53
EW SHOW DAILY
ASCRS•ASOA Symposium & Congress, San Diego 2015
they could who would also fight the
Japanese.
Two Sons of China is the story
of an unlikely friendship between
Communists, Dr. Lam explained. It
was at this time that the Americans
started to hear about Chinese gueril-
la fighters in the north who ended
up being Chinese Communists.
At that point, no one knew the
Communists would win a civil war
after World War II and become the
rulers of China, Dr. Lam said. The
Americans wanted to find anyone
saving their life or the life of a loved
one.
"These kinds of things showed
me how gratifying it could be to be a
doctor," Dr. Lam said.
This, combined with his enjoy-
ment of working with other people,
led Dr. Lam to medical school. He
attended the University of Penn-
sylvania, where he decided to be a
surgeon.
"I love seeing a problem and
trying to fix it and then seeing the
result," he said. "I also happen
to love the eye, so it worked out
perfectly that I went into ophthal-
mology."
After medical school, Dr. Lam
went to Wills Eye Hospital in
Philadelphia, where he was one of
the chief residents, and then stayed
there for a retina fellowship.
Two Sons of China
It was at Wills that Dr. Lam first
started thinking about the book
he wanted to write, Two Sons of
China (Bondfire Books).
"My goal as a writer is to try to
find lesser-known aspects of history
or episodes in history that deserve
to be better known and try to make
them accessible to people by writing
about them in a way that would be
interesting to them," he said.
Dr. Lam was particularly pas-
sionate about World War II and de-
cided that the best way to get people
interested would be to write a "fast-
paced, emotional, action-packed war
novel." In his research, he discov-
ered an American mission that few
knew about, the Dixie Mission,
involving Americans who were frus-
trated with Chiang Kai-shek's Na-
tionalists and subsequently reached
out to Mao Zedong's Communists.
In China, World War II started
when the Japanese invaded China
in 1937, Dr. Lam said. There was a
struggle going on between Chiang
Kai-shek and the Chinese Commu-
nists, but the Japanese invasion took
center stage. The Americans realized
that they needed to keep China in
the war to keep Japan busy, so help
was sent to the Chinese Nationalists.
But as the war progressed,
many Americans did not feel the
Nationalists were avidly fighting the
Japanese. To some, they appeared to
prefer hoarding American weapons
for use in a future civil war with the
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