Authority Doesn’t Have One Accent

By Linda Ding, MD, FACS

This is a special edition blog post presented in partnership with the Society of Asian Academic Surgeons in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

“The ED paged,” the circulator announced. “They have an admission for you.” 

I step away from the operating table and come to the phone.  A familiar voice on the line starts describing a 74-year-old patient with end-stage renal disease and perforated diverticulitis.

“Okay, sure, I can take the patient,” I said. “But you’re holding back a ‘by the way,’ aren’t you?”

“Well, actually,” the emergency physician replied, “the INR is 7.”

“Ooof. There it is,” I laughed. “I knew you were trying to pull one over on me.”

A colleague once joked that they were surprised I did not get written up more often. The comment was meant lightly, but it lingered with me.  How narrow is our cultural script for professionalism? Why do we expect authority to sound a certain way? 

My communication style has always been direct, humor-laced, and occasionally sarcastic.  I now practice in the Pacific Northwest, where indirect and non-confrontational communication is often the dominant culture.  Sarcasm is often interpreted as hostility. At the same time, trauma surgery frequently requires what I think of as “surgeon voice”: a tone designed to create focus, decisiveness, and authority in high-stakes moments.  Over time, I have realized that the same communication style is not always interpreted equally. A sharp directive from one surgeon may be perceived as confidence; from another, abrasiveness. Gender, race, environment, and cultural expectations all shape how authority is interpreted.

As an Asian-American woman surgeon, I often find myself consciously softening directness with humor. This kind of code-switching is not inherently bad. Adaptability can make teams function better. Humor can diffuse tension, build rapport, and make leadership feel more approachable. I do not expect to eradicate unconscious bias, but I can modulate my communication while still leading the room effectively. What I have become less willing to do over time, however, is erase personality in pursuit of professionalism.

For many Asian-American professionals, there can be subtle pressure to fit a narrow model of competence: agreeable but not passive, confident but not intimidating, assertive but never abrasive. Yet one of the strengths of representation is that it expands the acceptable range of who we are allowed to be.

I thought about this recently when my son met Seattle Mariners ace pitcher Bryan Woo. There are still remarkably few Asian-American starting pitchers in Major League Baseball, and even fewer of Chinese-American descent. Woo has reflected that he did not initially think of himself as an Asian-American role model. Later, he recognized how meaningful it would have been to see someone who looked like him playing professional baseball when he was younger.

My son is only in the rookie division of Little League and still rotates through all the positions. But after getting Woo’s autograph, he looked at me and said, “Maybe I can be a pitcher like Woo.”

That moment stayed with me because representation expands possibility. Not every Asian-American surgeon, athlete, or leader will look or sound the same. The goal is not to erase difference in pursuit of professionalism, but to widen our understanding of what leadership can look and sound like.

Dr. Linda Ding is a Trauma and Acute Care surgeon in Everett, Washington.   When not consumed by the extra-curricular activities of her two children, she enjoys running, skiing, watching the Mariners, and making fun scrub caps.