My Grandmother

By Michelle Zhang

June 5, 2011

“Michelle has got a frightening intensity,” my grandmother would tell my mother, “but this will make her into something extraordinary.” As one of the very successful doctors in China, my grandmother was, herself, anything but ordinary. A soldier for her convictions, she would tell my mother over and over that she had to go to college, despite the fact that the Cultural Revolution forbade such musings.

It wasn’t until I discovered medicine that my grandmother’s words finally started coming true. Over the course of my junior year in high school, medicine gradually crept into my life. “It’s a difficult path, and for a lot of people, it’s just not possible,” Grandma said to me. “But you have strength in your mind and goodness in your heart, and that will carry you through.” It’s been five years since I made the decision to pursue medicine, and to this day, my soul still burns for this field. To put my reasons into words would make for an incoherent mess, and would do them no justice. But if there was one person who understood my desire to go into medicine, it was my grandmother.

My grandmother told me that the human condition could be a frightening place, and that compassion was, quite possibly, the only thing that quieted our fears. She told me to always, without exception, approach others in kindness with the understanding that everyone is vulnerable. This vulnerability, I learned, is amplified tenfold in sickness. Though disease takes on innumerable guises – from a fractured wrist to a cancer diagnosis – there are some things that remain true about all illnesses: they magnify our fears, they play on our weaknesses, and they evoke a sense of uncertainty that no one wants to bear.

My grandmother never told me to become a doctor, but she told me to do what felt like home. She never told me to devote my life to this craft, but she told me to invest in something that I would always find valuable.

Grandma passed away on February 22^nd, 2011, after 85 wonderful, fulfilling years of life. Among the things she left me was a heart-shaped paperweight bearing the characters “心想事成”. “That which the heart desires,” it says, “can always be accomplished.” It is because I know this to be true that I come to you, humbled by my limitations but confident in my abilities to learn, in the hopes that you will grant me the opportunity to heal others, just as my grandmother did. I don’t need to make her proud – she has always been proud of me. But I do want to do justice to the unfaltering faith that she had in me – and the best way I know how is to do justice to that inextinguishable passion that she left in my hands.