Were your parents able to find work?

My parents were both professionals in China. My mother taught English at a university and my father worked as an engineer. But in the U.S. they had trouble finding jobs that were appropriate for their skill sets. My mother initially cleaned hotel rooms, then did some translation and worked in a video store. And my father worked a lot of odd jobs, then worked in a cheese factory. He still can’t look at cheese.

And you picked up English pretty quickly?

I had to. It wasn’t an option not to. My parents sacrificed everything because they wanted a better life for me and my little sister. That’s why we came to the U.S. So it wasn’t an option not to step up to those high expectations. So I didn’t go to high school. There was an early entrance program at California State in Los Angeles, and I started college at 13.

How did that happen?

If my parents could work two, three jobs each and raise me, then it's the least that I could do to learn English and test into college. And I was really fortunate that early on in college, I met mentors who believed in me in a way that I didn’t believe in myself. I had this childhood dream that I wanted to be a doctor, but I came from a neighborhood and an environment where nobody around me was a doctor. I literally didn’t know how one goes from studying in college to becoming a doctor.

Why did you want to be a doctor?

I had severe asthma when I was a child and I saw doctors growing up. Seeing someone who could not only help me medically, but also assure me that I was going to be O.K. at this really terrifying time — that’s what I wanted to do.

And when I was growing up in L.A., I saw all the people around us who didn’t have access to health care. My family depended on Medicaid and food stamps and Planned Parenthood and other services for our care. When I was 16 and I wanted information about birth control, Planned Parenthood was the first and only place that I could think of going for my health care and education.

Did medical school meet your expectations?

I was learning the science, which was really interesting and the medical care, which was really important. But I had a patient who was 8 years old who kept on coming in for asthma. Asthma is something that is fairly easy to treat, but this boy came into the E.R. multiple times. And it wasn’t that his medications were off. It was that he and his mother were without housing. They were experiencing homelessness. They were in and out of different shelters where people smoked.

At some point they were living next to an incinerator, and at some point they got into a rowhouse. The rowhouse itself was fine, but the two houses on the side of them were vacant and who knows what kind of mold and allergens were growing there. And I thought, I need to not only be addressing the medications, which is what I was learning through medical school, but how do I address these other questions, too? These other factors that are actually resulting in him being ill.