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My Turn by Wayne Chan

From The Asian Reporter, V35, #3 (March 3, 2025), page 7.

I don’t believe in stereotypes of any kind.

But if I’m being completely honest, some of the stereotypes attributed to Asians aren’t too bad if you really are going to be labelled something.

Asians are thought to be the model minority. They excel at math. They are engineers, doctors, and lawyers. They are hardworking.

I must confess, I am none of these things! But am I going to correct someone who thinks that of me? What possible good could come from that? Even the one quibble I might have about my own circumstance — that I really am hardworking — doesn’t quite fit.

You see, I worked really hard to develop my business so later in life (which is basically now), I wouldn’t have to work as hard anymore. My quest for attaining true laziness is what motivated me to work so much in the beginning.

Ironically, it is hard work trying to maintain the façade of being a hardworking, highly skilled model minority, as I quickly found out last month.

I belong to a country club. Every Tuesday, we play three rounds of tennis. For years, I’ve known these guys to be a bunch of numbskulls who find joy in levelling juvenile insults at each other, usually thinking of inventive ways to ridicule another player’s manhood. Such was the case in this instance.

After tennis, our group usually goes out for tacos and beers. While we normally talk about sports and follow up with expert analysis of each other’s failures in the game of tennis in the most humiliating way possible, this time was different.

On this evening, one of the players, Dave, talked a bit about what he’d done during the day — he spent eight hours removing part of the brain from a young girl who was suffering from debilitating seizures. He talked about how 20 percent of the time, these surgeries are completed with computer-controlled tools, but most of the time they are done by hand. He is a highly skilled pediatric neurosurgeon; he performs life-saving brain surgery on babies.

Another player, Jay, who is a radiologist, talked about some of the dramatic things he witnessed in his work. My friend Stan, an internal medicine doctor, spoke thoughtfully about some of the things he’d seen and worked on, most of which I didn’t even understand.

At some point in the conversation, Dave spoke about being an expert witness on various medical lawsuits. Then two players, Jim and Chris, who are both attorneys, elaborated on the intricacies of medical lawsuits.

At that point, good friends all, had a thoughtful conversation about medicine and law and some of what each had experienced in their careers.

Well, that is, except me. I was conspicuously silent throughout most of the conversation.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, I’m a real estate investor! All I’ve done for 30 years is buy and sell property, and collect rent every month! I’m not saving anyone’s life. I’m not defending anyone’s rights. Other than my investments and writing a little humor column on the side, that’s all I have!

Which means that in the span of 90 minutes at a taco shop, my whole persona as a highly sophisticated, incredibly hardworking, successful individual was crumbling in front of my eyes. There were several medical professionals and two attorneys talking about highly sophisticated topics and I had nothing to add to the conversation.

What was I going to do? Say "How about those mortgage rates lately?" No way. I had to come up with something more relevant to add to the conversation. My faux reputation was on the line.

When surgeon Dave mentioned he removed part of the girl’s brain due to seizures, I had one shared experience that I could somewhat relate to. About ten years ago, I suffered several seizures, but my doctor put me on medication and now it’s completely controlled. My only relapse was last year when I had another seizure, but I later realized it happened because I made a mistake filling up my daily medicine box and didn’t take my seizure meds for nearly two weeks. Having realized my mistake, I’ve made sure to not do that again.

Still, as flimsy an opening as that was, it was an opening. I know about seizures. And I asked Dave about it. He said that in this case, part of the girl’s brain was causing the seizures, and by removing it, the seizures would stop.

Later that evening, I half-jokingly asked Stan, given my past seizures, if brain surgery was something I had to look forward to.

Stan then said, "Well, maybe only if you forget to take your medicine again!"

Heck of a way to get involved.

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