Grey’s Anatomy, the medical show that produces wildly unpredictable plotlines at breakneck speed, has endured for almost 20 years. It wouldn’t have lasted the first decade without the ambitious Dr. Cristina Yang, played flawlessly by Sandra Oh.
To understand the impact of Dr. Cristina Yang, let me contextualize the television landscape of 2005. Readers, it was a bleak time. Network television tended to rely on mind-numbing gender stereotypes, introducing the harried wife and the lazy husband to loud laugh tracks. Think Family Guy and Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens and Grounded for Life. Along with this popular trope, misogynistic one-liners reigned supreme. A female character in a miniskirt—jokes about her alleged promiscuity, her “sluttiness,” inevitably cropped up. A female character in thick glasses and a cardigan—jokes about how no man would ever sleep with her, thereby rendering her ugly, inevitably cropped up.
On The Big Bang Theory, which began airing in 2007, an early episode introduced a plotline where the young, attractive neighbor, Penny, yells at Howard, a member of the core male group of friends, for sexually harassing her. Her neighbors, all men, proceed to guilt her to such an extent that, at the end of the episode, she apologizes to him. On television, women were always wrong and if they rejected the advances of male protagonists they were evil whores and there was nothing, ever, that acknowledged their humanity with compassion. It was a difficult time to be a girl and a lover of television.
And then, suddenly, there was Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy.
I met these female characters—I met Cristina Yang—who openly rolled their eyes at assholes in power, who fought, mercilessly, for operating experience, who studied for days and weeks and months to become the best surgeons in their fields. They made mistakes and they tossed sarcastic quips like baseballs at each other’s heads. But they also fell in love and pushed to save each other from professional ruin, often loudly arguing with each other while also hugging and complimenting each other’s surgical prowess. They were dynamic and multifaceted and angry and steadfast. Affectionately (and not-so-affectionately) called “Demon Spawn” by her peers, Yang was a ruthless surgeon who refused to be shamed for her ambitions, regardless of whether or not they followed stereotypical conceptions of femininity or womanhood. Standing in the hallway of Seattle Grace Hospital, Yang shouts, “Oh, screw beautiful. I’m brilliant. If you want to appease me, compliment my brain.”
Following Cristina’s arc often felt thrilling, like a shot of adrenaline. The show consistently respected her wants and needs, refusing to engage with any narrative traps that would undermine her agency. Early on in the show, Cristina reveals that she doesn’t want children. Full stop. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. When she marries another surgeon, Dr. Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd), she does not stop striving for leadership positions, for promotions, for absorbing as much knowledge as she can to establish control over her career. Cristina loves her job and chooses to prioritize it. This is who she is. When Owen tells her that he wants to have children, they reach an impasse. He keeps insisting that she will change her mind and that the very act of pregnancy will make her different. He keeps attempting to appeal to her “maternal side,” but doing so is a manipulative tactic that places his own desires above her own. And, while originally unsure, Cristina does indeed know that she will love any children she has, but she doesn’t want them.
Thankfully, Grey’s Anatomy does not pull a bait-and-switch. This is not a Netflix or Hallmark holiday movie. Cristina is not the overworked businesswoman who simply needs a kindhearted man to “change” her personality, soften its edges, and render her palatable as a mother or cookie baker. As the show emphasizes, Cristina does not need to change. She is perfectly fine—no, extraordinary—the way she is. In the end, Cristina does not have children. She does not pause her career as a surgeon. They divorce. But it is not her fault. They are two people who want different things. This is why their relationship must come to an end.
As Cristina explains, “Pretty good is not enough. I want to be great.”
And, of course, the most significant relationship on the show is not a romance, but a friendship.
In Yang’s very first scene, we see her turning around the operating room, studying her peers with a competitive eye. Within five minutes of the pilot, the protagonist, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo), scoffs at their colleagues in the locker room as they get ready for their shifts. “Only six women out of twenty,” she notes. Yang rolls her eyes in camaraderie. It doesn’t take long for the two women to recognize something similar in each other, a morbid, darkly funny sensibility that links them together, even on the first day.
Throughout her time on Grey’s Anatomy, Yang shares a “dark and twisty” friendship with Meredith that is unyielding, even in the face of plane crashes and storms and shootings. Even when they’re fighting, they know that they will do whatever it takes to support each other. While speaking to a love interest, Cristina straightforwardly explains, “She’s my person. If I murdered someone, she’s the person I’d call to help me drag the corpse across the living room floor. She’s my person.” When a shooter enters the hospital and attacks Meredith’s husband, Yang secretly performs surgery on him to save his life. There is a gun to her head and she is terrified. But she also knows what she has to do. She has to be the surgeon she has worked for years to become. And she’s not “pretty good.” She’s great.
The female friendships on Grey’s Anatomy elevate it from a standard soapy procedural to something richer, stronger. On the show, Cristina interacts not only with Meredith, but with fellow resident Izzie (Katherine Heigl) and their supervisor Bailey (Chandra Wilson). They talk frankly about their struggles in surgery and their desire to assert themselves in a male-dominated field. Although I was certainly not a doctor when I first watched this show, I deeply related to the ways in which these women consulted each other for advice and encouragement. The language of politics has never been something separate, but instead remains integrated within our conversations, weaving in and out of our words. It’s a matter-of-fact mode of being.
When my friends and I share stories about street harassment or commiserate about a sexist professor, it is not a “special episode” moment, something distinct that we pull out of our pockets for a very specific day or time and then return to our “normal” conversation. Like the women of Grey’s Anatomy, like Cristina, Meredith, Izzie, Bailey, we are simply commenting on what it is like for us to live, day by day, as a woman. There is no “separate” or “apart.” We talk about our favorite coffee orders and the temperate weather and then compare perspectives on the pressures to wear make-up in the workforce. It’s not us, but cultural forces, that have labeled these discussions “political.” The very act of being a woman, of being a person of color, of being anyone who does not live comfortably on the privileged hierarchy of race, gender, sexual orientation, and physical health, involves a constant negotiation with what we know and with what the outside world thinks it knows. I’m not being “political.” I’m talking about my life. And to sand down the facets of my reality that make others uncomfortable is to present a false experience. I, too, am often uncomfortable. But that discomfort is not my fault. It belongs to the systemic inequality that seeps into every aspect of our lives like rot.
And that, too, is something Cristina is keenly aware of as a female surgeon who isn’t white. In one episode, Izzie incessantly pages her for help at the emergency room. When Cristina arrives, she raises an eyebrow at what awaits her.
Izzie apologetically says, “I wouldn’t have called you but I can’t get hold of a translator. Can you just ask her what’s wrong?” She motions to a patient sitting on the hospital bed.
“No,” Cristina responds.
“Why not?”
“I grew up in Beverly Hills. The only Chinese I know is from a Mr. Chow’s menu. Besides, I’m Korean.”
While working at Seattle Grace, Cristina does not let others pigeonhole her into how they think she should act, nor does she allow them to treat any and all Asian ethnicities as the same. In this one moment, the show demonstrates the ways in which Cristina must confront the biases of not only her mentors, but also her friends. Her drive is made up of pure grit and determination, but it is also something that must navigate real-world prejudicial assumptions.
By season ten, Cristina chooses to depart for an extraordinary position as head of a revolutionary medical facility in Switzerland. It’s her dream job. Before leaving, however, she dances wildly in the hospital with Meredith, a callback to the origins of their friendship. She takes her best friend’s hands. She looks her in the eye. She tells Meredith to not let her husband get in the way.
As Dr. Cristina Yang wisely says, “Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He’s very dreamy, but he’s not the sun. You are.”
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