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The Four-Leaf Clover
On the walls I saw the vivid images of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had been dropped--hollow eyes stared at me from behind the glass. For the first time in my life, I saw what it looked like to lose everything.

I was eight years old when my mother took me to the Peace Museum in Chicago, Illinois. There I saw her name next to a framed four-leaf clover hanging on the wall. My mother was standing 1.1 miles from the atomic bomb when it exploded, and she survived. As I looked at the clover, she told me, ?I was sitting by the banks of the Ota River, clasping the ground beneath me and crying for everything that I had lost. And as I looked down at the banks, I realized my hands were full of four-leaf clovers. Even the Japanese think that this is very good luck. And I thought, how funny, that something so terrible as this bomb could fill the entire riverbank with these clovers.?

After hearing that story, I looked at the clover that my mother had given me, and soon I became very interested in the implications of such a destructive force. I began to wonder what could alter the genetic makeup of plants, and, following the example of my father, an engineer and inventor, I began to immerse myself in science.

While I was immersed in science at school, my life at home was very different. Throughout my childhood, my father acted out in violence against my mother, my brother, and me. While my family continually struggled with money, what most affected my childhood and upbringing was growing up in a home of violence and abuse.

While I struggled at school to hide my family life, and I still performed quite well, it became increasingly difficult to live a double life, attending honors classes during the day and returning home from school as late as I could. At night, I slept with a twirling baton tucked under my bed, never knowing when I might have to wake up in the middle of the night and protect myself or another family member from my father's unpredictable and violent outbursts.

I told no one about the violence until my junior year in high school. One night, I was looking at the bruises on my mother's arms after another ?incident.? I dialed 9-1-1 and handed my mother the phone. A few hours later, I watched my father, handcuffed, being led away from our house into a police car through a crowd of neighbors who had come to watch. That night the police took my father to jail, and a team of advocates helped my mother file for a restraining order and, eventually, a divorce.

By my senior year in high school, my father was no longer living in our home, and there was a family restraining order against him. Despite the order, one night he followed me while I was out, took the air out of the tires of my car, and almost ran me over with his speeding car. He was eventually charged with stalking, violation of a restraining order, and assault with a deadly weapon.

I testified against my father in court, pointing at the same man with whom I spent late nights as a child sitting next to his workbench watching and talking to him while he tooled away on his electrical engineering projects. In court, my father's lawyer yelled to me across the courtroom, ?So you finally got your father out of the house, didn't you?? And at that moment I understood what the people looking at me from Hiroshima had felt. I felt afraid, guilty, and ashamed. I was scared that if I went out late again at night, I might not be safe, guilty that my father was out of the house, and ashamed to show my face in the neighborhood. And, like my mother, who had decided at eighteen to leave her country and start a new life, I decided to go to college as far away from Chicago and my father as I could.

So I packed up my four-leaf clover and headed east to Wellesley College. I had hoped for a new start, and struggled to maintain what little self-esteem I had. While I did do well in college, I was continually living in fear. I worked two and even three jobs to support myself through school because I could not rely on my father for financial support, and I did not want him to find me.

From the first day that I selected classes, I took little interest in science. After growing up in a house filled with electrical panels and a chemistry lab, I left behind a childhood of violence and rejected, for a while, my father's love of science. I majored in psychology and did quite well, having chosen the most scientific of the social sciences, immersing myself in coursework that entailed scientific reasoning--reviewing research, conducting statistical analyses, and studying the biochemistry of abnormal behaviors. During this time, I also did work that helped me heal from my father's abuse, including counseling and support groups. As I continued my service experiences during and after college, I began to feel the need for more intellectual stimulation.

Coming to peace with issues about my father, I realized that I missed science, which he had taught me to love, and three years after college I started where I left off in high school--in a science class. Enrolling in a chemistry class, I was surprised with how much I enjoyed myself and with how well I did, continually scoring at the top of my class. I loved working in the lab, and began to remember how studying science had changed everything about how I viewed the world. By the time I began a premedical volunteer internship with a physician, my experiences of returning to science and my love of service led me to decide to become a humanitarian scientist--a physician.

I consider myself to be very lucky. I have worked hard for the things that I have in my life right now, and I have been able to draw upon my challenging life experiences to foster strength, courage, compassion, and wisdom. I still have the four-leaf clover that my mother gave me when I was a child. It sits on my desk as a powerful reminder of the great luck and beauty that can emerge from the most unexpected of life's challenges.