| I meant to write an End of the Year letter last year, but…I procrastinated to the point where it's now time to write the End of the Year letter for this year, so…you now have an End of the Two Years Letter for your enjoyment! Work 
My private practice group, Los Alamitos Radiology Group, has continued to grow in terms of "volume" (number of cases to interpret), because even in a down economy, people still get sick. Our group took on its 7th partner, Denis Bolton, in May 2008, which has meant more PTO (paid time off, i.e. vacation). We cover one medium-sized hospital, Los Alamitos Medical Center, and although I'm "on call" every fourth night and every fourth weekend, that mostly means staying late at the hospital and being available on beeper call if the "nighthawk" service goes down (after 11 pm, we send our cases out over the Internet for preliminary readings by a "nighthawk" group of radiologists that work overnight). But there are plenty of half days and PTO (vacation time) to make up for it! House I still live in the same 4 bedroom 2.5 bath house in Cerritos. It's been holding up well, needing only the occasional minor repair, and replacing the motor for the built-in spa in the backyard that I never actually use (what can I say, I'm not a Jacuzzi kind of person). I did install a 58" plasma TV over my family room fireplace just in time for Super Bowl 2008, which has since served me well for watching Lakers games. I still live by myself, unless you count the northeast corner of my back porch roof, which is a favorite spot for birds to nest and raise broods. House finches nested there twice in 2008, and mourning doves nested there twice in 2009:  
I even set up a webcam to take movies of the baby birds; you can see many of the videos on my YouTube channel (yes, I have a YouTube channel!): www.youtube.com/jhemon Asian American Organizations If you know me at all, you know how super-involved I am with Asian American organizations. (That's why there are so many Asian faces in my photos! Plus, I live in Southern California, where there's a lot of Asians). 
I was co-chair of the NAAAP (National Association of Asian American Professionals) National Convention in Los Angeles in 2008, which next to med school and radiology boards was the hardest, most intense thing I've ever done in my life, since it was three days of gala events, 800 attendees, scores of corporate sponsors, and 50 workshops, all done over eight months by a skeleton crew of volunteers, many of whom I had to pull together myself. Planning a wedding will be easy after that. (That's what I tell my girlfriend; more about her later) The event weekend itself was exhausting, since I'm the type of person that frets about how the event is going, and would wander around looking for glitches and not surprisingly finding them. Despite constantly putting out fires behind the scenes, it was a seamless, professional production from the attendee perspective, and I'm happy that we were able to pull it all together. I got to be honored on the field in Dodger Stadium, set up a Friday night reception at Fox Studios and got to help emcee the NAAAP National Awards again. 
Since then, I've helped with the founding of the Orange County venture of NAAAP, and I'm still heavily involved with the Orange County chapter of OCA (which I restarted 5 years ago), and have been Board Advisor for both. I'm proud of how much both groups have grown, and that we've developed a multi-Asian-ethnic, multigenerational group of officers for both. Highlight events for me this year included moderating a "Shift Happens" panel on job hunting and career development as well as NAAAP-OC's Inaugural Gala, which included miracle berry tastings, a performance by Kaba Modern Legacy and the debut of the NAAAP-OC 30 second commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFE7eb40VOc (It was shot at my house while I wasn't there (I was at the APAMSA National Convention at UCLA) and directed by Misa Nguyen (more on her later), but yes, that's my monotone narration at the beginning.) 
After years of fundraising, OCA National was finally able in 2008 to purchase its own headquarters in Washington, DC, the "OCA National Center for Asian Pacific American Leadership." I was happy to contribute a large enough sum to the building fund to earn naming rights to one of the rooms (the kitchen area on the top floor), which I dedicated to my parents. 
Consistency has been the watchword for my role as co-chair of the APAMSA (Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association) Advisory Board. The APAMSA president changes every year, and the officers cycle out every 1-2 years, but I'm always there, year in and year out. This year the Advisory Board was more active with monthly conference calls, and I took a more hands on approach by pulling together an entire track of programming (geared towards residents and young physicians) for this year's APAMSA National Convention in Los Angeles. (Too bad the residents and young physicians were too busy working to attend :P) At the physician level, however, there hasn't been a united voice advocating for Asian American communities and health issues at the national level, since most Asian American physician organizations are local and ethnic specific (e.g. Chinese, Korean, Filipino, etc.). This has been sorely missing for years, and with healthcare reform on the forefront, it was important for Asian American communities and health issues not to get left behind. Last year and this year, we've been able to create the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians (NCAPIP), a coalition of the numerous pre-existing APA physician organizations, to serve as this unified voice. I'm glad that I was able to serve as part of its Steering Committee and now its Executive Council as the organization's Secretary. Acting and Improv You'll recall that I got started on my right brain (vs. left brain) performance kick five years ago when I started taking classes with improv comedy troupe Cold Tofu, and managed to work my way up to its "Advanced Team" level. I've been on "hiatus" from improv and Cold Tofu (I really do hope to return in 2010!), but this is in large part because I've been taking acting classes with East West Players, the local premier Asian American theater, which has been a tremendously enriching experience. The "Studio Lab Projects" have culminated in an actual student production of a full-length play – "The Laramie Project" in 2006, Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in 2007. Last year, we did Chekhov's "Ivanov":  
As you see from the photos, I even got to don a beard and mustache (which I'd never be able to do naturally). This year, our class created from scratch an Asian American version of "Tony n' Tina's Wedding," entitled "The Marriage of Cruz & Chu: Our Big Fat Filipino-Chinese Wedding": 
It was partly scripted, partly improvised with audience interaction mixed in. It's set during a staged wedding ceremony and reception, with food, drinks and wedding cake, and I'm happy to say that we really crammed in a lot of stuff – lots more jokes, plot twists and musical numbers than Tony n' Tina's Wedding :). We performed it twice this summer, and if all goes well, maybe again in 2010. I've also been starring in a webisode series called "Miss Mah Poo." http://www.funnyordie.com/search/a?q=miss+mah+poo&commit=Search (in playing the sidekick in the series, Karen Huie told me to "just be myself." That's good – I have a lot of experience playing the role of myself.) I've also had fun performing in staged readings (all of the fun of performing without having to actually memorize lines) of Paul Kikuchi's "The Long Arm of Stanley Matsui" and Andrea Apuy's "Criss Cross." I love the bohemian-ness of hanging out with working actors. I've even gone on a few "real" auditions, which if anything have made me more thankful than ever that being a physician is my real day job. You spend days working on and preparing a monologue for the audition, stand around waiting nervously for your turn, and the after delivering your 1-2 minute monologue to the director…that's it. "Thank you," and you don't hear from them again. Too much like dating, no thank you. Travel    
Every year I travel quite a bit, but mostly within the United States (and occasionally Canada) for conferences (for radiology or more commonly for Asian American organizations – I consistently go to the OCA, NAAAP and APAMSA conventions every year). A major highlight of 2008 was a two week trip in the fall to Egypt, my first truly international trip and my first two week vacation since going to China in 2000. I'd always liked Egyptian archaeology as a kid, so I was quite interested when a travel agent friend, Amy Tan (not the author), wanted to pull together our own tour group for this and asked her friends to spread the word and invite friends to come. It ended up being a group of 24 people where no one person knew everyone, but because all of us were friends of friends of friends of friends, we got along surprisingly well. We toured the cities and monuments up and down the Nile River from Cairo to Aswan, including the Pyramids, the Sphinx and Abu Simbel. Even though I really dug (no pun intended) the monuments to the point of being a surrogate tour guide at points, I must admit that the most memorable segments were when we were "roughing it." Since the tour was less expensive and a bit more adventurous than the standard Nile River cruise ship tour, this included spending two days on a felucca sailboat on the Nile without toilets or showers, climbing up Mt. Sinai at 3 am to catch the sunrise, wandering around the city of Alexandria one day without a tour guide, and bumming around on the beach (and scuba diving) on the Gulf of Aqaba. What was most amazing though was that I totally didn't miss my cellphone, e-mail or the Internet the whole time. Other Interests After coming back from Egypt, I was inspired to take two correspondence courses on Egyptian hieroglyphics through the University of Chicago over the past year; you work your way through the textbook, send in your homework every two weeks, and get corrections back. Upon prompting from my girlfriend (I swear, more on that later!), I'm now taking a class in beginning Vietnamese with a room full of elementary school kids, which I must admit I'm not terribly successful with; I think I do better with dead languages than live ones since I'm horrible with pronunciation. I won a free course to University of California Irvine's Extension School this summer, so I took a for-credit class on "Integrating Social Media Within Your Marketing Campaigns" – which was more fun that it sounds, since it was all about Facebook, Twitter, etc. I even got my first ever A+ on the transcript, so I still have my academic mojo going (at Harvard, you could get A-'s and A's, but not A+'s :P) Still cooking and baking…I've been keeping an Amish Friendship Bread starter alive since Labor Day 2007, and finally after over two years, I've decided to put it into the freezer instead of feeding it regularly every five days. My biggest baking triumph this year was making a Red Velvet birthday cake and frosting from scratch with a recipe I'd never tried before for my girlfriend's birthday party last month. 
You know I've been busy when I can't seem to find "quality time" to play video games. But I'm still the first person on the block to get the latest installments of "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero," so come on by whenever you feel like rocking out on plastic guitars and drums. And like many of you, I'm mildly addicted to Facebook games, although I draw the line at shelling out actual currency on them. Family 
My family's doing well. Last fall my brother Wymon had his second child, a daughter named Mei, and my sister Won tied the knot to Dan Chandler in May 2008; she's now expecting, with their first child due in May 2010. My dad retired at the beginning of 2008, and now gets to wake up late, work on the garden and read the newspaper whenever he feels like it. He's trying to think of ways to sell his book, "Where Are the China Boys?", a mildly fictionalized version of our family history (I appear towards the end as a minor character) http://amzn.com/1430320958 (Yes, my dad would be pleased that I'm pimping his book here.) 
My mom came out to visit me for New Year's 2009; she's been an avid fan of the Rose Parade for decades and always watched it on TV, and she wanted to finally come out and see it live. Seeing it live meant waking up at 5 am and freezing your behind off on the stands even with "premium tickets," but it was worth it to give my mom a once in a lifetime experience. Parties I'm not much of a partygoer myself, but I do like to host parties since I do like to entertain. My birthday is a big deal to me, so last year I had a theme birthday party – "James Bond," where everyone dressed up as Bond or a Bond Girl…and I dressed up as Dr. No (i.e. Dr. Evil, without the baldcap):   
This year's birthday party was more conventional (and simple) at a local Italian/pizza restaurant. I've hosted Super Bowl parties, "Rock Band" parties and more seriously, committee meetings, volunteer thank you parties and board retreats for both NAAAP and OCA. I've even hosted birthday parties for other people. Which neatly segues into what you really want to know… My Girlfriend November 2008 I hosted the 30th birthday party for my friend Diana Nguyen (an ultrasound tech at my hospital) at my place. One person I met at the party was Misa Nguyen (no relation). She said that she first noticed me because I was busy working during the party (specifically, trying to heat up Bagel Bites from Costco in both the oven and the microwave) instead of just standing around and drinking/talking, and I managed to bore her with 350 photos on my iPhone from the Egypt trip I'd just returned from. Although we kept in touch, we didn't start dating until April of this year…and it's been going really well ever since. And in a neat bit of symmetry, I hosted Misa's birthday party at my place in November 2009 (NOT her 30th, she would want me to tell you). 
(I don't miss being "single" one bit. I remember asking my friend Max Yang which was worse – the overall miserable experience of "dating," or medical school. We both had to think about it.) Despite being the Marketing/Communication chair for NAAAP-Orange County, Misa is a somewhat private person, so she would ask that you get to know her personally rather than me writing all about her here. So if you haven't done so, I hope you'll have the chance sometime soon! I know I'm biased, but I think she's wonderful!        
By the way, this is her dog, Dexter: 
Random Bits and Pieces 
I was groomsman at Max Yang's wedding the day before my trip to Egypt in September 2008. My acting teacher at EWP, Leslie Ishii, is a small recurring character on Lost. I received an award for community leadership and involvement from the Asian Business Association of Orange County during APA Heritage Month in 2009 – it came with a nice plaque and a thick stack of proclamations from local elected officials. I need another room just to hang all of it up. Movies I liked most in 2008: The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, Quantum of Solace, Bolt, Gran Torino; movies I liked most in 2009: Star Trek, The Hangover, (500) Days of Summer, and the Julia part of Julie & Julia. I'm tempted to give G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra a special award for best action/dumbest plot, but I haven't seen Transformers 2 or 2012 yet. I'm still a huge Los Angeles Lakers fan – mind you, I'm the type of fan that politely claps instead of jumping up and down yelling and screaming (Kobe! Kobe! Kobe!), but the Lakers blogs are the first thing I read every day.
Still here? That's it, it's The End of the End of the (Two) Year(s) Letter! Go home! |
