Ilene (I.W.) Gregorio
I don’t remember exactly when I started hating my name, but I suspect it happened, like so many childhood traumas, on the school bus. It may have been the first time a kid called me “Ching-Chong Wong.” Or the time a girl I had never thought of as particularly mean felt compelled to tell me the old joke: “How does a Chinese person name their kid? By throwing forks down a stairway.” More likely, it was any of the thousand times someone made a pun about me going the “Wong way.”
Even as a child, I understood that my name was not my identity, but it sure as heck was a prism through which people saw me.
As a teenager, I called bullshit on Shakespeare’s famous quote: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” My name was not some meaningless signifier. It wasn’t a mere collection of letters. It was a brand, labeling me as an “other” in my otherwise Wonder Bread–white Central New York town.
I learned, over the years, that my name brings with it certain expectations.
First, there are the obvious physical expectations: the color of my hair, the shape of my eyes, my body type. Then there are the expectations of what subjects I excel at in school, which ones I’m hopeless at, and whether I play an instrument. It brings with it assumptions about my work ethic, how I will interact with people, even my financial savvy.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t ways the specific expectations of being Asian benefited me. I will never have an airline employee ask for my medical license when I raise my hand to answer a call for a doctor on a flight. I’ll never be denied a loan because of the color of my skin. I don’t think I’ve ever walked down a sidewalk and had a stranger cross the street to avoid me.
Sometimes I don’t know if it’s better when I meet these expectations, or worse, because it makes me wonder how much choice I had in the paths I chose, in the person I’ve become. Have I grown into the shape of my name, the way a tree’s roots spread and become molded into the shape of the pot in which it sits?
I graduated from college a walking cliché: an Ivy League–educated, former-violin-playing Asian-American student heading to medical school. One could say that I fulfilled the destiny of my name; my graduation cards should have said “Congratulations! You have met expectations!”
This is not to say that I fit perfectly into the stereotype. In some ways I am incredibly lazy. I rarely practiced that previously mentioned violin of my own volition. I am at times careless with my money. I’m a horrible daughter who never has time to call her family. I love eating to the point where I have a bit of a muffin top, but I can barely cook. I suck at statistics, and my husband handles all the IT in our household.
The writer in me would say that idiosyncrasies like these are what make me rounded, fully fleshed out, and human. My analytical side accepts this without question, even as my inner child hesitates. Because when the expectation is to fit perfectly into a mold, little defects can make you feel, well, defective.
Food, for instance: I love it in a primal, uncontrollable way that is best exhibited at dim sum restaurants, where I’ve been known to lunge out of my seat to flag down a tray of pineapple custard buns. Yet my entire life, this source of joy has been tainted with guilt.
Each year, when my mother comes to visit from Taiwan, one of the first things my husband and I do is take bets on how many minutes it will take for my mom to make a comment about how our weight has changed since the last time she saw us. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to her signature move—reaching out to grab and fondle the flab under my upper arm to get a sense of whether I’ve been exercising.
The little things my mother would do to manage my body never made sense until the first time I went to China, when I was dismayed to note that I could only fit into “extra-large” clothing. There I was, literally not fitting into the pattern that was meant for me.
My mom’s obsession with my weight made further sense in the context of the expectations placed upon the literal bodies of Asian women, like the time I went to get The Joy Luck Club at a video store and the checkout clerk said, smirking, “Good movie. Really attractive women.” It made sense the first time a friend warned me about a guy who had an eye on me because of his Asian fetish. “He totally has Yellow Fever,” she said, explaining that some guys like Asian women because they’re “exotic” and submissive. As I’ve gotten older and learned more about American military history in the Pacific, I’ve come to understand how these stereotypes came to pass (think Miss Saigon and Memoirs of a Geisha), and also how insidiously wrong they are. But when I was a teenager, all I could process was, “Oh, they’re kind of right.” After all, “student is a joy to teach” was the most common comment on my report card, followed closely by “should speak up more in class.” I was polite. I was quiet and deferential. I hated it when people were mad at me (still do) and did everything I could to appease and to avoid conflict.
Even—especially—conflicts within myself.
The thing is, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. Growing up, books were my best friends, my refuge from the loneliness and subtle but omnipresent racism in my conservative town. I have always known that I wanted to be a friend to others through story.
Problem was, Chinese girls weren’t writers. With one notable exception (Bette Bao Lord’s In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson), all of my favorite books growing up were written by white authors. Every. Single. One.
Medicine, on the other hand, was a fully approved career choice, one pursued by my grandfather, my aunt, and two uncles (one on each side) before me. As was my MO, I tried to compromise. Even though I continued writing, I told myself that I could do science writing—that I could follow in the steps of the many physician writers in history (Chekhov! Michael Crichton! Richard Selzer!) to combine my passions. It was a good plan.
The most insidious part of being a model minority is the contortion act, which is sometimes more evident to others than to yourself. When I was applying to medical school, one of my career counselors told me point-blank: “You want to make sure you’re not putting a square peg into a round hole.” To this day I’m not sure what tipped her off, unless it was my over-rehearsed justification for why I wanted to be a doctor (I wanted to help people, I loved working with people, insert romantic notion of medicine here ____).
Looking back at myself, I can see how badly I was straining for an identity, but how scared I was to invent one that didn’t include medicine. I wanted so much to conform to expectations that I brainwashed myself.
This is not to say that going to medical school was, in the end, a bad decision. I enjoy many aspects of medicine. I love most of my patients. Gainful employment and job security are good for mental health. But putting one’s dreams into a straitjacket? Not so much.
Langston Hughes asked what happened about dreams deferred, and all of his answers have fit me at one point or another: Drying up like a raisin in the sun. Festering like a sore. Crusting and sugaring over. Sagging like a heavy load. Exploding.
Explosions are by their nature sudden, violent things, but like all expenditures of energy, there’s work leading up to the big bang. There’s a pressure buildup, a storage of potential energy.
In my life I’ve had sparks of rebellion against expectation, but they were almost always deeply internal. I read fantasy novels instead of the scientists’ biographies my family gave me, buying comic books with my birthday money and hiding them underneath my bed. My father would try to coax me into listening to his old LPs of classical music, but I ignored him and listened to mixtapes of Broadway musicals. Then, in possibly one of my most significant transgressions—at least in the eyes of a family that viewed athletic activity as a complete waste of time—I became a sports fan.
Worse, I chose ice hockey, which is arguably the sport least likely to fit the sensibility of someone who’s grown up as the model minority. My introduction to hockey was the scene in Superfudge where Peter Hatcher’s friend talks about wanting to go to a game so he can see blood bounce on the ice, and of course the stereotype of the sport is that it’s a violent, even brutish sport played by large Canadians with anger-management issues.
Which is maybe why a Highlights magazine article about a skinny kid named Wayne Gretzky using his brains to lead the league in scoring captured my imagination. While I was attracted at first with the idea that you could be both cerebral and athletic, I fell for the game for the same reason Sandy fell for Danny in Grease: because it was fast, because it was beautiful, and because it was dangerous.
For most of high school, I admired the game from afar. I never went to games, not only because of cost, but because I was too embarrassed to tell my family where I was going. I never even flirted with the idea of playing myself. Ice time is expensive, for one; but the more honest reason was fear of ridicule.
Let’s face it: if a short, skinny Asian girl with glasses thicker than the size of her pinkie walked into a hockey rink, you would probably think she was an intern for the local paper. Or maybe shadowing the team doctor. Even if I had had the guts to try out for my high school team, I would never have been any good, what with the sum total of my proven athletic experience being the ability to run short distances at a moderately fast speed.
This idea that a pursuit is valid only if you’re able to do it at a level high enough to impress college admission counselors is one of the most insidious pressures on model minority kids. Growing up, the fear of being mediocre prevented me from trying so many things I secretly wanted to do: acting, art, playing the guitar.
There was no way I was going to play hockey under the eye of my family. Then, the summer after I graduated high school, Rollerblades happened. Then ice-skating and low-stakes club sports.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that skating was the first time I ever flirted with losing control, the first time I embraced that sense of panic you feel when you’re one burst of acceleration away from slipping, when you’re a fraction of a millimeter removed from tumbling face-first into unforgiving sideboards.
It turned out that I loved speed, that I got a thrill from the sharp crack of wood hitting wood whenever I fought with abandon for a three-inch piece of rubber and came out victorious with the puck. There is no hitting in women’s hockey, but there’s still a striking physicality, a struggle for possession, and a general lack of inhibition. There’s a fearlessness you have to have in playing hockey that allowed me to acknowledge—even welcome—my nasty side.
If the perks of being a model minority include a general security against racial profiling, the downsides include a visceral aversion to rocking the boat. I went through most of my education terrified of doing anything to compromise that identity. Because if I wasn’t a good girl, what was I?
Playing hockey, I found out that good girls had nothing on strong women, on women who take risks. Putting my physical body on the line every time I stepped into the game became a tangible reminder that the most exciting things in life don’t happen to people who sit on the sidelines.
I started stepping out into the world, unafraid of how it might perceive me. This is not to say that I don’t, deep to my core, want to be the best person I can be. It’s just that a lot of things—playing hockey, medical school, international travel, motherhood—have expanded my adolescent definition of “good.”
Ice hockey taught me that being tough didn’t mean you couldn’t be kind. My fiercest teammates were also the most loving.
Anatomy lab taught me that the best girls aren’t squeamish.
Travel to South Africa made me realize that the best girls aren’t afraid to be alone. The medical research I did there taught me not to fear doing something completely different.
My surgery rotation made it very clear that the best girls aren’t afraid of being decisive.
My urology rotation showed me that the best girls aren’t embarrassed by penises.
My writing groups impressed upon me that the best girls aren’t afraid of loud truths.
My children remind me, every day, that there is so much to fight for.
As my definition of “good” expanded, so did my circle of friends. And I realized the most devastating consequence of the model minority myth: how neatly it plays into bigoted myths of traits that are “good” and those that are “bad,” and how easily it divides the pie graph of our lives into “us” and “them.”
Writing this piece, I’ve struggled to pinpoint the moment when I realized that my family was more than a little racist. I vaguely remember my father complaining about the “Americans” he had to teach, and I remember the scandalous tone my mother took when she gossiped about one of my cousins dating a “hei ren”—a Black person. But I don’t have to look very far to see evidence of the Asian superiority complex in the here and now. I see it in the soft grumblings about affirmative action that I read in online parent groups. I see it in my Vietnamese patient who railed to me about how “those people” don’t contribute to our country after immigrating the way that “our people” do.
And so I continue to fight, not only for my children’s right to be seen and valued for who they are, but against the lifelong sense of entitlement that comes from being a teacher’s pet. Being a model doesn’t always mean that you’re the best, just that you’re the most successful at giving people what they expect. I want my children to have the whole world to grow into.
When I got married, it never even occurred to me to change my name professionally. I was always, and always will be, Dr. Wong. It was only when I needed a nom de plume that I took my husband’s last name. I still wear it uneasily, like a child wearing a plastic mask with eyeholes that are just a few millimeters off. Because, for the first time in my life, I want people to see me as Asian.
I want them to see me be loud, rebellious, and sometimes profane, and watch their assumptions about the model minority be blown into tiny bits. And at that moment of cognitive dissonance, when their stereotypes are subverted, I want them to remember with a start that we don’t yet live in a post-race society, not by a long shot. But our first step is to look beyond our expectations, not just in other people, but in ourselves.