Actually, i didnt talk about this today, but i actually went to law school, got a law degree as well because i was thinking that i dont want to do medicine, i want to do health policy, i want to be in government, i want to be in the middle of things. But then i took a step back because i realized i really liked seeing patients. There was something about being able to connect with people and making a difference this peoples lives that you cant replicate it in so many other areas of life. Despite all the hard work, thats what brought me back to it. It sounds like something you might read on a hallmark card, but there was something valuable that brought me back into medicine. Thats where i came from, from there. So, yeah. Any other final questions . Hurt. Oh, one more. [inaudible] if so, like what are some of the things that stand out to you . Do i review medical School Applications . Yeah, great question because, actually, i do. Ive been part of the Admissions Committee for a number of year its coming full circle because im at the school i attended. Yeah. I think, again, theres been this concern about focus on numbers and being sort of too much focus on numbers. I think theres actually been a concerted effort more so, its still a work this progress, to actually try to get to know people, the person really reading your application, understanding where theyre coming from, what are their goals, what have they done. So i think theres a lot more tf that personal side thats happening in the applications, more so than what was happening in years past. I think we are going towards that process. One of the things a lot of People Struggle with, theres a whole other piece i didnt talk about, but how africanamerican men are actually i talk about the low numbers of black doctors but africanamerican men in particular, the numbers are really going down in terms of blacks going to medical school that speaks to a lot of different issues. I think a lot of it is about having role models, about people knowing the process, knowing the path. And so i think thats a really important piece as well. So part of what we do is outreach to schools. A lot of hbcus, for instance, in north carolina, and we try and reach out to those, to the students there and try and help them know what they need to do to get where they need to go. Thats one big piece of what i do. Yeah, great. Any final questions . All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming out today. I appreciate everything. [applause] [inaudible conversations] well, thank you. So ill be signing some books afterwards, so if youd like to personalize a copy. So the books are available [inaudible conversations] every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more here on c c cspan2, and watch any of our past programs online at booktv. Org. Next, a program from the recent National Book festival. National book award winner evan osnos reported on chinas political and social landscape. S and it is my pleasure to introduce our guest for this program, evan os, this os. Osnos. E van was born in 1976 and is a staff writer for the new yorker as well as a fellow at the brookings institution. He writes about Foreign Affairs and politics. Fo hes the author of age of ambition chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new china. That wonderful work won the 2014 National Book award. It is the fruit of evans eight years of living and working in beijing. In the book he traces the rise of the individual in china and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. A colleague of mine at the Washington Post wrote a wonderful review of evans book in which he had this to say. Quote in the pages of the new yorker, evan osnos has portrayed, explained and poked fun at this new china better than any other writer from the west or the east. In the age of ambition, osnoshe takes his reporting a step further, illuminating what he calls chinas gilded age, its appetites, challenges and dilemmas in a way few have done. Evan also is a contributor to this American Life on public radio and front line, the pbs series. Before moving tofr the new york, he was the beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Hes received the aegis societys Osborn Elliot prize for excellence and journalism on asia and a moore record ar mirror award for profile writing. Please welcome evan osnos. [applause] thank you very much to david for that, the very kind introduction, and thank you to all of you. Youve heard this from other authors, but i have to tell you, it is a special pleasure to be here with people who choose to be inside on a Beautiful Day to talk about books. Youpl are selfselecting, and we are an endangered species, and i thank you for coming here together. I think thered are, im guessin, a lot of people in this room who are interested, as i am, in theh subject of china. And what it means for all of us. On thise side of the world. For me, well, and if you want to know what it actually feels like to be be a writer in china, its useful to remember an observation by John King Fairbanks whos one of the Great American china scholars, started the program at harvard. And fairbanks said, and i quote, china is a journalists dream and a statisticians nightmare because, he said, it has morear human drama and fewer verifiable facts per square mile than anywhere else in the world. I once mentioned that to awo colleague in the new yorkers factchecking department, and they didnt find that funny in the slightest, actually. [laughter] fair bans said that in 1947 fair bans said that in 1947 and in some ways, of course, the observation is still accurate. But china, actually, has become a much more knowable place, a much more verifiable place simply because somebody like me can go and live this for eight years and, simply by virtue of technology and transportation, you can get halfway across china in a a morning and begin your reporting or, in fact, you can go online and begin to understand a bit about whats goingin on. Re its not a substitute, by any means, for living there over a long period of time, but it is a place now we are beginning i should say we no longer have the luxury of imagining its unknowable. S we thousand have a responsibility to know it. And yet in other ways i think china has become more puzzling to us as we begin to ask larger questions about it, questions about its intentions in the, world, about its seeming contradictions. There are so many things about it that dont seem to make sense. There are things about it where we say but i thought on paper it says this, but in reality it says this. And that is, ultimately, what our responsibility is as writers, is to try to begin to make some sense of it on theou page. I want to read just a few lines from the very first page of agy of ambition, because i think itll frame how i have approached the place in writing. Whenever a new idea sweeps acrosspp china, a new fashion, a philosophy, a way of life, the, chinese describe it as a fever. In the first years after the country opened to the world, people contracted western business suit fever. Fever and e telephone fever. It was difficult to predict when or where a fever would ignite or what it would leave behind. In the village of shaw job population 1,564 theyre was a fever for the american cop show hunter better known in chinese as expert detective hunker. When the show appeared on Chinese Television in 1990 the villagers started to gather to watch detective rick hunter of the Los Angeles Police department go undercover with his partner, detective deedee mccall, and the villagers came to inspect the detective and find at least two occasions to other his trademark phrase works for me, though in chinese and came across as a religious man because works for me was mistranslated as whatever god wants. [laughter] the fever passed from one person to the next and affected each in a different way. Some months later when the police tried to search the home of a local farmer the man told him to come back when they had a warrant , aa word that he had learned from expert detective hunt to a. Why do i begin a discussion of china with the somewhat specific experience of a single village 25 years ago . For me it is about a waya way of seeing, a way of look looking at the place about a kind of focus on the internet changes in peoples lives, the perceptual changes, the things that dont always turn up in the headlines that are the forces that are propelling china through history at this moment. This is a period that ive called the age of ambition and im referring to two specific things. One is a grand National Ambition to stake out some greater glorious place for china and the world and then the other kind of ambition is the force of 1. 4 billion individual aspirations of one kind or another each now distinct and potent in ways that were never possible before in chinese history and if you begin to understand those two kinds of ambitions i think you begin to understand some of the Choices China is making collectively and also on an individual basis and the tension that is created for the country and ultimately for its relationship with the rest of the world. When we talk about where china is and where its going its too remind ourselves for a moment about the past that path that its traveled over the last quartercentury. Two decades ago i got interested in china. I walked into a class on contemporary chinese politics and for me it was absolutely electrifying. It was this apparatchik story of civil war and this tragic force of the chairman and then of course he led china out of seclusion and back into the world and then you had after all the events of Tiananmen Square, the democracy demonstrations in 1989 which at that point happened just five years earlier and i was absolutely fascinated by them not only because they were young people barely older than i was that had built up its intensity at the heart of the party power but you saw very clearly they were torn between what it meant to be of the east and of the west. They had these haircuts and boomboxes and in some cases they carried placards that had the words of Patrick Henry give me liberty or give me death and they also say the International Great party him hat man when it came time for them to present their demand to the leadership they did it in the traditional style down on their knees in a formal petition that they ended up to be his apparatchiks that were still still buttoned up in their suits that you have this sense of the place at the moment of the extraordinary demands. I dont know exactly what he wants, but he wants more of it. We marked the anniversary 25 years ago last year and i flew to beijing in 1996. I loved the sense of this place that was beginning to unfold in front of you when you were able to travel in ways that you couldnt before but it wasnt a very clamorous place. At the time when you want to go out for a nice night on the town they were described as a perfect replica of the holiday inn that he had seen in palo alto california. China is home to about 30 of the skyscrapers under construction worldwide. I should say its the last generation the story of china has been one of growth and a sudden new plenty that we may be having a different conversation but for the moment the thing that has been the defining factor of peoples experience has been the sense that they have of things they didnt have before. This is also a ravenous era of a different kind in which people have awoken with a hunger for new ideas and new inspiration and respect. The boom years hasnt met the chance to climb out of poverty for the first time with about 200 a year in 1978 the average income today is about 6,000 a year but with that has come an enormous gap between the rich and poor the poor and the income of the Life Expectancy between the richest places in the poorest places is the difference between new york city and if you think that kind of gap is a political issue in the United States you can imagine how awkward it is in the peoples republic that is ruled by the communist party and so that is one of the byproducts that has in some ways introduced a contradiction that is hard for china to reconcile so what do the leaders today the people that are running the country, what is it that they wont actually, what is their ambition and aspiration for china . This current generation of leaders in the Standing Committee came into power when i was living in beijing in november of 2012 and i got this invitation to go and see the unveiling of the leadership and thats what it is because until that moment you dont know who it is thats going to be running the country and its always held in the same place at the great hall of the people in this vast building inside Tiananmen Square built by the hands of the volunteers in the 1950s. So i go to see the unveiling and its all man in this case the president and the premiere and the other leaders of the Standing Committee and they come out on stage in the formation of you just saw and the first thing that you notice is the conformity. They were virtually identical in dark suits and they were virtually identical red ties with the exception of one i can talk about. Their hair was dyed the identical shade of black which i mentioned not as a plaintiff humor but its a relevant issue in chinese politics to book and appear that you have many years ahead of you in your professional life but to those watching at home the message was unmistakably clear that we have come together around a shared idea of what we represent and a spire to. There are no idiosyncrasies or divisions. We are one group. You remember this was coming after a turbulent time in chinese politics. Then the leader of the new president who will be among us in washington, d. C. In a few weeks, he steps forward to get his first visit, his first address to the nation as the general secretary in the party and of the party and what does he say . What he says is quite striking. He says he will dedicate himself above all to what he called the great renewal of the nation and he wouldve been would then repeat this over and over in the weeks to come. The great renewal is the chinese dream and you begin to see that it is now appearing everywhere. It was on bus shelters and Television Advertisements and there were songs dedicated so what does it mean . It sounds like the American Dream but what does it actually try to convey . It has a couple of meanings that are quite clear. One of course is extending this period of growth and transformation that has been essential, china as you know is building more airports and railroads and the rest of the world combined for instance. China landed a spacecraft on the the moon and is talking about the mission to mars and the mission to the deepest reaches of the ocean and china today wants more money to the developing world than the world bank and that number is about to continue to grow. But the idea of the chinese dream is also about Something Else into something less physical. It was about trying to pull people together in a country that is increasingly driven by centrifugal forces that are driving in all kinds of new directions, trying to pull people together around a common idea of what china could be to pull people together to unite and this was important to the leader of the communist party to unite the needs of the party to reinvigorate support for the communist party all with the goal of restoring china to the status that it once enjoyed. This was a civilization that was printing books for a hundred years before gutenberg. The country that was recently as the 18th century controlled one third of the worlds wealth. So if you are the leader of the Chinese Communist party that is the goal you are trying to reclaim and that full sense of what china can be today no surprises putting it into greater confrontation and great tension with the rest of the world not only with the United States and also the neighbors for instant around the East China Sea and South China Sea i think many of us have begun to wonder does china imagine itself going past the United States to become the most powerful country in the world . Doesnt see itself as a rival in its ability to influence others and the ability to intervene in ways that we want to. I think that its especially tempting for us to feel that way now when we sense in our own politics a kind of paralysis and inability to get things done as we would like to but i think its important to remember there are reasons to believe the chinese leaders have a sense of what is possible and what is not possible and the simple fact is china today is not prepared to go past the United States in so many ways the developing country today and being the preeminent power is expensive area you are expected to take the leading role in things like the response to the Islamic State or policing the international ceilings which are so essential to the Economic Health and as much as the military is growing and growing very fast its annual spending officially is only a fraction of what our defense spending is in the United States to put in perspective they have about a dozen aircraft carriers and china has one instead of imagining that china is preparing past, it perceives itself as returning to a position of greatness in a a multicolor world, returning to the position of leadership is not something short of being the preeminent power. So that gives us a sense of division of the journey and if that is what chinese leaders aspire to i think the question we should be asking is whether or not his people feel the same way whether they share the same dream and to understand that and ultimately is what has driven my interest in china for a number of years we have to know a bit more about what are the aspirations of the 1. 4 billion people because it is a force that is in its own way a source of the greatest strength and i would argue its greatest uncertainty and its useful to point out the subject of individual aspirations didnt merit much attention for most of the chinese history. The individual as a force in politics or law was always understood to be it to be embedded in a much Larger Forces whether its the family or the village or the military unit or ultimately of course the country and use office expressed in all kinds of ways in the wall but also the arch for instance. I will give you one example this is something that the great writer noticed if you look back at the most famous classical chinese images, this is a painting from the 11th century thats called travelers in the mountains and streams and if you look at it what you see is the only individual, the only person , the only individual here is a horseman driving a cart through the mountains in the lower righthand corner from where you sit and then you compare that and by the way if you saw that when you are looking at this in the 11th century or the centuries to follow the message is very clear this is where you fit into this as a vast beautiful complex cosmos. Then you look at the equivalent of western image lets say the most famous western image of it is after all the full framed portrait of an individual this is the first that we can take credit for that innovation. In china the word itself and had a negative connotation. One of the ways you can say it in chinese means wild heart and to have a wild heart in china was to have a kind of bold ambition of the desire to put yourself in your self in front of others at the expense of others. 2,000 years ago there was a collection of advice for rulers, and the advised rulers said keep power out of the hands of the its just as you would keep a sharp tools out of the hands of the foolish. And that idea, that sense that we should be suspicious as individual aspirations, that extended all the way to the heyday of socialism and it was congenial in the sense that you were to put yourself behind the collective sacrifices and the collective gains of the group and in fact the state newspapers in the heyday of socialism used to remind people that the highest calling was to be a restless screw in a revolutionary machine and the pressure to conform reached its most intense during the cultural revolution and that was the period of course when any deviation from the orthodoxy was dangerous. It could ruin your life and that if your family and that of a physician who suffered terribly during that time he was sent out to the far western reaches of the desert, his wife committed suicide and he was asked later what he learned from that experience and said the following to survive. It was bland and inconspicuous. The frame is less and less useful. The crucial when it limit of the late 1970s when they read open to china. They begin to open a window to the outside world and year by year, people began to leave the collective farms and factories that had so defined their existence and there were many restrictions of course still on the way people live and there still are today but within their private lives they begin to stake out this greater sense of autonomy. Its for the prisoner or the animal and that is how essential the change felt in peoples lives and they begin to return to their lives and they had to make decisions about all kinds of things they hadnt thought about before. In his day for instance it was was immoral and illegal to take a second job to moonlight all of your time and energy and aspiration was dedicated to the state didnt belong to the states and now all of a sudden people have to define themselves and for instance there was a boom in the printing of business cards and all of a sudden people needed to be able to identify themselves by name and things they could do and it was a is a kind of advertising of the south. And you no longer heard people say that it was your duty to be a restless screw revolutionary machine and in fact the newspapers had a different message as one headline but if you must rely on yourself, please your own path and fight and you begin to hear this turning up in the language in other ways, so for instance you a member of the old word for ambition, while the heart. Gradually while the heart began to lose some of that negative connotation and it etched into the neutral territory and continue to evolve to the plaintiff you go to the chinese bookstore today you can find this book which is called how to arouse a vital part. They leach out into the countryside to the plaintiff you go to the school today. My eyes and my ears, my brain and my soul. I often thought what would it be like for the roomful of kids that say that every monday morning. [laughter] challenging i think. But in china today people are asking themselves in one form or another what do i want for myself and what do i want for my family, what am i willing to risk in order to get myself there and ultimately put do i want for my country . I want to give an example of what it feels like for somebody thats swept up in the forces of this great current of the river. I met a woman about ten years ago just out of graduate school. She had been born in the mid1970s and had in some ways a sort of typical experience for somebody of her generation, her parents were farmers and couldnt read or write if she had grown up after the cultural revolution and she got a great education. Shed gone to school in beijing which is a great school and she went to shanghai and got her phd and then at that point her parents said okay its now time for you to come back to the village and get married just like generations before you, and we will introduce you to a nice guy from the neighborhood. And of course he had no interest marrying the kind of person that her parents could introduce her to be me that they inhabited entirely different universes by experience. Historically match maker is, parents, factory bosses, they handle the delicate business of caring young people up. This wasnt left for amateurs and its matters of the heart for Serious Business so people were paired up on the basis of a similar family background either in terms of the wealth or political profile. But as this autonomy returned to to peoples lives all of a sudden the matchmakers were in retreat. Young people wanted to do this for themselves and they really bear bear hug that this sense of choice over the piece of their experience that i want to give you an example of what i was like. I will review and an online personal ad by a young woman who was in graduate school in the city. This is somebody that i found on the internet. [laughter] she placed an ad seeking a young man with the following qualities. No previous marriages, masters degree or more, not an only child, no smokers, no alcoholics, no gambling, not from me. Taller than 172 centimeters ready for at least a year of dating before marriage, sporty, parents were so together annual salary over 50,000 come age between 26 and 32, willing to guarantee eating for dinners upcoming cheek, track record of at least two ex girlfriends but no more than four. [laughter] no virgos or capricorns. [laughter] if anybody is interested to see me afterwards and i will help you get in touch. [laughter] so she realized that there were a lot of people in china facing a similar predicament and shes all business opportunities. She started a company that means beautiful destiny in chinese, and it became the most successful dating site similar to match. Com and it allows you to find the person thats right for you and it became so popular that she brought it to the Public Market and made a 77 million i havent checked this suite actually. She almost didnt have a chance for her life to catch up. She lived in a tiny shoebox apartment and moved to the suburbs into a beautiful villa that the old habits endured and when i went to see her for the first time after she moved the machine was there with her mother and husband and grandmother and daughter and the first thing i saw when i came in the front door was the moped in the front hall which is in the village style i said why is it here and she said i think its safer to have it in the front and i said youre okay your nextdoor neighbor is the swiss ambassador. I dont think that hes going to take it but it was her house and she didnt get anywhere by being casual so of course her rules obtained. Theres nothing typical about somebody like this that goes and makes 70 million by starting an Internet Company that you see in her experience the hallmark of some important things one of course is the expectation that you deserve something of your own design that you can create for your self a reality. Number two is the possibility of can start a business like that. She certainly had troubles over the years but you cant begin to imagine doing it. And one of the things i learned is that over the years as i studied this age of ambition i came to see three very specific pursuits, three things people are pursuing were pursuing some of the pursuit of fortune, truth and faith. The pursuit of fortune is the one that is easiest for us to see from afar and you see it after so many years of deprivation Chinese People people are were finally having the opportunity and ability to try to improve their lot in life but whats interesting is what happens next. As you begin to accumulate these things you wanted for so long, you discover that in fact you need to know more about the world around you. That house that you just about for instance might not be safe unless you know exactly whos in the position, who is setting the rules in my neighborhood or for instance maybe you begin to wonder about things like as you check on your smartphone what is the air quality that im breathing and in fact on a smartphone today in the big cities in china you can go online and see what the air quality is and how it compares to the World Health Organization standards and what you find is that people have a thick conception of what it means, what constitutes a good life and they are pursuing information and truth as i call it and they begin to say who is setting up the rules in our society and who is breaking the rules in our society. This was the Railway Minister and youve seen a whole number of arrests during the Anticorruption Campaign at all of this is driven in some form by this desire to know more about the country around you and what happens is that as people then begin to answer these basic questions about the law law and policy and news and of course there are restrictions on what they can read on the web and in the newspaper they all know that it is what is interesting is that people then begin to ask deeper questions and these are the hardest of all these are questions about faith and questions about what does it mean to be after all a citizen in our society . What we stand for as a culture, what are we pursuing as a nation, what are my obligations to my neighbor . Socialism no longer means very much to people in any meaningful kind of way so what drives me today and in some ways theyve provided people with economic answers but without moral answers and its that people out on their own and we now see this enormous widespread search baranowski Christians Christians as well as members of the communist party thats not just religion and thats the interesting thing in this pursuit of moral meaning its about people saying im going to choose for myself what i care about and what i want to pursue because the material satisfactions are inadequate and i will leave you with an example of what that feels like for somebody who is in the thick of it. A few years ago, you remember when beijing hosted the olympics in 2008 there was right before hand and uptake of nationalism. The olympic torch made its way around the world and as it traveled around the world from its encounter with protests in one way or another and inside of china there was a reaction. The Young Chinese especially reactive and said they reacted very defensively and said what are these people saying about our country just doesnt match my image as a place and in the midst of that it was an angry moment i were members of that was directed at the foreign correspondents and i got a note on my fax machine Machine Network that said correct your misunderstandings on china or you and your loved ones will wish you were dead and it wasnt directed at me personally it was that journalists as a group but there was a sense that people were frustrated and in that moment there was a video that popped up on the chinese web and it was angry and it was called china stand is called china standoff and that video was a manifesto of a certain kind that had flags waving in the wind and they had had blurbs but said china must defend itself against the effort to circle and contained a country and keep it down and i said whom and it became enormously popular and i said whom he did this and i got fascinated so i got in touch and i said can i come see you and i had an image of who it was it was somebody that was in his parents proverbial basement and he said you can see me so it was in my view somebody that didnt have much of a sense of the west and i got up there and i realized quite quickly that my impression was wrong. He was 26yearsold and the first thing he did when i got there is tried to pay for my taxi and was dressed more or less the same way that i was and he was at that point getting his phd in western political philosophy characteristic university and was studying i asked him what is your dissertation on and he said its on phenomenology and the work of Edmund Hershel and he said are you familiar with his work and i said of course,