Eric knows what’s in his mother’s locket now, so he’s asking the kind of questions 4-year-olds ask.
“Where are they?”
The events of September 11, 2001, left a lasting impact on the small town of Shanksville, Pa. In the decade since Flight 93 crashed in a field nearby, the community has worked to construct a memorial that honors the heroes and victims who perished that day, and offers closure and a place of healing to those who visit.
“They died.”
“Why did they die?”
“Their plane was taken by some bad people,” his mother says.
“Why?” Eric asks.
The question hangs in the air as his mother considers what to tell him about her parents, whose photo is tucked into the gold heart-shaped locket. She could tell him that they came from Beijing 11 years ago to visit her in Baltimore for a year. She could tell him that they went on a trip to Maine in early September 2001 because it was cooler up there. That they boiled lobster in a cozy cottage. That they drove back to Maryland on Sept. 9 and were due to fly home to China on Sept. 10 on American Airlines Flight 77. That she thought her parents could use a day of rest before embarking on another long journey. That she called the airline and re-booked them on the same flight one day later.
But even if she told him all this, he’d probably still ask the question. Just as she has, and always will.
Why?
••••••••
Death, under a microscope, is colors and shapes.
Endangered bone marrow cells are a cloud of navy dots. The cells of Hodgkin’s lymphoma are purple pairs of owl’s eyes. Zoom in to see the building blocks of an abnormality. Zoom out to see the architecture of the pathology, the whole picture. Every day, through twin lenses, Rui Zheng views mortality at the cellular level and looks for patterns in its geometry.
The microscope rests on her plain desk in a windowless office on the second floor of a building in the Johns Hopkins cancer center in Baltimore.
“Hemepath,” she says into the department phone when it rings.
Hematopathology is the study of blood diseases, the pathologies that afflict our essence. This is her specialty.
Rui (pronounced “Ray”) speaks to colleagues in a stream of jargon and acronyms. She is petite, diligent, youthful, quiet. A hemepath research fellow, a walking oncology textbook. A private person. Stoic but blunt, in virtuosic control of her temperament, the exchange student you might’ve known in high school — the one who grasped English as a second language better than you did as a first.
She’s up at 6 a.m. every weekday to the trill of her iPhone alarm. Skips breakfast. Kisses Eric before her husband takes him to summer camp or school. Listens to NPR as she drives south on I-83 through Baltimore to her microscope at Hopkins, where she has worked since she came to the United States in 1999. Then, depending on the day, she attends lectures or grand rounds, or conferences with physicians.
The goal: to help identify, understand, treat and ultimately defeat life-threatening abnormalities. Patient data flow across her desk every day and keep her at the hospital until 8 or 9 at night.
She was a college student by 16 in Beijing, then swiftly obtained a medical degree and a PhD in hematology and oncology. Science runs in the family. Her father was a chemist (and a violinist, painter and man of few words). Her mother was a pediatrician (and an excellent cook, easygoing and lively).
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