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Hollywood and the Asian Exclusion Part 2 of 3
IGNORANCE IS ONE THING,
hypocrisy another. On September 19, 1999, KNBC News in Los Angeles interviewed a Chinese-American surgeon who had operated on an infant girl with a genetic heart defect. It all took place at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the so-called "Hospital to the Stars." Picture the irony: a distinguished surgeon on the staff of a world-famous hospital where many network and studio executives and their families receive medical care, but who wouldn't be hired by the hospital in Chicago Hope because the producers wanted a heart surgeon who looked like Barbara Hershey.
is typical. In the past six years I have had three major surgeries: two by an orthopedist born and educated in India and one by a urologist from Taiwan. As a cancer survivor, I have been scoped, probed, biopsied, imaged, and scanned by enough Asian medical specialists to mount a production of Miss Saigon. But my concern should not be misunderstood. I may be driven by my Eurasian background and an academic career in which my primary research field was the history of race relations; but I'm also an actor and am well aware that casting decisions must meet the dramatic requirements of the story. Only the most obtuse critic would not know that medical dramas are not really about the practice of medicine. Like all character-driven stories, they are about relationships and conflicts; hospitals and clinics merely provide the contexts. But there are many situations in which ethnicity is irrelevant; and many scenes in which the ages, genders, and ethnicities of the doctors have no dramatic significance.
IN FAIRNESS TO THE PRODUCERS
LOST EMPIRE:
PEARL HARBOR:
ROMEO MUST DIE:
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHAL:
ICEBOX.COM'S "MR. WONG:"
IF THE PRODUCERS
ANOTHER FORUM
AND IT'S NOT JUST MEDICAL DOCTORS.
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