By Emma Blackwood

Very few people have lived in three countries, speak three languages, and have survived multiple authoritarian regimes. Ling Fung-Wu is the exception. Ling is a current Upper School Spanish teacher at Collegiate, with one class of Spanish III, one class of Spanish IV, and two sections of Honors Spanish V. She has taught at Collegiate for since 2015 and is accustomed to bringing the concepts of identity and culture into her curriculum in order to educate her students about the events all over the world. 

Three years ago, Ling gave a faculty speech in an Upper School assembly about the concept of race and identity to explain how complicated the matter can be. Ling was born in Valencia, Venezuela after her family emigrated from China. She then moved to New York City when she was 17 years old, where she lived until finishing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in New Jersey. Then, she worked on her PhD in Pennsylvania, followed by the final move down to Richmond.

Ling comes from a multi-ethnic background, an identifier that’s noticed much more at Collegiate than in New York City. When asked about what it’s like to work here, her answer was clear: “I’m the other.” Aside from just being perceived as “other” by students and faculty, Ling mentioned how exhausting it is to have to alternate constantly between different parts of herself. She says, “Having to juggle between three different cultures, and then the North vs. South are different cultures on top of that, is so… tricky.” 

Because Ling is so rooted in the places she’s lived, in addition to her family’s background, she recounted some of her clearest memories from each place she’s lived. In Venezuela, it was watching her family cope with the consequences of the Caracazo, a series of violent protests in Venezuela in 1989. “My parents lost everything they had,” she said. “I still remember having to leave because my parents decided to move to China, and I remember my grandmother hugging me and crying.” Yet political unrest continued to affect her family: “Once we were in China, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protest happened. My parents, at that time, were Venezuelan citizens, and we had to go back home.”

Next was New York, where Ling lived during most of her education, and like many Americans, her most prominent memory was where she was during 9/11. After classes were cancelled, she had to walk home that day from City College of New York, a few blocks away from Columbia University in Upper Manhattan. She remembers walking the streets alone for hours to get to to her home in Queens, since public transportation was not working, and watching people trying to sell bottled water for five dollars each on street corners. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow. If you can try to sell something at a time like this, something is wrong. Something is very wrong.”  

These first two memories are intense examples of how gracefully Ling handles sensitive topics. Her voice softens as she carefully chooses her words, and she has a way of making a room feel tiny when she has something she needs to say. However, her tone immediately lightened when moving on to what she remembered from her time in Pennsylvania at Penn State University. As she told me, “I remember how smiley people were, and, coming from New York, it was a culture shock. One lady at the bank saw me and was like, ‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’ and I said ‘You’re too happy. It freaks me out.’”

New York is a part of Ling’s identity, and anyone in a class with her knows it. She gets confused at her student’s inability to critique each other and the need to compliment people all the time. Because I’ve had the privilege of learning this first-hand over the past semester, I asked her about her insights on how she thinks her identity has shaped how she teaches. Generally, she likes to think of her teaching style as experience-based.

“I really value what my students have to say about different topics, because it’s always interesting to look at one thing and see the different perspectives. If I have nine students, that’s ten perspectives in the room, and your identity will shape the way you see things.”

Despite being a self proclaimed “stone-faced New Yorker,” Ling is one of the most understanding people I’ve ever met. Her background makes her impervious to the assumptions that most people would make of someone based on their race, gender, or ethnicity. She completely supports the idea of being blind to someone’s identity until you get to know them. In her words, “I don’t think anyone should explain who they are. People should just let people be, but it’s not just at Collegiate or anything. We fall into this imbedded bias and stereotypes when you look at someone and expect certain things. I wish we had less of those expectations and instead created open ideas and encouraged people to find out who someone is.”