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I just got this in my email. She submitted it for publication. She's been published before, and after you read this, you'll see why.
My father, a prolific storyteller, likes to spin a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of the English language:
It’s the sixties, and he’s a young intern at a small public hospital on the Jersey shore. He has only been in the United States for six months or so. After years of college and medical school, medical internship and residency in the Philippines and another half a year of surgical residency in the States, he’s feeling very secure in his chosen profession. When he tells this story, my mind paints his images in sepia tones. He is thin with high cheekbones, his thick, black hair is held in place with pomade and he walks into a patient’s room with a cocky gait, cloaked in a white lab coat.
A man is lying in bed, recuperating from surgery, tired, stressed and very quiet.
“How are you feeling today, sir?” my father asks.
“O.K., but I’ve got a charley horse,” the patient says.
“Oh, that’s nice,” my father responds. “Do you get to race him?”
When my father is jocular, he plays up the corny immigrant tale. And, for many people who’ve survived my father’s many story tellings, they think that he has just woven himself into an old and tired joke.
But when my father is sad and sentimental, he tells the rest of the story: The patient later asks a nurse to see “a proper white doctor.”
My father is now retired after a successful 30-plus year career as a general surgeon in private practice. Obviously that wasn’t the last racial incident he encountered in his career. He has always been the type of person to respond to that type of situation in one of three ways: rage, laughter or rage and laughter. But that one incident early in his career resonated. It didn’t stop him from being a good doctor; it probably made him work harder to become a better one.
I was reminded of my father’s tale after watching a recent episode of Desperate Housewives, in which Terri Hatcher’s character receives an unusual diagnosis and angrily demands to check her doctors’ diplomas to make sure “they are not from some med school in the Philippines.”
It is a slight that not only disparages the achievements of foreign born medical professionals, but also American-born physicians who were trained in foreign schools.
In a single sentence, a television show belittles the contributions of thousands of health care professionals. It is estimated that there are 20,000 Filipino-American physicians practicing in the United States. They have gone to school, trained in residency programs, and passed rigorous local and national board exams. They work long hours, make life-and-death decisions, and serve the sick and needy, in many instances, in under-served urban and rural areas.
Unlike the recent controversies of Bill O’Reilly’s review of a Harlem restaurant and Don Imus’s assessment of the Rutgers women’s basketball team – both insulting and hurtful episodes – the scene from Desperate Housewives was not an extemporaneous remark by an individual. It was a carefully crafted and edited work. It was written by series creator, Marc Cherry, and read by other writers, directors, producers, television executives and actors. They are co-conspirators in disseminating an ugly message.
Some people will look at this incident and wonder what all of the fuss is about. It’s just one line in one television show.
I will follow my father’s lead and rage and laugh about it. Because, as my father can attest, English is a tricky language and we all must take care in how we use it.
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