By Scott Wong

Dr. Barry Fung and Dr. Lien Nguyen share medical practices in Mountain View and San Jose, but they also share a house and a marriage.

In their first year of running a private practice after more than a combined 40 years of medical school and research, said there are naturally ups and downs when your partner at work is your partner in life.

“It’s a blessing, because it’s nice to have a partner whom you can bounce ideas off,” said Fung, a third-generation Chinese Canadian from Vancouver. “But at the same time, your wife is your worst critic.”

Nguyen, a first-generation Vietnamese American who comes from a long line of doctors, admitted she’s tough on her husband when the scrubs go on.

“I truly enjoy working with him, because he is a perfectionist,” she said.

The key to a successful “working” marriage is to separate your professional life from your private life, Fung said.

Over the past decade, the two have been crisscrossing the country and the world in a long-distance relationship while completing their medical studies. The Los Altos residents first met at Stanford Medical School in the mid-1990s and married two years ago.

Fung, who specializes in oculoplastics, plastic surgery around the eye, said two-thirds of the operations he performs are for cosmetic purposes; one-third are performed to correct impaired vision caused by the eyelid or skin around the eyes.

Cosmetic surgery to form a double eyelid is very popular among Asian women, he said.

“The thing with the double eyelid is, it’s not just a matter of looking pretty,” he said. “The platform that the double eyelid provides allows you to put makeup on, whereas if you don’t have a double eyelid, it’s pretty hard to apply the mascara. But my philosophy is, I never push this on somebody,” he added.

Nguyen, who fled South Vietnam for Paris during the Vietnam War, said she went into cornea surgery because she hopes to return to her native country and help Vietnamese who commonly have bad eyesight and eye infections.

Currently, half of Nguyen’s surgeries are Laser Assisted In-Situ Keratomileusis (LASIK), a procedure that involves lifting up a flap of cornea and applying the laser to the eye.

According to Nguyen, LASIK is very safe when done by a well-trained surgeon who knows how to choose the right candidate for the procedure.

“People who have a thin cornea are not good candidates for LASIK surgery,” she said.

Both doctors are multilingual. In addition to English, Fung is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese; and Nguyen in Vietnamese, German and French.

Nguyen conducted four years of research at Harvard and Stanford medical schools before completing a two-year fellowship in cornea and laser refractive surgery at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Fung received his training from the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. He attended Emory University in Atlanta and the nation’s oldest eye institution, Willis Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, for his fellowships, and went to UCLA for training in cosmetic eyelid surgery.

The couple, who also use medical facilities at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View and Regional Hospital in San Jose, moved back to the Bay Area to be closer to Nguyen’s father, a former chief military judge in South Vietnam, imprisoned by the Communist government for 15 years before coming to the United States.

For more information, call 967-7834.