EyeWorld is the official news magazine of the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.
Issue link: https://digital.eyeworld.org/i/387844
149 EW IN OTHER NEWS October 2014 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 This, combined with his enjoyment of working with oth- er people, led Dr. Lam to medical school. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, 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 ophthalmology." 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, which was recently published, Two Sons of China (Bondfire Books). "My goal as a writer is to try to find lesser-known aspects of histo y 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 passionate about World War II and decided that the best way to get people interested would be to write a "fast-paced, emotional, action-packed war novel." In his research, he discovered an American mission that few knew about, the Dixie Mission, involving Americans who were frustrated with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists 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- continued on page 150 Map from Two Sons of China Source: Andrew Lam, MD