The life of a Chinese American female physician executive

Physician Executive, March-April, 2005 by Lily Jung

When I was first appointed medical director of medical specialties in a large multispecialty clinic in 1997, I bought a copy of ACPE's Why Physicians Fail. The book taught me what to expect as a physician executive, what pitfalls to avoid.

I had attended many of the management courses at ACPE and thought that I had at least the academic knowledge about what to expect in my new position. However, it was really my life experiences as a first generation Chinese American female that shaped my course.

I was born in Macao, then a Portuguese colony off mainland China and now a bustling special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. My father was a stowaway to New York City during the Great Depression and became an American citizen after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II.

After the war, he brought my mother, a Chinese living in Japan, to America as a war bride. They operated a hand laundry in New York for several years and then moved their growing family back to Macao, where I was born.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out in China, I was five years old. My parents returned to New York, where my father opened a laundry in Spanish Harlem and my mother worked as a seamstress in Chinatown. My first memory of coming to America was being spanked in kindergarten because I couldn't recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.

Although I quickly became Americanized, my parents fought to keep me in contact with my Chinese culture. I had to go to Chinese school in Chinatown every Saturday, and when things quieted down in Macao, they took me back for junior high school. I spent my early teen-age years feeling like an outcast in Macao--looking Chinese but not able to speak Chinese fluently.

On finishing junior high, I was allowed to move back to live with my sister in rural New Jersey.

Academics only

As a child, I was interested in medicine, and in high school I directed my attention single-mindedly to becoming academically prepared. My family certainly fostered that focus.

I was expected to forego all social aspects of high school to ensure that my grades would help me achieve my career goal. Dating was strictly forbidden, particularly since there were no other Chinese in the little town of Long Valley, N.J. It worked! I was accepted to the honors program in medical education at Northwestern University, a program that allowed me to begin medical school after just two years of college.

College in Chicago, away from the intensive oversight of my very strict family, was a real eye opener. I learned that I could do whatever I wanted and that I was responsible for myself. I developed a sense of independence that would not have been allowed if I had stayed close to my family.

Since leaving for college, I have not been able to bring myself to live under my family's roof again, except for short breaks. This has created a certain amount of resentment among my older siblings, who felt that I deserted my parents by not returning to the East coast after my training.

I remember being assigned to a female mentor--a pediatrician on the medical school faculty--during my third year in medical school. Having grown up in the 70s, I took women's liberation for granted and thought that continuing to talk about women's lib was passe. Women were already nearing equal numbers of medical school admissions. What did I need a mentor for? I was not interested in hearing a lot of whining about how hard it is to be a woman in medicine.

However, as my friendship with my mentor grew, I realized the hardships that she had endured as a female medical student in the 60s. The snide comments about how she had taken a man's place in medical school. How she was not good enough. Even her choice of pediatrics was said to reflect how women tended to go into "the softer" more family-oriented specialties.

That was all in the past, I thought. How fortunate I was not to live through that. Ironically, I did not notice that at the same time my boyfriend, a dental student at Northwestern, was complaining about how only half of the female dental students became practicing dentists because the other half got married and had families.

Family matters

As I found myself going through my clinical clerkships, I began to realize how complicated things could be, particularly in the male-dominated rotations like surgery. I found my biggest struggles were not how to learn the material but how to survive the suggestive comments thrown at me, such as a resident's suggestion that my best friend and I join him in a threesome.

An attending doing a breast reduction offered to donate the tissue to me! Of course, by attracting the attention of the male surgeons, I also caught the wrath of the female nurses who felt that I was intruding into their territory. A full three months into my surgical rotation, the OR nurses would still not stock size 5 gloves for me, so that I had to consistently scrub in much later than my male colleagues.

During this same period of time, my parents were pressuring me to get married. I was reminded that I was getting old and if I didn't get married soon, I was going to become an old maid--at the age of 22!