From Darkness to Sight by Ming Wang

Author:Ming Wang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dunham Books

Chapter 12

My Adopted Country

“I’m an American now!” I shouted, the phone pressed to my ear. I felt like I was floating in the spring air. After living in the United States for ten years, I had just been sworn in as an official U.S. citizen.

My parents were on the other line, congratulating me from back in Boston. Mom worked in the department of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, and Dad was a visiting scholar in the department of pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. My brother, Ming-yu, came to the U.S. in 1990 for a graduate program in genetics and microbiology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. During my last few years at Harvard, my parents, brother, and I shared a two-bedroom apartment on Worthington Street near the medical-school. For the first time in nearly a decade, our entire family was living in the same home, more than seven thousand miles from Hangzhou.

Following medical-school, I moved to West Orange, New Jersey for a yearlong internship in transitional medicine at St. Barnabas Medical Center. During the first few months I was in West Orange, Shu, Dennis, and I lived together for the first time in our entire five years of marriage. We had been living completely separate lives, both of us consumed with school and work, but we hoped that now we could finally be a family. Unfortunately, by that summer we realized it was too late and our marriage had disintegrated irreparably. We filed for divorce that fall. Dennis, who was only three years old, was once again in his grandparents’ care. I felt a deep sense of failure at the collapse of my young family. Perhaps Shu and I had gotten married much too young, or perhaps we were naive to think we could make it work while living so far apart. Regardless of the reasons, I felt terrible despair about not being able to create a family life for Dennis like the one I had enjoyed as a young boy. Years later, I would look back with profound regret at how much of his young life I had missed. To escape the painful emotions I felt about my failed relationships, I poured myself even further into my work.

Given how fragile my own young family was, I was thankful to have my parents and brother with me. Moving from China to America had been a drastic change in geography and culture for all of us. But I also noticed that a profound inner change had been taking place in me over the course of many years. Becoming an American wasn’t just a move across the ocean or an event facilitated by a bureaucratic process. It was a gradual inner transformation over a decade of life here in the United States.

My first inkling of this metamorphosis occurred when I returned to Maryland after my first trip back to China in 1984. After two-and-a-half years of graduate school at the University of Maryland, passing my qualifying exams and

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