You might be wondering what anesthesiologist Dr. Tiffany Moon, the latest addition to “The Real Housewives of Dallas,” is doing on a TV show more famous for drink-throwing than peer-reviewed medical journals.
Moon provided the Bravo franchise with both its first medical doctor and first-generation Asian-American star. And as a practicing physician who’s stayed on the frontlines of her city’s battle with COVID while raising a family, she admits she had limited familiarity with the show before joining.
“I don’t watch TV in general,” Moon, 36, told Page Six recently. “Honestly, I work, and I hang out with my kids and my husband, and then, I work. People are like, ‘What are your hobbies?’ And I say, ‘What’s a hobby?’”
However, she added, “Dallas is small. You run into the same people over and over again.”
So Moon has notched blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameos in “RHOD” before, and says she’s known veteran cast members D’Andra Simmons and her mother, Mama Dee, “for many years.”
“D’Andra had always joked, ‘You would be perfect for ‘Housewives.’ And I would say, ‘Last time I checked, I was a full-time physician and mom. I’m not gonna do the show.’ That was a serious conversation we had around 2017. But things change. I went to some of the tapings, I saw that she was enjoying herself, and I thought, ‘You know what, why not?’ I’ve done everything else in my life exactly by the book and exactly how everyone expected me to. This time, I’m gonna do something totally out of my comfort zone that no one would expect of me. It’s not every day that Bravo knocks on your door.”
So Moon went about applying the rigor of her “day job” to her decision to join the show: “I made an Excel spreadsheet of the positives and negatives,” Moon explained with a laugh. “I did it in the most methodical, nerdy sense that I knew.”
Her list of reservations was short but impactful: “I have young children and I wanted to think about them; my husband is a prominent businessman in Dallas and I did not want this to reflect poorly on his business or embarrass him.
“I have very conservative Chinese parents that go to a Chinese church with my Chinese aunties and I didn’t ever want them to go to church and say, “Ai-ya, I saw Tiffany on TV and she’s embarrassing us,’” she continues. “Because that’s what Chinese aunties do. They gossip and drink tea.”
And lastly, “I worked my entire life to be where I am right now, and I did not want that to be invalidated because I was on TV arguing with women about petty things.” Ultimately, “I thought it would be a good platform to showcase a real-life working mom and use it to share my story and educate and inspire young women.
“No one tried to talk me out of it — not in my immediate family, at least.”
Moon, who was born outside of Beijing and immigrated to the States when she was six, wants that experience to be a part of her “RHOD” presence. “I want to represent the Asian-American community. We constitute a large percentage of the American population at this point and that’s not reflected in the media.” (Thus far, she has been vocal about educating the show’s other cast members about being on the receiving end of racism.)
“Maybe that sounds naive,” she admits. “Maybe in a year I’ll look back at this when it’s all been just a s–tshow and be like, ‘Why did I do that?’”
Moon also has several causes important to her that she wants to pull into the “RHOD” spotlight: One is North-Texas-based domestic-violence advocacy group The Family Place, on whose board she serves. She’s also judging a Valentine’s Day poetry contest (“I like Emily Barrett Browning; I like a little sad, forlorn poetry”) for Texans Can Academies, a nonprofit education organization that runs a network of dropout recovery schools.
“I was cleaning my house recently and I found the essay I wrote to get into med school, and it was all about how I wanted to help people and change things,” she says. “I was reading it, and I was like, ‘Oh, girl. You’re so innocent.’ Now I’m so jaded with organized medicine and everything that’s going on with the world … but reading that essay, I also thought, ‘God, I miss her.”