My Story

This path began with a phone call.

I was working for Levi’s in San Francisco, fresh out of college, when my sister called. Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, metastasized to every vital organ. Three to six months to live.

Within four days I’d packed up my life and moved back to Cape Cod. She was a waitress with two young kids and no health insurance. She enrolled in a 20-person chemotherapy clinical trial in Boston with a 20% survival rate.

This was the era of dial-up internet, yellow pages, and Yahoo chat rooms. I searched obsessively for anything that might help. I found Michio Kushi’s macrobiotics. I brewed her a bitter four-root herbal tea every day. We brought in reiki, reflexology, yoga, meditation, prayer.

She survived. She thrived. She’s now a nurse in our hometown — and the only person in that clinical trial without lasting side effects. Her doctors said directly that the difference was everything we’d woven in alongside the chemo.

That experience cracked something open in me. Why do we wait for a diagnosis to care for our bodies? What if we could know ourselves deeply enough that when a serious diagnosis does come, we have real choices?

Afterward, I traveled to Saigon, where I was born during the Vietnam War. I returned knowing it was time for my next chapter. When I interviewed at Western medical schools, the doctors I spoke with actively discouraged me — they were exhausted by insurance and pharmaceutical pressure, and they pointed me toward Eastern medicine instead.

Though I was raised apart from my Chinese mother and never met her, the wisdom of the East found me anyway. I’ve dedicated my life to it since.