She's all that

Vyvyane Loh, physician, dancer, musician, has achieved the title she always aspired to: writer

WATERTOWN -- If you met Vyvyane Loh of the Rehabilitation Hospital of the Cape and Islands, in East Sandwich, you'd know her as a physician. If you saw the recent performance of Igor Stravinsky's "L'Histoire du Soldat" at Harvard's Lowell House Opera, you'd know her as a choreographer. And if you've read an intense new novel of World War II in the Pacific, "Breaking the Tongue," you'd know her as a writer.

Vyvyane Loh is all of these things, as well as dancer and drummer and sometime classicist; harpist; singer; teacher of aerobics, Spinning, and kickboxing; and speaker of Chinese and Portuguese. There are other doctor-novelists, but the range of Loh's activities makes her one of Boston's more unusual Renaissance women. Writing, though, is her center of balance. "Breaking the Tongue" is set in Singapore in the early months of 1942, as Japanese forces advance through the British colony of Malaya and close in on the island city. Shy, teenage Claude Lim is the son of ethnic Chinese parents who identify so strongly with British culture that his father forbids the boy's grandmother to teach him Chinese. And yet, Anglophiles that they are, in racist Singapore the Lims must order from the Asian menu in restaurants and sit in the Asian section of theaters. Amid the gathering chaos, Claude is caught between armies, languages, races, loyalties, and ethnic identities.

For Claude and Singapore, as at times it has been for Vyvyane Loh, the enduring question is, "Who am I and where do I belong?" In an interview in her second-floor apartment, not far from the Charles River, she sits on a sofa, one foot folded under her, surrounded by plants and musical instruments. Her deliberate speech is spiced with light laughter and faint British inflections. Even when seated, she seems as graceful as the orchid blooming on a nearby table. As she speaks of her life, she tells much, yet proves to be private about some things, such as her age and personal relationships.

She was born in Malaysia of ethnic Chinese parents who moved to Singapore when she was 4. She attended convent schools in that former British colony, which separated from Malaysia in 1965, and was streamed at a young age into the top academic rank. "It was extremely stressful and competitive," she says. "Everyone had straight A's. We followed the British system, and our exams were graded at Oxford." Somehow she found time for ballet, piano, and the writing of poetry.

Her parents assumed that she would study engineering, law, accounting, or medicine. She had different ideas. "I always wanted to be a writer," she says, "but nobody talks about being writers in Singapore. Whenever I mentioned writing, people would say, `That's a nice hobby, something you can do in your spare time.' "

Her parents thought it would be beneficial for her to study abroad, so in 1986 she came to Boston University, which a cousin had attended previously. Her college preparation had been so rigorous that she was able to bypass many BU courses. But rather than coast, she double-majored in biology and classics -- Latin and ancient Greek -- "so I would be doing something with my time," she says.

Under strong parental pressure, she went to medical school, also at BU. She says, "I was a little angry, because it wasn't something I wanted to do. But I felt I had to, for my parents." Restive at the dryness of some lectures, she got a job as an air courier and traveled the world. She would study on airplanes and in hotels in foreign cities where she knew no one, and once she barely got home in time to take an exam, bursting into the classroom with her luggage. Her feelings about medicine changed in her last two years, when her clinical training began at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center).

"I loved City Hospital," Loh says. "The residents were wonderful, the teaching staff was amazing, and the cases were challenging. I loved being on the ward, being with patients." Still she traveled, taking overseas electives in Katmandu, Nepal, and in Brazil, at one time in a hospital near the mouth of the Amazon River. There a new passion bloomed: Afro-Brazilian dance.

"I compressed all my vacation time into the last couple of months of med school," she recalls, "and told them, `Mail me my degree,' and went to Brazil to study dance and drumming until it was time to come back for residency." She graduated in 1993, then followed with three years of residency at Newton-Wellesley Hospital and a year in a busy private practice in Newton.

Her old dream of writing had quickened. During her Newton-Wellesley years she attended writing workshops and decided to seek a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing. In 1999, she was accepted to a prestigious long-distance program designed for people with busy lives, at Warren Wilson College, in Asheville, N.C. Her teachers included novelists Claire Messud and Andrea Barrett.

"She showed me `a story I'm working on,' " says Messud, who is living in Somerville this year. "I recall saying to her, `This is bigger than a story.' It was the only time I ever read something very early and had the feeling, `All she needs to do is keep going.' It developed into this extraordinary book."

While she was still a resident at Newton-Wellesley, Loh would write fragments, in fragments of time. "I would write on the night shift, when it was quiet," she says, "in a notebook, index cards, hospital progress notes, whatever was available. My fellow residents would tease me that my physical histories were seven pages long -- the length of a short story." Then and later, after she ended full-time work as a doctor and subsisted on part-time jobs (she had four at one point), she wrote "in gyms, cafes, in lounges, in my parked car. There wasn't the luxury of waiting for the right time or place."

The novel, which Loh dedicates to her husband, Mauricio Toledo, jumps back and ahead in time, with many short segments. "I wrote without any planning," she says. "I had a sense of where it was going. I would be waiting between appointments or jobs, and would shuffle the cards and pick one -- `OK, this is what I'm writing now.' "

Despite the fragmented early drafts, her advisers at Warren Wilson speak as highly of her as she does of them. By telephone from her upstate New York home, Andrea Barrett calls Loh's book, "a sophisticated novel structurally -- polyphonic, with multiple points of view, a huge cast of characters, large historical circumstances. That it's a first novel makes it remarkable."

Loh graduated from Warren Wilson in 2001 with a completed draft, and found an agent: Brettne Bloom of Boston-based Kneerim & Williams. Bloom sent it to Carol Houck Smith of W.W. Norton, who accepted it.

"I was amazed and fascinated by the book," Smith says, "but it was challenging. It was more impressionistic than it is now, with more ectoplasmic voices. It needed more attention to narrative, a narrative that moved." It was the first time, Smith says, that she has signed a book (in fact, a two-book contract) before meeting the author in person.

The story, says Loh, "grew out of my experience of growing up in Singapore at the time when it was emerging out of colonial rule. On the one hand, there was a need to separate ourselves from the British; on the other, a tendency to refer to the British as a standard for education, culture, levels of sophistication. When I first came to America to study, it was viewed as a second-class place -- not that the standards were worse, but that it wasn't England."

But now, Vyvyane Loh has built a life in Boston and feels rooted here. While she ponders her next novel, she will remain a doctor. (She works part-time on Cape Cod and also at Health Management Resources, a clinic in Newton.) She likes being a doctor, and besides, feels a need to, as it were, honor her privilege. She explains, "I took a place" -- that is, to abandon medicine would be to waste a medical school slot that someone else might have taken.

At the same time, she leads a writer's group and teaches dance and choreography. Her own dance company, Carmina Lucida, will soon begin rehearsing for a summer performance. Recently she choreographed the spring show of the Wellesley College Dancers, and she is choreographing a piece about novelist Virginia Woolf, based on Woolf's writings. Cambridge-based producer Caleb Hammond, who asked Loh to do the work and calls her "an incredible choreographer," hopes to stage it in May or June.

For Vyvyane Loh, dance, music, and writing go together. She explains: "I have to write -- it's part of who I am, it makes me whole, makes me sane. Sometimes, as a writer, you can be too much in your head, and expressing myself through my body helps me stay grounded. It was a perfect balance -- if I stopped dancing, the writing suffered. Once I got my body moving, the writing would move along."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.