Lost At Home, Worlds Apart

At the age of 4, the world as I knew it had three countries - daddy in the UK, mama and laolao in China, and for us to get to daddy, we had to transfer planes in Moscow. My first Christmas in England, I received an Atlas of the World, which would become my most flipped through book until Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. At 5, airports were my rabbit holes. After the cloud show, we emerge in a place with different looking people sounding incomprehensible. We would spend the rest of our lives fighting to make ourselves feel understood, in the home that has become a battlefield of identities and values.

This has been, and remains where I live my life. The first time I was asked to write my story was at a Grade 5 writing competition. It wasn’t a voluntary choice; I was handpicked by our Chinese language teacher, which was the first shock, as up until that point, Mandarin was my weakest subject. Out of all the given options, the only topic I could comfortably write about - without being wrong - was “My Story”.

Jialun Tong

What kind of stories would an 11 year old have? You might ask.

I was the only Chinese-looking student out of almost two-thousand who had joined the school from being abroad. I had failed the entrance exams, which included only math and Chinese, so I was placed into second grade instead of third, where I had come from. Where I was from, Wingrove in Newcastle, I was beginning to study French and the violin, subjects which did not exist in the school in Tianjin. Everyone thought I was weird — from my clothes to my non-metal pencil case. There were those who were curious about me — surrounding my desk to look at my foreign objects and… me, the foreign object. Then, there were the ones who raised their arms to me, with a finger pointed at my face, calling me “traitor”, because I had come from England, a country they associated with the Opium War, an invader and occupier of Tianjin. 

Even as an 11 year old, I noticed sharp differences between cultures, expectations, expressions, and therefore difficulties, misunderstandings, and moments of unintended humor in communications, all of which I recorded on the pages of the writing competition. I was completely stunned when my laundry list of cultural misadventures ended up winning first prize. That was the first moment I was made aware that by simply sharing my experiences — what I saw, what I heard, I was already translating culture and showing the “big people”, the very real things they couldn’t have understood, fathomed, or imagined to be true or possible.

I’ve always had a lot to say, a quality that colored me in stark contrast in the West vs in the East.

In the West, they like the way my mind works — they call it “leadership quality”. From our very first classrooms, we installed an “ask why” brain — to question our sources, to question objective, reason, and intention. I loved and sharpened my “ask why” brain with each year that passed, and each debate I never lost. My “ask why” brain got me full-ride scholarships and steady government work. My teachers and employers all praised my gift of saying the right things at exactly the right time. So, I was pursuing a career in diplomacy. But within the family, my “ask why” brain ignited landmines. In my notes to self, when I was 17, I wrote how ironic life can be in its polarizing contrasts.

I couldn’t figure out how someone who is supposedly so good at communications, someone who excelled at leadership and public speaking, would experience so much friction with parental relationships. 

This question clouded me for years. But because my life was mostly rooted in the English-operating world, very distant if not completely disconnected from the Chinese-language world, I was never able to see or understand how at the root of all discord is classic cultural difference. Life on the battlegrounds of culture is ironic at first, but with time, it becomes cruelty.  

Jialun Tong

When I was 23, I put a pause in my diplomacy career for the promise of a life at the New York Film Academy and the Juilliard School. My parents didn’t understand why I gave up my “metal rice bowl” job with the department of Foreign Affairs, but they yielded to my pursuit of my dreams. I didn’t consult them in my decision making; I just told them that I was selling my car, changing my number, and moving to New York.

I kept writing through all the turbulent times, and was quickly made a VIP columnist by Elephant Journal. My focus has always been on the human connection in the digital age, and the most popular reads have been translated also into Spanish. Spanish, not Mandarin, just this alone speaks volumes. My experience of the Latinx culture is that they really do put family first, whereas the Chinese culture, as much as my exposure allowed me to see and learn, family is not often the focal point of life. Work is. Service is. Our contribution to the larger society is. Family came after all of that, supported that, and was often sacrificed for that. Ultimately, to our detriment.

Another critical element is that those who do comment on my work — those who read and resonate with what I wrote, are all English speaking. They, too, had “ask why” brains. So, there was no way that they could offer a glimpse into the Chinese way of thinking, or tell me the norms of Chinese culture, or introduce me to “Chinese logic”. They couldn’t help me decipher the puzzle I was trying to solve, because it existed in another realm — one that couldn’t be reached by the English language. Without a Chinese “legend” or reference to behavioral norms, I tumbled deeper into the rabbit hole.

Until one day, when I was going through casting notices, I saw that Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America was looking for actors for their production of The Empress Dowager. I was offered an audition for the role of The Noble Consort Pearl –- a historical figure, someone intelligent and a feminist ahead of her times. I stepped into her shoes as I performed an original monologue. I got the job, a role much coveted among all the actresses in their early 20s that could pass for Asian.

The years that followed, I went from actress to resident composer, and found a cherished sense of belonging through my work with Yangtze. However, it wasn’t until much later, did I realize that within the greater Asian American world, the space they occupied was still more American than Asian. Without having had contact with the “more Asian” part of the Asian American community, I would have never been able to tell.

Working at the Mandarin Radio changed all of this.

Jialun Tong

In 2017, I started to work at “the number one Mandarin radio in New York”, WKDM1380 and SINO TV. The time spent in this “Chinese bubble” surpasses the time I spent living in China. Just as Fellini once said, a different language is a different vision of life.

I had never expected that a door opened by my native language would lead me into a world so utterly disorientating.

News in a different language presents a world that looks and feels very differently, and if you didn’t have anything to compare it to, it would be impossible to notice the difference. Filter the world through a different search engine, use keywords in Chinese instead of English –- the results are very different, and that was wild for me to reconcile. I learned a tremendous amount from being on air, and even more during the commercial breaks. I spent well over 10,000 hours listening and observing — it allowed me to see the architecture of how people, similar to my parents, think.  

I started to see how we each bring our own cultural orientations, conditioning, and expectations to the relationship, and it’s worse when we speak the same language, but different values are assigned to what is spoken and what is withheld. Words then become a maze and there’s no label or instruction of what is not meant to be taken at face value. How many layers of sub-text exist? Which lines are “ke qi” (polite empty words that one must say but are never meant)? Which lines are “fan hua” — lines meant to be understood in the opposite direction? In the West, we are much simpler, direct is best. The two styles are like oil and water, but spoken in the same tongue, they all look the same.

How do you tell which one is water and which one is oil?

The architecture of disconnect goes beyond language, but language is easier to point to. My supervisor at the radio station told everyone to consider me “foreign”. From that vantage point, I started to help Chinese Americans navigate a language and culture that baffles and excludes them. The obvious idea, which became the only original content show on the East Coast, became “Xiren Let’s Talk”, now running in its 6th year. From the very first episode where I demonstrated that “Chinatown” is pronounced “China-t-OWW-n” instead of “ChinaTANG”, we have moved onto Western life barriers such as how to understand non-Chinese menus, and that when someone “has beef” with another person, they are not communal dining. One’s quality of life in the US is in many ways constricted or expanded through one’s understanding of non-Chinese thinking. This essential quality, and skill, is also the most difficult for a population of mostly fixed minds — the schools they went to never did install in them an “ask why” brain.

When I realized that this pain point is also an opportunity, I started to push toward light, though perhaps the cracks weren’t wide enough yet. My many failed attempts have taken me off a socio-political talk show (despite me being the only person who held a political science degree), and have suspended “Speak Up” — a show I created to equip Chinese Americans with the language to speak up for themselves during the early days of COVID and mounting aggression. The show was suspended because it contained “too much English” during a time when Mandarin brought comfort, and the listeners tuned in for comfort.

Personally, it has been disheartening to know that I am unwelcome, in the community that I wholeheartedly serve. I was advised by my superiors that my programs should only focus on simple English conversation. But vocabulary alone never changed anyone’s life.

Though I am the daughter of Chinese parents, I couldn’t identify with many of the listeners, some who loved me, while others called in to verbally assault me on air. I understand why English-speaking Asian Americans don’t talk to Mandarin-speaking-only counterparts. My show aims to bridge the fragments.

I've always been fascinated by why things are the way they are.

But my “ask why” brain didn’t get me far in China. The friction started as soon as I landed in Beijing Airport in December of 2023, and continued through all the megacities on the fastest trains in the world, through the tallest skyscrapers I’d ever seen. Modern China looks unrecognizable. My small-town New Yorker “ask why” brain was confronted and confounded by people who couldn’t answer any of my questions. I got answers like, “there is no why”, or “this is the rule”, and “why” doesn’t penetrate rules. It dawned on me that my “ask why” brain must have been just as foreign to my parents. As frustrating as I feel about not getting my questions answered, they must have felt the same about me — a child they couldn’t parent. I vocalized the very things they are conditioned to suppress. I challenged everything that has held their lives together. Their graveyard of sacrifices became my minefield of love and needs.

What becomes the language of worship after we have been uprooted from home?

The Chinese culture conditions us to become detached to emotions as we pursue success, ranking, and recognition. Only until much later, do we realize that we detached from the core things that give us a sense of home. In its place, there is a Western shaped house, outlining our emptiness and void. I can say this for myself, but I now understand it must be true for my parents as well.

What shape are their hearts that they failed to tend? What shapes are their dreams beyond what we see in the mirror?

Jialun Tong

My Western conditioning made me the black sheep who is always the one opening the can of worms, though I never get far. It’s as if Chinese parents are allergic to vocalized emotions. I am always met with phrases that dismiss me altogether. Phrases like, “Suan le suan le” (forget about it); “You wan mei wan?” (Is there an end?); “Xing le xing le” (enough already).

Maybe this is another reason why I love working at the radio, because I am professionally obliged to not shut up.

The tragedy of life in the cultural chasm isn’t not having a home; it’s that we live our lives fighting with the ones we are lucky to call family, the ones we should be loving. The tragedy of life in the chasm is that we are often misdiagnosed when we do decide to open up and share our problems with those who are not equipped to see it through a cultural lens. The tragedy of life in the chasm is that our silence means something different to our parents’ silence, and that the echoes of silence don't always equate to the absence of love. The tragedy of life in the chasm is that when we build our lives in places foreign to our heritage, no one will tell us that we are culturally different from our parents. Just the opposite — we are grouped and seen as the same, when at the core of our being, we operate on totally different codes, and are becoming distinctly different, more and more each day.

When we start thinking in a new language, what language is our pain, what language is the generational trauma, and how is that translated, if it is? How does the pain land? How is it received? Does it get distorted in the process of translation? Does it get twisted in the process of misinterpretation, expectations, and assumptions?

What does our silence mean?

Several years ago, I made a short film called, “What You Leave Me With,” very much influenced by my quest to look deeper into the parent-child fighting dynamics. Of course, every family and every culture has this, but the misfires are tripled in Third Culture families. It’s a phantom leech.

Every Third Culture family I know feeds this phantom leech. It feeds on love and pain; it feeds on sacrifice. It’s a monster that we all share, as people who move through the world. And every time another fight breaks out, we feed it more.

But its invisible cloak has one caveat — once you see it, you can never unsee it.

Jialun Tong