Real Housewives star and doctor Tiffany Moon on anti-Asian racism, growing up poor and using her new-found fame for good

Tiffany Moon moved to the US from China when she was six, and was ‘spit on, slapped and punched’ by her peers on the bus rides home from school

Now a doctor, a wife and a mother, Moon says appearing on the Real Housewives of Dallas has given her a voice and a platform to speak up on racial issues

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Doctor and Dallas housewife Tiffany Moon is the first first-generation Asian-American on the Real Housewives franchise. She talks about anti-Asian racism, growing up poor and why she joined the show. Photo: Ringo Chiu

Published: 8:15pm, 2 May 2021Updated: 10:10am, 10 May 2021

Tiffany Moon recalls a seminal moment in her life as a six-year old flying from Beijing to New York, her first time on an aeroplane, with no one to accompany her. She was offered a Coca-Cola by a flight attendant, to which she responded by saying she had no money.

Even today, three decades later, she still delights at the memory of being able to have all the soft drinks, snacks and television she wanted on that long journey. “I came from a pretty poor family,” Moon says. “I’d barely been in a car.”

That is a long way, literally and metaphorically, from where she is now. The China-born doctor is the first first-generation Asian-American to appear on the Real Housewives franchise, and made her debut in January of this year on season five of the Dallas-set version of the television series.

She certainly has all the attributes of a typical housewife on the series; a beautiful home, successful husband (Daniel, a lawyer who works within his family’s real estate and hotel business), exquisite wardrobe (she estimates she has between 40 and 50 Hermès handbags and 250 pairs of shoes). She’s an established career woman in her own right, a practising anaesthesiologist.

The cast of The Real Dallas Housewives. Photo: Instagram/@tiffanymoonmd

She is also something of a renegade housewife for other reasons; she considers herself a private person and shies away from conflict, which would seem counter-intuitive given the nature of the show, where profanity-laced quarrels among well-dressed society women are quite the norm.

“I’m not a person who likes to involve myself in conflict,” Moon explains. “If I don’t like someone, I’ll just ghost them. But in this show, that is not the method of conflict resolution. And I can’t pretend that I didn’t know that, that we were all going to sit around nicely and drink tea.”