When we stepped into Guangzhou Women and Children Medical Center at 8 o’clock on Monday morning, this public hospital located in Zhujiang New Town, as usual was already crowded. Walking through the crowd, we were heading to Abraham Morse’s office on the 11th floor.

His office looks like any other doctor’s office in China, painted uniformly in shades of gray with a tidy desk and a hospital bed. However, the English handbooks on the bookshelf and the diplomas from overseas on the wall suggest something different.

The photo shows the bookshelf in Abraham Morse’s office. Morse said he loves trying different types of Chinese tea.

The office’s occupant, Abraham Morse, was one of the very first foreign doctors working full-time in Guangdong’s public hospitals. He came here to be the chief of a urogynecology department in 2016, which, as he described, is “a unique opportunity” that has connected him with the city.

Morse said working in a Chinese public hospital while clearly different to working in the U.S. sometimes shares more in common than you might expect.

Over the past two years, he has undertaken clinical care, helped improve surgical and academic training, as well as having taught English while learning Chinese at work. “In the beginning, my colleagues spoke English so that I could understand, but now when they speak Chinese I can understand. Medical terminology is not that hard, for example, “宫外孕” is ectopic pregnancy.”

Reported by Jasmine Yin

Edited by Wing Zhang, Simon Haywood