Joanne, Part 1 - Chinese American: Catching Snakes & Camping Trips

Joanne shares what it was like growing up as one of the only Chinese American kids in a small upstate New York town—and the year her family moved to Taiwan, placing her in a public school during the height of martial law and anti-communist propaganda. In Part 1, she talks about her parents’ refugee journey from mainland China to Taiwan, learning Mandarin and Bopomofo, and navigating identity, belonging, and culture shock across two countries. This episode explores family history, diaspora, growing up between cultures, and the moments that shaped Joanne’s understanding of who she was.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1Fcw4aEHxsk

Connect with Joanne:

• Strelo Group: https://strelogroup.com/about/joanne/
• Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanne-chu-strelo/
• Email: joanne@strelogroup.com 

Transcript

Transcript generated by AI and may contain errors

Joanne: [00:00:00] And I'm like, you know, seven, I have no idea what they're talking about. And everywhere we go, we have to bow. How do our teachers in the morning, we learned how to do calligraphy. We learned how to do math with, 

Jess: Abacus.

Joanne: abacus. An abacus, I mean all this stuff. And I was just like, what the heck is going on here?

And that's when I, I remember, I, I couldn't play with the boys 'cause the girls were not allowed to play with. So I, 

I had a terrible time. Yeah. It was my usual crowd. I wasn't allowed to, 

Jess: You are listening to Cultureful. where human stories bring us closer. I'm your host, Jess Lin. My guest today is Joanne, a 58-year-old first generation American born, Chinese American woman from Oswego, New York, Now living in Atlanta, she's the co-founder of the organizational strategy firm, Stello Group. And in our conversation [00:01:00] we explore her journey with identity, belonging and the awakenings she experienced while teaching at Spelman College, a historically black women's college here in Atlanta.

This is the first half of our conversation where Joanne shares about her parents' youth as refugees, what it was like for her to grow up in a predominantly white neighborhood in the 1970s and eighties, the cultural gap she felt with her parents and the year she attended school in Taiwan. During a time when anti-communist propaganda there was at its peak. Through her family's story, we can glimpse what life looked like for everyday people during major historical moments like the Chinese Communist Revolution and the Marshall Law era in Taiwan.

For me, Joanne's story runs parallel to parts of my own family history shaped by the same moments in China, Taiwan, and the us, but from [00:02:00] different angles.

Sometimes our experiences and family histories overlap. Other times they completely, it's a reminder of the plurality of our stories. How stepping into someone else's shoes, even when they look similar to our own,

can entirely shift our perspective. As always, you can find the video version with photos on YouTube. I hope you enjoy. Hi Joanne. Welcome to the show.

Joanne: Hey, Jess. Good to be with you.

Jess: Yeah, I am really glad we met at that badass Asian women's event. Shout out to Han Pham for, you know, her organization and, connecting Asian women in Atlanta.

and we just got chatting and it was just so easy to talk to you. And when you mentioned that you used to work at Spelman, a historically black women's college and how that led to these two awakenings that we'll get to, I was like, [00:03:00] okay. Have to have you on the show. So thank you so much for making the time.

Joanne: You are so welcome. I'm so happy to be able to be here and tell you. My story.

Jess: let's start with your parents. You know, both sides, mom's side, dad's side, um, where were they born? What kind of backgrounds, did they grow up in and yeah, what's their, their story.

Joanne: What's their story? Yeah. I'm really glad that we got talking because when we met at the Badass Asian Women event, I had told you that I have only recently been in, Owning my identity as a first generation American born kid, which is essentially an immigrant story. This is not language that I had, for myself.

You know, I know that my parents were both immigrants to this country. They, both of them were born in mainland China. They were both born in 1930. So at that time, China was at the cusp of going to war with the country of Japan. that [00:04:00] pivotal moment in Chinese history was a defining moment for them because they ended up being war refugees for most of their childhood.

So my mom and her family from the north near Beijing and my dad and his family south in Nanjing, so both the former and the present capital of the, of China, they essentially lived a life of war refugee. Running from the Japanese, running from the communists, which led to both of their families in 1949 

escaping mainland China and Mao, and following Chi Kai-shek as he fled the mainland to Taiwan. So at this point, so it's 1949, so they're teenagers just out of high school. they and their families both ended up in the city of Tio Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan.

and had to start completely new lives, torn away from their homes and everything that they had, they had been familiar with. So it, I found out much later in life that my mom's [00:05:00] family comes from 20 generations in the same village in Northern China. I don't know that much about my dad's history, but needless to say, they spent their young adulthood in Taipei during a pretty.

chaotic time for that, for the Chinese people and for Taiwan. And then somehow or another, my dad got into his, mind that he wanted to come to the United States and go to graduate school. So he, I think he immigrated first on a, on a Fulbright scholarship

Jess: at that point, had they already met?

Joanne: let's see. I think they met in college.

Jess: Okay.

Joanne: And, and the story goes that my dad refused to kiss my mom for an entire year when they were dating. Uh, because he said, I'm going to America and unless you're coming to America with me, uh, I can't kiss you.

And so I guess my mom really wanted to be kissed by my dad. Uh, so she, uh, said, well, I'm coming with you.

Uh, and so I don't know if they had a plan or not, but he had a plan.

Jess: Uhhuh

Joanne: He had a Fulbright scholarship and ended up, [00:06:00] oddly enough. In a historically black college, Fisk University 

Jess: an HBCU or historically, black College and University is a college founded before 1964 with the mission of educating black students during a time when they were excluded from most US institutions. 1964 was when the Civil Rights Act passed, which outlawed segregation and education after that point, schools could no longer be created specifically to serve black students in the same way today, H BCUs continued to play a vital role

higher education, culture and community. Life nurturing black leadership, scholarship and creativity.

And while they were created for black students, HBCUs are open to everyone and enroll students of all backgrounds. 

Joanne: In a historically black college, [00:07:00] Fisk University in

Nashville, Tennessee. Yes. Which I didn't appreciate at all when I was a kid. Um, I just knew it was Fisk University by a name, but I didn't have any idea.

It was a historically black college as well. So he landed here in the United States studying this new field called sociology. my mom followed suit and she enrolled in an institute and got a master's degree in library science. So she was a librarian

as a professional. And my dad ended up finishing his doctorate degree at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

And he always told me very proudly that I was born a professor's daughter because he and my mom decided not to have kids until he got his first job. That first job was at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, which is where I was born. but soon after that, we moved to the town where I grew up in the town where I identify from, which is a tiny little [00:08:00] college town in upstate New York on the shores of Lake Ontario called Oswego, New York.

So both my parents were on faculty there, and I essentially grew up, uh, on that college campus.

Jess: Professor's kid eventually times two,

Joanne: Eventually times two. That's right.

Jess: going back to when, are there any stories that you have heard about your parents while they were kids in China? And like, just, like do they tell stories of, of their childhood?

Joanne: So a lot of. People who have gone through war and, distress, famine, fear, they don't talk about their childhoods much. So my father, never talked about his childhood and when he did, he only did so in Mandarin. And all I remember, from his talking about his childhood was. He would refer to himself as a refugee.

He referred to famine. [00:09:00] He referred to eating rocks and rice with animal feces in it. I mean, it was a bad, it was a bad, bad time. so I don't actually know that much about what his actual childhood was. He was also the youngest of five or six children. so he was sort of the baby being sort of. Dragged along in this chaos on my mother's side, however, I later found out, that they come from a long line of farmers.

so they were very much tied to the land and they would have, uh, a lot of, uh, uh, sort of ancestral Chinese homes, have multi-generations living in one household. And so later I heard about. Them playing games in their, in their family, uh, courtyard and doing all sorts of things that mischievous kids do.

but not too many stories from my parents directly, just sort of indirectly from other relatives as we grew older.

Jess: any stories of, you know, adjusting to Taiwan [00:10:00] as young people?

Joanne: Yeah. Also not very many stories 'cause I, I just think that they, once they came to the United States, they, a lot of immigrants just kind of put a lot of that behind them. And I think my parents were typical of certain immigrants in which they just looked forward. 

So they didn't talk about the old country, they didn't talk about what life was like because they were so bound and determined to assimilate.

Become Americans. So everything I remember about our childhood, uh, was really about us sort of trying on all sorts of American things.

Jess: I'm like, what?

Joanne: Uh, well we got a dog at

one point. Um. I was five or six and my dad was going through a phase in which I vaguely remember he tried everything that was sort of quintessentially American.

So he tried fishing and he tried hunting and uh, and through the hunting he decided he was going to get a hunting dog. And so we got this Irish Sutter that we named Mars that was completely unmanageable. [00:11:00] He didn't know anything about raising a dog. so later on, you know, we, we, we started camping and canoeing.

And that actually becomes kind of part of my origin story, how I became, uh, pretty obsessed with nature as a little kid. But the one thing I do remember, and I didn't understand how significant this was at the time, but my mother always had a garden. And she always had a vegetable garden. She had a flower garden.

And I didn't know at the time how deeply ingrained, the land and raising food was, a main part of her family's identity. I just thought my mom had this like cute little garden that she always grew. All these Chinese vegetables in it

because sh they, you couldn't, I'm not sure where they, she got the seeds from.

They always, it was always kind of like on the hush hush, like somehow she had smuggled them into the United States. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how, but my mother had a green thump, which I did not inherit, but my mother could grow anything. And so a lot of my childhood, I [00:12:00] remember my mom spending in her garden and I, Spent a lot of time not being invited inside her garden, but being able to sort of play on the, uh, sort of the outside edges of the garden. So I spent a lot of time with my mom, but not with the plants, but oddly with the animals that were, sort of around the garden all the

Jess: Like the worms or like pets

Joanne: ev well, like worm?

Yes. Like worms. So, um,

my earliest memories as a kid. Were things like catching toads in the garden, catching frogs later, catching snakes.

Jess: What would you do with them?

Joanne: but my, oh, I just kind of play with them and, and let them go. But my biggest, my biggest memory of that, especially my early childhood, was I caught caterpillars and I caught a particular kind of caterpillar, which we don't see too much of down here in Atlanta, but, uh, they're monarch butterfly caterpillars, and

they have a particular stripe.

They only eat somehow I knew, [00:13:00] even though I was like, you know, six, that they only eat milkweed. So I'd capture the butterfly caterpillars and I would, I would feed them milkweed and I would keep 'em in a little cage and I would watch them, form their chrysalis and I would watch them. Pupate and emerge as monarch butterflies.

And I did this every single summer. and so I've always, I was always the kid with my head in a field guide. I had memorized my entire golden guide of insects and golden guide of reptiles and amphibians. I could tell you everything about every animal that was, uh, in the gardens Next to my mom's vegetable garden. 'cause I just spent so too much time. I just remember summer is just spending on my stomach just watching insects be insects.

Jess: Wow. and so, I mean, you must have loved the camping trips too then, right?

So 

like, tell me about a camping trip. What was like a typical camping trip like?

Joanne: So camping trips. So this is early, I think like everyone was kind of getting the camping bug. So I [00:14:00] remember we had this big blue canvas tent that we'd gotten from Sears and we had these big heavy sleeping bags and my mom would make us a little nest in the, in the tent. Um, 

they would bring cans of spam and we had this, you know, two burner Coleman stove and they would bring cans of spam and we'd cut the spam up and we'd fry it on the grill for breakfast. We'd have eggs. but my parents loved, um, 'cause there was no camping food back then. Right. So we would have ee more.

Canned beef stew, always with rice, right? So my mom would make rice and we'd have canned beef stew and that was amazing 'cause we never could eat that stuff when we were home, but only if we were on camping trips. And we were really lucky because we, we were near, the Adirondack State Park, which is, uh, 500 acre ginormous piece of property in, in upstate New York.

And so I spent my childhood. Camping there, hiking there, canoeing. Later we got into canoeing and my family owns several canoes. Uh, one of them is still in my [00:15:00] basement today. The canoe that I had when we were in high school. And so we spent a lot of time, um, actually in nature. And then the weirdest thing was, uh, because Oswego is in the blizzard belt. So we get a lot of snow. So there are lots of pictures of me, uh, as a kid, like perched on top of snow drifts. 'cause that's apparently what you did. You put your kid on top of this ginormous snow tro drift and you took a picture of it. but later, as as high school kids, we, we picked up cross country skiing and so I actually spent a lot of my childhood, you could actually cross country ski from my backyard Into these woods that the university owned. 

And so my friends and I, we go cross country skiing and so yeah, nature was always a big part of who I was as a kid and I didn't know it was later I kind of realized it was weird for a Chinese kid to like being out in nature. 'cause I think a lot of my parents' friends were like city people,

Jess: It

wasn't as common, right? Mm-hmm. yeah.

Joanne: But I was like this country kid that I liked being dirty and catching [00:16:00] frogs and. Things like that.

Jess: and so like on the camping trips, like would you go with, you know, parents, friends and their families, or was just your family. 

and what would people talk about? Like how would you, how would y'all pass the time?

Joanne: Gosh. I think back then people talked to each other.

Jess: Yeah,

but like about what kind of stuff?

Joanne: I remember we did, we did a lot of hiking. I do remember my parents did like, or maybe I wanted to do a lot of Ranger programs, and so we were always doing some Ranger programs, but, I don't know. I, I seem to recall we'd just sit and make a fire and

my dad liked to sing and so he would sing songs that he learned,

back when he was in grad school.

Jess: English songs. English songs. Yeah. Later I realized that they were, uh, perhaps racially questionable songs. A lot of sort of from the American folk song, cannon of the South. Um, but we didn't know the difference back then. He just liked, he probably didn't know what they all meant, so it was things like. [00:17:00] Dixie,

Joanne: you know, oh, Susanna, you know, things that he liked to sing, but as an immigrant, you just like the songs.

You don't really know what they mean.

Jess: Like the rhythm, the melody, you know? 

so, you know, we were talking about, that like your, your mom's garden had a lot of Chinese vegetables. and like, what, what were the ways that Chinese culture, was present in your life as a kid? 

Language, like, yeah.

Joanne: so I think I, I never had any proof, but I, I think Mandarin was my first language, and the reason why I think this is because when I speak. Other foreign languages like Spanish or German. I have been told by native speakers that I don't sound like an American when I speak it. So it's like I'm incorporating these like mandarin phonies in my language.

But we always, so when we were kids, didn't, unlike a lot of Chinese [00:18:00] kids in the United States that were subjected to Chinese school, so the weekend Saturday Chinese school, we didn't have that 'cause we were the only Chinese family in town.

Jess: Wow.

Joanne: So it was this weird thing in which at home you spoke Mandarin, you took your shoes off at the front of the door, you ate Chinese food, you only, you know, used chopsticks.

and then outside you were like this other kid, right? So you're trying to be American, trying to be white outside of the family. But inside the family it was very. Chinese language, Chinese culture, Chinese manners. So we were, we were told to be very, you know, obedient to our elders. And, you know, I did the classic thing where I played the piano, you know, when some from the time I was four, uh, and, uh, so I learned how to play the piano.

And it really was this sort of split, you know, between how you were at home and then how you were of the home.

Jess: What was outside of the home? Joanne like.

Joanne: Outside of the home, Joanne loved [00:19:00] to ride her bike, loved to catch snakes and frogs. So, outside the home, Joanne was a tomboy. 

Jess: when she says tomboy, she's using the word many of us grew up with these days. People might describe it as having not traditionally feminine interests. 

Joanne: I liked riding my bike. I loved, uh, so later we, um, moved to a place that had a pond nearby and I spent my summer catching frogs and dragonflies and giant spiders. And, I loved exploring in the woods by myself. And so I was very much a nature girl.

And at home I read books. I was a voracious reader. I helped my mom in the kitchen and I played the piano and I got good grades. 

Jess: This came up earlier and I must ask because I know listeners will be curious. Um, what kind of snakes [00:20:00] did you catch?

Joanne: Ah. So in upstate New York, we did not have poisonous snakes.

Jess: Okay.

Joanne: Uh, so we had garter snakes and lots of garter snakes. I just seem to recall garter snakes everywhere you'd look. Um, and garter snakes had a really, uh, unpleasant characteristic is that, that if they were scared, they would, sort of like, it wasn't exactly poop on you, but they would excrete this really smelly.

Ugh. it was this noxious substance that they would extrude out their butts. And the, the idea is that it would be so noxious that whatever Predator was trying to catch 'em would say, Ugh, and drop it. so the trick was, if you're a kid, if you're good at catching snakes, is you, you had to catch it in a way that you didn't scare it to release this stuff.

'cause then otherwise it got all over your hands and it was kind of gross.

Jess: why did you, why did you like catching snakes?

Joanne: I liked catching snakes. That's a really good question. I was fascinated by snakes.

Jess: Hmm.

Joanne: [00:21:00] probably because of something I was watching on TV at the time. Which was this television show called The Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and it starred these two guys, one guy named Marlon Perkins and the his sidekick named Jim Fowler. And Marlon Perkins was always doing stuff like wrestling, anacondas, like he was always like out there somewhere and catching animals. I was actually, I was reminding myself about these episodes and so I was actually pulling up a couple of them on YouTube and sure enough there's, there's Marlon Perkins wrestling in Anaconda in the Amazon, and then another one, he's like wrestling a taper. so this idea of like catching things, was fascinating to me.

Jess: Like the act of catching or the 

act of 

observing once you

Joanne: well, yes, that too. But there was something about snakes because I knew they couldn't hurt me.

Right? Catching frogs was interesting, but not that interesting. snakes just [00:22:00] because of the way they move, the fact they didn't have legs. Um, later on, my mom, my librarian mom, would bring home, 'cause apparently I asked her, 'cause I have a lot of these books still on my bookshelf.

I was fascinated about how did these animals evolve. How did you evolve from animals that had legs? How did you become an animal that didn't eat legs at all and yet survived? Just fine. And so even though I had never been to the south, I from a young child, I was fascinated not just with big snakes, but with poisonous snakes.

'cause I was very interested in all these things that snakes had to evolve, fangs, poison.

Constriction, some snakes, had live birth and some snakes laid eggs and some snakes took care of their babies and some snakes didn't. And so there's all this like diversity and I didn't have the language to know any of this, but I was just, even at a young [00:23:00] age, I was always interested in why,

Jess: Hmm.

Joanne: why was something the way it was. Why is it that when I was lying on my tummy and watching a female praying mantis, why was she chewing off the head of a male praying mantis? Like, what was going on there? so because we lived in a rural area. So that area is still pretty, known for its farmland. And in fact, we lived in an area called Fruit Valley, so it was known for its agricultural, um, cherry trees and pear trees and apple trees.

So there was a lot of nature around. Um, and so I just remember spending a lot of time just laying on my tummy and in the grass and just watching animals do what they do and perpetually asking myself why.

Jess: After the break. Joanne talks about trying to fit in her brother the genius and the shock of a 1970s Taiwanese public school at the height of its [00:24:00] anti-communist propaganda. 

Joanne: you know, you talk about how there was at home, Joanne, and then the Joanne that was out in the world was trying to assimilate fit in. To, the white majority around you. did you feel like you fit in when you were out in the world?

No, never did. That, that was hard.

Jess: Hmm.

Joanne: So this is the seventies and the eighties. So, so we're talking about a time in which everybody had big hair. So Farrah Faucet, the big, you know, [00:25:00] Cheryl Lad, I mean the, the first big glamorous, supermodels were very much part of the. Pop culture and everyone had big curly hair with feathers and all the girls had curling irons and curly hair, and here I was with my black straight hair. yeah, I, I think, I wonder now if it was why I was a tomboy because at least if I didn't fit in it was because I was a girl. Not because I was a Chinese girl.

Jess: Mm.

Joanne: And so I never really put those two things together until more recently. Like why is it that I didn't have a lot of girlfriends? But then when I think about it, it's like, 'cause I wasn't allowed to buy DoorDash jeans.

Jess: What are DoorDash jeans?

Joanne: Well, George Jeans were the thing in the eighties. Everybody had, this is how, um. Brooke Shields [00:26:00] when she was a, a very young girl. So she was like barely 16, I think she was 14 when she became a supermodel. Brooke Shields was famous because she, was the DoorDash Jean model and her slogan was, nothing gets between me and my J Dashs.

and so, very young Brooke Shields was walking around these really, really, really tight jeans, DoorDash, jeans. and so. A lot of the things that girls other girls could do. My mom wouldn't, she wouldn't let me get pierce steers. She wouldn't let me wear high heels. She wouldn't let me wear tight clothes, right?

And so I always had to sit with the tension of, of course, wanting to fit in, and then just being perpetually reminded both at home and outside of the home that I was different.

Jess: Would kids bully or say things

Joanne: middle school was a little rough. that's when kids get cruel. When we were element in elementary school, I never got bullied. 

Jess: Interesting. I 

had a bully in elementary school.

Yes, I did. I moved [00:27:00] and there was this kid that just was just so mean to me in fifth 

Joanne: Yeah, it was definitely junior high school that 

Jess: Mm-hmm. 

Joanne: racial slurs. 

So, when we initially moved to our house out in the country, like the boys in the neighborhood, they threw eggs at our house. And so we, we never, I never really understood, but I kind of understood it was because we were different.

and we, like I said, in this entire college down. Any given time, there was at most one other Chinese family in town and was usually another professor, family, and for some reason they would come and go. I vaguely remember they kind of came and went. So I do, our parents didn't have other Chinese friends in town 'cause there weren't any Chinese people around, so I, I didn't have any other Chinese kids.

Around me, which is, I imagine really different from your experience growing up, you know, in

Jess: La. Yeah.

Very majority minority. 

Joanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jess: [00:28:00] Yeah. 

Joanne: Yeah. So I had, I mean, our town was, so the, they're like the town folks. The town folks were, Irish, Italian, Polish descent. Um, then there was like the college kids, and the college kids were like. Like the un right? It's like one of every

Jess: Mm-hmm. 

Joanne: ethnicity, but 

Jess: yeah, everywhere.

Joanne: Yeah. Yeah, everywhere. but we never, like nobody ever talked about social, I, you know, we didn't talk about stuff like that back then, so we didn't really ever identify with each other as non-white. We didn't have language for that. Um, but yeah, I always felt like an outsider.

Jess: so as you, got into middle school and high school and were growing up, what were your parents' expectations for you? This worth 

Joanne: Uh, 

Jess: immediate gut laugh.

Uhhuh. 

Joanne: I was five, I was told, well, somehow I had assimilated. I am going to Harvard University and I'm going to get a PhD,

not. 

Jess: were told that,

Joanne: I [00:29:00] was told that, and I knew how to say it, right. I didn't know what Harvard University was or a PhD. I just knew my dad had one 

and somehow I was told that was the expectation that my brother and I were both supposed to get PhDs and become college professors.

We weren't ever really asked, but we, so that was the expectation that we were gonna, we were gonna go get our PhDs and become college professors.

Jess: Could you decide in what field? Was that kind of up for you to figure out? Or was it like more specific than that?

Joanne: That's a good question. Both my brother and I ended up in the, in the sciences. I don't know if I had said I was gonna get a PhD in English. Actually never even occurred to me like, what, what would happen? I do remember at one point, um, when I was in grad school, I said something about becoming a plumber. And I said, you know, maybe I should just drop outta grad school and, and become a plumber.

And you would've [00:30:00] thought that I had said that I wanted to. Go to Vegas and be a stripper. I mean, you know, it's like my dad was like horrified. I mean, he, we, we got in this big fight because I was like, I never got a chance to choose and what if I wanted to be a plumber? But yes. So the expectation was you're going to grad school, you're gonna a PhD and you're gonna become a professor in what?

Uh, probably ideally in the sciences. Oh, that was the other thing. So, so this is how, how insidious this is. 'cause we were in New York. My dad got a paper copy of The New York Times. Every single day we would go to the student union and he would pick up his New York Times and he'd bring it home and, and he would cut out articles for his class.

And so he, he always had a big stack of New York Times and he had a pair of scissors by his office and he would cut out articles. And every year, I don't remember when. This time of year was what it was every year he would cut [00:31:00] out a particular picture and an article from the New York Times, and it was a picture of the Westinghouse High School Science Award winners for that year. I don't, to this day, I don't really know what the Westinghouse Science Award-winning was, but he would cut it out. He would show it to my brother and I and he would say, look at how many Asian faces are in this picture. 

I guess he was trying to inspire us,

Jess: were there a lot or were there a

Joanne: I guess, so enough for him to cut the picture out every year.

Jess: Oh, and be like, aspire to do this.

Joanne: to win 

the Westinghouse, right? This could be you, right,

Jess: I want it to be 

Joanne: right 

Jess: could be you. Wow. Okay.

Joanne: so in a tangential story, I have a younger brother. He's 20 months younger than me. And ever since he was a kid, he was told that he was a genius.

Jess: Hmm.

Joanne: Now, my brother's pretty smart. I don't know if he's a genius or not, [00:32:00] but he was told he was a genius. And one of the ways he demonstrated his geniusness was so we went to a a, an elementary school that was run by the university. And I say we were just little educational Guinea pigs throughout the 1970s. So one of the experiments that they ran, and they, we, they did a lot of experiments on us that there's a whole other story.

but one of the experiments that they did was they said, Hey, let's take a bunch of sixth graders and let's see if we can teach them high school algebra

Jess: Whoa.

Joanne: and let's have them take the United, uh, the New York State Regents Exam. Algebra, which all ninth graders took just to see what would happen. So they grabbed a bunch of sixth graders from this elementary school and they taught him algebra and they, they took the exam and my brother got like a 98 or something.

He's in sixth grade. So he, he was told that he was a genius. And in fact, when our grandfather, so my mother's father would call the house, you know, you pass the phone to. Talk [00:33:00] to grandpa. The way he would greet my younger brother is he would say, has Oslo called yet?

Jess: Okay, for the listener, my eyes are very wide.

Joanne: So in other words, have you been awarded your Nobel Prize yet? He is in sixth grade.

Right. 

Jess: Wait, way 

to like encourage an oversized ego for a kid,

Joanne: a lot of imposter syndrome. 

So when, yeah. So when you talk about, when you talk about expect family expectations, that's what we're talking about.

Jess: Oh wow. Okay. quite, quite the bar.

Joanne: Yeah.

Jess: okay, so middle school, high school. While there is this environment of expectations to become a professor, hopefully in stem, what were the interests that were developing for you internally? Because was it still [00:34:00] reptiles and you know, bugs and was it still that stuff just like on the same trajectory?

Joanne: Yeah, so I was interested in biology,

um, having, having grown up watching Wild Kingdom, I wanted to grow up to be Marlon Perkins. I wanted to chase things and study things and know all these weird facts about them. So I, uh, I decided I was going to be a biology major. In college. and I wanted to become a, a, essentially an organismal biologist.

I wanted to study ecology and evolution, animal behavior, and, uh, so, and that, that was my main motivation coming out of high school and going into college.

Jess: That like I'm imagining, you know, putting on your parents' shoes, like they must have been like, well that's a great stem career. Like were they just very, like, that was very pleasing to them. Right.

Joanne: yes, they were. They were quite pleased.

Jess: so growing up your, your grandparents, were they in [00:35:00] Taiwan? did you spend any time. Taiwan as a kid,

Joanne: Yes. So, um, when I was seven, my dad, 'cause he was a college professor, he had a chance to go to, he went on sabbatical. And for his sabbatical, he decided he was gonna spend the year in Taipei, in Taiwan. He had not been back to Taipei to live since he was a young man and his mother was getting older.

my mom's dad was also still in Taiwan at the time. and so they decided they were going to take the entire family and we were going to spend an entire year in Taiwan. So they yanked us all up. So they pulled us out of our hippy dippy elementary school and we flew across the ocean and landed in Taipei, Taiwan, My grandfather at the time was running the Railroad [00:36:00] administration for the entire island of Taiwan. So he was a, big deal. and, but we had this little house. I remember we had this little house in a village somewhere, and they plopped my brother and I just a normal Taiwanese elementary school.

Jess: Public school.

Joanne: Public school. We did not go into an American school. We, we went to a 

Taiwanese public school. And that was wild. 

It was wild because one, we knew a little bit of Chinese. We didn't know how to write. We did not know how to read. We had been going to this elementary school that was testing out.

In America, state of the art, the latest theories in children's education, and lots of like crazy number two pencil tests. I mean, we were, we were really on the forefront of really liberal, educational practices in the United States. So we go to Taiwan and we show up, [00:37:00] and I have to be crammed into a little uniform.

I still remember a little pleated skirt and a little white. Button down thing, my hair and a braids. We had a line of it in front of the flagpole every morning and sing the national anthem, which to this day I, I still, I can sing the words phonetically, but I have no idea what they mean. It was the height of, sort of anti Mao, I think Chiang Kaishek had just died. So the cult and maybe Mao had just died too. So the cult of both Mao and Chiang Kaishek were like, at its height, 

Jess: In Taiwan. The most intense political messaging in schools happened during the martial law era. Which lasted from 1949 to 1987.

This period overlaps with what Taiwanese scholars call the white terror. A decades long time of political repression when the government monitored speech, censored media an arrested people suspected of opposing the ruling Kuoming Tang Guoming [00:38:00] Dang. Or of sympathizing with the Chinese Communist Party

from the 1950s through the 1970s, this climate shaped what students learned in school under Chen Kai, 蒋介石, and.

蒋经国,

classrooms were filled with strict anti-communist education, textbooks, assemblies, and patriotic films all portrayed the Chinese Communist Party as a dangerous enemy. And children were taught that Taiwan's mission was to quote unquote take back the mainland.

Historians widely view this era as the peak of state led propaganda in Taiwan's education system. 

Joanne: there was still a lot of rhetoric about how. The Taiwanese people were going to rise up and liberate their brethren from the evil communist regime. And so the children were being indoctrinated in this liberation worldview in which [00:39:00] we were gonna be saviors and rid the world of communism or something.

And I'm like, you know, seven, I have no idea what they're talking about. And everywhere we go, we have to bow. How do our teachers in the morning, we learned how to do calligraphy. We learned how to do math with, um,

Jess: Abacus.

Joanne: abacus. An abacus, uh, I mean all this stuff. And I was just like, what the, what the heck is going on here?

And that's when I, I remember, I, I couldn't play with the boys 'cause the girls were not allowed to play with. So I 

I had a terrible time. Yeah. It was my usual crowd. I wasn't allowed to, so I, I don't remember very much about that year, but it was. So then like my, so I was in fourth grade, my brother was in third grade, but for like Chinese classes, they sent us to, to be with the first graders.

So we would have to go all, we had to go catch up and so we'd sit with these first graders and we were much bigger than them and we learned our alphabet. So they had a, a particular phonetic alphabet that all the time these children [00:40:00] 

learnedIt's called Bopomofo. Bopomofo, that's right!.

Jess: Is a set of phonetic symbols that kids in Taiwan learn to help them pronounce Mandarin. it doesn't work exactly like an alphabet that spells out whole words. Instead, it sits next to Chinese characters to show how each one should sound, kind of like training wheels for learning to read Chinese.

Joanne: we learned how to read and we learned how to write.

And that was this, just this crazy, um, year of, again, not fitting, not fitting in, right. Because they looked at us and they're like, oh, you kids are American. Like, well, I guess, but we were outsiders in America and now we're here and we're outsiders again. I mean, it was, it was rough. It was really.

Jess: Were the feelings. the predominant feelings of that year?

Joanne: Confusion. Like my mom. So my mom, I guess she was a stay [00:41:00] at home mom, and I remember coming home from school and she's like, how was school? And I'm like, eh, it was okay. She's like, what did you guys talk about? And I'm like, I don't know. It was like, sun, yet, sun, blah, blah, blah, junk. Kai, she blah, blah, blah. I don't really understand what's going on, 

but we talk about those two guys an awful lot.

Jess: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. My mom is gonna listen to this episode and she's gonna laugh because I've heard a lot of stories about how, you know, when she was in school, I think she's, you know, maybe like she's, she's a bit older than you, and it was definitely, you know, that kind of education for a lot of like essay questions.

Like the responses were like, you have to. regurgitate propaganda, right? It's like, okay, let's repeat that. 'cause we know that's the correct answer for this essay question.

Joanne: Correct.

Correct. There's a lot of indoctrination and I thought it was kind of funny, right? I, I remember this like, so they, I think all of the time, and your mother and I [00:42:00] might have had the same, we're about the same age. We might have had the same curriculum and I remember like whatever the equivalent of social studies was like there were these horrific pictures of fat communists.

'cause you always could tell 'cause they were wearing the little Mao hat. Like holding whips, beating these emaciated, shriveled up people that were like pulling carts. I mean, it was just like this really graphic, graphic stuff in which they were trying to indoctrinate the children. Of course, nobody really knew what was happening because the, the, the bamboo curtain had been, was still pretty far up.

So no one knew, of course, about the starvation and the famines and, and these things. But there was, there was a lot of conjecture and so. So we would get these cartoon versions of what was happening over there and then being indoctrinated about our role [00:43:00] as Chinese people to someday go back to the mainland and 

liberate 

our brethren from the yoke of communism.

Jess: Mm-hmm. 

Joanne: And so I just, you know, I grew up like reading about Laura Ingles Wilder and Little House in the Prairie and Wizard of Oz. So I went from like reading. My favorite book, like I remember like Harry Kat's Pet Puppy,

like these, you know, things that you would buy from the Scholastic book catalog, right? So I went from reading books like that, wizard of Oz, Dr.

Doolittle, little House in the Prairie to just reading Taiwanese propaganda. And I just found it to be bizarre, right? I, I, I couldn't take it very seriously and I didn't have enough. I really, I probably just didn't really know what was happening, but I just found the whole thing perplexing, I think 

Jess: you were able to see it from an outsider lens, but on the inside

the school 

[00:44:00] experience. But also you were reading at a, at a like first grade level instead of a third grade level too, the content of what you're reading was so different, the level too, because it was a different language.

Um, I think this is a great place to take a break. What do you think?

Joanne: Sounds great.

Jess: Thanks so much for listening. In part two, Joanne opens up about the harrowing and unexpected ups and downs of her career from crashing and burning in college When she first discovered boys and beer to eventually finding her way to the work she truly wanted to do.

We talk about resilience, her awakenings at Spelman College, and how she learned to chart her own path.

If you enjoyed this episode. You can support this homegrown indie podcast by leaving a comment, and sharing the episode with a friend.

Your support keeps these stories of representation coming, stories that move beyond stereotypes and bring our everyday [00:45:00] narratives to the forefront. You can also find ways to connect with Joanne in the show notes. This episode was produced and edited by me with advising and executive production support from Ruben Gnanaruban.

I'm Jess Lin. See you soon.