Alice Mong Runs Her Museum Like a Business
The executive director of Hong Kong's Asia Society has also been the director of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America.
I’m a Chinese-American. I was born in Taiwan but at age of 10, our family immigrated to the U.S. I didn’t speak any English at all when I arrived. You have to start thinking differently, because the world you grew up in is totally different from the world you are now going to school in.
There were not many Asians or Chinese people where we grew up. We were the only Chinese family in the school. What it taught you at that young age was how to adapt and how to start again, learn all over again. We moved from Taiwan where we had a large extended family, and now we were in a place where your friends become your family, whether they were American or Chinese.
You learn to make friends, you learn to connect with people. You just have to be creative—it’s survival, but not in a bad way.
We spoke Chinese at home—my parents don’t speak English very well, so I always grew up with this bi-culturalness. It wasn’t my doing: I guess we just had it, so it was quite natural. That’s why when I moved to Hong Kong as an adult, it wasn’t such a stretch. I had an opportunity when I was in my late 20s to come work in Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong for 11 years, from 1992 to 2002. In around 2003 I had the chance to join a non-profit in New York, so I moved back to the US, and came back to Hong Kong four years ago.
I missed the energy of Hong Kong after nine years in New York—I like New York, I love the fact that I worked there for almost a decade, but I wanted to come back.
