Asian-ness has become a cultural phenomenon. The New York Times said so in a recent article about Asian food trends and the rise of various Asian markets. On the other side of the coin, The Washington Post observed that 1 in 10 Asian Americans live in poverty despite the “model minority” trope. 

Asians in the U.S. face a mixed reality. 

On the one hand, Asian communities seem to be making strides in spreading cultural influence through Oscar-winning films, trend-leading social media and delicious food.

On the other hand, the wave of Asian hate still looms large as a result of bigotry stoked by COVID and of sometimes difficult relations between two global superpowers.

As the “Asian” experience becomes more intersectional than ever, what is the value of identifying or answering to “being Asian” in the broader context of this country?

A conversation with Yinglei Zhang, a Middlebury artist and resident, revealed one Asian experience, out of many, that is highly intersectional — that is, her interests, personality and personal traits cross over many identities in our society.

Zhang’s life, like a prism, refracts eras of social stagnation to high mobility all condensed in a few decades in contemporary Chinese history.

A misty rain washed a recent morning in Middlebury, but the rapid raindrops escaped Zhang’s notice while she was cooking up a few homely dishes for her visitor from this newspaper, who also comes from China. 

Many know Zhang for her calligraphy, ink painting and porcelain artworks displayed through the Vermont Crafts Council’s Open Studios Weekends. Some might have attended her classes on painting or pottery at the Middlebury Studio School. She has produced beautiful artwork for the annual Empty Bowl fundraiser.

“I used to sell a lot of art for what you call nonprofits. When they need, I tell them they can just take it,” Zhang said. “There used to be an old piano I painted for the art school. I don’t know where it’s gone now.”

She was often invited by the Middlebury College Art Department to host talks and workshops or teach winter term classes. She proudly showed a certificate from Middlebury College that lauded her contribution in 2019. 

Art had become an anchor for Zhang in Middlebury since she moved here in 1997. Today, she has lived here longer than anywhere, even in China, which she still calls home.

YINGLEI ZHANG’S KITCHEN window looks out at her Middlebury yard, where she has many hydrophilic plants and koi fish in a small pond. On the windowsill sit several porcelain dumplings she made. The wooden plate on the left side of the pane says “Guan Yu,” or “fish watching.”
Independent photo/Caroline Jiao

Her High Street home in Middlebury is nestled in the slope of Chipman Hill, surrounded by maple trees and common ivy. 

The flowers in her front yard yearn for weeding. Zhang always makes sure there grows the plain and silver mugwort, which is unwanted by many gardeners but she harvests and preserves to be used as incense for her house. 

Another spot of attraction that might seem unusual to most people around here is her backyard, where a patch of water spinach, chives and watercress is grown next to a small pond. An underground stream nourished these hydrophilic plants. 

From within the house, a narrow stove window facing north encloses this corner of the garden. There hangs a small piece of calligraphy that says “fish watch” in Chinese. On the windowsill sit several porcelain dumplings made with her own hands.

“When we were young there used to be famine, and food was precious,” the 70-year-old recalled. She explained her motivation for making the porcelain dumplings. “I got to make something out of clay, so I naturally picked it up and made food.”

While many find it unique and seek her private tutelage in Chinese language and arts as well as traditional food and tea practices, these to Zhang are no more than aspects of life. Denying that she has a deep well of knowledge in these areas, she says it’s her lived experience that conditioned her body to understand and do most of what she does.

Her lived experience includes one of the most tumultuous times in contemporary Chinese history.

CHILDHOOD IN CHINA

The famine Zhang referred to is likely a period of food shortages amidst the Cultural Revolution. Her father, teaching at a university in Jiangsu at the time, suffered especially. He was a success of sorts in Sichuan, but he moved his family to Jiangsu —  a decision that Zhang regretted. 

“My father used to work for the press when the Communist army marched to Yan’an during the revolution. After the civil war was won, his army unit took over the factories and government in Sichuan. That’s where he met my mother.” 

He was a cultured man of letters in a socially well-off place. But that small degree of affluence evaporated after they went to Jiangsu. 

“You don’t know the power of social relations,” Zhang lamented.

She believed her father must have been isolated and cornered at his institution in Jiangsu during the Cultural Revolution. 

From 1966 to 1968 when the Red Guard was most active, there were up to 4 million high school graduates who were unable to continue in schools or jobs. Younger students in cities and towns were encouraged to participate in what’s called the Up to Mountain Down to Village movement, to supposedly learn from the rural peasantry. Many never got to return to their homes.

Zhang probably wouldn’t say so herself, but she was lucky. Or, resilient, as she believes. 

She and her younger sister Ruling Zhang were able to waive the responsibility to move to rural villages since their elder sister had already gone. And fortunately, as Yinglei believed, she inherited her father’s cultured nature. She enjoyed studying. 

After China reopened its schools in 1968, Yinglei Zhang went back to secondary education when she was 14 years old. 

“I just sat in the front (of the classroom), and many other kids were rowdy in the back, but I didn’t care,” she said. “The exams were easy for me, and the teacher paid special attention to me.”

It was not until 1977 that China officially resumed the nationwide college entrance exam. Students could finally go to college again. 

But by that time, Zhang was 23 and had already taught at her old high school for four years. She had been trained to become a Chinese language teacher. There was a severe lack of teachers after many had been dismissed or had died during the calamity. 

“We were required to go back to rural villages and do farm work,” Zhang recalled. “I was just two years older than the kids in my class.”

She lamented that she didn’t have a choice.

“I had wished it was something else,” Zhang said. “English is good, art or music are fine, but most of us had to become Chinese teachers because a school needs more of them.”

Fortunately, she liked literature enough. After a few years of teaching, she convinced her high school to send her back to a program at Nanjing University to study Chinese classics. She wanted to extend it into a master’s degree, but the odds were not in her favor in 1981 as she faced competition from the class of ’77, the first-ever class of college graduates after the Cultural Revolution. 

“My professor chose two students, a male and a female, from his university, so I didn’t get it.”

TO AMERICA, EVENTUALLY

The 10-year calamity caused a pivotal shift in the government. In 1978, China entered its era of economic reform.

Riding on the waves of this gradual economic opening, Zhang acquired her passport after two rejections and got her tickets to San Francisco. It was 1985, and she was 30 years old.

Four years later, the Chinese capital of Beijing suffered from the government’s violent suppression of the student movement on June 4 opposing the country’s turn to capitalism. At the time, Zhang was far away studying and getting married in the U.S. Her son, Robbie, was born that year.

Back in China for a stint, she and her son left Hong Kong for Middlebury in the summer of 1997, where her husband at that time, Robert Smitheram, was already working at the Middlebury College Center for Educational Technology. She moved to her current house in 2000, around the time their marriage broke up.

Zhang has hopes to travel back to China with her younger sister Ruling next year.

“My younger sister was in Stanford too,” Yinglei said. “Now she’s a famous scholar in France. I always took care of her when we were so little. People say, ‘Ruling always listens to her elder sister Yinglei.’ Every time she has something written for an occasion, she’d still run it through me.” 

Zhang’s study experience perhaps forms a stark contrast with the increasingly institutionalized pipelines nowadays that channel international students from around the world into elite colleges in the U.S. It is hard to say if a more globalized world has manifested more opportunities for people seeking to enrich their experience and broaden their horizons. 

Yinglei is now content with her life in Middlebury, surrounded by art and the community that appreciates her culture. 

“It’s about being in the right place at the right time, with the right people,” she said.

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Editor’s note: The interview was mainly conducted in Mandarin Chinese; the author translated Yinglei Zhang’s words into English.