Get to Know ... Fu-Ying (May 2006)

Fu-Ying Lee-Lam. The name makes an impression. Short sounds laced together by hyphens, by layers of life. The first part means “flower after the rain”, a traditional Cantonese name given to a petite, rose-cheeked girl, the eighth and last child of the Lee family. Lam came with marriage, 13 years ago. She met her soul mate as a fellow traveler for part of her three-month incursion through eight Asian countries in the early 90s.

Fu, as every body calls her now, was born in Hong-Kong and moved with her hole family, at age three, to “the ghetto”, as she describes the lower east side Manhattan. “We have the classic immigrant history,” she says while describing the journey to America for better opportunities in life. Her father was a fireman and her mother used to sell vegetables in the market. She recalls her mother, currently the director of a Chinese opera school, telling how an uncle decided to sponsor them and how his wife “changed her mind about it when was too late.” The thought still makes Fu’s skin to crawl, but she sees meaning in telling the story as an example of the struggle they all lived to build a new beginning. “It was ruff,” she sighs in her New York accent, listing tells of robberies, butcher knifes used as self defense and life or death fights for nothing more than pocket change and pieces of gum. “I will never forget the day when we heard a thump in the front door and it was my Dad knocking in despair with the back of his feet. He had his mouth muffled and was being attacked. He escaped by luck.”

Her family entrepreneur abilities moved them out of that situation. They all worked on the garment industry, “sweat shops, really,” she says. Until they bought a home in Queens. When Fu entered third grade, her family acquired their own production line to work for either bigger factories or small business such as restaurants. “The first three children had no choice but to work. Yet five of us went to college.”

Fu grew up liking volleyball and French language. “Although I am fluent in Cantonese, I do write in French much better,” she says in a shy voice as if her multiple talents require an apology. She had the chance to visit France and to know Paris well. But her biggest traveler impression was in mainland China : “all that history, all that people and the Terracotta sculptures in Xian.”

She never though of a career choice until she worked in a neighborhood pharmacy store during high school. “I found a drug instruction book and, out of the blue, I quizzed the pharmacist. The fact that she knew all the medicines made an impression on me,” Fu explains. “I guess I wanted to be that knowledgeable about something too.”

And so she is. On medications and life. Fu is one of E1 pharmacists.

She bridged her way through two cultures, two American coasts, and millions of pharmacologic choices for stem cell recipients. She has three girls, two are twins, and a fun life with her husband that fully recovered from a “Christopher Rives-like horse back riding accident” six-month after their marriage. “It was more than a month in a hospital. It was very scary.” Yet she keeps insisting that her life is “not that interesting…what do I have to tell?” Our guess is that the secret is in the layers. On all those hyphens. Fu-Ying Lee-Lam. She makes even a bigger impression than her name does.

Get to know ... Jenny Llacer (Feb. 2006)

We’re all used to seeing Jenny Llacer sailing smoothly across the BMT unit from one acutely ill patient to another. We just never knew she could also sail between Fiji and Tonga.

Jenny’s done just that, not to mention the Mediterranean and the Panama Canal, in her family’s glamour-free boat. She navigated along with her step-father and other two or three crew.

Along the way, she rejoiced in four-hour sentinel watches on the most wide-open brilliant seas – no call light rings, no beeping IV pumps, no cardiac monitor alarms.

Jenny has always been a coastal girl. She grew up chasing crabs in the West Coast beaches of Southern California and had her share of ocean views when her father’s physics research moved the family to Long Island. There were frequent childhood visits to her father’s native Spain and her mother’s homeland in The Philippines. Back on this coast, Jenny studied biology at UC-Santa Cruz – “a radical surf town, a little empty-headed and a little politically engaged. I felt comfortable there.’’

But she felt a little isolated in her first career, cloning orchids for a commercial grower. Her favorite was a three-pedaled, fluorescent orchid from the mountains of South American called Masdevallia. The job required Jenny to spend hours cultivating orchid seeds, as tiny as dust particles, in sterile dishes. Lots of labor, little pay, but very peaceful. Her work among the orchids allowed Jenny many hours of meditation and sailing through the green. “I walked through a fantasy,’’ she recalled, “but the plants didn’t talk back. They were slow growing and I wanted to run.’’

So Jenny headed east again, earning her second bachelor’s, this time in nursing in New Jersey. With a goal to work with elderly patients, to soak up their wisdom, she accepted a job in oncology at the University of Pennsylvania. Then her husband-to-be Paul’s desire to head back to the West Coast got the new couple as far as Chicago for another stop – and a wedding in which Jenny donned a $39 white summer dress she found on sale just before the ceremony.

The couple and their daughter Isabel moved to California in 1999. Jenny’s been working at Stanford since then. Now that her daughter is 7 years old, Jenny is nurturing dreams to sail again, this time with husband and daughter in tow – “if Trisha lets me go,’’ she says with a witty smile, for a taste of adventure this summer to explore French Polynesia.