The Surgery I Could Not Speak About

As far as I am concerned surgery for me has been an unspeakable subject for good reasons. But when I was young and daring I had elected to have a nose job with some of my first earnings from one of my first hard earned job starting out as a young adult. I was never pleased with the way I looked my nose did look normal but looked out of shape as if something was obviously wrong with the way it looked and so I had Dr.Robert Brandfield a surgeon perform a nose job on me. I specified I wanted a western style look with a bridge like Caucasians usually sport and he agreed. I wanted the David Duke look and so I told him to make me look like David Duke. I told the surgeon to make my eyes more round rather than the slant eye look which Orientals are born with. In essence I told him I wanted the white look after all I spoke and still speak perfect English having lived in America for three or four generations I was expert in impersonating white men so why not go all the way and have the total white look? I had already read the book Black Like Me and so I was ready for a race change or a transracial operation. There was no such word back then as a transracial or any operation which was a transracial operation but that was the word I formulated for my own personal use. This was the liberal city of Berkeley mind you so I felt the liberty to choose the look I wanted was fair game. Dr. Robert Brandfield refused to do as I specified with my cheekbones and my eyes so that I could look white or more like David Duke. I didn't care if I looked white because it had always been fashioned to be white. I was ready to be anything but an Oriental or Chinese. The Chinese had been living in humiliation long enough and I just wanted out! I even had visions of white women who would change their racial look by having their eyes surgically designed to look Oriental or Asian but no one but no one not even myself would dare to mention such an ideal. I was already compelled by the dean of men Jack Lemon at the University of Berkeley to see the chief psychiatrist in 1971 by the name of Harvey Powelson. I was to be disciplined and suspended for a act of radical display when I was probably one of the first Asians to have dated a white woman and by then some complaint about me had been lodged against me. It was only in or around 1965 that John F. Kennedy had lifted the ban on interracial relationships and I had already violated the social etiquette or rules of social conduct by making myself known or conducting a relationship of friendly acknowledgement with this white woman, Jane Lomax but her friends knew this was wrong and I was wrong for her. The issue came to the authorities in charge of student conduct and I was out. My love for her I could not dismiss and let go but I was compelled to tell the chief psychiatrist the story and what went down. Her final last two words she said to me the one I loved was related to Harvey Powelson; the hurt words I cannot repeat in print. There are only a few mixed marriages between the Asian male and that of white women. Bruce Lee was one and the only one of celebrity status I can think of and then I was there once upon a time but that will never come around for me.