emotional female - yumiko kadota
“Calm down. You’re being an emotional female.’’
These were the words uttered to surgeon Yumiko Kadota by an Emergency registrar, when Kadota questioned why he phoned her over a non-urgent issue at three in the morning. Kadota had worked back-to-back days in a Sydney hospital, putting in punishing hours, and was attempting to sleep to get the rest her body and mind sorely needed. A short time after this phone call Kadota, having worked twenty-four days in a row, asked her superior at the hospital to go home early due to extreme exhaustion. When this was denied, she promptly resigned.
Yumiko Kadota’s first book, memoir Emotional Female packs a punch. It is a story about burnout, systemic racism and misogyny, but is also a story of resilience and finding the strength to walk away from things you once desperately wanted when they are no longer fulfilling and, in fact, become quite damaging.
Kadota begins Emotional Female by sharing details from her early life with the reader. Kadota was born in Tokyo, spent her childhood in Singapore, then moved to London with her family as a teenager. She describes the ways in which she experienced racism even in these early years of life, with peers and teachers alike assuming English was her second language. Peers would compliment Kadota on her English being ‘so good!’ without realising she had grown up speaking English just like them, and teachers blocked Kadota from studying language-rich subjects such as Modern History due to an incorrect assumption she would not be able to keep up with the literacy demands.
Emotional Female covers a lot of ground; the reader gains insight into Kadota’s years of medical school, where her ambition to become a surgeon blossomed. Kadota describes both the triumphs and failures of these years; she contracted chronic fatigue as a university student, where she faced judgement and lack of understanding from those around her (while in the throes of this chronic illness, Kadota overheard a friend at university complaining that she was ‘useless’ on a group project).
The memoir then of course delves into Kadota’s post-university journey to become a surgeon, and details her experiences (both good and not-so-good) of working in hospitals with various colleagues and patients. Here, she continues to grapple with a sinister undercurrent of systemic (and interconnected) racism and misogyny, highlighting just how prevalent these issues are in Australian medicine and surgery. A disturbing message that becomes clear as the memoir progresses is that female doctors who are whistleblowers – that is, doctors who call out and follow up misconduct and sexual harassment in their workplaces – put their careers and livelihoods at stake in doing so. One such example in Emotional Female centres on a doctor who took her boss to court for sexual harassment. She won the case – ‘but she’s never had a job in the public system since’.
It is impossible to capture here the complexity of Yumiko Kadota’s tale in Emotional Female. The experiences shared are of course challenging to read at times, however that is exactly why this work is so important. Kadota’s experiences of harassment, racism, misogyny and burnout are ones that too many can relate to, and highlight just how much still needs to change in Australian workplaces and wider society. However, the memoir is ultimately a hopeful one, with a key takeaway being the simple truth that nothing is more important than your own wellbeing.
