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AI: Well, I'm... the other, toward the end of your experience in India, of course, that you wrote about, that was also very powerful and was very moving to me as I read it, was about the birth of your child. And not to ask you to go into detail, but maybe if there's something you'd like to tell about that experience, and the change that, the shift that you made in going through that, and then eventually returning to the United States.

PJ: Well, I think I'd spent this time sort of trying to be, trying to figure out what was Indian and what was Western, and this whole idea of letting go of things and not controlling them. I mean, the, a big part of the Indian experience is just not being in control, and kind of understanding that you're not in control. Which is all well and good until you really are not in control. And so I think part of what I went through with my son's birth, and he was born very, very early, just under twenty-seven weeks -- he weighed one pound fourteen ounces, we didn't think he was going to live -- we had to go from the village to Bombay. It was an unbelievable experience, very traumatic, and so I think one piece of it was seeing myself all of a sudden, in India, on the tail end of this two-year exploration of kind of the Indian parts of myself, and really putting forward how I felt we needed to operate as a society and how we do need to let go of control, being put into a situation where the only thing I wanted was control over my son's health, and whether he was gonna live or die, and what could I do that was gonna make a difference. And, and all of a sudden, spirituality and all of those things were not enough. And they were all I had, in a way. And so that was one piece of it, I think, that was incredibly compelling to me. And then the other piece was that I had struggled the whole time; as I said, I lived very simply compared to what I could have done, but really it was quite luxurious compared to what most people in India have. And then here I was in a situ-, but I had really tried, I mean, I had tried very hard to sort of minimize what I was living on. But here I was in a situation where I wanted the best care for my son, and I was gonna get it, and I had the resources to get it. And there were hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, hundreds of millions of people who didn't have access to any health care at all. And I was in this situation where we spent what's considered a fortune for the best care that we could possibly get in India. We had the top doctors, the top hospital, which are all nothing compared to what we have in the United States, but I had access to that, and other people didn't. And there were babies like my son that were dying all the time, because -- and so it was just very confronting.

And then there was all the physical piece of being lost. We had to fly to Bombay, it was, we had nowhere to live, for a month and a half my son was in the NICU, and the conditions there are completely different from the hospitals here. They didn't have basic equipment in some cases, but they had a lot of the basic heart equipment, the things that kept him alive, but what they did have is this unbelievable care, personal care from the physician. And I'm going through some things, I've gone through some things with my son in terms of his health here, where he has very good doctors, but nobody would take care of him, I don't think, the way that his physician took care of him in India, and took care of us. And so again, it was that individual relationship kind of coming right back up, sort of this modern technology versus individual connection. And he, I'm still in touch with him, in fact, my son and I just went and visited him just last September in Bombay, stayed with him, and went to see, I took my son to see the hospital he was born in, and it was really an amazing experience. And I'll never forget, for all the things that didn't happen, and all the technological worries that we had, I'll never forget his role in kind of keeping us sane and keeping my son alive.

And so sometimes I think, "Would I rather have had that happen in India or here?" And I think, ultimately, I come to here, because the technology is so incredible. But it's not an easy decision for me. And in some ways, it really epitomizes how I feel about my choice to be in the United States. It's, I think I'm happy that I'm here, and I understand all of the incredible opportunities that I have here, but there are some really fundamental pieces that I miss from India, and I don't think you get here.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.