Good Life Project - Dr. Sayantani DasGupta | A Foot in Three Worlds

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Dr. Sayantani Dasgupta has a foot in three worlds: medicine, teaching and writing. Growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants, she fell in love with writing at an early age. But she decided to focus on medicine as her early career, eventually becoming a pediatrician and then a professor, teaching med-students and others about the power of listening and peoples’ stories as a faculty member in Columbia University’s Master’s Program in Narrative Medicine (http://www.narrativemedicine.org/), and co-chair of Columbia’s University Seminar on Narrative, Health and Social Justice (http://universityseminars.columbia.edu/seminars/narrative-health-and-social-justice/).All the while, she was writing. She started with a memoir, then collaborated with her mother on a collection of Bengali folk tales, before creating her own fantasy series designed to not only capture the imagination of young adults but also feature a heroin with brown skin that her kids could relate to. Now with 3 books out, including The Serpent’s Secret, Game of Start and the Chaos Curse, and a NYT bestseller in the mix, she splits her time between the world of medicine, teaching and writing, all the time focused on reconnecting people with stories that allow them to see themselves as they are in the world.You can find Sayantani DasGupta at: Website http://www.sayantanidasgupta.com/| Twitter https://twitter.com/@sayantani16-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So many of us have so many different interests, so many directions we would love to go down when we think about how we want to contribute to the world, make our dent in the universe. What if you didn't have to choose between two loves? Well, that is one of the things I explore with my guest today, Sayantani Dasgupta. So growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants, she fell in love with writing at a really early age, but later on found herself in med school, then eventually becoming a pediatrician, and then moving on to become a professor, teaching med students and other professionals about the power of listening and other people's

stories in creating really tremendous outcomes. All the while, though, she was writing and eventually publishing a memoir about her time at Johns Hopkins, then even collaborated with her mom on a collection of Bengali folktales before creating her own fantasy series designed to not only capture the imagination of young adults, but also solve a problem that she saw. Her kids loved adventure series, things like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, but none of them featured a main character with brown skin. So she created her own heroine and her own world. Now with three books out in that series, including The Serpent's Secret, Game of Start, and The Chaos

Curse, and a New York Times bestseller in the mix of those. She splits her time between the world of medicine, teaching, and writing, all the time focused on reconnecting people with stories that allow them to see themselves as they are in the world. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I'm fascinated by the way that you have developed a life and a living in different worlds and somehow made them, at least from the outside looking in, seem to work together. But let's take kind of a step back in time first. You grew up, from what I understand, I guess starting out in Ohio, but then ending up in New Jersey. Yes. Where in Ohio were you actually? So I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, right outside of Columbus, Ohio. My parents had immigrated from Calcutta, India to Cincinnati before I was born. My father came for graduate

school. And then I grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the seventies when there weren't a ton of immigrants necessarily. There were some, we were a small group. And then I eventually in eighth grade came to the East coast to New Jersey. Yeah. What was it that, that brought the family to New Jersey? My father's work. Yeah. He was working for Bell Labs, which became Lucent Technologies and he came to New Jersey. Yeah. Yeah. Was that, I mean, but you were born in this country, right? I was. I was born in Ohio. Yeah. My parents came over first and I was born in Columbus. I mean, I'm curious, as you mentioned, it sounds like there wasn't much of a community of kids of color in the neighborhood. What was that like for you as a young kid?

I mean, what I had was I had my Bengali community or my Indian community, who I would see on the weekends. But certainly, as you said, there was not a ton of either immigrant kids or kids of color in my immediate neighborhood or in my school. And on the one hand, I would say growing up in Ohio was a really idyllic childhood. It was block parties, and it was open doors, and it was lemonade stalls and brownies and like brownie troops, you know, that kind of a thing. I was not a very good brownie. I was a marginal brownie at best. But that said, I think it wasn't until later that I recognized how just the microaggressions of, you know, schoolyard taunts or people like rubbing my

skin to see if the brown would come off or, oh my gosh, you know, after years of not having seen myself or somebody like me represented in pop culture, there came along the second Indiana Jones movie. And, you know, before we had gone to see it, we were so excited. It's going to be set in India. There's going to be Indian people in it. It was such a detriment. So for years, you know, there were, you know, do you eat monkey brains? And, you know, those sorts of questions that emerged from there. He's younger than me, but Hari Kandabulu, the comic, talks about that character Apu on The Simpsons functioning for him in the same way, like being the one thing in pop culture that people knew about South Asia.

And then you're asked about it constantly. So it was a little bit of, you know, I think a rude awakening later to realize like, oh, or not even a rude awakening. It was an awakening, I would say. It was a necessary awakening to realize, oh, all of this kind of negative stuff that I'm carrying around inside of me has nothing to do with me, right? That was the necessary awakening. It was to realize like, oh, this is something external to me. But the rude part of that was that for years and years, I carried around this feeling like there was something wrong with me. Like I wasn't enough. I wasn't American enough.

I wasn't, you know, good enough. And I think that now that I write for children, I recognize that it's really hard to be what you can't see. And if a child never sees themselves as the hero of any story that's around them, it's really hard to believe that they can be the hero of any story, including their own. And that was my experience. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating also, because I know your mom also was and is a scholar, a teacher, a social activist who's really spent a lot of her life devoted to giving voice to the lives, sometimes the circumstances, sometimes the plights of South Asian women, both here and overseas. Did you have conversations with your mom at an early age about what you were feeling or was it not until later that started to unfold?

So it's interesting. I grew up in this activist household. I grew up with parents who were able to give me a model of kind of resistance and able to give me a model of kind of progressive activism. And yet it took years for me to be able to articulate what was happening to me. They were able to give me the language, but I think it's such an insidious and kind of slow moving thing, this destructive power of racism on young psyches. And it took me years to even recognize that it was happening to me. And perhaps for others it takes even longer. I think I was a young adult by the time I was able to kind of put words to it. I have these – in the series I write for children, I have these monsters called

Rakkush. And in the first series, in the first book, The Serpent's Secret, this Rakkush comes crashing into my heroine's kitchen and whisks her parents off. And I always say when I go to visit children with my books, I say, you know, Kiran Mala, my heroine, she faces this monster called a Rakkush. But my monster was racism. And it kind of crashed into my kitchen. It crashed into my mind.

It crashed into my family life. And it threatened to whisk me away. And it really took a lot of power to kind of fight it and kind of rend myself away from it. Yeah. I'm curious also because I know at a certain point you started to, started to, whether you were in Ohio or whether you were in New Jersey, it sounds like you spent a number of with my family in Calcutta. And it was the first time I think I got to see or hear about kids who looked like me starring, you know, being protagonists, being heroes, being awesome, saving the world. And that was really important, I think, to the process of me recognizing that what I was experiencing wasn't something wrong with me.

And when I would go to Calcutta, my grandma would gather all of us under the mosquito net and it would be hot and the fan would be going and the mosquito net would be waving and it would be kind of this magical space. And all of us cousins would kind of gather in with her and she would tell us these folk tales about princes and princesses on flying horses and like evil serpent kings and these rakkosh monsters I was telling you about. And not only was this kind of a universally wonderful experience like any child with their grandparent listening to stories, but for me as the immigrant child, you know, coming home, it was so much more important because suddenly I recognized like, oh,

wait a minute. Like I can, somebody like me can be a hero. You know, a brown kid can save the day. And that was really important. Even if at the time I couldn't articulate it in the words that I just did. It's a really powerful thing to see someone like you being heroic, starring in their own story, being active, saving the day. So that was a really important experience to me. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it was just truly formative in so many ways. Was that sort of like an every summer type of thing for you? Almost every summer. Every summer to every other summer kind of a thing. How old were you when you first went? I mean, I was probably too young. I was probably 18

months or two years when I first went. So really from the beginning? I mean, I have pictures of that time. I have no memories of that time. The time we went when I was four, I have pictures from, memories of six pictures of no memory but as a eight nine ten like those years I do remember yeah I mean it must have been so interesting also sort of comparing notes with other kids your age with their experience versus your experience yeah you know it's interesting I think that many of us have that experience of like coming home, like you suddenly land. And it is like being in a different galaxy, particularly back then when my grandparents didn't have a telephone at first. They didn't have television. There certainly wasn't the internet.

And so you were just in an entirely different world. All of a sudden the plane would open, the heat would hit you, the kind of redol plane would open, the heat would, you know, hit you, the kind of redolent smells and colors and sounds would hit you. And there you were, you were a space explorer. You were in an entirely different world and you would be there for three months. And no one in your other world, no one, you know, in the world back home in America knew what it was like. And people in this new galaxy in Calcutta didn't really understand what my life was like, you know, in America either. So it was a little bit like being a galaxy hopper, like being a, you know, multiverse traverser. And I think that some kids that I've

spoken to, some immigrant kids, have that experience of like coming home, finding themselves, feeling embraced by a country. And then it's very interesting. My daughter was just reading Chumpa Lahiri's book, The Namesake, my teenage daughter. And we were going through this passage and, you know, she, of course, is one more generation, right, removed from the immigrant process. And she was reading this section where the siblings in the story go to Calcutta. Jhumpaleri happens to be Bengali as well. And they feel really alienated. You know, they feel like, oh, you know, we don't belong here either. And my daughter turned to me and she was like, well, is this how you felt? And I was like, no, you know, I've told

you that's not at all how I felt. I felt the opposite. So I don't think it's necessarily uniform. I think we, you know, we're a heterogeneous group, we immigrant kids. I think the experiences can be different. But certainly that really struck out to me when my daughter was reading that and she kind of looked at me and she said, well, you never told me you felt like this. I don't think you ever felt. And I said, no, you're right. This is not my experience. My experience was of kind of coming home to myself, like finding a missing piece of myself

when I would go on those trips. Yeah. It's like the representation that you were looking for. It almost sounds like you had this perpetual sense that something wasn't quite right, but couldn't put your finger on it. But dropping into that world helped you identify like, oh, this, like this is what's actually going on. I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like that.

No, that's exactly it. It's like having a missing piece of yourself that you can't see, you can't identify, but there's something there. And then when you go there, it's like that puzzle piece, it clicks right in. And part of that was language. Part of it was representation. Part of it was family. I'm an only child. So suddenly being surrounded by all this love and kind of overwhelming kind of family togetherness was really important to me. But now as an adult, I really recognize how important and empowering it was to get that missing piece of representation

in there. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like also one of the things that happened during that window, because so much of your life is built around story these days. It sounds like that. I mean, the way you describe sort of sitting around like in the evenings with no technology around under a mosquito net with the elders telling stories. Was that where a lot of the seed of your love of and fascination of stories and storytelling was planted? Absolutely. Absolutely. The thing I love about oral stories also, I base my children's series on these folktales. And to tell you the truth, I was nervous at first. I was like, well, is it okay? Can I do these stories justice? And then I remembered that the interesting

thing about oral stories is that they change. Tellers tell them differently depending on who's listening. So let's say one of my cousins was naughty or lied about something or hit his brother or something. My grandmother would incorporate a lesson about like not hitting your siblings or not being naughty in that particular way into the story that she was telling. And so that gave me permission to play fast and loose with these Bengali folktales. I recognized that, you know what, if my grandmother and every grandmother can kind of incorporate stories about like, listen to your elders, don't hit your brother, eat all your dinner into the stories they're telling,

I too can take these Bengali folktales that my grandma told me and tell them to a new audience in ways that this new audience needs. I can put my heroine in a Kortha in combat boots. I can put her in New Jersey. I can make her speak like an immigrant daughter would speak who grew up in Jersey. So that gave me permission to do that, remembering that my grandma would consistently make up things and stick them in to teach us cousins a lesson. So that gave me a little bit of permission there. Yeah, I love that. When you were a kid, it sounds like you were probably a voracious reader. Did you have the writing bug as a kid too, or did that develop really later? No, no. I was a voracious reader. I wrote a ton. My father, I always tell kids when I visit schools

this, pre-computers, pre-internet gave me this giant notebook. And the one thing he told me was, don't ever throw away anything you write. Just keep it in this notebook. Even if you don't like it, even if you want to come back to it later, don't throw it away. Everything you write has importance and has meaning. And so I would write in this notebook and I still have it, I think, in my basement somewhere. And it was such an important lesson. It was such a lesson about the power of everyone's story and the power of each person to tell their story. I mean, he was basically telling me, your words have worth. Don't throw them away. They are worth keeping. They are treasured, even if you don't recognize

that treasure yet. And that was a really important lesson, I think, for me as a young person. And then, of course, you know, I was an only child. My best friend who lived two doors down and I were constantly in the library. We were constantly devouring stories. We were constantly reading together. And we both loved fantasy. So it was a lot of Hobbit and mythology and Narnia all the time. So absolutely, I was a reader and writer from a very young age. Yeah. I love that your dad gave you that,

but also that he said, don't ever throw it away. What was so important to him about that? I mean, was it just having a reverence for whatever comes out of you, no matter what it is? Or was it, did he see the value of 20 years later being able to reflect on and see like where your mind was? I think probably both. I'm not sure that at that point he was thinking about 20 years on. I think he was trying to teach me to value, you know, the act of creation. I think he was trying to teach me that something doesn't have to be big and grand. It can be small. It can be a four-line poem for it to be an important act of creation. And even though,

again, he didn't tell me it in so many words, just that gesture of the notebook and don't throw anything away, it stayed with me till now. And I think, you know, that was a very early lesson in the importance of the word, the importance of creation, the importance of valuing what we put out there into the world. Yeah. Did that become a journaling process for you or was it just kind of haphazard? I have lots and lots of ridiculous journals, but that particular notebook became a notebook of poetry for whatever reason. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. It became a notebook of earnest 10-year-old, 12-year-old poetry, however old I was at the time.

But yeah, it became a notebook of poetry. And I must have known, I must have been about seven because I was young enough that I would skip lines and my handwriting was really big. But for some reason, I felt like I started writing poems and I will continue to write poems and that's what ended up happening. I love that. So you have this fascination and you started writing pretty young. I know you ended up at Brown. What did you actually study at Brown? I did. I went in thinking I would study English. I didn't. I took a lot of English classes, but Brown has this very open curriculum. So even though I graduated with what at the time was called Health and Society, if you really looked at my course schedule,

there was as much African-American women playwrights of the 20th century and as much literature on it as there was kind of health, the socioeconomics of health, epidemiology, those kinds of things. It was 1992 when I graduated Brown. So it was, you know, right around kind of AIDS making, you know, all of our head spins, you know, kind of being an alarming process kind of throughout the world. So I ended up writing my senior thesis kind of at the intersection of literature and representation and health. It was on kind of AIDS messaging in India and public health messaging and what hidden messages those kind of public health campaigns were conveying.

So I think even at that time, even though I didn't recognize it, I was kind of working at the intersection of story and healthcare. Oh, that's so interesting. Did you go straight to med school after that, or was there a break in the middle? Just a year. I ended up working at the American Foundation for AIDS Research in Washington for a few months. And then I ended up translating a book of Bengali folktales, the exact same stories that 20 years later I would be writing my children's series based on. And I think between AMFAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and then traveling to India and doing this book of translation with my mom, I think that was my year. And then I went to medical school.

Right. So when you hit med school, what's your intention at that point? Because I know you go to med school, you're at Johns Hopkins, you end up with an MD and an MPA. So public health is clearly a big through line through this whole thing. But you also focus in on pediatrics, which I'm curious about. So I think I went into medical school. My parents are not physicians. I don't have doctors in my immediate family. My parents are, you know, my father's an engineer and a writer and my mother's a psychologist. So they're academics, but I had this very outsider's view of what medicine was, and I still have it. I have this idea of what medicine should be and could be all the time. I don't think it always is. Many times it is. I thought of it as a tool

for social justice. I thought of it as a concrete way that I could give, that I could help. It was a tool that people needed. I went to India almost every year as a child. I knew or I at least saw what stark contrasts in income levels, how that impacted people's health and well-being, right? I saw that with my own eyes, even if I was protected from it, quite frankly, just through economics. But that said, I didn't know that that wasn't everyone's view of medicine. I didn't realize that that wasn't the prevalent kind of culture of medicine. And so it was a little bit of an adjustment, I must say.

Johns Hopkins is an amazing place full of kind of intellectual rigor and research, but not everyone, many people, but not everyone have that same view that medicine is a tool for social justice. There's plenty of people there, you know, pursuing medicine for other reasons. It was at a time when, you know, shockingly enough, I hope this isn't still going on, but I suspect hearing from some of my students that it is, you know, lectures were interspersed with like sexist slides sometimes, or like people would say like pretty overtly racist things in the middle of lectures. And so, you know, it was a time where things like that were happening, but simultaneously I had these incredibly knowledgeable and gifted

colleagues, you know, some of whom had been in the Peace Corps, some of whom had worked, you know worked in different aspects throughout the world. When I went to public health school, I was in class next to the health minister from Gambia, let's say. I mean, there was so much talent and just so much energy and intellect all around me. So I won't say, you know, it was all one way or the other, but certainly I had to refine my footing. Ben Carson was one of my professors. So I'll just put that out there. So, you know, there were places where I had to remember why I was there and keep going. I went to medical school thinking I was going to

do women's health. And while I loved delivering babies, honestly, it sounds cliche. It is miraculous. It's amazing to bring life into the world or to help somebody bring life into the world. I ended up really falling in love with pediatrics eventually. I really enjoy hearing from young people, telling stories to young people, being involved in young people's lives. And so that's how I went I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, Charge time and actual results will vary. So you graduate, you go out into the world as a pediatrician, but you also slipped in there that in that intervening year when you're at Amphar, you just happened to write a book also. That was with your mom also, right? Yes, yes. Right. So these things are already starting to, like, the dance is continuing at higher and higher levels on both sides.

Like, it's you as the writer, you as the doctor, you as a public health advocate and sort of like medicine as a form of social justice, which is fascinating to me because so often I hear stories about, you know, people who become really accomplished and really adept at two pretty disparate fields, but almost invariably when that happens, you see that they devote themselves to one and until they get to a level of mastery or expertise or reputation where they feel like they've kind of done what they came to do. And then they will either step away from that or they'll kind of done what they came to do. And then they will either step away from that, or they'll kind of set it on autopilot to a certain extent and start to devote

themselves to something else. But your path has always been yes end, it sounds like from day one, which I think is unusual. Absolutely. And so I think that when people ask me about like, oh, is this a second career? You're a physician, then you became a full-time professor, and then, you know, you went into children's writing, and they ask me about like a career switch. And I have a hard time answering that question because I don't feel like I ever left one thing for another. Yes, I stopped seeing patients clinically, but I'm training the next generation of healthcare providers.

I feel like that's the work I'm doing for healthcare. And so I don't feel like I've left medicine in any sense. So when people ask me about kind of physicianhood, professorhood, and being an author, I often say, you know, kind of glibly, I'll say, well, it's all about the stories, right? Medicine is about story receiving, storytelling, so is being a professor, and and obviously so is being an author. But I think what I'll tell you is, yes, it's about the stories, but it's also about power. And it's also about thinking in all my careers, you know, whose stories are told, whose voices are heard, whose, you know, lives are centered and whose aren't, right?

You know, who speaks and who whose aren't, right? Who speaks and who's spoken for, right? That has always been, I think, the thread connecting all of my careers. So it's really been about stories and power, stories and representation. So that's how I make sense of kind of this shifting of my work. Because I don't, you're right, I don't think of it as leaving one thing behind and picking up another.

Yeah, it's like this consistent through line through everything that you've done. And it is this, the common denominator is that activist's heart. It's the social justice side of things, which clearly your mom has sort of like been a big part of from the earliest of days. So you come at it and you did practice as a pediatrician. What was it that, I know, like you said, you haven't left the field of medicine by any means, but you have left the private practice, which is a really big step for most people in that world. You devote yourself, it's a lot of time, a lot of money investing to get to this place where you're anointed in this role and

you're doing something. It sounds like you didn't, it wasn't that playing that role was horrible. It sounds like there was a lot that you loved about it, but for some reason you made the decision, okay, it's time to close this chapter. I'm curious whether it was a gradual evolution. Was there something that happened? Was there a moment that just made you say now? You know, it was gradual. So what I did is when I left Johns Hopkins, I went to do my pediatrics residency. So you don't go off into the world, right? You have to continue your training. I came to a wonderful program in the South Bronx called the Social Pediatrics Program at Montefiore. It was brilliant because it was exactly what I was looking for. It was that intersection of

social justice, patient care, service, and training, the medical training I needed. And I found mentors who understood that that's why I was there. Philip Oswa, who now I think is the head of the entire hospital system, he was my mentor. He understood that that's what I was going for. And he modeled a way to do it. So during that training process, I then wrote another book. And the mentors now at this new place understood that that was a part and parcel of my medical work. So it was a collection of essays that was kind of a memoir. And they let me go on a little book tour while I was a resident. They were incredibly supportive of me having one foot in the world of narrative and story and one foot in the world of medicine. I came to Columbia to do a fellowship. And as I

was doing that fellowship, I was already getting involved in this narrative medicine program, which I'm still involved in. And as I was involved in the program in narrative medicine, I started shifting a little bit less patient care, a little bit more teaching. And then I eventually had children and it became a personal decision. I loved, I love pediatrics. I still love it. And I think the same thing that drew me to loving spending time with other people's children drew me to wanting to raise my own children myself and spend more time with them. And quite frankly, teaching is just more flexible when you have small children at home than seeing patients. If somebody's kid is sick, I don't want, you know,

the doctor to say, hey, I have to go because, you know, my own kid has a whatever, karate class or a piano recital. You want them to, and rightfully so, you, you know, you stay and you finish seeing your patients. So I ended up, you know, kind of revising that particular part of my career for personal reasons, for kind of parenthood reasons. You know, again, my father would always say every time I would be up against like a hard decision like this, he would say, well, you know, at the end of your days, what are you going to regret? Are you going to regret not being with your kids? Or are you going to regret not seeing more patients? And that made the decision easier for me. Because I was. I was getting personal pressure. Like, oh my gosh,

I've trained so long. Really? I'm not going to do this anymore? I enjoy it. I love it. I was getting kind of social pressure from other folks who had trained with me. But that question of like, at the end of your life, what are you going to regret? Hopefully at the end of a long and rich life, right? When you're putting your head down for that last time on your pillow, like, what are you going to regret? And I was going to regret not being with my children at that point. And so that's how I made that decision. Yeah. I mean, such a powerful awakening. And also I love that your dad planted

that seed again. And I love that the nature of your relationship with him was open enough and that he had a set of values that would sort of be able to zoom the lens out and say, you know, like let go of expectations. Like what is it that's right for you? Yeah. You know, when you look back, it's super powerful. And I know, you know, the practice of medicine, especially in the, this would have been what, the late nineties, right? South Bronx also was a tough place and very under-resourced in a lot of ways. So, and with you, with the, you know, like a social justice heart, that must have been a really,

you're sort of presenting it as, well, kind of a logical linear decision, but it must have been somewhat anguishing at the same time. Oh, it absolutely was because the kids you get to serve and you get to work with, I was in the South Bronx and then I was in North Manhattan, are amazing. They're hilarious and talented and ornery and bright like kids anywhere. And I felt like I was being abused. So of course it was incredibly anguishing. And so that's why I think we need elders.

We need elders, whether they're our own elders or elders in our community, people who have that bigger eye view. You need somebody to say, hey, you got to do this thing to pay your rent? Do it to pay your rent. That's important too. So I hope and I try to function in that way for now my students. You know, I try to, you know, give them that perspective and recognize that so many, my own parents and then so many other parent figures in my life have and continue to give me that perspective of their kind of wisdom. That's why I think like intergenerational relationships,

you know, extended families, they're so important because that, you know, it works in all directions, right? The young folks suddenly say something incredibly illuminating, right? For us, you know, elders bring insight for us, you know, it works kind of along all the trajectories. But yeah, I've been incredibly lucky to have very supportive parents and a very supportive extended family who have constantly demanded that I not get caught up in just the immediate, but really think about like, what actually matters? Are you being of service? Where will you be the best of service?

What will you regret? Where are you needed? You know, is this work you're doing the work that you're supposed to be doing? Is this the work that the world needs you to be doing? kind of were. It was both big questions like that and then small practical questions like, oh, how are we going to fund the women's group that my mother is starting? We're going to be stuffing envelopes on the kitchen floor and cooking samosas and selling them at the next community event. So my life has been filled with these very big questions and then very practical ways that you implement those big questions. Yeah, I love that. It's sort of like you had the big ethereal and then you had the on the ground. How do we actually get this done? You brought up in a number of times now, so let's dive into it.

The Columbia program on narrative medicine, I had never heard. I mean, being a lifelong New Yorker, super familiar with Columbia, legendary school, tremendous med school, tremendous institutions and hospitals. And I kind of thought I knew most of what was going on there because I've known a lot of people there over the years. I had no idea. I had never heard this phrase narrative medicine. And now I'm curious. Tell me more. So my colleague, Rita Sharon, coined this expression narrative medicine. She is an internist with a PhD in literature. And it was she back in 2001, I guess. I knocked on her door. I was a, you know, newly minted pediatrician who loved to write, who didn't really understand what the term narrative medicine meant either, but I heard of it. And I knocked on her door and I said,

well, can I work with you? And she said, sure. And that's how that kind of began. So the program in narrative medicine began as her brainchild up at the medical center as solely a training program for residents and medical students who are already kind of on their way to becoming doctors. It was a program in which we sought to honor and center the role of story in the healthcare relationship. So if we recognize that we human beings are storied creatures, that the way that we understand the world is through the giving and receiving of story, Then we must acknowledge that in moments of crisis or trauma or strife, stories are even more necessary, right? We need to express ourselves and be understood, right? And be heard and be attended to, not just in the sense of physical

attention, but emotional attention, right? Then we must recognize that medical trainees of all sorts, physicians, nurses, chaplains, you know, what have you, need to be as adept at interpreting a story, eliciting and interpreting a story as they are at eliciting and interpreting an x-ray because it's a skill set just as important, right? You can't say, hey, you know, we're going to make sure that you know your pharmacology and your physiology, but we're not going to be as rigorous when it comes to engaging with another human being, listening to their story, interpreting their story, relating their story to another. That's ridiculous. It is just as vital a skill set. It is just as critical, if not more critical, a skill set in the healthcare encounter. And so narrative medicine started up there, and then it became a graduate program.

Now it's a master's program down at the Morningside campus, so Columbia's other campus. And we train, yes, future doctors, but also future lawyers and people who are already involved in, let's say, medical reporting or careers, other academic fields, where they're still interested in health and embodiment and kind of the social determinants of health, but maybe in various ways. And so what I always say to people when they ask me about narrative medicine, like in an elevator, I'll say, you know, it's the clinical and scholarly field centering the role of stories in healthcare. But if that's for a longer explanation, I'll give them what I just gave you. Got it. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

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charge time and actual results will vary. So here's my curiosity. You're training young doctors or aspiring doctors, right? And med school is notoriously not easy. Very often it demands not just emotional, psychological, but physical rigor that's brutal and a mass amount of overload in a short amount of time. And med students typically so often struggle just with the fundamental information that's thrown at them at breakneck speed. I'm so curious how you have the conversation with med students that says, you know, all that stuff that you're learning, and you don't even have time to integrate any of that. And you absolutely have to know that in order to diagnose and treat. Well, there's this other thing that will also require that

you invest even more time and is quote softer, but equally important, how do you frame it in a way that lets somebody realize, oh, this is actually as important, if not more important than all that other stuff that's out there in my process of becoming an effective doctor, or in the broader case of people, someone who can really understand and then respond to what's truly going on. Yeah. So just to make clear, at Columbia, we call it narrative medicine, but this work is going on all around the country with different names, medical humanities, literature and medicine, health humanities. Certainly there are people all over the world and all over the country doing this important work. And I find that when we try to add it on as one more subject in medical school, it becomes exactly like you're saying. It becomes like one more onerous task or one more

thing I can blow off or what have you. When we think about narrative medicine or these health humanities perspectives, changing the fundamental way we teach, do we teach in a more storied way? Do we train not just the young folks, but we train up the deans and the senior faculty so that they themselves are teaching and approaching their students differently? So you just mentioned that medical school tends to be extremely draining and extremely, you know, kind of enervating and frustrating. Well, if we are treating our students poorly or putting their health secondary, how can we expect that they won't do the same thing, you know, that was done to them in the classroom in the clinic room? How can we model more healthy

kind of learner-teacher relationships in the classroom so that they can then enact more healthy, you know, co-authored, partnered, empowering relationships with their patients in the clinic room? So I think less than an extra subject to learn, I think in the medical setting, narrative medicine is a fundamental way we change pedagogy, we change the way we teach. The benefit is now that I teach in a master's program outside of the medical setting, I'm getting either middle level or senior doctors who are already there and want to step out for a year and train up so they can go then implement that training at their own institutions. Or I'm getting very young

folks who are out of undergraduate who are on their way to medicine. And so we get to do this kind of intensive, rigorous work together before they go there. So that's been the benefit of being in the master's program. But I do, you know, I was saying before, it's hard to be what you can't see in children's books. Same thing in medicine. If you don't see an empowering model of health as a partnership, health as a process, Paul Farmer calls our task as walking alongside a patient, that we are the accompanier of, you know, the person who's ill. It is not our journey. It is not our path. It is not even up to us to determine which is the path we walk, but it's up to them. We just get to accompany them, right? If you don't have that kind of a model set up for you between you and your teacher, how can you ever have that kind of a

model create, or it's going to be a lot harder to create that kind of a model, let's put it that way, between you and a patient. So when I teach, I really go to the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who said, you know, we're all problem posers. We're all educators. We learn together in the classroom. He talked about education as a practice of freedom. And so I really believe in that. I believe Bell Hooks talks about the classroom as an ecstatic space, that if you don't have joy in the classroom, if you don't learn from a place of humility and joy as a teacher, you will never be able to model that for your students. So it's very much along the lines of this kind of intentional living that, for lack of a better word, that, you know, I was talking about

before when I talked about my father. I really try to be very intentional either in practice, when I was in practice with patients, or intentional in the classroom. What am I here for? I don't have all the answers, but I'm here to accompany each of my students on their journey to find the answers. Yeah. That's such a powerful lens, I think, to bring to almost any experience. Recently, I was having a conversation with Stephen Hoff. He started a program in Brooklyn called Stillwaters in a Storm, where they bring together kids in a storefront afterschool program for free. And these are very often kids that have no other places to go and they write and they talk. And

the one rule is everyone listens to everyone. And they have kids in there from like age five to 18. They have legendary writers come through and be in the room with kids and they all write and they all share their stuff. And, you know, this iconic person will come in from the outside and they can share what they want to share. And then they listen, you know, and that's just part of what's going on. There's no pecking order. There's no status. There's no, it's such an unusual experience though, especially when I think about the, in the context of professional training, whether it's law, whether it's medicine. I think there's such an ingrained culture, I think, in so many grad school professional trainings of hierarchy. And you have to earn

your way into the right to speak and to be heard and to have a more level playing field, be modeled by people who maybe you revere. What a powerful experience that must be. I mean, you must see just some real moments of grace and awakening with what you do. I feel like I get to experience those moments of grace and awakening. I mean, I hope I impart them or I hope I create an environment where others can feel them too. But I feel incredibly honored to be a learner. My students are my greatest teachers and I really feel that way. I talk about this idea of narrative humility and I feel like if we approach our own selves with humility and recognize that it's a lifelong

process of learning, if we approach our own stories with humility and recognize that it's a lifelong process of learning, if we approach our own stories with humility. I love this example of the famous, you know, writer, you know, coming in, giving a writing exercise, but not being above doing it themselves. Like that's the thing. I always write, you know, when I ask my students to write, I try to always write as well because I'm not above it. I don't demand that they read. They can read what they like, right?

I'm not, you know, going to come in and, you know, demand that they read something that maybe came out that was very private. But if they want to share it, I am there to listen to it. And I love that. I absolutely love that as an example. Yeah, I feel like these moments of either being a physician, you know, with somebody's health and embodiment like in your hands, that's an incredible moment of kind of grace that's beyond, I think, our ability to really comprehend what it is. I think being a teacher is that. I think being a parent is that. Being a storyteller, right, is that. We're doing these things that are so much bigger than ourselves. And if we can just honor a little bit of it and keep promising ourselves that we'll keep getting better at it and learning more about it and doing it better every day. And some days we'll stink at it and we'll just keep going. I don't know. I feel like maybe then we're doing the right thing. Yeah. I mean, I feel like so few people feel heard or seen these days, especially when you're in a

place of true need, where you're in a place where something's wrong and you don't have the skills or the knowledge to make it right. So you have to turn yourself over to somebody else to a certain extent, not surrender agency entirely, but you can't make it better yourself. And in those moments, I feel like it's so rare that we actually feel seen and heard. But when we do, there's something profound that happens. I wonder, are you aware of research that speaks to outcomes, medical outcomes, and any changes that might actually unfold based on the nature of and sort of like the depth of relationship with the healthcare provider and a patient and the quality of listening and things like that? Some of my other colleagues who are more involved in kind of the one-on-one dyadic relationship and what happens, do you have less patient recidivism

where somebody doesn't come back? Yes, that's true. Do you have more what we call in medicine compliance, which I think is kind of an awful term, but where people keep taking the medicine that they have to take for their diabetes, right? Or do the recommended thing. Yeah, you do. Because you have more trust between patient and provider, because that provider has proven that they are listening, they're engaged, they want to know your story. Now, the work that I do is mostly at the level, again, consistent with my life, of narrative health and social justice. I am mostly concerned with not the one-on-one patient-provider relationship, but really thinking about on a broader societal level,

let's not be too precious about stories either because genocide or incredible injustice often begins with a really good story. You tell a story transforming your neighbor or, you know, your fellow community member into a, you know, vermin, into a pest, into, you know, somebody who's infecting you, somebody, right, into a disease, a manifestation of a disease, right? You create the story in order to dehumanize them, in order to then permit violence against them, right? So the predecessor to putting kids in cages or, you know, calling certain segments of society, you know, disease bringers or to war and genocide is often a really good story. So what I'm concerned about is, you know, what Chimamanda Adichie says,

you know, the danger of the singular story. I'm really interested in how can we at a broader societal level look at these dangerous or unjust stories and how can we transform them into just stories? And I think it's along the lines of what we were just talking about. You know, the novelist, Arne de Duroy says, there's no such thing as the voiceless. There is only, you know, those in powers refusal to hear. And so, you know, nobody is voiceless, but those in power are refusing to hear. How can we use, how can those of us who have, let's say, a modicum of social power, be that because we're trained as doctors or we have social power because we're politicians or in other ways, how can we become partners?

How can we become facilitators? How can we become accompaniers so that those individuals who need to tell their story because they are at the center of something that's happening. How can we be amplifiers of that story, right? It's not that we are somehow giving voice to them. They always had a voice. But how can we amplify that voice? How can we be partners, right? How can we be in dialogue with people who need desperately to have their stories heard and reacted to because something's going wrong, right? Because something unjust is happening to their community.

Yeah. It's amazing. Your energy profoundly shifts when you talk about that side of your work. Not that it was low or disconnected, but when you talk about that, when you talk about being the amplifier at scale, there's something in you which clearly just absolutely expands dramatically. It's palpable. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I am just giving that spark because I feel this is the spark I feel like I get to put in the heart of all my students. And then hopefully that exponentializes out, right? You know, right now we've been hearing a lot about how viruses exponentialize, but like I hope that good teaching also exponentializes out into the world, right?

And we can send these students out there to teach more students, to, you know, enact more justice on their own, whatever field they go into. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's my life's calling. Yeah. So meanwhile, in the background of all of this, as you mentioned, you become a mom, you have kids, they're readers. At some point, you notice that your son has a similar Jones that you had when you were a kid, love sort of like fantasy, and especially the series is, but he's reading things like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. I guess you start to key in the fact that there was the same gap that was going on, and everything we've been talking about here starts to manifest in a

different creative process for you. I was like, darn it. This isn't going to happen again. I'm not going to let this – that incredibly painful process for me growing up, darn it, this many years later again? I'm not going to let that happen. You know, Junot Diaz, the novelist, has this great quote that I'm going to misquote. But he said something along the lines of, you know, there's this thing about monsters and vampires can't see themselves in a mirror. And he says, you know, I don't think it's really about vampires not seeing themselves in a mirror. I think it's if you want to make someone feel monstrous, you deny them any cultural reflection of themselves, right?

And so he said, you know, he said, not seeing myself, I thought, yo, is there something wrong with me? No one wants to, you know, talk about somebody like me. He says, you know, I said to myself, before I die, I want to create a couple more cultural mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves and not be so monstrous for it. And I feel that same way. I was like, darn it, not on my watch is my kid going to have the same experience that I had. And even if I create one mirror in this world so that a kid like my kid can see someone like them being heroic. That will be enough. Like,

let me create one mirror. And I'm referring here to Rudine Sims Bishop, who is the professor emerita at Ohio State University, who came up with this idea of books functioning as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. And so the mirror function is when you see yourself, right? The window function is when you see into another life. The window function is when you see into another life. And sliding glass door is when you walk into another life. But anyway, I thought, if nothing else, for my children, let me not, you know, have them have the same experience of being either invisibilized, right? Erased narratively, right?

Narrative erasure, right, is psychic violence. Or have the only things they see of themselves culturally be negative, kind of negative portrayals. So I started writing this series, Kiran Mala and the Kingdom Beyond, at the bedside with my children to afford them a mirror. I reached back to my grandma's folktales. I was a little scared, but I said to myself, hey, if my grandma could transform those folktales to teach us lessons, I can transform them too. I started writing it for my kids. And then over a very, very long process, finally got them published many years later. The long process was a combination of me not realizing I wanted to publish them at first,

not knowing what I was doing, and then the market not kind of being ready for a funny, fast brown girl protagonist. Back in the day when I was first trying to publish my first book, The Serpent's Secret, I would get this very frustrating feedback, which was, oh, we love your voice, but why not write a book about your immigrant daughter's cultural conflicts with her parents? And I was like, because A, that story's out there. That story of brown, sad girls suffering is out there. And B, I'm not interested in continuing that particular story. Like you can't only tell stories about communities of color that are about suffering or about some kind of lesson to teach other people about our food. I'm not interested

in that kind of story of the week or book of the month, you know, Asian American month kind of story. And I really feel like if in our libraries, we're only telling African American stories when it comes to civil rights or enslavement, or we're only telling Native American stories when it comes to the past, or we're only telling Asian American stories about food or like about Asian American communities as somehow different, right? And not American. And we can't fathom a funny brown girl who also is from New Jersey and also cracks jokes and is a protagonist and who fights evil, that's a problem. I wanted my kids to just have some element of joy in the stories that they were reading about kids of color. And I feel like joy is resistance. Joy is resistance when certain

communities are only portrayed as kind of sad or suffering. And luckily, I think it's changed. There are groups like We Need Diverse Books who I work with, which is a nonprofit really promoting broader representation in children's books. I think that it's changing, but it's still got a ways to go. Last year, I think the Cooperative Children's Book Center said, and these statistics were put together by David Huck and Sarah Park Dalen. I think if you put all of the stories about African-American, Latinx, Asian-American, and Native American children together, all the books that were out last year, not even by creators from those communities, just about those children, there were still more books about animals

than there were books about all of those children combined. So it's getting better, but we still got a ways to go. Yeah. I love that you just said, again, here's a problem. I may not be able to solve it society-wise, but I can do this one thing. And dove right in. I mean, Serpent Secret was out 2018, right? And then Game of Stars, 2019. Game of Stars hit the New York Times bestseller list also, didn't it? It did, which was very exciting. Right. Which is, I mean, as a writer writer, yeah, like we all love when that happens. But also just culturally, I mean, I think it says something too, that maybe like you were saying, from the time that you started working on the first one to where we are now, hopefully we're like the moment is evolving to a certain extent. I'm curious, with your kids now being a little bit

older, will you keep writing this type of book since I'm guessing they may be kind of aging out of it? What's on your mind for continuing to write in that way? A lot of people ask me this question. My kids are 15 and 17 now, so they're very much aging out. My son's going to college next year. Although he just finished, because we've been at home, he just finished the most recent book, The Chaos Curse, the other day, which was lovely. I feel like I've got a lot of stories to tell. I enjoy telling stories or interacting with my college students, you know, who are near teenagers or some of them are teenagers, as much as I enjoy interacting with 8 to 10-year-olds. So I could imagine writing, let's say, maybe YA, a little bit older age. That said, I feel like at heart,

there's something about me that's 12, 13 years old in my heart, I think there's something really revolutionary about kids that age. They are so angry at injustice and they're just so outraged that people could be selfish and they're not jaded and they're so hopeful that they can do something and make a difference and make a change that I really love writing for that age. And I really love tapping into that part of my own heart. And I'm really bad at writing sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I got to tell you. I'm a little, I mean, maybe just right now, maybe I'll learn. But right now, I'm just not that good at it. I'm kind of square. You just got to be hipper than me.

I'm really trying hard. My kids are trying to get me a little hipper. But it's a process. I told you, everything is a process. Me getting more hip is a process. Yeah, I am a long, long, long way from that, as my 18-year-old daughter often reminds me as well. Exactly. That's the thing. We have these teenagers who are apt to remind us, right? Yeah. It's a good thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So it feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So as we sit here in this container having this conversation in the Good Life Project, if I offer out this phrase, to live a good life, what comes up? To learn, to grow, to live with humility, and to love, I think. I think those are the things to live a good life. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This has been an absolute delight.

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