Brief Bio:
Chris a New Yorker, a neuroscientist, a devoted teacher and advocate for faculty rights. Her values are grounded in her upbringing as a first generation Chinese American and on Confucian principles of community above self.
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My parents were from China where they experienced difficult conditions during the Japanese invasion which lasted from 1937-1945. During that time, they had to move around a lot, especially my mother because her father was in the Government. Since she was used to moving, our family later also moved around a lot in New York. We kids had to learn quickly to make friends anew, and adjust to a new school.
There were five of us siblings, three girls and two boys. I remember that the girls liked learning more than the boys did. Some of it was just cultural pressure. As an Asian family, everything was focused on the boys, it was a male dominated family. The boys were always considered as smart and intelligent, and if the girls did well, it was just because “You were lucky”. Only when I was older did I realize that this was sort of a negative thing, nobody bragged about the girls and their accomplishments. On the other hand, if the girls didn’t do well, it was OK; there was less pressure and we could do what we wanted. Thankfully, my mother was our champion. She had come from a very enlightened family and the women in her family accomplished a lot, so she was bent on us having a career and doing well. It was always clear from the very beginning that she expected that of her daughters. My father wasn’t necessarily expecting that!
He was 10 years older than my Mum and they got married when she was 23. Their families knew each other from China; both grandfathers had been good friends and in secondary school together. The families probably arranged for my parents to meet.
Soon after they were married, my parents came to the U.S. for college. My mother did her undergraduate and graduate degrees here while my father completed his undergrad in China or Hong Kong, and went to grad school here. Recently, going through all their paperwork and artifacts, we found documents and some looked like they might have been forged. My father seems to have been born in Hong Kong but he always told us he was born in China. All their official papers were probably lost during the war. It may have been that a Hong Kong certificate made it easier if he later wanted to get a British passport. “Lost during the war” was the common refrain when we asked about something.
Things were different back then.
My father’s father had also migrated to the U.S. and was in the food business. He supplied Chinese food to different restaurants in New York City, and he also had a food stand at Rockway Beach. As the oldest son, my father was expected to continue the food trade even though he trained to be a chemist and wanted an academic career. His brothers got to do what they wanted but he had to lead the family business. I still think that was a pity.
Asian families were somewhat different from American families especially current American families. With my family, it was about Confucian ethics and morality. The family was an important unit and things were always done for the greater good and for the community. It wasn’t proper to brag about anybody or anything; in fact, my community always picked on the negative. If you got all “A”s in school and perhaps a “B” in gym, the focus would be on, “Why couldn’t you get an A in gym?”. I’m not sure why the Asian culture is like that, perhaps it’s about being humble, not bragging about anything is also part of Confucian philosophy as I was told by my father.
In America, there’s the opposite tendency where everything’s so great and fabulous whatever you do. I think one may really need a balance. Fortunately for me and my sisters, we all liked studying and we were big readers. In our Chinese culture, being a scholar was considered the top profession and accomplishment. That was what drove the academics for us, and of course, the girls took this more to heart than my brothers did.
I don’t remember our habits and values in Confucianism being practiced as a religion versus as a philosophy. But, maybe, religion is also kind of a philosophy. For us, everything was for the greater good, not for self-benefit. We also learned early on that everything we did reflected on the family and the community. There weren’t that many Asians in the U.S. back then so you weren’t supposed to do anything that reflected badly on your family or community; I think it still informs me and my siblings to this day.
There was pride and a strong cohesive sense of family. My grandmother would say “Friends come and go. Your family is forever.” They’re always there for you and you’re there for the family. It’s a little bit different from the American emphasis on individual accomplishment. In the Confucian system, you don’t really accomplish anything on your own, it’s always the mentors, family, someone who gave you that leg up. I’ve noticed that even though many people help you along the way, many Americans are proud to say, “I did it all on my own.” I think this is mis-guided because there’s always someone who helped you, whether a teacher, a parent or a friend.
In different ways, this dichotomy between our Chinese heritage and newly adopted American culture caused many conflicts. My parents were first generation American and we were raised in a very Chinese way. We recognized that the boys were everything, and the girls were nothing. Our first language was actually Chinese before we learned English when we went to school. We spoke the Cantonese dialect even though both my parents were excellent linguists and knew different Chinese dialects. They decided to teach us Cantonese because most people in New York were from the south, the Guangzhou-Canton area. Later on, we did learn Mandarin through school and university courses, and one of my sisters also lived for a summer in China.
It was also interesting with our health issues. While my parents believed in Western medicine, my father also believed in eastern traditional medicine. We had a cabinet in our house, all labeled in Chinese; we didn’t know what all the roots or powders were but when we were sick, Dad would go down and make us a potion while Mum would bring us to the Western doctor. We never knew which treatment made us feel better! Nowadays, I read about all these herbal medicines coming from China and other places that have active ingredients that probably worked. When Dad passed on, we threw everything away and I wish we hadn’t. He died when he was 89 and mother passed away 4 years later.
When I was growing up, there were no racial discrimination laws but we were lucky as Asians were considered the model minority. We didn’t suffer as much discrimination as the Blacks; there weren’t many Hispanics in my area of New York. I was born in the 50s and the Civil Rights Act was passed in the 60s but it took a while for things to change and for any enforcement. Just like the sex discrimination laws in the 70s, it felt like there were many discriminations against women especially with choosing to go into STEM fields. I grew up through all of that.
When my older sister was going to High School, my parents moved us to New Jersey to what was perhaps a small Mafia-like town. My mother was always very anxious about our schooling and she would go around to check out different schools. We moved because our family was growing and my parents felt they needed to really settle down. That’s how they chose New Jersey.
We were the only Asian family and coincidentally, on the same street, was the only Jewish family; the rest of the town was all White. For High School, we were bused to a different town which was also majority White so I didn’t experience a lot of diversity.
In school, I remember being told, “Chris is going to graduate top of the class.” But I also remember another teacher saying, “Oh, but she’s in my English class, she’s not going to top there.” I didn’t think of racism back then. I realize society has changed a lot and that today, a teacher would not be allowed to say things like that in front of the whole class.
Fortunately, I had other teachers who were nice and supportive. And, when going through my parents’ stuff after they passed away, I found notes that they had sent to my parents – “She’s so interested in everything, it’s really great having her in class.” I didn’t know about any of this as my parents never said anything about their comments.
I liked all my subjects in school especially math and the sciences, and also English and history. I would ask my friends for their reading lists and read everything. As an undergrad, I was a math major but math is theoretical and very much about swinging and mapping things around in your head. I couldn’t see or get the application and practical part of it. I chose engineering but I really got tired of going into classes where I was the only female.
I was at Columbia University from 1973-76 for my undergrad and completed my Master’s in Engineering in 1978. I would have stayed at Columbia if they had offered Biomedical Engineering at that time as it would have melded my different interests. Anyway, I moved to Harvard and switched to Biology and got my PhD in 1985. I then started my postdoc working on nematodes which I have stayed with through my research career.
As a professor, my approach has always been about what’s going to help everybody. You set up your lab and do what you have to do but you try to make things better for your colleagues, department and students. I found this to be different from the philosophy of many other researchers. Now that I’m a senior scientist, I’m always advocating for the junior members but there’s sometimes a lot of push back. Some of the senior faculty say, “That’s what we had to do when we started out. You’re just making it too easy for these young people.”
I kind of view people as having two predominant mindsets: one group that says, “This is really bad, let’s change it so the next generation doesn’t have to go through the same thing” and the other, “We had to suffer so they have to suffer too.” But the goal post keeps changing, and maybe I’m making too big of a generalization. I’ve come to realize, as I’m older, that there’s this factor of resiliency. The same thing can happen to two different people, and one responds or recovers better or differently than the next person. Still, I think a lot more happens with harassment of women than happens to men. Also, experiences related to harassment are complex issues bridging things like gender, and cultural and individual differences.
When I was a graduate student, I did experience harassment. Women weren’t taken seriously in engineering and the sciences. I remember an argument with a postdoctoral colleague. I said to him, “Yes, you may take women seriously but other people don’t!” Later, we were at a neuroscience meeting together and he saw firsthand what I was talking about. We were chatting with a bunch of his friends and someone said to him, “Who’s this girl from your lab? She’s so cute and adorable!” Nobody said anything about the work I was presenting. For all these reasons, I decided from the start of my professional career to publish using a gender-neutral name. I was lucky that my name allowed me to use CHRIS instead of CHRISTINE. After my PhD, I worked for a while in a company, and there were also a lot of harassment incidents in that environment.
And you become a professor and this doesn’t end. There was a full professor who was just so obsessed with my hair, “Your hair is so beautiful and so silky” and he would run his hands through my hair. People told me, “You should confront him” but I said, “No, I can’t, I can’t do that. I’m telling you so you can confront him.” I had to refrain from antagonizing my senior colleagues because they voted on tenure and influenced departmental politics.
As a junior faculty during those times, sexual harassment laws were passed but not really mandated. We didn’t have complaints from students but I think it was because the system wasn’t set up for students to lodge a complaint and feel that they would have the support to address these issues. Even though I was not tenured yet, I was nominated to be chair of a newly formed Sexual Harassment committee. We developed guidelines for faculty and one of the first was, “Don’t fraternize with anyone in your class. You’re teaching them and responsible for their grades.” At the departmental meeting, my male colleagues were upset and insulted that they couldn’t be seen as being objective and doing the right thing. With everyone yelling at me, the Department Chair finally said, “Alright, we’re not voting on this one, it’s a rule. Move on to the next guideline.” He knew Rule #1 was going down to defeat if he didn’t intervene.
I think my parents had instilled strongly in me that everything is done for the greater good and so it just goes with everything in which I conduct myself. You fight for the people who can’t fight for themselves. You fight for the students, you stand up for the junior faculty, you stand up for the people who need your support. That sort of moral compass is with me all the time, from my early days to now. Make things better always, not just for yourself but for everyone. That’s a philosophy that I always hold for myself and it’s consistent with science too.
The search of knowledge with science, and with biology, is a search for knowledge to inform medicine and to help humankind. I think that drives the research and also drives who you have as trainees in your lab or what sort of schools you choose to work for. When my friends and I finished our PhD and postdocs, we knew that we could work at universities that just focused on research like at a medical college, or choose to work at schools that combined teaching and research. I have always only applied and chosen to go to places where I could work with and help students and where I could also do research.
A lot of the big-name researchers today learned to do and love research as undergraduates largely because someone took the time to help them reach their goal and make it as a scientist. Someone took the time to mentor them as students. That’s what I feel I need to do to help the next generation move on. Confucius did a lot of teaching. You teach and help the next person move on in what they want to do.
When we were growing up, we didn’t go to temple or church. My mother did become an observant Christian later in life but my father was a heathen in that regard and always maintained a Confucian perspective. My mother’s side of the family was more religious; they had been Christians in Hong Kong and continued when they came to the US. I don’t remember if my mother was a Presbyterian or Methodist though I can see the church that she attended in my mind. Anyway, she didn’t try to convert us. We had discussions about religion when she was older and I remember that she asked me why I didn’t believe in religion. I would say, “It’s whatever makes you feel better; if religion helps you through your life and makes you feel better, that’s fine. But for me, what you and Dad gave me early on was enough to give me my moral compass. I don’t feel that I need for it to be reinforced every week. She liked going to church every week and listening to the sermons. All that said, both my parents were very dedicated to hard work, to family, to improving and making things better for people.
They encouraged us as children to volunteer for things. Growing up, we helped with this drive and that drive, and we did what we could to help people who were less fortunate, or with cancer research or some other cause. My grandfather was also very politically oriented. We went campaigning when we were very young, something I perhaps would not allow a young kid to do today! At our dinner table, we were always talking about political things; for instance, most of my family were for the Vietnam war but I was against it. These types of arguments were common in family. They worried about communism spreading here and to other places and I was always against war in general. We argued about Civil Rights and different things and that kind of informs and shapes your political views.
What do I want to do when I retire? One thing that’s got my goat is the long backlog of cases on victims of rape. I’ve thought about getting certified and volunteering at a medical examiner’s office to help process these files given that I’m familiar with research and validation techniques like PCR. I have my bucket list of places I’d like to visit and other things I’d like to do.
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Draft Oct 2021