Passing the Test: Stories about making the grade

In this week’s episode, both our storytellers are assessed and evaluated in ways they never expected.

Part 1: During a visit to her doctor, comedian Angel Yau finds herself answering “always” to every question on the mental health evaluation.

Angel Yau is a comedian, storyteller, actor, and filmmaker from Queens, New York. She started her comedy career (unintentionally) in high school when she ran for school council. From then she knew how to laugh at herself. She founded "Asian American Film Thing", and "Shoes off, Mouth off." Both events showcases AAPI storytellers and creators. She is also proudly in the musical comedy group, AzN PoP! Angel's festival-winning stop-motion animations are where she explores her childhood in comedic but heartfelt ways dealing with solitude, rejection, and alienation. Angel was recently featured in a BBC short documentary on being a comedian dealing with mental health.

Part 2: Scientist Valerie Bentivegna doesn’t know what to do when her PhD supervisors tell her that her thesis isn’t good enough.

If you ask Valerie Bentivegna to describe herself in three words, she would say: tall, nerdy, and clumsy (not in that order). She has a Ph.D. in Life Sciences from the University of Dundee and currently works as a Science and Medical Writer at Cognition Studio in Seattle. She enjoys diving deep into the science, translating the complex into the engaging, and bringing in authenticity and the occasional bit of humor.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

It was a clinic in Flushing, Queens. Flushing is actually really far from my home but it's the closest thing to Hong Kong that's not Chinatown for my parents, so we go to Flushing.

I go to doctors all the time with my parents and I could do it on my own. Like this time, I'm a grown up. I'm writing my own name. I'm filling out these papers. I have to fill out SS number. I'm just going to put zero and move on.

Then there was another paper that I wasn't familiar with. I was like, “Is this a depression test?” I was really excited because I love tests. So I looked at it and the first question was, “Are you unable to sleep at night? Always, Sometimes, Never?”

And last night I wasn't able to sleep because I kept thinking what if I grew up to be a murderer. I just kept thinking that just wide-eyed and then I started biting my nails. I know biting your nails is wrong but I keep doing it and I just felt guilty. I knew I had to wake up early in the morning. Like the whole night I was just like, “Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Don't bite your nails,” but I kept doing it.

So unable to sleep, always.

“Are you never proud of your schoolwork?” Always. I could shade that apple better.

“Do you question everything?” Do I question everything? Yes. Always.

“Are you tired all the time?” Always.

“Are you nervous all the time?” Always.

“Are you anxious all the time?” Always, always, always.

Angel Yau shares her story with a limited audience in December, 2021 at The Tank Theater in NYC . Photo by Zhen Qin.

“Are you doing this right?” I felt like I was doing this wrong because I'm putting ‘always’ in everything, but deep down inside I knew I wanted an adult person that's not my parents to tell me what is wrong and maybe help me fix it.

Then the doctor came and we did a regular checkup. Finally, at the end, he looked at the paper. He grabbed it and I was excited. My heart was beating. He just looked at it and looked at me and he was like, “You don't have this, right?” And just kind of dismissed it.

He's like, “Everyone is stressed all the time. Everyone can't sleep. You don't have this.”

And I was just like, “Uhm-hmm.” And in my head I was like, “He's right. He's right. I don't have this. Why did I do that? Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I needed attention. I don't know.”

So, right away, I was just like, “He's right.” And I said, “This is normal. I'm normal,” and I moved on.

Then as I was growing up, still sleepless nights. I still bite my nails. I'm trying, I'm trying but I can't. And also in my mid-20s, a lot of my white friends were raving about their therapists and I was like, “Oh, okay.”

I was really open to it but I didn't have a job. I didn't have insurance and it takes me so long to figure out the simplest things, like what type of maxi pad to buy. I would be like by the time I think extra long, extra absorbent, wings, generic, floral scent, my period would be over already. So imagine me picking a therapist. That's impossible.

Then I was like, “I will do this on my own. I can make myself feel better.”

So I did it on my own for ten more years until I was 30. And there was one day I was commuting to work. Yes, I got that nine-to-five job. Snagged a job. I was commuting to work and the subway just halted. It was one of those times where it stopped and people had to physically leave the subway.

So in my head I'm like, “Okay. Do I wait for the next train to come or do I go to the next stop? Walk to the next stop? Should I just take a whole train or get like a new route all together? Or a cab? Maybe I should cab it, but it's so expensive. And maybe by the time I get a cab the subway will be already there and then I would have wasted all this money.”

So I got to work and no one was there, so I had that whole thing for nothing. And because no one was there, I just turned on my computer and googled ‘Asian women therapists Queens’. And only one name came up, Cherry Tan.

I was like, “Okay. That was very easy. I just had to do it.”

So then Cherry Tan was my therapist. The first few sessions were fine. I felt like I was just venting a lot. I made sure I had a list of everything I needed to say because $3 a minute, that's a lot and I had to make sure it was worth it.

And then a few more sessions in, Cherry was like, “Well, along with your anxiety,” that we diagnosed right away, of course, she said, “I think you have OCD.” That surprised me because I don't scrub my hands a million times. I don't count my steps. I'm not Monk.

And I'm like, “I do have focus issues. Maybe I have ADHD.” I was kind of aiming for that, because a lot of adult women have undiagnosed ADHD, like Paris Hilton and Solange Knowles.

And she was like, “No, I think you have OCD. Well, let's go to a psychologist to get you assessed.”

So we scheduled a psychologist's appointment and more assessments, which I loved, but it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be. There's just a lot of tests. There was like a memory test, a pattern test and then a reading comprehension test. I felt like I was back in high school, like SATs.

I'm like, “Okay, do I read the passage? No, I don't have to read the passage. I can just keep the keyword. No, I have to read the question first and then look at the passage? What if I don't know the answer? Should I leave it blank or should I just guess? What is the correct thing to do?”

And then I didn't finish the test in time.

But there was also a lot of self-assessment tests. It was like, “Are you tired all the time?” Yes.

“Do you question everything?” Yeah. Yes, I do question everything.

“Can you sleep at night?” Well, last night I was worried that what if I got murdered by a 14‑year‑old?

And then I just felt like I wish this was easier. I wish it was a BuzzFeed quiz. I wish it was just like six pictures of breakfast foods and then you just pick one. I'm like corned beef hash, you have ADHD. That's what I thought. There wasn't that.

So then finished the test and maybe a few months later I got the results. It was an 80‑page PDF on my email. I opened it and it just had summary of the test I took. Then it said there were some observations.

And it said, “Angel Yau presented herself as a 33‑year‑old with slim build and she looked younger than she is.”

I was like, oh, thank you. Slimmer, younger, like stop distracting me from the results. Okay.

So I kept scrolling and then, finally, the diagnosis. The first one is general anxiety disorder, which I have. Second one was specific learning disorder, reading impairment. We'll save that for the next story. We'll unpack that later. Let's just ignore that.

And then third one, obsessive compulsive disorder. It was there. I finally felt like, okay, it's real. This is what I have. That was kind of the first step to recognize that. It's helping me to say whenever I have a random memory of something that happened a long time ago and I'm replaying it in my head, and I feel like I did something wrong or I should have done it better or this person hates me, everyone hates me, and I have to kind of step back and think. It's an obsessive thought thought.

No one hates you, right? No one hates me. I am doing nothing wrong. That there is no wrong. There's no wrong. There's no wrong, just to you. That is still hard for me to do now. I'm still having trouble with that but it's something I learned.

Also, there was another observation on the diagnosis. It said, “Angel benefited when prompted to persist.” And I felt like that was the truth because I do need that extra push to do something.

And every time I go to the doctors, I always think about that first doctor, Dr. Cheng. I'm always fantasizing about going back there and slamming my 80-page PDF on his desk and being like, “Big mistake. Huge. I do have something. I'm not normal.”

Thank you.

Part 2

I am a planner. I make a plan and I stick to it. When I was about 11, I made a plan for what I was going to do with my life. I gave myself three options just to be a little bit flexible, but I was going to be an inventor and invent something that could help people. I was either going to invent a time machine, something to solve climate change. That's how specific I was. Or something to cure cancer. Those were my three options.

So when I went to go study at university, I studied bioengineering, which was as close to inventing I can get. I did a masters and eventually went on to do a PhD. I found a great PhD program that was right at the cross section between physics and biology and engineering, using physics and engineering to solve a biological question which was how can we detect colorectal cancer. Check. According to plan.

It was a pretty cool program. It was going to be in Scotland. It was funded for three years so I made a plan. I was going to get my PhD and submit my work within those three years.

I get started and hit all those usual milestones you do during a PhD. Your first successful experiment, then the machine breaks. You find a paper that just has been published that is exactly about the thing that your work is supposed to be about. And then a new direction and that first significant p-value, all the ups and downs that were usual.

My PhD was a little unusual, though, as well. I had two supervisors because it was interdisciplinary. One who was a biologist and one who was a physicist. My biology supervisor, she was convinced that I didn't really know any biology and my physicist supervisor thought I was a biologist, and neither was quite true. They didn't really know how to supervise me really well very well and they didn't know how to talk to each other. Turns out that if you're hyper focused on one subject your whole career, you kind of don't know how to talk to other people who are hyper focused on something else.

Valerie Bentivegna shares her story with a limited audience at Greenwood Storefront Studio Space in February, 2022 in Seattle, WA. Photo by Elizar Mercado.

So I got really good at translating. I translated biology for my physics professor and the other way around. I really liked translating science, turns out. I even started a science blog so I could translate my science to the world and my mom.

Two-and-a-half years later, I'm still on schedule. I'm wrapping up my lab work, getting ready to write my PhD thesis. I tell my supervisors I started writing. They're like, “Cool. Go ahead.” And I decide I want to write my thesis in a way that anyone who's going to pick it up will understand, because I know my biology supervisor is going to read it needs to understand the physics and the committee members who are also going to be from two different fields need to understand. I also want my mom to be able to read it.

So I start writing, do all the things and, eventually, I send a draft to my supervisors that's titled ‘Thesis_final.pdf’, probably like the fifth one that was named that. And I get ready to move on and do my next thing in my life.

I book a flight home. I give up my lease. I send most of my stuff back to my parents’ house and I'm just waiting for the sign off for my supervisors that I can submit. And there's nothing for me to think that that wouldn't happen, that things wouldn't go according to my plan to finish my PhD within three years, which in Scotland is not that abnormal. Three to four years is typical.

But I hadn't heard anything back yet on that latest draft. And they asked me to come into a meeting on a Friday afternoon and right before I was going to go on vacation for a week. I get a little bit worried and I go to that meeting. I'm in my supervisor's office, which has a lovely view over the city.

And I know that on a shelf there's bottles of champagne that have been finished because every time a paper is published in the group, one gets popped and there's a celebration. On another shelf there's the bound theses of all the PhD students that came before me. I don't see any of that because I'm just looking at my knees.

I am looking at the piece of paper that I'm holding. It's a letter that my supervisors just gave me in which they say that they don't think my thesis is of the quality to submit for a PhD degree.

I know they're waiting for an answer. They're looking at me. Feels like they're looking down on me, which isn't fair because I'm taller than them and we're all sitting, but I just feel so small. It's like they just told me that my science sucked and my writing sucked and I like doing both of those things.

They give me three options. I can submit anyway without their blessing. That's usually not a great way to pass and get a degree. I could submit for a master's degree or I could spend some more time and do more work for my thesis and stay a little longer.

I don't know. Neither of those options sound great. I was going to go home. I had a flight booked. I wasn't going to stay in Scotland any longer. I was going to look for a job and start the next chapter of my life.

Eventually, one of my supervisors, biology supervisor, she tells me, “I know this is a hard decision. You don't have to answer right now. You can let us know later.” And I haven't said a word for like a whole half hour, so I just nod and walk out and go cry where people can't see me.

A week after I had a vacation planned, I had some friends come visit me in Scotland and we were going to go hiking and drive around. Obviously, I had made all the plans and booked all the hostels and bought the whiskey. I don't know. That week kind of just it's exactly what I needed. I think it was maybe the Scottish landscapes. They're so green even though the sky is gray. The world is the greenest you've ever seen in Scotland. It makes you understand why people there believe in fairies because it's so magical and there's like moss everywhere and ferns and Loch Ness with definitely Nessie in it.

And I almost imagine that at some point I, on a hike, ran into a bridge and there was little boulders with moss on top of them like in Frozen so they were definitely trolls. And there's a troll guarding the bridge asking me like, “You got to pay a toll or you have to answer a riddle or you can't cross.” This is just me imagining.

But the riddle was who am I? So somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, knowing that there was a whiskey at the end of the day for me, probably important. I decided that I was going to be a doctor. I was going to do extra work and make sure that I got my PhD. So what if it took me longer than I had planned. Three years, it eventually was five years. Who cares. I was going to finish, contribute my science to the world, that little piece to help people to maybe someday cure cancer. That's what I did.

Well, I did some extra work. I went back to the lab. Wrote my thesis for the second time still in a way so that my committee members, who are from different fields, would know, like be able to pick it up and understand it.

Eventually, I come to the day of my defense, which you have to do a public presentation and then go sit in a room with your committee members and talk about your science and answer your questions. That part took five hours. I was in a room with two people for five hours just talking about my science. While it was exhausting, it was exciting because they were asking amazing questions. It's like they read my thesis and understood it all.

And they were engaged and I was enthusiastic to talk about my science, something that I hadn't felt for a while writing it a second time. After those five hours, they eventually told me that I had passed, that I was a doctor. And I cried in front of them because who cares? I was a doctor.

Anyway, thank you. That was my story.