Interview with… Kwan Kew Lai

All the best laid plans, and all… I try to get round to updating this blog more frequently, but I’ve been so busy writing everything else is pushed into a corner. I won’t say I’ll try harder, because I might not be any more productive, but if you’re still here and still reading my occasional posts (and more importantly, these interviews), thank you so much!

Today, my interview is with Kwan Kew Lai. Originally from an impoverished family in Penang, Malaysia, Kwan Kew attended Wellesley College on a full scholarship, paving the way for her to become a doctor. She is a Harvard Medical Faculty physician. In 2006, Kwan Kew left her position as a professor of medicine to dedicate time to humanitarian work: in HIV/AIDS in Africa and to provide disaster relief all over the world, during wars, famine, and natural disasters, including the Ebola outbreak, the Syrian, Rohingya refugee crises, Yemen, and the COVID-19 pandemic in New York and the Navajo Nation. She is a three-time recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award. Her work has appeared in Science Speaks, MedPage Today, Balloon Literary Journal, Literally Stories, Vine Leave Press, and others. She is the author of Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak (Viva Editions), Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir (McFarland), and The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly (Vine Leaves Press). I live near Boston.

Wow, that’s such an impressive resume! Welcome to the Fountain Pen, Kwan Kew – is there anything left to tell us about yourself?

I am from a large impoverished Chinese family in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. My grandparents migrated from the Guangdong Province in southern China to Singapore. My father settled in Penang, a British crown colony in Malaya in the early twentieth century.

My third book, The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly published by Vine Leaves Press (2022), a memoir was about me daring to dream big. I came to attend Wellesley College, one of the prestigious colleges in the United States on a full scholarship which paved the way for me to become a doctor.

I believed in paying it forward. Almost two decades ago, I left medical academia to become a humanitarian volunteer while working part-time as a clinician. That was my dream when I was a teenager reading about Dr. Tom Dooley’s humanitarian work in Laos and Cambodia. I find that through my volunteering work, I receive far more from the people I help than what I give. I always marvel at the resilience, courage, desire, and love for life of the refugees no matter how hard their situations are. Sometimes, I wonder whether I could be as strong as them under the circumstances.

I have received awards for my volunteer work, including being a three-time recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award. Wellesley College, my alma mater awarded me the Distinguished Alumna Award and Chicago Medical School, the Distinguished Alumni Service Award.

I used to run marathons but my last one was a few years ago, in London. Now I run a 5K, 5 days a week for fitness. I love to travel and hike wherever there are mountains. Recently I hiked to Everest Base Camp, Nepal, 17,598 feet, a 12-day hike, and a 90-mile journe, and on the Ugadaga trail, an ancient trail of the Unangan native Americans in Unalaska of the Aleutian Islands.

I paint when I am inspired and exhibit my artwork at the Belmont Art Gallery.

Abraham Verghese the best-selling author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone trained with me in infectious diseases in Boston. He knew very earlier on that he wanted to be a writer but I didn’t. I had a boatload of student debts to pay back and a young family to care for. But I’m glad now I’m an author and a physician.

And there I was complaining about not having enough time to blog! How did your writing career begin?

When I was a teenager, I kept a diary, an exercise book that I saved my meagre allowance to buy. I burned that diary when I left Malaysia, not wanting anyone to read it. I wrote cut-and-dry scientific papers while I was in medical academia. After I left academia to do humanitarian work, I started journaling. While I was in Uganda by myself, during long lonely evenings with no internet, TV, or radio to distract me, I decided that I should write about the early part of my life, how I came from Malaysia and travelled halfway around the world to pursue higher education. It was not meant for public consumption, it was a record for my children to read.

For the ensuing years, I was all over the world responding to natural and man-made disasters, spending quite a bit of time in Africa. I gathered the materials I had accumulated and wrote a book about my African experiences. I landed an agent and she looked for a publisher for my book, Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir.

In 2014-2015, I volunteered in the West Africa Ebola outbreak for several months. I was very affected by it and blogged almost daily to keep my memory of my Ebola experience alive and also to help me decompress. Nurith Aizeman, the NPR foreign correspondent interviewed me. I had thought about writing a book about my Ebola experiences and Nurith encouraged me. I started writing and suggested to my agent to put this book first when Ebola was pretty much on people’s minds but she wanted to concentrate on the Africa book. It took about a year before she turned her attention to my Ebola book, by then it was not on anyone’s radar.

My debut book was Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak, This was followed by Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir.

By then I learned that memoirs are a hard sell unless one is a celebrity.

Nevertheless, I turned my attention to the rambling account of my early life and organized it, focusing on the message of girls’ empowerment for higher education. Vine Leaves Press accepted The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly for publication.

In the meantime, I also write short stories and publish those in several journals.

What do you hope your readers take away from your work? What are you trying to achieve?

All my books so far are memoirs. I like to think that readers who delve into my first two books will have a sense that there is a higher purpose in life and that to give is to receive. In the midst of volunteering during the Ebola outbreak, I marveled at the human spirit, especially among Africans. Many could not return home while they worked in the Ebola Treatment Unit because they were considered contaminated, too dangerous to their communities. They threw themselves into a life-threatening situation, yes one could say that they needed to earn a living (NGOs pay well), yet I could not help but remember John 15:13, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Through The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly, I hope to inspire readers to dream big and aspire to reach their goals, especially young girls. The obstacles I faced growing up trying to be educated are minuscule compared to the Afghan girls and women who are prevented by their government to have an education, working, and having the right to determine their own destiny.

Tell us about your most recent publication.

My most recent publication is Healthcare in War-Torn Yemen, in volume 7 of the Spring issue of Synapses (pages 19-22). It is a non-fiction piece about my experiences in Yemen. It tells about how the war affects the healthcare personnel, the infrastructure, and medical supplies to the detriment of ordinary people, mostly women and children under the age of five who die daily because of malnutrition.

What’s next for you?

While writing my books, I usually have other projects that periodically I would go back to them and resume writing. A few readers asked me to write a sequel to The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly, which will be my college experience as an Asian, and an immigrant. I have written a number of pages many years ago even before the publication of The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly, but that is on the back burner.

A few years ago, I heard about National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo”, that year

I wrote a 50,000 middle-grade novel about surrogacy. Last year I did another 50,000 words of another novel, a multi-generational novel, still untitled, and continue to build on that, now it is up to 70,000 words.

Some days I am on a tear. Creating story plots and characters place me in a world of my imagination but on other days I wish to fight my type-A personality and just simply enjoy my days with my garden, my cat, Kuchi, and my family, and walks in the wood without any stress or goals, and just to be thankful for every waking day.

NaNoWriMo is a fantastic way to get a project started. Good luck with your novel, and I definitely think you’ve earned a walk in the woods. Thank you for joining me today.

You can learn more about Kwan Kew on her website and on Facebook.

You can read more about dealing with the Ebola here.