Liang Gu, Public Health in China, Summer 2013
My name is Liang Gu, and I’ve just finished my junior year at Northwestern. I am currently a biology major with a concentration in physiology and also pursuing a minor in global health. After graduating I plan to take a year off to attempt to enjoy life before entering the dark tunnel that is medical school.
My love for biology comes from my childhood passion for bug collecting. When I was young, to my mother’s dismay, I have caught and raised bugs ranging from Japanese Hercules beetles to the Giant Water Bug that grew so big it ate my goldfish. Having immigrated to the States in 2001, I consider myself a 1.5th generation Chinese American. I often find myself identifying with a culture that is neither as Chinese as my friends who are international students, nor as American as my friends who were born and raised in the States. I proudly tell people that I am fluent in Chinese and can easily converse with natives, but sometimes find myself struggling to read and understand Chinese children’s books (a fact that my 12 year old cousin in China finds hilarious).
China is a special place in that in some sense it is “home,” but it is a home that I have not visited for over four years. For me, it is a strange yet familiar place. I want to take this opportunity to remember but at the same time to learn anew the contemporary China and also to improve my Chinese. The economic reforms, political atmosphere, fast-paced urbanization, and the clash between the old and the new all blend together to make China unique. The pollution, population density, infectious diseases, acupuncture, herbal medicine, qigong, and cultural narratives create an environment that is brimming with opportunities for public health research. I will be participating in the Public Health in China program and I am interested in how bio-medicine and traditional healing co-exist and cooperate to create new forms of healing in China. I hope that through my project, I can help people understand the practice and the place of traditional Chinese medicine in contemporary Chinese society.