Model Minority

Growing up Asian American in a predominantly White town, a future doctor had tried to fit in with the White community. She feared the disproportionate disappointment of my teachers and peers when she was wrong and feared confirming stereotypes when in the right. In this narrative, she describes her fear that as a medical student under the constant scrutiny of clinical preceptors, she would start to act and feel the way she did when she was growing up—a desire to dampen her Asian American identity to fit into the medical world.