An Asian-American author’s journey through motherhood and media
Connie Wang, author of the memoir Oh My Mother!, on growing up in America’s Midwest, telling her mum’s story, and working at Refinery29
I was born in Jinan, China, in 1987. My grandpa named me Xiao Kang after what was a pretty popular slogan at the time, which roughly translates to “a moderate amount of prosperity for all is better than a great deal of prosperity for a few”. If I’m butchering it, this is part of the diaspora kid problem, where you only know just a smidgen of your history in your culture.
Lincoln convert
My parents were actually in the United States for the first two years of my life. I lived with my grandparents, predominantly, as a baby. I joined my parents in 1989 in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was always supposed to be temporary, but it turns out that, through a variety of circumstances, we ended up staying and became US citizens. To this day my mum jokes, “We’re on the world’s longest vacation, going on 35-plus years now.”
Dodging Elmo
Shortly after I came, we applied for green cards and I had the option of having a new legal name. At the time I was attending Head Start, which is a federal programme for day care. I had a pretty great experience, but the one thing that was always sticky was that no one could pronounce “Xiao Kang”. My parents said, “Xiao Kang, choose a new name to learn English.” I thought of two or three people from television – Elmo from Sesame Street, Michelangelo from the Ninja Turtles, the ayi (auntie) who looked so pretty named Connie Chung (the television journalist). It was an easy decision in that sense.
Connie mania
