I step into my orthodontist’s office and Dr. B greets me with the same smile he greeted me with six years ago. Six years ago he smiled to a shy girl, a new immigrant whose hopes of America were nothing like those of her parents. A girl who wore a thin, disheveled scarf around her head, an oversized turtleneck and a pair of jeans, and whose smile was only out of respect and curtsey. She was too embarrassed to correct her name when it was mispronounced, a humiliation she could not bare. The day she met Dr. B and his happy, friendly assistants, who smiled too often and too greatly, she was horrified to learn that her braces were not acceptable and that they had to be redone. She was discomforted when one of the nurses took her photo and she had to force yet another smile, exposing the metal wires in her mouth. She was further distraught by the fast English spoken around her. But despite the horrors of that visit, she never forgot the sincerity of Dr. B’s smile, one that was like a promise, a promise that said everything would be okay, that time would pass and those braces would eventually come off. Unlike other patients, her concern was not due to painful doctor visits, but to the foreignness of their faces, the strangeness of their language and the difference of their appearance.
Somehow the promise I saw in Dr. B’s eyes on that first visit was not broken. Everything did work out; the braces came off and became a distant memory, along with all my bad feelings about America. My name continued to be troubling but I didn’t mind correcting it. And now today, sitting in his office as a mature, 18 year-old young woman, I feel no different than the other patients here who are waiting to be checked. I thank him, though he doesn’t know that I’m not only thanking him for what he’s done for me as a faithful doctor, but also because of his promising smile on that November afternoon when I was timid and humiliated by a mispronounced name.