CHAPTER
8 Never Giving Up
THE GOOD DOCTOR
BABACAR CISSE, MD, PHD, a 45-year-old neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine, is not technically a Dreamer—one of immigrants who are the focus of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The DREAMER legislation was introduced in 2001, outlining a multistep process that would grant conditional residency and, upon meeting other qualifications, permanent residency for undocumented aliens who were younger than 18 years of age upon initial entry to the United States.
Cisse was already 24 years old when he got off a plane from Senegal at JFK Airport in 1998. He had graduated from high school in 1993 in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, but had no other degrees. In his pockets, he had just $26, a student visa, and a piece of paper with the address of a cousin. At that point, he did not know that his visa would soon lapse because he could not afford tuition. He almost immediately learned from a taxi driver that the street on that address in the Bronx did not exist. The driver knew a street with a similar name, but $26 was not going to get him even close to that address.
Cisse had no bank account, no credit card, and no other contacts aside from a cousin whom he barely knew and could not reach. But the taxi driver, an immigrant himself, took pity on him and drove him around the Bronx in search of the right address. They couldn’t find it, so the taxi driver took him home to his tiny apartment, offered him dinner (he ordered from a Chinese restaurant), and let him sleep on the couch. In the morning, they started again and found the cousin.
Screenplays are written about days like Cisse’s first 24 hours in America. But that day was neither the first nor the last time that Babacar Cisse ran into problems that might have dashed his hopes.
Two months later, he was an undocumented immigrant working as a busboy in a Midtown restaurant. But during his breaks, when other busboys might relax outside and smoke, he went to the New York Public Library and scoured college catalogs, searching for a place where he could get a college education. He was eager to start down the road to becoming a legal citizen and finding a job where he could pursue what had been the core value of his family for generations—doing good for others.
Because of his resilience, hard work, and a series of mentors who saw his potential and loved his warm personality, he got into and graduated from Bard College and earned MD and PhD degrees at Columbia University. He then trained in one of the top neurosurgery programs in the world, and joined the staff at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian Hospital. Today, he cares for patients with brain tumors and other neurosurgical conditions, and runs a large grant-funded laboratory performing research.
He is not technically a Dreamer. I just don’t have a better idea for what to call him. Except, perhaps, for reasons that will become clear, “The Candle.”
* * *
Babacar Cisse was raised in Senegal, the former French colony in West Africa. It is a poor, predominantly agricultural country, and his parents were from Kaolack, an inland region that was a common stopping point for traders on their way to Dakar, the capital city on the Atlantic Ocean. Sometime before Babacar was born, they followed those traders and moved to the outskirts of Dakar. Babacar’s father ran a small store there, selling goods brought into town from the countryside, and raised a growing family, including his wives and 16 children. Polygamy is legal in Senegal, and a man can marry as many wives as he wishes, but like most men in Senegal, Babacar’s father followed the Islamic rule that limits the number of wives to four. Babacar was born to the youngest wife in 1974, the third child and the oldest son among six children in that subset of the family.
“So it was a full house,” Babacar recalls. “For a period, there were nine of us sharing one room. We had running water in the neighborhood, but not at home. We didn’t have electricity, so you would have to use a candle when you were doing your schoolwork.”
That schoolwork was important, because as Babacar puts it, “We were a family of knowledge.” Babacar was given the name of his father’s father, a well-known religious scholar who taught the Quran to Babacar’s father and many others back in their village. “All of his children, including my dad, memorized the Quran,” Babacar says. “My dad married fairly late, because he spent his early years just learning. That is what my grandfather wanted—you learn, and then you go out and work and have your family.”
Despite the value that Babacar’s parents placed on learning, they did not trust the official French-based educational system, nor was there enough money to send their children to regular schools. “It is hard to imagine the suffering and the difficulties they were going through just to pay rent and take us to the hospital if one of us had a scrape,” he says. “So my education in primary school was very informal until we moved into a new neighborhood in the suburbs of Dakar. That was when I started in a real school system.”
It was May 1985, and Babacar had just turned 11. The new school was Arabic and French, not part of the government-sponsored education system, but a real school, with chairs and desks and classrooms. (His previous school had just been a room where all the students sat on the floor together.) The school year was just coming to an end for the other students, and the administrators had to figure out what class to put Babacar in for the rest of the term and the next year.
They took him to the first-grade classroom. There was something written on the blackboard in Arabic, and they asked him to read it. He could. Then they took him to the second-grade classroom, and he could read that blackboard, too. They went to the third-grade classroom, and then the fourth. He read what he could there, and they said, “Maybe this will be the right place for you. Stay here, and next year, you will repeat this grade.”
To send Babacar to this school cost his parents about $3 per month—a fee that had risen to about $10 per month by the time he finished high school. As small as this amount of money might seem, it was an excruciating stretch for his parents. His certificate for passing sixth grade was held up because his parents were behind in his tuition.
“My parents didn’t have a bank account until I was already out of high school,” he says. “That wasn’t part of our culture. There wasn’t enough money to save. You worked, you earned some money, and then you spent it. And then tomorrow brings what tomorrow brings.
“My mother had six children, and my mom had to make a decision,” he says. “It wasn’t possible to educate them all. I had older sisters, but they were married. I was older than my younger brother and two younger sisters so I was the one who would get sent to school.
“That meant that I was expected to do really well,” he continues. “I had to succeed. My education came at the expense of my younger brother and younger sisters, who actually could not finish school.
“My youngest sister is a thousand times smarter than I am—she was never second in her classes at school. I’m nothing compared to her,” Babacar says. “There is a very famous girl’s school that people go to after sixth grade. You get in by passing a national exam, and she passed it. But she couldn’t go. She had to leave school and she got married when she was 16. The message in the family was that I was the one. They didn’t want anything from me but to succeed in school.”
He doesn’t think he was the chosen one because he was a boy. “It was more age than the fact I was a boy,” he says. “If my younger sister had been older than me, I think they would have still invested in me, but I would have gone and found vocational work to help the family. Instead, because I was older and doing well, they focused on educating me.”
When Babacar thinks back on that time, he is amazed by how gracefully his parents made painful choices and sacrifices. “I know that they did not sleep well,” he says. “They did not spend anything on themselves. They only spent money on us. They felt like they had to do everything they could to take care of the family.”
Despite their limited resources, Babacar’s parents constantly stressed that doing good for others was a fundamental value of their religion, their culture, their family. “One thing that was very, very clear, throughout my childhood, was the importance of altruism,” he says. “My mom used to tell us, ‘At some point in your life, you choose to live as a candle.’ That meant you light up, and then people can see, even though in the process you might actually disintegrate.
“That’s why when you come in here as a neurosurgeon at six in the morning, and sometimes leave the hospital at 3 a.m. because there was an emergency, you don’t let it bother you. You are thinking of that patient, and you are thinking about the privilege of taking care of another human being, just like your parents did in very difficult situations.”
* * *
From the start, Babacar loved school—and his teachers loved him right back. He was smart, worked hard, and had a winning personality. “My mom used to tell me, ‘The only thing you’re really good at is school, so you had better focus on it,’” he recalls. “The truth is that I was also very good at soccer. And creating trouble at home.”
In those last few weeks of fourth grade during that 1985 school year, Babacar showed enough promise that the teacher helped him enroll in some summer classes in areas where he was behind. That allowed him to enroll in fifth grade in the fall—the first but not last time he would have to work hard to catch up in a new educational system.
The classes were taught mostly in Arabic and sometimes in French. In seventh grade, Babacar started to have English classes two hours per week. Looking back, he thinks his education in geography and history was excellent and broader than what US students are exposed to. “We learned a lot of modern history and a lot of ancient history,” he says. “My wife is always surprised that I just know facts like Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin died in 1953. There was a lot of religious teaching, but more than that, in social sciences. I feel like we learned about everything.”
In the natural sciences, it was another story. “We had no math, physics, or chemistry,” he says. “We learned to count, but algebra, trigonometry, calculus, derivatives—I did not study any of that until I came to the United States.”
* * *
“I graduated from high school in 1993, when I was 19,” Babacar says. “And then the problems started.”
The most common path for graduates of the Arabic high schools in Senegal was to take an examination. If they passed, they would go to Cairo, Egypt, for university studies. Babacar sat for that examination and did well, so Cairo seemed like the next natural step. But another plan was proposed by a close family friend, an older man in the neighborhood who doted on Babacar. He announced that he had spoken to friends in Morocco and arranged a scholarship for Babacar there. Babacar had two options and thought he should not turn down the family friend’s act of generosity. He decided to go to Morocco.
But before Babacar could go, the family friend contracted yellow fever and died. Without that connection, the Moroccan scholarship was given to someone else. The window for the Egyptian option had also closed. Babacar was an unemployed high school graduate with no particular vocational skills, from a poor family in Senegal, and without options or a plan.
“I had to do something useful, and I had to help my mom,” he says. He tutored children in Arabic—earning about $20 a month. Meanwhile, he wanted to improve his English, so he started going to the American cultural center and the British Senegalese Institute in Dakar. Throughout the week, the staff at the American center would record the ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings, and on Fridays Babacar and others interested in improving their language skills would sit and watch the news of the past week.
Babacar could see that there was a big world out there and started to dream big about where he might go next, even though how he might get there was far from clear. “I thought to myself, ‘The sky is the limit,’” he recalls. He started writing away to schools, seeking admission and a scholarship and sending his transcripts with his excellent grades. Many were interested, but the scholarships that were offered were never enough.
“I tried France, and I was admitted to one school, but didn’t have the money to go there,” he says. “Belgium, same thing. Norway. England. I tried them all. But I didn’t try the United States because I knew it was very expensive, and there was no way for me to pay for four years of education in that country.”
* * *
Babacar tried and failed to find a place to go to college for five years. He applied to the local medical school in Senegal. The dean looked at his application and said, “Well, you graduated last year, and we only take people who graduated this year.” He was turned down at the local university because it did not recognize the diploma from his private high school.
“Obviously, these things meant a lot of crying, but you can’t show people,” he says. “Still, when you’re sitting by yourself, you have to wonder, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Babacar’s parents did not want him to give up his dreams of pursuing higher education. “People would tell my parents, ‘Look, it’s about time you sent this kid to work to help you. He’s a full-grown man,’” Babacar recalls. “But no. My parents would say, ‘Well, let him try. This is what he wants to do. He wants to focus on education. We’ll support him.’” So Babacar did not get a job besides the occasional tutoring, and spent much of his day in the library or at the American cultural center or the British Senegalese Institute.
“I decided that I should start teaching myself science,” he recalls. He picked up a copy of the book The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science by Isaac Asimov and fell in love with it. Asimov is perhaps most famous as a science fiction writer, but he was also a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, and in the period before he started to earn enough to support himself from fiction writing, he was hired by Basic Books to write a general overview of the sciences. (The audacious title of the book was inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s famous 1928 work, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Later, Asimov would apologize for the sexism in his title and say that the “man” in the title referred to himself.)
The book is brilliant, really—it provides an easily accessible, sweeping overview of the major advances in several areas of science during the last century. And it inspired Babacar to start reading about physics, chemistry, and other topics. To this day, he likes to read about developments in astrophysics.
He had the curiosity about science of a Renaissance man—but he wasn’t living in Europe and it wasn’t the Renaissance. The reality was that he was an impoverished young man in West Africa with no obvious path forward. “It was very tough—five years where you feel like you are moving, but there is no clear direction. The only thing you know is that you want to succeed in getting an education,” he says. “At the same time, I always had that resilience and that determination that, at some point in time, I was going to get somewhere. For five years, I was basically living on hope.”
* * *
Babacar had a cousin who had come to the United States, was living in New York, and had encouraged Babacar to think about coming to America. “Just try it,” the cousin said. “There are schools that give out scholarships.” That cousin actually paid for Babacar to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) that is required of foreign students. Babacar did fine on the test thanks to all the time he spent watching Peter Jennings and working on his English over the years.
Babacar started sending out applications to US schools, and the University of Portland, in Oregon, wrote back that he was accepted and offered a partial scholarship. Babacar did not have the money to cover the rest of his expenses, but his cousin said, “Come to the United States. Maybe some people here will help you.” And an uncle agreed to go with him to the US embassy and attest that he would help out financially.
It took three trips to the embassy to get the paperwork right. Babacar got his visa on August 8, 1998. It was the day after the terrorist attacks on two US embassies in East Africa—in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya—near-simultaneous truck bombings that were among the first evidence that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were major threats to the US. Security at the US embassy in Senegal was extremely tight when Babacar showed up the next day, and the staff was sending almost everyone away. But one young woman knew Babacar from his previous two visits and said, “OK, come at 4:00, and you can get your visa.”
He now had an F1 visa, which requires that he be enrolled as a full-time student. Next, he borrowed money and bought a ticket for August 30, 1998, on Air Afrique, which had direct flights from Senegal to JFK airport. He had never been on an airplane before. He had a window seat and remembers bouncing around, feeling every bit of turbulence while staring out the window at the wing.
“Oh, God,” he recalls. “It was quite an experience.”
* * *
Babacar had $26 when he landed. He had never seen a credit card or debit card in his life, and didn’t even know that they existed. (Islamic law prohibits usury and gambling, which is generally interpreted as forbidding interest on loans.) He did know about taxi cabs, and walked up to a driver and gave him the address of his cousin on Wilson Avenue in the Bronx, near the Boston Post Road.
“There’s no Wilson Ave. in the Bronx,” the driver said, “you must mean Willis Avenue.” (He was referring to a major road in the southern Bronx, far from the Boston Post Road in the northern Bronx.) Babacar said that he had been writing his cousin letters at the Wilson Ave. address, and he had always gotten them. The driver insisted that Babacar’s address must be wrong and said he would take him to Willis Ave.
Babacar asked him how much it would cost. The driver said $30.
“I have only $26,” Babacar said.
“It’s $30,” the driver answered.
Babacar paused, and said, “Let’s go. My cousin will help me with the remaining $4.” And he got into the car, joining other passengers who were going to other destinations in the Bronx.
Babacar was the last passenger to be dropped off, and the driver could not find a Willis Ave. address that made sense, nor could he find any evidence of a Wilson Ave. Enough time had passed that it was now dark. And enough time had passed that the driver and Babacar were starting to become friends.
“Look, here’s what we’ll do,” the driver said. “You can spend the night at my house, and in the morning we’ll search for this avenue again.”
Babacar agreed. He really had no other options—a hotel was out of the question. The driver, a Gambian, offered Babacar his first American meal—chicken fried rice from a Chinese restaurant.
The next day, the Gambian taxi driver found another taxi driver, this one Hispanic, who knew the various neighborhoods well, and learned that there was a Wilson Avenue—it was a short stretch after a bend in a much longer road. They found Babacar’s cousin’s apartment. Babacar pressed the buzzer, and his cousin appeared. “He paid the driver the 30 bucks,” Babacar said. “And it was the beginning of my life in New York City.”
* * *
Of course, Babacar did not think he was going to be in New York very long. His plan was to figure out a way to borrow money from relatives or their friends so he could enroll in college in Oregon. “But as soon as I entered the house, I realized that these were people who were working hard, just trying to make a living,” he recalls. “There was no way that they could afford that.” He called the University of Portland, and they offered him $8,000 in financial aid, but he still had to come up with the rest. When he said that he didn’t know how he could do that, they said, “Why don’t you stay in New York and try to figure it out. We can defer your admission to the spring.”
Babacar talked to another college, Stevens Institute of Technology. Again, he could get partial assistance that was about half of what he needed. As the reality that he could not find a way to borrow enough money set in, he realized that he had two options. He could go home to Senegal, or look for work, which would be in violation of his F1 student visa. He opted for the latter.
He found a job as a busboy at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, on 49th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. There was another man from Senegal working there, and staff who had come from Haiti, Mexico, and Morocco. Like some of them, Babacar was now an undocumented immigrant. When he started working, one of them asked him what he was doing in the United States. He explained that he was trying to go to school. They laughed. “You’ll never go to school,” one said. “You’ll die here. We all came here for school. That is never going to happen.”
Babacar would not give in. On his lunch breaks, he would walk to the New York Public Library on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. He would go to the college handbook sections and search for schools that might give international students a scholarship. That’s how he found that Bard College, the private liberal arts school about 120 miles north of New York City, had a Distinguished Scientist Scholarship that would pay full tuition. If Babacar could get it, he would still have to come up with the rest of his expenses, but it was more help than any other school might provide.
He sent in an application, and weeks went by. Then one day when he returned from work, his cousin said, “There was a school that called. They said they wanted to talk to you.” His cousin had thought it was a telemarketing ploy of some kind, because Babacar had not told him that was applying to schools. “That’s typically how I work,” Babacar says. “I try to do things, and don’t tell anyone. Then when they pan out, I share the news with my loved ones.
“What’s the name of the school?” Babacar asked.
“I don’t know,” his cousin answered. “I think it starts with a B.”
Babacar called Bard the next day and asked if they had been the ones who had called. That is how he learned that he was being considered for the scholarship. “You did really well in high school,” the Bard official said. “But you don’t quite fit the profile. This program is for people who did well in science in high school, and you didn’t have any classes in the sciences. But since you are in New York and not that far away, why don’t you come up so we can get to know you?”
Babacar and the official set a date, and Babacar left that day without telling his cousin or his boss at work why he was taking a day off. In his interview with the chair of the biology department, Dr. John Ferguson, they discussed the reality that he had not taken science courses, and thus wasn’t really the kind of student for whom the program had been designed.
“Look, I did as much as I could with the opportunities that were presented to me as I was growing up,” Babacar said. “If you give me a chance, there is a good possibility that I might do well.”
The biology chairman paused and looked at him. Finally he said, “I’ll defend you at the committee meeting.” And two weeks later, Babacar got a letter saying that he was being admitted to Bard with the scholarship.
It was early spring, but Babacar kept that news a secret until August 1999, shortly before he had to leave. He had started at the restaurant in October 1998, had worked hard, and had received two pay raises. He went to his boss, who had become fond of Babacar and appreciated how hard he worked. When Babacar told his boss that he was leaving, his boss assumed that Babacar had found a better job, and offered him another raise. Babacar explained that he was going to college, to Bard.
His boss was sad. “It’s their gain,” he said. “It’s our loss, but the college—it’s their gain.”
Babacar thanked him and then went to the kitchen to tell everyone else that he was leaving. After that, he went home to let his cousin know. And very shortly thereafter, he left for Bard.
* * *
Bard College is in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, with a beautiful 600-acre campus overlooking the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains. It was Babacar’s first experience in the US countryside. He soon learned that he was the first Senegalese student in its 140-year history. His memory is that the student body was close to 97 percent Caucasian.
But Bard was generous and supportive in every way. Babacar had saved $3,000 from his work as a busboy. The financial aid officer immediately offered loans to cover everything beyond his tuition, which was included in the scholarship. Babacar explained that his immigration status was now a problem, since he had worked illegally. Bard’s legal team got to work, and—after a delicate moment or two—Babacar was once again a legal documented alien. (In his second year at Bard, he applied for a green card, and won one through the State Department lottery process.)
“So I started school, and I loved it,” he recalls. “I started taking basic math classes—learning calculus, trigonometry, algebra. I took physics and biology. The English classes were very hard for me, and Bard did not have English as a foreign language. I had to learn to write papers for the first time in my life, and I was competing with super-super smart kids. But fortunately, the science came easy to me.”
Babacar spent the summer after his first year at the University of Illinois, and the next summer at Harvard School of Public Health. During the third summer, he performed research in a laboratory. By this point, he knew he wanted to pursue research and also become a physician. He applied to MD-PhD programs, and got into one of the most respected in the country—Columbia University.
The idea of becoming a doctor had been in his mind since that five-year period of limbo after high school. Medicine seemed to him the perfect combination of altruism, a core value of his upbringing, and science, for which he had natural talent. “Back in Senegal, when I was alone, I wondered what I could do to help people, and at the same time bring myself happiness. The answer was medicine,” he says. “But it just did not seem an option. I was turned down by the medical school in Senegal because of my story. Still, I never gave up on this idea. I knew it could not happen for me in Senegal, but once I reached here, I had to try.”
He was six or seven years older than the other students in college, but he did not let that bother him. “There is an Arab poet who says that the heartbeats of a human being are telling him that life is minutes and seconds. So make sure you leave a legacy when you die, because legacy is a second life,” he says. “I felt that it didn’t matter how long I live or how old I was. What mattered was what I did with my life.
“Besides,” he adds, laughing, “Africans tend to look younger than we actually are.”
* * *
Even though getting a PhD as well as an MD would delay Babacar’s graduation by several years, he was determined to get both degrees because he so enjoyed research. His initial goal was to become an infectious disease specialist and study malaria because of the obvious public health implications. He started a program of immunology research that has been extraordinarily successful, but the science has taken him other directions. Today, he runs a large grant-supported basic science laboratory that studies the interactions between the immune system and brain tumors. The goal of the research is to understand how brain tumors develop and grow, and to work toward identifying targets for treatments that might slow or reverse tumors’ progress.
The scientific questions that Babacar found most fascinating steered him toward studying the brain. He decided to go into neurosurgery even though training in that field lasts an average of seven years. Yes, he was off to a late start. He had graduated from high school at 19. He had lost five years trying to get to the United States, and another as an undocumented immigrant working as a busboy. He had spent extra years getting a PhD as well as an MD. But he liked the idea of his clinical work and his research being in the same area.
He enjoyed the residency, but it was hard. “It was like West Point, even worse,” he says. “But I learned so much.” He trained in a prestigious program at the Weill Cornell Campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital and rotated through Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. By 2017 Babacar had completed the journey from an informal one-room elementary school to working as a busboy, to training in one of the top neurosurgery programs in the world and serving as its chief resident, to finally joining the staff.
* * *
While still in school, Babacar had married a young woman from Senegal and had three children. But while he was still in training, she decided to take the children back to raise them in their homeland. Today he lives with his second wife and their children in an apartment across the street from the hospital, where he splits his time between running his research program and his clinical care.
He performs a wide range of brain and spine procedures, and has special expertise in primary and metastatic tumors in both regions. The cases are technically challenging, and the diseases often daunting. His hours are long, but by all accounts, Babacar never complains and is unfailingly kind to his patients, and his work is technically excellent.
On the morning that we spoke in his office, he was in scrubs, getting ready to perform an operation on a patient with a large cerebellar mass. He had been asked to perform the procedure by his mentor, Phillip Stieg, the neurosurgeon in chief at Weill Cornell Medical School, with whom he has a very close relationship.
Babacar is aware that part of his success is based upon his intellect, hard work, and resilience, but he knows his journey could not have been successful without unexpected acts from so many and the support of mentor figures like Dr. Stieg. He remembers them all:
• The teacher who helped him go directly from fourth grade to fifth.
• The woman at the embassy who gave him his visa just hours after terrorist attacks elsewhere in Africa.
• His cousin who advised him to apply to US colleges and helped him when he arrived.
• The taxi driver who took him home on his first night in America.
• The many administrators at Bard who bent rules because they recognized his extraordinary potential.
When we talk about the issue of burnout in healthcare, he immediately brings up his parents, and comes back to their constant reinforcement of the importance of being altruistic, no matter how difficult one’s own life might be.
“I don’t think I have ever thought to myself that I feel burned out,” he says. “And I very seldom even feel like I am getting stressed. The reason is that I am here because of choices that I made. No one took my hand and told me that I had to do the things I am doing.
“In medicine, we are so fortunate. We have a world full of opportunities. You can choose anything you want. I picked this, and I said this is what I want to do. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. You go through a residency of seven years, where you have people above you, below you, and alongside you that you have to manage. You have patients’ families who have expectations, and you have difficult situations when patients are not going to do well. But at the end of the day, we have picked a field in which what really matters is what happens to the patient.
“If I spend 17 hours operating on a patient, doing a big cranial procedure, it often feels like it was just five minutes,” he says. “You don’t think about the time. You just think about what is happening to them. If I am operating on a young man, I feel like I am operating on my brother. If I am operating on an older woman, I feel like I am operating on my mother. If I’m operating on a child, I’m operating on my son or my daughter.
“As long as I am doing the right thing for my patients, it’s like being that candle that I heard about from my parents,” he says. “You have to choose to be like a candle, and light up, and help people even if it means you disintegrate. This is the way I have chosen to try to be like a candle. And I’m happy with my choice.”