Kevin

On Being BBC, Transatlantic Romance, & Medicine

Photo provided by Kevin Yip.

Kevin is a 24-year old attending medical school in London.

Interviewed Dec 17, 2013

Tell me a little about yourself. What do you do right now, how did you get there?

MMy name is Kevin, and I'll be 24 a week from now. I'm from London, but I'm temporarily in New York on a two-month rotation at NY Cornell Presbyterian Hospital in critical care and physical medicine/rehabilitation. I've always wanted to go to America since I was a teen, and I'd thought I'd come here as every med student gets a chance to go abroad in their final year. In the UK, med school starts when you're 18. Afterwards, everyone does two years of general medicine before specializing. It varies what you do then — surgery, family medicine, etc.

How did you decide to come to New York?

New York drew me in particular because a long backstory of mine. I had a pen pal when I was 16, and a part of me promised myself that I would try to chase her down after all these years, but she never got back to me when I came this time after my first message in 6 years. I met her back in during the MySpace days, when people took random IMs from random people.

She found me and we started chatting. Eventually we started to send each other letters and I'd stay up all night talking to her over the next two years. She called me her British dream because I was this "fantasy boy" all the way in London. Of course her new boyfriend at the time really didn't like the idea of me and wasn't comfortable with me at all. I eventually had the opportunity to actually visit America during high school, and when I snuck out of the trip to finally meet her, she confessed to me. To be honest I had feelings for her for the whole time we were talking... but I asked myself "Could I compete against her boyfriend? How could I actually be there for her when she needed it?"

I tried to do the right thing and deny any feelings I had when I realized that we couldn't have this transatlantic relationship to try to make it easier on her. In hindsight, I think it hurt her pretty bad. After that happened, she told me we shouldn't be talking anymore.

Wow, have you been influenced by Korean dramas?

Haha right, I should sell my story to a drama producer. She ended up cutting me out of her life which was pretty brutal for me... but she is still with the same boyfriend so I hope I made the right choice.

At the time, I had a really strong conservative identity of the whole nice-guy, white knight image. I had strong morals — I'd like to think still do — so I kind of suffered in silence. I'd like to think I was looking out for her. I didn't think it would work out at the time, because as naïve as I was, I still felt like I hadn't really known the real her enough for us to have a chance to work. Long distance wouldn't have worked out well. I'd be in med school and she'd be in fashion over half a world away. Back then I tried to convince myself that I didn't fly to NY on that school trip just to meet her, but I totally did.

Have you always been a hopeless romantic?

Yes, before the world turned me into a cynic. Just kidding, I'm still a hopeless romantic, although I'm better with women now.

At what point did you get better?

(Long pause.) I think after I gathered some self-belief. For a while, I felt inadequate... then I started to look at the hard evidence around me — I had people asking me out, I had groups of friends in varied social circles, people say I'm friendly and approachable... at some point I realized I'm not as bad on paper as I thought I was! They say you're your own worst enemy. When I started believing in myself, I got more confidence.

At some point I realized I'm not as bad on paper as I thought I was! They say you're your own worst enemy. When I started believing in myself, I got more confidence.

Are these all external factors or internal?

In a sense both. I'm still finding myself. I'm a British-born Chinese (BBC), and in Britain, unless you're in a major city, being a BBC can be very isolating. My immigrant parents' generation all set up Chinese takeaway shops, and you need to set up with some distance away from everyone else to remain competitive so we moved to Somerset, a fairly rural area. Growing up in Somerset was very isolating. I always felt different at school, they'd all say that I wasn't "really" British, and on the other end my parents teased me about being a "banana", or how bad I was at Cantonese.

Being so different made me feel inadequate as I didn't feel like I fit in perfectly anywhere. I felt weird that my interests were different from my peers. With my family, I was not fully accepted as one of them and never had the chance to learn how to read or write Chinese. I felt like I was bad at being Chinese, at being "me". I didn't make another Asian friend until I was in University -- everyone around Somerset was a WASP and we were really the only ethnic minorities for miles around. My friends didn't really treat me differently, but there would inevitably be indirect racism. I felt out of place during my teenage years and inadequate as a Chinese person because of my family. I think it really affected my self-esteem at the time. I eventually realized that my Cantonese is actually better than most BBCs', but even then I still don't feel like a "proper" Chinese person.

That's part of the reason I wanted to move to America -- I feel like there are so many more people like me. Many BBCs are very polarized in Britain, being either very Chinese or very English, but I'm somewhere in the middle and had no one to relate to. With my family, I'm nowhere near as eloquent in Cantonese as in English. I've got the vocabulary of an unschooled 13 year old in Cantonese, and I have to shout in English to get my point across with them sometimes. I feel like it's a bit of a strange family dynamic, because I don't feel like I am as close to my parents as I could be due to communication issues (although admittedly they are in every family to some degree!).

I have a younger brother and his Cantonese is even worse than mine, but he took steps to improve it. He doesn't have the same identity crisis as I did; he overthinks it a lot less and found his own niche.

What were your parents social circles like?

They had friends before in the town, but after moving to the village in Somerset, they didn't really have any more friends as they were only really comfortable making friends in Cantonese (which there were none of in the entire county). It made us really sad to see their life morph into work and nothing else.

Did you face any overt racism in Britain?

More so back when I was a kid... but now — the overall climate was that you were treated like any other slightly different British person. I do feel some issues haven't been explored as much here as in America; for example, cultural awareness, inter-racial relationships and media depiction.

Do you think that was related to political correctness or just manners?

Probably manners, haha. I was isolated from some of the xenophobia that happens in Europe these days. Most of it is centred on Eastern Europeans, Indians and Arabs due to the media scaremongering over the increased immigration from those countries.

Does the model minority myth exist for BBCs, as it does for Asian Americans?

There really aren't many Asians in Europe. My friend describes it as being seen as one of the "good immigrants" (Jenny: So, the model minority myth). In my view, positive discrimination is as bad as negative discrimination. There are only about 250,000 Chinese in all of the UK. There are easily FOUR times more Asians in NYC alone. That puts into perspective how scattered and few we are.

Why were you interested in Chinese stuff at all?

I don't think it was because I was trying to prove to myself that "I'm Chinese" or anything to my parents. When I was 5 or 6, I spent a year in Hong Kong and my parents brought a lot of Chinese shows back with them. They always had Chinese music playing in the car, and the level of familiarity made it seem like I was living in two worlds. When I step into my parents' car, I'm in Chinese Britain, not white Britain. I ended up maintaining this feeling even through my high school days. I just felt much more connected to Asian music/media than I did to the Western world. Maybe it's something about seeing someone like you play out all the roles of the world around you rather than being confined to the stereotypical hapless meek geek we're placed in by Hollywood.

In Britain, I pride myself on being a polite, well-spoken, educated individual with an idea of the world around me. I try to read a lot, stay up to date with the news, etc. But in Hong Kong, without literacy or grasp of the language, I feel like I am a 13 year old kid that can't discuss anything too complicated due to my lack of difficult vocabulary. Issues like politics, philosophy and even the daily news can be lost on me in Cantonese. I feel like that identity is taken away from me. I think another reason why I was interested in Chinese stuff was to improve my understanding of the language so I wouldn't feel at odds with myself.

When I went to New York's Chinatown for the first time, I immediately felt at home. The difference between Chinatown and Hong Kong was that I was getting by with my Cantonese but I felt that no one was judging me by my accent in NYC (again, I always feel like I have to validate!). I was thinking, "I bet there are loads of ABCs with worse accents than me". In New York's Chinatown, I feel like I can get by — though perhaps it's all internal judgment, really. Even though Hong Kong is familiar, I still feel like I'm walking on eggshells and don't feel comfortable in my own skin.

They always had Chinese music playing in the car, and the level of familiarity made it seem like I was living in two worlds. When I step into my parents' car, I'm in Chinese Britain, not white Britain.

Did the immigrant struggle help you relate to your parents?

I never thought of it as that — my parents were always really isolated. I never applied my situation with Hong Kong to England as their move from Hong Kong to England. To this very day, my parents still struggle with English. My mum is still embarrassed with it — she lacks that self-confidence even though in actuality her English is great (a mirror image of what she tells me actually).

There is definitely something that binds commonalities with the immigrant experience. I have more in common with you as an immigrant than with a Chinese mainlander. Do you think you could go back to Hong Kong?

No, I don't want my "command of language" taken from me. My Chinese friends are like, your Cantonese isn't that bad, and you've even managed to pick up a girl with it. But comparing to the level I have with English, I can't really expect to jump to that level in Hong Kong easily. It would kill me inside. My parents are very blue collar, and I didn't realize I was using a bunch of offensive politically incorrect terms I picked up from them in Cantonese, because I just repeated what terms my dad used. Things like that would bother me in Hong Kong.

In Chinese culture, status is very important and I fear that locals would treat me differently like an outsider because of my lack of literacy. I don't think I could even accept it myself as an aspect of my personal identity and I'd get frustrated with the inability to communicate to as fully as I want to rather than just get by in casual conversation. In Chinatown here, people are just so friendly and they understand that they are in a different land. I feel like it's because they're immigrants too.

It takes a lot of humbleness to make that jump.

Yeah. I used to go back to Hong Kong every few years, and my Chinese improved loads each time because I'm just using it more often. I just lack that self-confidence and it annoys me because I've got it in most other aspects of my life.

A lot of what you said reminded me of topics we covered in a program I did in school — APALI, the Asian Pacific American Leadership Initiative. I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, and for a long time before I went to college and found the vibrant Asian American community there, I felt like I was alone. I wasn't a cookie-cutter American, but I was too American to be recognized as fully "Chinese" in China. It's hard to not have that support system or realization you belong to a community of people when you're in this position. When you're an immigrant, you're an island.

Your program sounds amazing and it really makes me wish we had a similar thing here. Community is definitely something I lack. I'm actually quite surprised by how much of my life I've spent chasing a community and trying to find a place where people understand your upbringing, customs and culture in a non-judgemental way.

In Britain, I pride myself on being a polite, well-spoken, educated individual with an idea of the world around me. I try to read a lot, stay up to date with the news, etc. But in Hong Kong, without literacy or grasp of the language, I feel like I am a 13 year old kid that can't discuss anything too complicated due to my lack of difficult vocabulary. Issues like politics, philosophy and even the daily news can be lost on me in Cantonese. I feel like that identity is taken away from me.

So tell me a bit more about your family and how you grew up. Who or what had the biggest influence on you while growing up?

I take after my father's tenacity. They moved to the UK around 26 years ago because work was hard to find in Hong Kong. The rest of my mum's extended family had already set up shops in the UK. They helped my parents out, and eventually they set up their own takeaway business.

I really appreciate that they went to an unknown land mostly for me and my younger brother as a way to get a better education and escape the life that they had. They both came from poor backgrounds. Working one of these shops is very hard work, and they would easily work 13 to 14 hour days. However, I was always resentful of having to help them out as a kid either on the cash register or hauling sacks of chips (fries). It takes a lot of your time, and I was angry about how conservative they were or why I wasn't allowed to go play with the other kids after school had finished.

I remember one time that we moved locations as my dad tried to move the business to increase our income. The takeaway wasn't doing well and I hated having to move there. Looking back at it, I feel quite selfish. He came home one night really drunk, and started talking about his own father, who had passed away only a couple years before. He was saying how sorry he was to be a failure to my grandfather's memory, to us, and was asking what the point of all this was. I had never seen my dad with tears in his eyes like that. I remember as a 10 year old how I clung onto his leg and asked him not to go out; he wanted to drive around in his drunken state and give up it all up.

He eventually recouped, we sold off that shop and he was unemployed for about half a year before he tried again. That's how I ended up in Somerset. Seeing him never give up and work those ridiculous hours 6 days a week for the last twenty years, without any friends or social networks or anything, is why I have the attitude of either do it properly, or don't do it at all. He never gave up on us no matter how difficult it was and had the courage to try again and risk everything. That episode made me realize that I will do whatever I have to for my family. It really instilled that into me.

After all that, what made you want to be a doctor?

Looking at my brother and me, I realized that we were the stereotypical successful BBCs. Our poor parents came from another country, worked their asses off, and the kids became professionals. My brother is in engineering and I'm in med school. Although my mum always pushed education on us, they always claimed they didn't care what I did, as long as I had a degree so I had the option of making money. I don't know how much I believe that — I don't think she would have let me be a philosophy major or something. Luckily for her, I was always interested in sciences and she never actually forced Medicine on me like I know a lot of other Asian parents do.

I have a habit of looking after others before myself first, and while doing some volunteer work in a nursing home, there was a woman named Rosie who had advanced metastatic breast cancer. In addition to her disease, she had really bad dementia and would be scared, confused and in constant pain. She would bite, scratch, or yell at anyone that went close to her out fear. Even giving her water was a dreaded task amongst the volunteers.

One time, the nurse asked me to go to her room and give her some juice as she'd been drinking less and less. I remembered all the previous incidents and reluctantly entered her room. For the first time in months, she was calm. She had lost the ability to speak by this point, but I could see that she smiled and was grateful that someone was trying to care for her. I sat with Rosie for a while as the sunlight beamed through the room and we looked at the birds chirping away in the spring gardens. She passed away just a week later. It was then that I realized Medicine was for me. I told myself that ff I could make even a small difference to someone's life in their hour of suffering, it would be worth it.

You find your niche. You could have seven bad days, but one good day makes it worth it. In the end, I still want to be helping people. That's why I'm in this business in the first place, but all the hoops you jump through make you question if it's worth it.

What values are important to you, and do you feel like you're living them?

I'm not sure sometimes. I do know that I want to find myself and hopefully rediscover which values are important to my life. I feel like Medicine has defined everything I've done in my life up to this point and that I've forgotten how I'd describe my life in any other way. A lot of people at medical school let classes consume them because they had to fight tooth and nail to get to where they are. It's a highly stressful, highly competitive environment. You always feel like you're fighting someone else who is super smart and enthusiastic. It slowly envelops people's lives — they only hang out with medical professionals, only talk about work etc. Slowly but surely, I feel like Medicine is taking over other parts of my life that I once valued, like martial arts. I wasn't even very good at it, but I still enjoyed Kung Fu a lot and I feel like medicine took that away from me due to the time constraints.

If I had to name one, I'd say that I'm fiercely loyal and trusting. If you're my friend then I won't let you down and I'll be there whenever you need me. With that comes my worst fear of being betrayed by the people I value the most.

Are most of your friends from med school?

Yes, but I'm trying to stay away from hanging out with them too much. Most of my non-medical friends graduated and left already because med school is so much longer. I'm trying to reach out that comfort zone and meet people doing other types of things.

What else would you want to do if you had the time?

That's the big question. Martial arts, volunteering. I used to be very involved with the army cadets (they're like scouts with guns) who spend lots of time doing community work and helping veterans etc. I just don't have the time anymore.

Do you feel like you're an adult or a kid in comparison to people in the workforce?

A lot of my friends are working now, and I feel weird saying that I'm still a student. I'm very envious that my friends have these perks and benefits from having jobs. I feel like they're real adults, but I'm still stuck behind. I'm lucky that I have a job guaranteed after I graduate but it's hard watching everyone establish their lives while I'm still studying for the next test.

How do you fight that feeling?

You find your niche. You could have seven bad days, but one good day with a grateful patient makes it worth it. In the end, I still want to be helping people. That's why I'm in this business in the first place, but all the hoops you jump through make you really question if it's worth it. The endless studying, the sleepless nights on-call, the missed commitments to your significant other, your friends and your own family. I see doctors in their fifties who are in their third or fourth marriages, and I need to remember to help myself as well as helping others. I'm trying to become more laid back and need to remember to live my life first.

If you could redo things, would you pick the same profession?

I could let a coin decide. Probably. Yeah. I'm 51% sure I'd pick the same thing again. When I was 6 years old I said wanted to be an astronaut, then a lego designer. Being a doctor was actually my third choice! Later as a teen, I imagined I'd work in some office with spreadsheets, like some sort of standard professional job. Medicine, at least to me, is more exciting than that. People interest me and you do get the best anecdotes from this job!

What do you imagine yourself 10 years from now telling yourself?

To quote my best friend: "Everything always works out okay in the end."

What would you tell yourself 10 years ago?

Stop eating so many fish and chips. I was a fat kid! :(

Do you have any major regrets or things you'd want to change?

I only have one regret and it was with the New York girl although it did teach me an important lesson. On paper I did the right thing, but I've always regretted not saying anything to her. It made me realize that I need to start looking after myself and my best interests. I can't spend my whole life "selflessly" helping the rest of the world. No one else will fight your corner or your battles.

Is there an event you are looking forward to or dreading in the coming decade?

Growing up in a tiny shop, I was always really cramped and never had my own space. I spent the first 18 years sharing a room with my little brother. To me, standing on my own two feet, not needing to rely on anyone, and having my independence is a big thing. I can't wait to have that. ■