About Me — Juin Fok-Seang
Origins: Confusing!
People are often confused when they first encounter me. I look Chinese but speak to them in perfect English. They assume I was born in Britain until I inform them it was in Madagascar, at which point their faces light up and we talk enthusiastically about monkeys and/or cartoon jungle animals, which after a minute pretty much exhausts the extent of their knowledge of Madagascar.
Still confused about my heritage and feeling the need for answers they then assume my parents must have been from China. But once again I have to correct them as both my parents were in fact from Mauritius! In the end, I have to put them out of their misery and admit that my grandparents were from China!
This usually brings them some relief and they grin as if to say “I knew it. You are Chinese.” Of course, I am actually British, having lived in the UK, on and off, for most of my life.
However, I did spend much of my childhood in a cultural identity tug-of-war being pulled on the one hand by my parents towards embracing Chinese culture/language and, on the other by pretty much everybody else, for me to be British. The latter won out, due to the need to be accepted in my adopted home, and British pubs, British sense-of-humour and bad food became my way of life, for better or for worse.
It was indeed for the better at first as I was able to fully integrate into British mainstream and achieve some degree of success. However, this would come back and bite me in the bum later in life.
During my travels to China many years later, while searching for my ancestral home, which was a popular trendy pursuit at the time, I met a woman who was to be my guide. However, one thing led to another and I never found my ancestral home. Instead I found my future wife!
Life has a sense-of-humour of its own so, of course she had to be Chinese! It was at that point that the Chinese heritage, the culture and most of all the language, that I had neglected for years, did matter! I could see in my mind’s eye my mother wagging her finger at me mouthing “I told you so!”
Ultimately, how my wife and I navigated this cross-cultural minefield is a story best left for another time. Sufficed to say, it was not plain-sailing and I’m sure many Chinese immigrants who came to the UK in the 1960’s and 1970’s will have similar stories they could tell.
Qualifications For Writing: My Life Experiences.
I attended a large British modern comprehensive school where, more than anything, I learnt basic urban survival skills, which would help me navigate and rise above the somewhat drab, mildly-menacing existence that was South London at the time.
University was my way out, which I grabbed with both hands and I became an academic initially in London, then Cleveland (Ohio) and finally in Cambridge (UK), essentially trying to prolong this life-style for as long as I could before I had to get a real job.
The real job when it dropped onto my lap was not just a job, but my dream job no less, as a Discovery Scientist at a major pharmaceutical company based in the UK. In my dreams, this was going to be a job for life, unfortunately, the reality was it only lasted 15 years, as life yet again intervened and contrived to have the site closed down and redundancy served on all its hapless employees! This unfortunately was common in the pharmaceutical industry at the time and it was not unknown for people to be made redundant from multiple establishments in the course of their lifetime.
After briefly dabbling in a business selling, or rather trying to sell, luxury holidays online, my lack of understanding of the wealthy proved to be a fatal flaw and I quickly moved on to more familiar territory to become a Virologist in a clinical trial company.
Not just any clinical trial company, but one with an innovative twist that forced me to do a double take when I first heard about it. Rather than recruiting patients afflicted with, for example ‘flu, before treating them with the anti-viral medication under test, we recruited perfectly healthy volunteers, infected them with a dose of ‘flu, then we administered the test anti-viral treatment!
Of course, this was all performed in a proper clinical quarantine unit and all the volunteers recovered from sickness before they were allowed to leave. I should add they usually left happy with the knowledge that, for their troubles, their bank accounts would be topped up sufficiently to pay for a decent long-haul holiday for two somewhere nice and sunny or equivalent pleasures that this reward can buy!
There are many reasons why this is such a good model for performing these types of clinical trials, but once again this a story for a different time, should anybody be at all vaguely interested. Here I served as a Virologist, immersed in a world of respiratory viruses, blood, urine and nasal samples, generating pages and pages of data to process until my retirement last year.
Clearly, I have plenty of experiences I could write about and I have the qualifications too; a mixed bag of scientific journal publications, technical reports and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s)! Writing formal documents is hardly inspiring but will serve as the nuts and bolts for what, hopefully, is to come.
So, what did inspire me to write, if not SOP’s?
This stems back to my young adulthood in the last century at a time before emails when people still communicated with friends and family by putting pen to paper! We even had pen friends in those days! Unlike most people, I enjoyed writing long letters and found that the more creative I dared to be the more people seemed to enjoy reading them.
This progressed to writing long emails once PCs started to take over. However, it was only when I realised that a well-crafted email got me more attention with the opposite sex than chatting to them on the phone that I finally understood the power of my words. Unfortunately, this only got me so far in terms of relationships, the rest would take me much longer to grasp!
So that is pretty much my resume for writing and is the reason I am on Medium. I’m itching to write more but unsure where to start. Perhaps readers more experienced than I may be able to point me in the right direction or perhaps I will just write whatever floats my boat and be guided by Reader response. Let’s see.
