A Scientist is Born: Stories that cross generations

This week we present two stories that give us insight into the birth and life of a scientist.

Part 1: As a 16-year-old, Lily Be gets an unexpected education on the reproductive system.

Lily Be started sharing stories in Chicago by accident in 2010. She never had a want to express herself artistically. This is not something she ever planned on doing. Lily is from the westside of Chicago, born and raised where she's spent most of her days raising her son. Storytelling fell into her lap one day and she's gone on to do crazy amazing wonderful things with it. From winning story competitions that would inspire and oftentimes usher more Latinos and marginalized people to tell their stories, to teaching people from all walks of life to share theirs, Lily has not stopped giving back to the artform that changed and saved her life. Lily produces The Stoop and Story Collider, is an editorial assistant for Story News magazine, and account manager for GoLucky Studios. She teaches storytelling all over the city both in person and online, is writing a book, and hosting a myriad of community and storytelling events. She's half magic, half amazing, and 100% real.

Part 2: Xavier Jordan discovers the party side of science at his first scientific conference.

Xavier Jordan is a University of Illinois graduate in chemistry and molecular and cellular biology. He is currently applying for microbiology research positions in Chicago. He's been telling stories for a long time and is glad to be part of the scene again.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Lily Be

I don't know if, as the producer of this show, I’m allowed to say this but I’m not that into science. I mean, okay, I take it back. Not that I’m not that into science. I get it. I appreciate it. I watch some Dave Attenborough nature show. I love that shit. I love it, I love it. And I appreciate it for like I could take selfies because of science. I get around. I’m going to Paris because of science. I get to drive cars because of science. But I’m not going to tell you how none of that works. I’m not going to. And not because I don't-- it’s just I didn’t grow up with it. I didn’t.

I grew up in a very Catholic household. God did all that. That’s what God did, all of that. And God does everything and does not, right? So you got the job. That was God. You didn’t get the job. That was God. Everything was God.

When I moved out of my house at 15 and in with my boyfriend’s dad, which is a story for another day and another day, I know my mom and my grandma prayed about it. I know they did. I know they were like, “Por favor, Dios, cuidala.” Like, “Take care of her. I hope she's okay.” Because I moved out.

And I was kind of just thrown into this world of discovery. My boyfriend’s father is a Buddhist limo driver and showed me a world outside of my little 8 by 8-block world that is or was Humboldt Park. This man showed me everything outside of what I knew, which was like for the most part: sushi, I found out like I had tasted sushi for the first time with this man. I saw communities like Hyde Park and Korean restaurants. He introduced me to so much the city has to offer that I did not know.

Lily Be shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Cards Against Humanity theater in Chicago, IL in July 2019. Photo by Elias Rios.

And so when I lived with him in this little one-bedroom apartment, this was our daily thing. like we would just go out and explore the world. And then we got a two-bedroom apartment and that’s when his son moved in, my boyfriend.

And again, Miguel wasn’t too big on like teaching us anything, telling us anything. He wasn’t a science guy either. Again, he was a Buddhist so that’s a whole different world of just something else takes care of it and not science. And so we weren’t told anything.

Outside of health class, didn’t nobody tell me about my body. Neither Miguel, not my mom, definitely not my Catholic-ass family. No. they're not telling you about your body. You don’t got a body in a Catholic household. Body of Christ. That’s all you got. So when Mike moved in, at the time I had not had my period yet. I’m almost 16 years old. I had not had my period.

And from what I remember at CPS science or health class, if you don’t get a period, you can’t ovulate. If you don’t ovulate, you can’t have babies. So that gave me a free pass and Mike too to fuck like rabbits. That gave us a free pass to just have sex, boyfriend and girlfriend, no protection.

We didn’t even need protection because I can’t get pregnant. I can’t get pregnant if I’m not ovulating, guys. So that’s what we did whenever Mike’s dad was out doing jobs. And we did this for months.

And I remember, oh, gosh, just not really like... again, health class. I wasn’t hearing the horror stories. Like I wasn’t experiencing the horror stories and so I didn’t notice these little kind of changes happening. My sore boobs, that was something else. The little foop that I developed, that’s all that cheese you're eating now. You write that off. You write it off. We wrote off every little thing, because I’m not ovulating. I’m not getting my period.

And then I go with Mike to spend Easter with his mom’s family. And we go spend Easter at Grandma Alma’s and she makes tamales for Easter. And I love tamales. It’s like my favorite food. My favorite Mexican food is un tamal and I ate probably 18 of these, just shoveled them in. And I ate like 18 tamales, all kinds, and then afterwards we get dropped off at home. We’re living together. Don’t judge us.

And I get home and I sit down to relax and all of a sudden I’m just like I got to go use the bathroom. I’m full. I ate a lot of tamales. Before I could sit down to pee, I get the urge to just blaah, I throw up red, white and like green chicken, red pork and cheese tamales, all in the toilet, just blaah.

And I step out of the bathroom and I look at Mike and he's like, “You all right?”

And I’m like, “I think I’m pregnant.”

And he's like, “What? What are you talking about? What makes you say that?”

I was like, “Look, I’m Mexican and I never in my Mexican live thrown up a tamale, ever. Ever.”

And without question, he was like, “Oh, yeah, you pregnant.”

No test required. That was our test right there. “Yeah, you pregnant, “ and so now we’re like, “But who do we tell? Who are we telling?”

And I was like, “It’s not going to be my Catholic-ass family. We are not telling my Catholic mom that I got pregnant at your house because, no. That’s not going to happen. We still get whoopins. That’s not going to happen.” So we agree that we’re going to call his mother Angie.

So we tell Angie and it’s like she had it in like a playbook, waiting. She was waiting on this day. It’s like as soon as he moved out, she had it turned to this page, that bitch is getting pregnant. Like she already knew. Because real talk, as soon as we called her she was like, “Okay, so you're going to move in with me and we’re going to go see, we’re going to go confirm the pregnancy and we’re going to go and see that everything is... before we jump to conclusions we’re going to make sure.”

Sure enough, it happened like this fast. The next day or two we were already at the clinic. I get to the clinic. I’m just sitting there like, “When was your last period?”

“Never had one.”

“What? Come here. Sit down.”

They put me in a chair. I’m sitting in a chair and a little table with a little paper and I lift up my shirt. And without a test, she's like, “Oh, darling, you are like in your second trimester.” I was five-and-a-half months pregnant. They put the jelly on my belly right then and there, and did the little science sonogram, whatever the word is. The little sciencey word where it’s like a baby just [makes heartbeat noises] that’s what you hear.

I heard my son’s heartbeat that day and I started crying kind of like, “Oh, my gosh.”

And then Mike’s mom is like tears of joy and tears of sadness, because she's like, “My first grandchild.” You know, it’s like kind of a mix for her.

Then we go home and we tell Mike and he's like, “Oh, you are pregnant.” And we tell him like second trimester. And he's like, “What?”

Because what? It turns out I had been having my period. It just wasn’t the horror story that I heard from all my friends or how it was explained. I was still shedding the lining, you know, it’s the uterine lining. I just wasn’t bleeding profusely. I was discharging but I was writing that off as sex stuff. That’s just some sex stuff.

And I had to have a baby in four months. When most people have like nine months to do I had to do it in four months. And then I have this baby. And the postpartum sets in because I’m like, “Stupid baby,” and the baby didn’t have a fault. There was no fault. It wasn’t his fault but I’m mad at the community of people that should have told me about my body.

Science had failed me, you guys. Like no anatomy, no physiology, no like, “There's a difference. There's a spectrum of period.” Nothing. Like I got none of that. And now I’m stuck having a baby and then everybody else gets to go live their none-baby life while I raise a baby.

And I do. I guess, right? I mean you play the hand you're dealt. But I did know this. I knew like, “Okay, well, now this is the hand that I am dealt. What am I going to do different with this hand?”

And I’m like, “This baby is going to know everything. Whether he likes it or not this baby is going to know everything. There is not going to be a story. This baby is going to know the story, that’s for sure, how this baby came to be.” And that’s what I did. I spared no detail. The fucking like rabbits, heard that. He heard all of that. Because I want to believe that because I did that, because I took that moment, damn, what moment, that I was able to then do something different.

I’m hoping that in encouraging this get to know, know everything, know everything that that’s what encouraged my baby to study science later in his life. Maybe. I want to believe that. And as my mom would say, “You know, probably. Who knows? Maybe God.” Thank you.

Part 2: Xavier Jordan

I am standing at room 314 in a hotel. I’m trying to knock but I can’t. Why are you doing this? Fuck! Why? Why? Why? You're not a party guy. This is stupid and arbitrary. You're not trying-to-be-friends-with-strangers-in-the-dark kind of guy. You're a talk-with-two-cool-people-at-a-booth kind of guy.

But you're 20, you look 16, today was a really shitty presentation and drinks are required, so I knock.

Lucy, the girl who invited me answers and I’m caught off guard because earlier that day she was in a pantsuit doing a year’s worth of XRD assays presenting them in about 20 minutes. Now, she is super tipsy. She has one of those tight dresses with like stylish missing pieces from it. She's trying to make conversation. I ask her about her research and she stops me and says, “I am not thinking about that right now. You tell me what I’m doing. You were there, right?” Kind of implying I wasn’t listening to her presentation that day, because I wasn’t.

You see, earlier that day, I wasn’t paying attention to her or anyone. Me, my boss, Dr. Burn, and seven other undergrads from U of I drove three hours to U of C, University of Chicago for a microbiology symposium and we were presenting our research.

It was a big deal. And I don’t say that to brag. I say that because I was fucking terrified. This is my first time doing anything in a research capacity and presenting it. It’s one thing to talk about your work in front of your friends or family at a lunch but it’s another thing to present all of your research for the last year to 400 people who have dedicated their lives to something that you've only scratched the surface of.

Xavier Jordan shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Cards Against Humanity theater in Chicago, IL in July 2019. Photo by Elias Rios.

Shit! Fuck! Fuck! This is so stupid and arbitrary.

And money? Money? My boss gets money if I do well. Who would trust this? Me. This. For money for you? Come on. I remember being frantic in my laptop just going through the PowerPoints, going through potential answers for potential questions not looking at anyone. And I see water dropping on my laptop.

I look up and there's no one there. I feel my hair only to realize that the water is coming from my forehead. I am sweating. I do not sweat like this. I sweat after exercise or from my eyes after watching Toy Story 1 through 4. I do not sweat. This is stupid and arbitrary. You're going to fuck it up. You're nervous. Breathe. Just breathe. Just picture yourself six hours from now when it’s all over. That will make you feel better. Just picture it.

And there I am, six hours from then, with Lucy. She leaves to tend to her guests. She's trying to predict where graduate vomit is going to go before it does. And she's got a lot of ground to cover because this room is huge. It’s super fancy, super clean. No carpets. It’s got like a mini-bar and a hot tub and ottomans and sconces. It’s like just rich Ivy League research money. And my room, the same hotel, had a microwave so I’m not salty about it. I like hot pockets.

I couldn’t throw a party that crazy anyway, and it was crazy. Like protégés in line to get their tenure we’re taking their tenth shot of Everclear. There were people who should not have been doing keg stands who were doing many keg stands. There was Kim Lee this tiny, adorable, unsuspecting Chinese woman who had literally won an award for research service that day who had been chugging out of a beer bong for like a while, like a Viking. It was crazy.

Me, I was slightly trashed enough to talk to some geniuses I didn’t know. I remember staring into a circle of people and I recognize a face from the blurred faces earlier that date. Name, name. Jean? Greg? Greg, great. Okay. Name, conversation. I hear them talking about taxonomizing viruses. You've worked in that field before so I can say something, so I enter. I ask, “Oh, yeah, okay. Have any of you worked with ICTV before?”

“Oh, yeah. I have too, yeah.”

“Do you agree with their sub-family assignments or...” Am I bullshitting? Honestly, I don't even know at this point.

But I’m in a circle. I’m not lonely at the party anymore. That’s a huge relief.

So it’s me, Tony, some other young scientist and Greg. Greg is the most important person in this circle and the most important person in the story. He would be ecstatic to hear that. He is a blonde, blue, tall charlatan who could charm an ox. That’s something he would say when he was drunk. He's weird.

I’m sorry that my impression of him sounds like mandarin from Ironman 3, just if any of you have seen it, I’m bad at impressions so he doesn’t sound like this. But he said stuff like, “You're looking as sharp as a tack today.” Or, “I’m not drunk. You could make me drive into a canal and I'd be fine.” Fucking Greg.

We soldier on, though. At this point in the conversation it’s just me, Tony, Greg. They ask about work. I tell them I love it. I love my boss. I love my work. We’re going to save the world. And then we talk about Greg’s job and his mood tightens up a little bit.

He's talking about how he used to scan and comb through people’s life’s work to pick 2% out of them to fund and to leave the other 98% in financial purgatory, letting time kill them in their sleep. Fucking Greg.

So we ask him why. Why do you do this worthless job? Why do you do it? He takes a second to answer. And, as anyone would do, he grabs a wine bottle off this oak wood table, says, goes, “Bitch got to have his money,” which is out of character, and he threw the bottle on the ground and it scattered.

Me and Tony back away immediately. We lock eyes trying to see who knows Greg more so that they can take care of Greg for the rest of the night when we both realize in that eye contact that neither of us know him at all.

Lucy immediately comes over and says, “You have to go,” and she starts pushing him out. So she's pushing Greg out. Me and Tony take Greg over our shoulder and we start to leave. I can see people in the room glancing at us with half pity and half shame in their eyes. I just don’t want them to recognize me tomorrow because after today’s presentation, I mean, I've had enough embarrassment for one weekend.

Because the symposium did not go well. I remember being backstage frantic, trying to quell my anxiety and the sweat and the breath. But then the emcee calls us up. Symposiums have those. They have emcees. And it’s all of us, eight people going up.

I know the words front-to-back. “This serum will help make this bacteria nonvirulent, safe in future mice models. It clearly, this figure clearly shows that its structures are similar to microfilament isoforms.”

In other words, it’s renewable, it’s reproducible and it forms muscles out of thin air, what we’re working with. That’s going to save the world. That’s amazing, right? Wrong.

Wrong. Because I’m looking in the audience and everyone is looking away. No one cares. What is happening?

Okay. This is safe place. I have this nightmare that my porn browser pops up on the projector instead of my PowerPoint. I shit you not. I do a double take. No porn. No problem. Why is everyone acting like I took a shit on stage? Fuck! This is stupid. Why are you here? This is stupid and arbitrary.

We finish all Q&As. We go through the discussions and the diagrams and the procedures. We get off stage and nothing changed. What happened?

And the worst part is that we have to do this tomorrow again. This is a weekend thing and I already know that they're going to react poorly again. Fuck! But you can’t change the past. Just calm down. You're going to go to this dope party. You're going to have a great time. You're going to get some rest. And you're going to do better tomorrow.

None of that happened. It’s me and Tony at a booth talking about Star Wars: Clone Wars. Greg is also there. Greg is there. His head is trying to hold itself up. He's texting his boss that he loves him and he still wants to work for him and that he could maybe use a raise because bitch got to have his money.

I get a text that the Uber has arrived. We’re taking Greg home. Me and Tony get in the car and Greg is not getting in the car. He's not bending his body. Me and Tony get up. We try to help him. And the moment we like grab his neck he shoots up and his legs go above his head, the back of his head slams on the pavement.

Me and Tony freak out. We try to pick him up but he gets up fine, like he didn’t just slam his head on the pavement. And then his knees buckle and he falls down hard this time.

The symposium didn’t go much better. As soon as we were done, I immediately went up to my boss, Dr. Burn who’s a wise Mr. Miyagi. He's great. And I ask him like, “What happened? Everything was great. The Q&A, the diagrams. Everyone else seemed to be talking good. What happened?”

Dr. Burn stops me and he says, “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s right. You haven't done this before, right?”

I say, “No, this is my first time.”

And he says, “Let me ask you a question. Can you tell me what Stanford is doing at all? Can you tell me any of the projects they're working on?” And I couldn’t, in fact. I could not. I couldn’t tell you what anyone was doing. And that whole day I wasn’t paying attention.

And then Dr. Burn tells me to look around and it clicks. I’m here presenting and I’m not paying attention to anyone. Everyone here is doing the same thing as me, so most of everyone doesn’t care about anyone here.

So I ask Dr. Burn, “Why are we doing this? Why are we running in circles? Are we here to validate ourselves? What are we doing?”

And Dr. Burn stops me again. He tells me to look around a little bit more. He points out about 10 or 20 people, and they're different. They're a little fancier, a little happier. They're in groups of two or three. Those are the investors. Those are the people that matter.

He tells me, “Those are the people that I’m training you to talk to. Those are the people that pay us to do what we want to do. And I think they liked what you had to say.” I didn’t believe him.

Day two of the symposium. It’s just another day and we have to present again. I’m a little less nervous this time and a little more fuck it. I present, we finish, we pack up and, on my way out, I see the most beautiful like three-piece, black and gray Valentino suit. And who in it but fucking Greg.

He is looking fine and next to him is his boss, so we can’t talk about the night before. We can’t talk about him slamming his head on the pavement or me and Tony having to take him to the ER, me and Tony having to wait in the ER and then him coming out with six stitches in the back of his head and him saying, the first several words he had said to us that night, “So, who wants breakfast?” Fucking Greg.

We didn’t say anything because his boss is right there.

So I met his boss, Nathan Clark. The name I recognize from Dr. Burn the day before. And that’s when the lesson sort of clicked. It subsided my fear of these loud and complicated rooms. I don’t think they're stupid or arbitrary anymore. They're here so that we can connect and, more importantly, so that we can create and save that part, because Greg made a play date between our bosses. Maybe he was interested in our work or the fact that I saved his life. Nathan Clark and Dr. Burn go to lunch and, just like that, Nathan Clark funds our research for three unimpeded years.

Time to plan, time to work, time to save the world because of these loud, complicated, stupid, arbitrary rooms that I was so afraid of. And because Greg cannot handle his gin. Thank you.