A Banana Tale

S M Chen
5 min readOct 17, 2024

I am the youngest of 6 siblings.

With good fortune, all of us are alive and reasonably well.

Various ones amongst us have a variety of ailments and untoward conditions, but the fact we are alive is noteworthy and perhaps worth celebrating.

I wish to talk about one brother in particular.

He is now 85, so has exceeded the life expectancy for American males. In that respect perhaps I shouldn’t be writing about him at all.

A confession: although American, we are of Asian descent.

As one brother put it, we’re like bananas: yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

Being Asian myself, I can say that without much risk of seeming racist.

And I certainly mean no offense to bananas.

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I wish to illustrate a point with my brother.

He is not overweight, a smoker, diabetic, or hypertensive. He does not drink alcohol.

He is married, ostensibly happily.

Indeed, for a time he was the medical director at a health and wellness center in central CA.

But he has 2 conditions one would probably not wish on an enemy.

Some years ago he developed chest discomfort.

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