LIFELINES

A provocative exploration of public health from an immigrant physician and expert’s point of view.

Wen arrived from China in 1990 at the age of 7. After two pleasant years in small-town Utah, where her mother was studying, the family moved to Los Angeles and fell on difficult times. No jobs existed for someone with her mother’s doctorate, and her engineer father had trouble learning English. Consequently, they remained impoverished. Despite their trying circumstances, Wen praises the support system in the U.S.—food stamps, Medicaid, free public education—without which they may not have survived. Once her mother obtained a teaching credential and her father a solid job, the family entered the middle class, allowing Wen to begin the long pursuit of becoming a doctor. Following medical school and study at Oxford after she won a Rhodes scholarship, she began her career advocating for family-centered care. Then she became health commissioner of Baltimore, serving from 2014 to 2018, followed by a year as the head of Planned Parenthood and the arrival of Covid-19, which she calls a “once-in-a-generation public health catastrophe.” Wen is at her best describing the years in Baltimore, where her idealism bumped up against politics, necessitating compromise. She writes how officials seemed willing to kill a good program rather than eliminate a single feature, but ultimately, national organizations honored her achievements. Unfortunately, Wen’s flexibility didn’t work at PP, long attacked by right-wing politicians and pundits for performing abortions (only a minor part of its health services). PP’s core supporters wanted a leader as pugnacious as their enemies, and she was forced out. At the dawn of the pandemic, she took up her present position as professor of public health at George Washington University, and even readers familiar with criticisms of the Trump administration’s sluggish response will be unsettled by the author’s detailed, well-informed condemnation of its aggressive opposition to public health basics as well as anything related to reproductive health care.

A moving account of an impressively fruitful life.