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The NHS doctor and House Gospel Choir singer talks to Hadley Stewart about pursuing a creative outlet alongside his career in medicine.
On a warm autumn evening, I meet Mickey Chong for the first time in King’s Cross, the location of our cover shoot. He’s seated outside a bar having his makeup done. Chong greets me with a smile, but seems almost trepidatious, unable to see the artwork being crafted on his face. Does he want glitter? He looks at me, as though waiting for my opinion. I nod, he laughs, he agrees. Moments later he squints at the compact mirror being held up to him – he’s pleased with the results.
“The kids will love it,” he remarks of the glitter, once the shoot is over, with Chong heading straight into a night shift at the children’s hospital where he works. It’s perhaps moments like this, I think to myself, that reflect the bridge between Chong’s two worlds: medicine and music.
Some weeks later, I call the anaesthetist and House Gospel Choir singer for our interview just as he arrives home from his shift. We were due to speak the previous evening, but he understandably needed to reschedule. It’s a story that’s all too familiar to Chong and his fellow medics: staying late at work. Yet despite the exhaustion of another busy day on the frontline, his infectious positive energy soon emerges through the phone.
Growing up, Chong played the violin, was in the school orchestra, and used to listen to music as he revised for exams. It’s a revision technique he took with him whilst studying at UCL’s medical school, which is also where he strengthened his musical muscles, joining the musical theatre society and discovering his voice. “That was the kind of singing that I probably most aligned to,” he says. Chong even ended up directing a couple of shows during his time at university, which gave him the confidence to explore singing further.
(Priyan Odedra/Vada Magazine)I wonder what his peers at medical school made of him hot footing it from lectures to the rehearsal room. “I think that people were really intrigued by the fact that I sort of had a semi-other life, despite having to be at all these clinics, lectures and seminars, nine to five every day,” he replies, adding that many of them celebrated the fact that he had passions outside of medicine. “There are people who might have this idea that medicine is your life, and whilst I really like my job, that’s just one part of my life.”
Having graduated from university and while working as a doctor, Chong considered how he could continue his passion for singing. “I’d take whatever opportunity I could to sing in the genres of music I enjoy the most,” he tells me, naming pop, soul, R&B, and gospel music as genres he feels most in tune to. He sang in a couple of semi-professional groups, before joining House Gospel Choir seven months ago.
Chong first heard about House Gospel Choir through a friend who had just joined the group. They then kept popping up on his social media feed, with Chong joining the group’s 95.7 thousand Instagram followers. Performing both covers and their own original music, House Gospel Choir was founded in London, with the idea of combining house music and gospel; they debuted at Glastonbury Festival in 2014. Since then, the group have garnered an impressive social media following, as well as A-list collaborations with the likes of MNEK, Rudimental and Ella Henderson.
(Priyan Odedra/Vada Magazine)“I just thought that they had such a great vibe, and everyone seemed to be having such a great time,” says Chong of what first stood out for him about House Gospel Choir. “But I also wanted to, I guess, challenge myself as a singer a bit more.” When it came to the audition process, Chong sent off a video and nervously waited to hear back. “I definitely do get anxious around auditioning, for sure,” he tells me. “I just try to put quite a lot of thought into it and practice a lot around my audition pieces.”
As someone who “came into singing late in the game” as Chong puts it, with no classical training background and not singing full-time, he shares that it’s something that does sometimes play on his mind when auditioning. How is he with rejections, I wonder. “It’s definitely always a knock to my confidence,” he replies. “I don’t know, maybe it’s related to working in healthcare, but as a doctor you suffer setbacks professionally too. And I kind of see audition rejections in the same way. Sometimes you’ve just got to roll with the punches.”
Chong feels there is more of a predictability and structure when it comes to a medical career. When it comes to singing, however, things aren’t always so straightforward. “It’s a field where I feel a little more insecure,” he says of singing. “Maybe because I feel less rehearsed in it, compared with the formal training that medicine gives you. Sometimes the knock backs from auditions have hit me harder. But then I also think maybe I should give myself a break, because despite not having loads of professional training as a singer, I’m still doing it.”
Although he admits that part of his personality is that he likes being good at things, which encourages him to keep pushing himself as a singer, it’s a love and enjoyment for music that ultimately drives Chong. “There’s something about it,” he says. “That unfiltered, pure enjoyment of singing.”
(Priyan Odedra/Vada Magazine)Singing also helps him with his job as a doctor. The work is hard and the hours can be tough. It can take its toll on his mental health. Singing, Chong says, gives him a positive outlook and something to look forward to during those challenging moments at work. As for being a performer, he believes it makes him a better doctor. “Particularly at the moment, I’m working at a children’s hospital, so being a performer gives you that confidence in terms of how you are with children, like trying to relieve their anxiety when you’re putting them off to sleep for an operation.” The kids also love his pink hair, Chong is keen to add.
Speaking of appearance then, has he ever had any pushback about his hair? Perhaps from the outside, the world of medicine can still seem to be a bit… reserved. “I would say that I’ve generally had very positive experiences working in the NHS. I think that the NHS as a whole is generally pretty accepting and open to most.” As someone who is visibly queer, Chong says his queerness has always been celebrated. He’s personally never faced overt discrimination at work.
“I think there is maybe an unspoken opinion, that perhaps my appearance gives off that impression of being a bit reckless or unprofessional,” he adds. “Maybe sometimes I might be underestimated, and I just hope that I can straddle both ends of that. Yeah, I can look the way that I look and still be good at my job.”
It’s equally important for Chong to dispel racial stereotyping. “For me, part of being visibly queer or looking queer, is that it’s so important to take up space. Particularly as a queer person of colour and as an East Asian person. We’re kind of classically seen as a bit nerdy, like, you’re a very nerdy doctor. You’re kind of put in that box.” He acknowledges that not everyone may wish to take up space in the same way that he does, but that he equally wants to create change for others. “I want to represent a different kind of representation for LGBTQ+ people of colour. I guess it’s really important for me that as queer Asians, we can be celebrated by being both in this clinical environment and still looking the way that I look.”
(Priyan Odedra/Vada Magazine)Juggling the demands of being a doctor, alongside being a singer, requires a degree of discipline and separation. Chong says that he feels he’s good at leaving things at the door, especially when it comes to dealing with the challenging situations he faces as a doctor. “I just like to have a conversation, maybe with my partner or with a colleague or a friend, about something that might have happened at work,” he explains. “But after that I’m pretty good at not overthinking a situation.” It’s a skill that he’s worked over time and agrees that anyone working in healthcare will have various ways of coping with what they experience at work.
He also credits that going part-time in medicine is now generally well-received by employers. Most training programmes for junior doctors now gives them the option to work part-time, Chong explains, which allows for not only caring responsibilities, but also the pursuit of creative outlets.
The notion of not being consumed by work is something that Chong is passionately advocating for. He wants others to feel that they can divide their time between a career in medicine, and other passions or hobbies that they might have outside of work. But he admits it takes guts to step outside of your comfort zone. “I think feeling uncomfortable is also part of human growth,” he says. “It’s about putting yourself in sometimes uncomfortable situations that are out of your comfort zone.”
He’d recommend stepping out of that comfort zone, though. “I think by separating out your personal time, giving yourself time to nurture yourself as a human being, whether that be through a hobby or not, also helps you become a better and well-rounded doctor and person.”
Mickey Chong is featured on Vada’s latest digital cover, photographed by Priyan Odedra. Mickey is an NHS doctor and singer in the House Gospel Choir.
