When I was only 3 years old, my mother taught me to memorize and recite poems. She was my first teacher of the arts, and my father was the first to appreciate my performance. Even at that young age, I had a simple understanding of how art and culture affect us as human beings and how we can connect to each other through the arts, which shapes my life to this day.

When I was growing up, my parents supported my interest in taking acting classes and doing community theater. Their faith in me and the professional training I was getting from my theater teachers gave me a sense of purpose and a sense of self-confidence. I learned what artistic achievement actually was and what hard work the business was. Although many people see the rosy picture to our business, I was really learning what it would require for me to become a professional.

I became an actress, but arts education isn’t just about preparing our young people for a job in the arts. I recently talked to some of the kids attending theater education. Some of them want to work in theater, and some don’t. They are learning not only theater skills, but also about the world around them. They learn about discipline(纪律) and hard work and what’s required and what they have to do to bring themselves to the work. They learn how they can be of service in the world through the arts. They learn how to work with a team. By studying the arts, these students are open to worlds and lives that they might not have any other way of knowing about or any other way to connect with in their lives the way they are right now.

These young people are our future. We are passing the torch to them. And I think that’s one of the most important reasons why we need to foster(培养) the arts.

Mrs. Jones was my first patient when I started medical school—and I owe her a lot.

She was under my care for the first two years of my medical training, yet I knew very little about her, except that she was thin, perhaps in her mid 70s. It might seem rather negligent not to know the basic facts of my patient, but I had a valid reason—Mrs. Jones was dead, and had been dead for about three years before I made a patient of her. Mrs. Jones was the dead body that I dissected（解剖）over the first two years of my medical training.

Of course, her name wasn’t really Mrs. Jones, but it seemed a little impolite to be conducting research into someone’s body without even knowing its name, so out of courtesy, I thought she should have one. “Me and Mrs. Jones, we’ve got a thing going on,” went the song coming out of the radio as I unzipped the bag of her on my first day — and so she was christened.

As the months passed, I soon forgot that Mrs. Jones had, in fact, once been alive. One day, though, she suddenly became very human again. I’d been dissecting Mrs. Jones a good 18 months before I got around to the uterus（子宫）. After I’d removed it, the professor came up to me, “If you look at the opening carefully, you’ll see that the angle indicates that this woman has had several children, probably three.” I stared at it, and I suddenly felt very strange. This woman, who had given me something incredibly precious that I’d begun to take for granted, wasn’t a dead body. She was a person, a mother, in fact.

At my graduation, the same professor came over to congratulate me. I explained the story about Mrs. Jones to him, and recalled what he’d told me about her having children and how that had affected me all those years ago.

“Well,” he said, “at the beginning of your training you had a dead body and managed to turn it into a person. Now you’re a doctor, the trick is to have a person and not turn them into a dead body,” and he laughed, shook my hand and walked away.