized about using owls instead of the United States Postal Service. That sentiment persisted until the first week of college, when I signed up for too many activities at the Extracurricular Bazaar and spent the evening deleting the notifications that ensued. Those emails, strangely enough, gave me a thrill. Never mind that I was one among many names on a mailing list; someone out there had composed a...

Many have asked if I cook much in medical school—old friends, who remember the days of the cucumber turtles, and new ones, who ask as a matter of practicality. Will I need a giant wok or a regular pan? Should I invest in a slow cooker? Am I doomed to spend my adult days eating microwaved chow mein?

I cooked my meals for the first week of Anatomy but quickly found that what once was a hobby had now become a chore. My main concerns were neither presentation nor taste but cost and calories (the former too high and the latter never enough). I ate quickly, within 20 minutes, usually while catching up on my YouTube feed or cramming for an exam. How I missed dining halls and prepaid meal plans! Not because they were cost effective or the dishes particularly tasty (though I will always have a soft spot for Stiles pizza) but for the sheer variety. The first time I visited Yale since graduating...

We called her many names. To me, she was lao lao. To my mother, she was ma. But when my cousin’s son was born, we couldn’t find the words. Lao lao was the title appropriate for his own grandmother—my aunt. Should he say Old lao lao? Great lao lao?

“Either way, I have the most lao [old],” my grandmother piped up. In my mind, she has been 90 since the day we met.

I texted my mom for her birthday. She replied: Thank you. How is school? I am not sure if you dad mentioned to you or not, your grandmother in Jinan passed away about three weeks ago.

I once wrote a Daily Theme from the perspective of a goldfish, whose short term memory condemned it to a life of swimming around the same castle again and again with unceasing excitement. The last time I saw my grandmother, she appeared to me like a goldfish. She could no longer recall events that had happened 5 minutes prior. She introduced me to...