…

And then, yesterday, I got this WhatsApp from my mom:

Just to put this in perspective, my mother (a US and HK citizen, previously also a British subject and British passport holder) is advising me to enter the US – the country of my birth and first citizenship – on a British passport … because she’s worried I’ll be sent to an El Salvadoran prison. Or worse.

My mother knows that I have committed no crime. She knows that I’m an immigration lawyer, qualified to practice in both the US and the UK.

She worries, that would make no difference.

…

Initially, I brushed pass this exchange as a bit of folly – silly older person panic, too much MSNBC.

It is also “illegal” for a US citizen to enter or leave the country unless they are bearing a valid US passport. I have always thought this was a particularly stupid rule – and anyone who is a dual citizen and travels between their countries of citizenship will understand why.

Our family histories, hidden in plain sight

Even so, these messages made me think a bit harder about my mother. She was born in Macau, where her parents fled to seek safety during the WWII Japanese military occupation of Hong Kong.

And I thought about her husband, whose Jewish parents fled to the US from Eastern Europe, escaping the early days of the Hungarian Holocaust.

Both were born to families who fled their homes to escape war or persecution. At the time they were born, their parents were struggling to build a new life, in a new place, while their homelands of nationality were occupied under martial law.

It made me wonder what their parents were like. Their parents knew what it was like to live with freedom and privilege and to see that swept away in days, perhaps hours. They must have known profound fear.

I remember my grandmother as a distant, formidable and terrifying figure, and a total queen at the mahjong table – but was she also grieving, traumatised?

My mother has never really spoken to me about this. And I’m certain that my mother, at least, doesn’t identify as a “refugee”.

…

A mother’s wisdom

And yet. Something about my mother’s lived experience – a memory, an instinct – drove her to give me this advice: keep your options open; travel on your safest passport.

And this made me revisit some other wisdom from the olds

• Get a good education. They can take everything from you, but they can’t take your education.
• Look after your family. You don’t have to like them, but it is your duty to look after each other.
• Look after your health. Without your health, you have nothing.

I’m sure I bridled and fought against each of these lessons over the years. But this morning, with the sun on my face, and both history and future in mind, they seem wise and true.

Almost, urgent.

…

Here’s where I’ve ended today: maybe it’s time to teach the kids how to play mahjong.

Maybe we watch the film Crazy Rich Asians while we’re at it.

Maybe the olds were wiser than I thought they were.

…

And while we’re there, leaving you with this other wisdom from the olds:

Every day is a new day, and the sun always shines again

Thanks for reading The Long View again this week! I would love to hear your reflections, either on the challenge of living across a border from family and loved ones – or on a moment when you realised that your “olds” were wiser and stronger than you thought they could be.

First published on LinkedIn on 11 April 2025:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crossing-borders-safety-mothers-love-jen-ang-mwawe

What exactly is Thanksgiving?

You can skip this part if you already know, but here’s a brief rundown: American thanksgiving is a celebration that takes place on the fourth Thursday in November and is a federal holiday, which means that most people get this day off work.

In the US, traditionally, people travel home for Thanksgiving dinner and take Friday off work, so they can stay through the weekend. That makes for a very busy week of travel, but also means that the holiday can have a strong cultural significance for some families, and communities – being a secular holiday that everyone can celebrate at the same time – and a more inclusive alternative to Christmas (which not everybody celebrates) for gathering with family and friends.

The Thanksgiving Story: Disney Version

As a child, I was taught the Thanksgiving story in nursery and primary school, sat listening as I made turkey decorations out of handprints on paper plates, and daydreamed of roast sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and Libby’s pumpkin pie.

We are told that in the 1600s, the Pilgrims (Puritanical Christians fleeing religious persecution) came from England, by way of The Netherlands, and settled in what is now New England. They were ill equipped for the weather, and also had no idea how to farm the soil.

Half of the 105 people who arrived in the autumn, died during the first winter. They were saved by a tribe of Native Americans who had observed them from afar, eventually took pity on them, shared clothing and food, taught them to farm, hunt and safely navigate the landscape.

To thank the Native Americans (who we were told to call “Indians” at the time), the Pilgrims held a feast and invited the tribe to celebrate a successful harvest and the survival of the colony with them. This was such a success, it became an annual tradition – of “thanks giving” to the people who saved their lives, and the colony.

Lovely, heartwarming and simple… but is it true?

Sort of.

Actually, not really.

The “Real” Turkey: English Identity, Slavery and Counternarrative

Most of us now realise that the “real” Thanksgiving story is a lot darker, but also takes in a bigger slice of history – and is a lot more human, and interesting.

It’s true that the Pilgrims were fleeing persecution in England, because they were religious separatists in the early 1600s, at a time when it was illegal to form any church outside of the Church of England.

They fled to Amsterdam in 1608, and mostly settled near Leiden over the following year. Leiden is apparently known as the City of Refugees, and a fun fact according to the city’s official website is that today, 3 out of 4 “Leidenaars” are descended from refugees. The Pilgrims lived free from persecution in Leiden but apparently (and I do find this difficult to understand) experienced their children growing up speaking Dutch as a loss of English identity and somehow felt it would be better to travel to the New World to found a colony there.

Some Pilgrims left Leiden in 1620, famously joining others on a ship called the Mayflower, which later landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Today, in the US the Mayflower Society is an organisation compromised only of direct lineal descendants of those who originally sailed on the Mayflower, which is quite something to own up to, given what I’ve just told you (and am about to tell you) about those people.

It’s true that half of those who landed on the Mayflower, perished through the first winter, and their lives were saved by the kindness of strangers – Native Americans who had observed their arrival but kept a distance for a good few months.

But who were these kind people?

Most modern histories refer to a pivotal figure: Tisquantum (or “Squanto“), a Patuxet from the Wampanoag confederation, raised around the area known as Plymouth, where the Pilgrims landed.

Squanto spoke English because he had, in 1610 or 1611, been kidnapped and forced into slavery by an English captain (either Thomas Hunt, John Smith or George Weymouth – possibly, all of them). The only account all the histories give for this, is greed. Either the English wanted to “show Indians” to their financial backers, or they wanted to sell slaves as as commodities to increase their financial return, or both.

Squanto and a number of other Native American slaves were thrown into a ship’s hold, taken to Europe and sold as slaves in Malaga, Spain. Squanto either escaped or was later sold to Master John Slaney in Cornhill, London, who became Master of the London & Bristol Company (known as the “Newfoundland Company“) and put him on a ship back to the New World, to serve as translator and negotiator in the interests of that company.

According to legend, another Native American sent for Squanto after the tribe made contact with the Pilgrims, because they knew that he was fluent in English and would be able to serve as an intermediary for the two communities.

…

If you are now curious about alternative history and counternarratives, I highly recommend checking out this from the National Museum of the American Indian: Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving

…

Bringing It Home: the kindness of strangers

Something I like about digging a little deeper into our common histories is that is is messy, but it is also more human.

We see and feel the fear, uncertainty and questionable decisions that people make when they are stressed and under pressure. We also see historians (and others) struggle to ascribe human motivations to the actions of people, after they have acted.

Did Squanto act out of kindness and generosity, exercising near superhuman ability to forgive English people for what they did to him?

Or did Squanto “betray his people,” for greed or out of a sense of self-preservation?

Did he even have a sense of “my people” – after everything he had endured, and all he had seen of the world?

We can’t know, but for me, the messy story is a better place to start from. And it’s the messy story I want to reflect on today, and how I will talk about Thanksgiving to my own children, and maybe to their children, in years to come.

So today, I’m giving thanks for:

the kindness of strangers

messy history

the human capacity to forge friendships, to endure, to take action to change their circumstances, and to tell and retell their stories, forever

Thanks for reading again this week and would love to hear about your own relationship to messy history, or the kindness of strangers, or maybe just the things you’re grateful for today. (This is also a Thanksgiving tradition, and a good one!)

And finally, here’s a Thanksgiving treat for you, the unstoppable lyricism of Bob Dylan presenting an alternative version of the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower

First published on LinkedIn on 29 November 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/giving-thanks-kindness-strangers-jen-ang-e34ke/

This month is about East and South East Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month and picking through stories from my own and collective history, I have two stories that just might be worth passing on.

Story Time: The History of the Mooncake

I have a surplus of mooncakes because the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival fell on 17th September this year, and it is one of two Chinese festivals (the other being the Lunar New Year) that I always celebrate here in the UK.

The Moon Festival is a harvest-type festival, it is marked by the appearance of the full moon in on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the year and typically, families share a celebratory meal that includes mooncakes.

These are vaguely linked to a fable about a legendary archer and his wife, Chang-e, who took a magic potion and became goddess of the moon. Want visual context? Watch the 30-second Disney version here in the trailer for their 2020 film Over the Moon

The mooncake also has a brilliant subversive history. For a period of time, China was ruled by a Mongol dynasty (called the Yuan dynasty) and legend tells us that a successful rebellion was incited by Ming revolutionaries who placed subversive messages inside mooncakes distributed widely to Chinese families but not their Mongol rulers. When families cut into the cakes on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, they read the messages, took up arms and successfully overthrew the ruling dynasty.

All good and fine, but why do I have a surplus of mooncakes?

Two reasons: (1) I love mooncakes, but none of my family here shares this passion. They consist of a sweet pastry outer shell with a dense, sweet bean paste inside – so far so good. But the deluxe versions also feature a cooked, salted duck egg at the centre. Personally, I think this is the best part, but for most people with Western palates, this is really just a step too far.

And (2) following Brexit, Asian foodstuffs have become more expensive and harder to buy in Scotland. Last year, there was a run on mooncakes, with price gouging in the last few days and a single mooncake going for eyewatering prices of £8-12 each.

So this year, I have simply bought far too many. More than anyone in my family will ever eat. Which suits me fine, because it just means – more mooncakes for me.

Story Time II: The Curious History of Opium, Rhubarb and Me

Last week, in London, studying the history of colonialism with colleagues and walking the City of London, we started to speak about the Opium Wars, which were a series of wars between China, the British Empire and France in the mid-19th Century. My own father was a historian of modern Chinese history, and when we lived in China, he made a point of taking me to museums in southern China and talking me through the exhibits.

He told me that the British Empire, facing a trade deficit in China and wanting very much to find items to trade with the Chinese for tea, silk and porcelain were looking for a product that the Chinese wanted to consume. They eventually settled on opium, cultivated and exported from India – a substance which is of course highly addictive, as well as harmful, and resulted in a permanent reversal of the balance of trade, in favour of the British Empire.

If you would like to read more, here is a version of this history from the British national archives which is quite light on taking responsibility, and which justifies Britain waging a war in order to legalise the opium trade as a reasonable defense of a global interest in free and unregulated markets. (If you live in the UK, by the way, this is definitely what your kids are learning in school.)

So Hong Kong, where my mother was born and raised, became a British colony and free trading port, ceded by China to the British following its total defeat in the Opium Wars.

My grandfather, his father and his brothers, originally farmers and small shopkeepers from Southern China, emigrated to the US in the early part of the 20th century. They opened Chinese restaurants and laundromats on the East Coast of the US, eventually however, sending my great-grandfather back to China in his later years, because it had become too expensive to support his lifelong opium habit in the US – it could more easily be serviced in China.

For both my parents, then, our family’s history of nationality, identity and migration – are linked in different ways to the British Empire’s decision, at one point in the distant past, to start trading opium from India for tea in China.

So what about the rhubarb? Hopefully having given you quite a serious schooling on opium, I can now lighten the mood.

My father also taught me that Chinese rhubarb, for a long time, was a highly sought after ingredient for Western medicines, as the root has purgative properties, and was traded on the Silk Route via Russia and also Turkey in medieval times, fetching higher prices than precious cinnamon and saffron. When Britain opened sea trade routes to China, they also traded for rhubarb, which held its price – sometimes trading at 3x the value of opium – for a long time because it could not be cultivated successfully in Europe.

There was a period, though, during or between the Opium Wars, when the Chinese proposed a blockade of rhubarb exports to Britain. The Chinese believed, in short, that if they withheld rhubarb for long enough, British people might actually build up enough internal wind to risk…exploding. Or to at least experience extreme discomfort.

They were, as we now know, mistaken. And eventually, strains of rhubarb were successfully developed to withstand cultivation here in the UK, where it now grows hardy and strong, almost weed-like, in most conditions – consigning this tactical miscalculation by the Chinese to little more than a wry footnote in history.

The stories we tell, and how we tell them

This week, I had wondered about whether to share how we celebrate traditions in Chinese culture, and why it might be worth doing so.

I’ve landed somewhere else … in telling you a story that matters, but also in pointing out the many ways a story can be told and retold: by the victor, by the defeated, by their descendents. I’d like to share these stories with my children, who hold both Chinese and British heritage, and ask them what sense they make of such things.

Like the mooncakes, I’ll expect them to know about their history, personal and collective, but will leave them to decide how to hold that history, and how and where they pass it on.

I guess I’ll finish by also reflecting that I had started with the idea of making visible our connections because I hope that I’ve demonstrated also that “other people’s” history, if you look even just a bit beyond the obvious is also your history… or maybe, all of our history.

That could be liberating if we think about it that way. It is at least the way I would like to think about it.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend, and thanks for joining me again at The Long View. I would love to hear reflections, on these stories or on how you hold traditions and pass on personal and collective histories in your families and to your friends.

First published on LinkedIn on 27 September 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-visible-our-connections-past-each-other-jen-ang-ng2ze/

Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that ban marriages between people of different races.

The personal, and the political

Four years ago, in June 2020, I was working from home, at my kitchen table, whilst “home schooling” my two daughters through the first Covid lockdown. In a rare attempt to deliver some form of education to my 11-year-old, I spoke to her about the unimaginable bravery of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate into an all-white school.

I then went on to tell her that segregationist laws had had an impact on our family, too. For example, anti-miscegenation laws were only outlawed a couple of years before her grandma and grandpa were married – and whilst now, most of the relationships and marriages in our family are interracial, this would have prohibited – potentially a criminal offence – without the Loving case.

Even when her (white) father and I married in the State of Virginia in 1999, we were still legally required to declare our race on the marriage certificate. This requirement was only banned by a court, following a successful legal challenge brought by three couples in 2019.

“But,” my daughter said, “I don’t understand. How do those laws affect us? We’re white.”

Now, my daughter is my biological daughter, which is to say – although her father is white, she looks (at least in a Western cultural context) like me: Asian (or East Asian, depending on where you are reading this).

“But sweetie,” I replied, “That’s nice that you feel white, but that is not how other people see you.”

This was an interesting moment, as a parent.

Does it matter if she doesn’t notice? Should we prepare our children for the world as we know it, or the future world that they will build with others?

Law and the categorisation of people

There is something about law (again, at least in the Western tradition) that proceeds from the categorisation of people. Our diverse and layered identities are carefully peeled back for inspection and regulation.

For example, I will identify myself as: female, between 40-59, neurotypical, Scottish Chinese. If I have to, I will use other categories too: employed, divorced, migrant, homeowner.

Our legal personas are a pale reflection of our true selves. If I ever get to design my own Govt ID card, I would want it to look like this:

(Love this? Make your own trading cards at VisualThinkery https://remixer.visualthinkery.com/a/toptrump)

Thinking critically: whose data, and why?

Many people feel quite alienated from the legal categories used to describe them, and suspicious of giving information about themselves when asked.

That is for good and sensible reasons – for example, my reluctance to give my race on my marriage certificate was (rightly) linked to the ambivalence that I felt about complying with a system of statistical control that had been invented by a white supremacist.

But I am not wholly against legal categorisation. The problem is not the collection of data itself – the key questions are: whose data are you collecting, and why – for what purpose?

In many cases, I think governments should be doing more to collect data about our intersecting identities, for example, in order to better understand the impact of their policies and to fund services that specifically target groups of people who are furthest from justice, and equality.

For example, the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls in Scotland have repeatedly called for more intersectional data to be collected on women and girls’ lives to understand the everyday impact of Scottish Government policies for women and girls.

When important parts of our identity are not accounted for, they are not seen – and gaps in being seen for people with marginalised identities also mean gaps in access to services and support.

That’s why we should keep thinking critically about whose data we collect, and why. And we should welcome positive steps like the decision in the 2022 Scottish Census to include optional questions on sexual orientation and trans status for the first time.

Love is love

Anti-miscegenation laws are not the only example of efforts to control and prohibit relationships between people, solely on the basis that they do not conform to a desired mainstream norm.

And equality has come late for some people – the right for same-sex couples to marry in the United States was not secured until only a decade ago, in the US Supreme Court case of Obergefell v Hodges in 2015. There are good reasons to fear this right could be overturned in the next decade.

Solidarity means making space to ensure our diverse identities are recognised (and celebrated), whilst resisting the control of people through categorisation, where such control is unnecessary or actively harmful.

In short, we should have a say in whose data, and for what purposes.

The last word: Mildred Loving

In June 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving, Mildred Loving issued the following statement:

“My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry….

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

First published on LinkedIn on 14 June 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/equality-marriage-love-loving-jen-ang-z90ge/

For a start, this week, we celebrated the launch of a new Roma Cultural Centre in Govanhill, Glasgow – my work with the brilliant Romano Lav team has included delivering a session with their Community Catalysts on the law as oppression or liberation, grounded in principles of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Earlier in the week, I also attended a showcase event featuring the work of law students in the University of Glasgow School of Law Glasgow Open (GO) Justice programme, and this put me in mind of the powerful connection between learning and teaching, even for students who are still themselves figuring out their relationship to the law and legal practice.

Since 2007, I have taught law at the The Open University alongside legal practice for most of my professional career. I know why I continue to teach, but I honestly cannot remember the reasons I first applied for the role. Why, at the age of 29 and many months’ pregnant – I thought adding a second part-time gig to my already demanding full-time job, just ahead of discovering for the first time what it was to be a parent – was going to be a great idea.

Teaching as an inheritance

I knew about teaching as a career option because my father was a teacher before me. He taught at a community agricultural college for about 10 years, while raising me and also trying to finish his PhD in the evenings and weekends. My mother was also a college librarian. As they did not have close family nearby, I spent many school nights, sat in the back row of my father’s evening World Civilisation lectures, or falling asleep in piles of unshelved books in the children’s section of the college library.

I knew then that my father taught a required course (history) to students who mostly did not choose to learn that material – they were attending college mainly to gain certificates in agriculture, or animal husbandry, or primary education, perhaps.

I remember the tactics my father used to make his lectures memorable, and worth attending – humour, surprise and relatability. He spoke plainly, he played the clown – and his students laughed, and learned.

The educator has the duty of not being neutral, Paulo Freire

My father was a historian and he taught me this one thing early in life: there is no neutral interpretation of history. History is written by the winners. He referred me to a book called The Whig Interpretation of History which I have never read. Now, many decades later, I reflect this is quite an odd thing to say to your seven-year-old child… I just might read that book.

Teaching as an education

Since picking up that job at the OU, I have never looked back.

My students were keen, hard-working, grateful for the opportunity of an education and – especially in the early years – exceptionally kind and forgiving of my shortcomings as a tutor.

I did a lot of trying, and failing, in the first decade – and in putting in that time, I grew wiser and more confident about what could work, less afraid to try new things in the classroom too.

My students became the reason I continued to teach.

Whoever teaches, learns in the act of teaching; and whoever learns, teaches in the act of learning, Paolo Freire

Teaching is, for me, the best way to learn. You test your own understanding when you try to communicate your ideas with others. You hold yourself vulnerable to critical feedback and to the simplest questions (which are usually the hardest).

And if you ask students the right questions, you broaden your own experiences of the world, expanding your horizons and connections.

Teaching as a revolutionary act

For many years, people have spoken to me about this book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed written by Paolo Freire, a Brazilian educator in 1967/68. He began working with illiterate peasants in 1947 in the NE of Brazil and, two decades later, had organised a popular movement to eradicate illiteracy.

But I have never read the book in its entirety, and that is what I’ve set out to do this month.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far

• Traditional education adopts a “banking” approach – teachers have a fixed amount of knowledge that they need to transmit to students, who must be filled up, or must “bank” this knowledge. If they are able to reproduce what they have banked, they have demonstrated understanding and the process is a success.
• This process is itself the product of systems that create oppression and therefore reinforces the oppression of those who are worst off in our societies. We cannot expect people who benefit from exploiting others to design systems that liberate the people they exploit.
• If educators are truly committed to uplifting people’s lives through education, we need to change and challenge the system – what we teach, where we teach, how we teach

If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed, Paolo Freire

And finally, if we do this thing – if we challenge and question and transform how we teach… we are committing a revolutionary act.

That is the act of dismantling systems of oppression – and this work can be done both from the outside (in communities that are normally shut out from traditional education) and from the inside (in educational settings like universities that are traditionally allies of the establishment).

Concluding thoughts

I am not finished with the book yet, and to be honest it is hard going!

I would really welcome suggestions about other media for understanding Paolo Freire’s work (video, lectures, comics or animation) that might be more accessible for grasping the best of his ideas. I would share these, if I knew what they were – so please do write back if you have something to recommend.

Thanks again for reading and thanks also to all of you out there, who spend even a little bit of your time, sharing your knowledge and life experience with others

Education is an act of love; and love is an act of courage, Paolo Freire

First published on LinkedIn on 7 June 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/teaching-revolutionary-act-jen-ang-cxdve/