50 Stories for 50 Years: Yi-Ming Yang ‘86

To celebrate our 50th anniversary year during 2018/19, we collected stories and profiles of people and institutions that have helped us build our organization, which first began as one person's dream in 1968. We will feature one story per week on our blog. Please enjoy these “50 for 50” profiles featuring ASSIST's dedicated board members, dynamic staff, welcoming host families and enthusiastic ASSIST Scholars.

Yi-Ming Yang ‘86
China, Taft School

It has just occurred to me, as I sit here recollecting my memories of ASSIST for its 50th Anniversary, that I am at the same age – I just turned 50. A rather interesting oversight on my part, I thought, that I failed to realize the coincidence until now. It is probably because we celebrate the 50th of an organization as a crowning achievement with unbridled pride and joy, while we tend to look back on our lives as individuals at the 50th with a melancholic taste of the bittersweet. There is an old Chinese saying, “The 50th birthday is the time to know your fate.” To me, this is a journey as much about getting to know the world as about getting to know myself. And as fate would have it, it started with ASSIST.

I still remember how anxious I was that morning 33 years ago at the Danbury bus station. We had just been dropped off at the station after a couple of days of fabulous ASSIST orientation in New York City, waiting to be picked up by a “school person” to go to our respective ASSIST schools.

“This is real now,” I remember saying to myself, knowing that I would be attending an American boarding school full-time; living and studying among hundreds of foreign people whom I knew next to nothing about; immersed in a language in which I was barely passable in conversation, let alone reading and writing; and studying subjects like English literature and American history which I had never been exposed to before. Compared to those concerns, it seemed trivial that I'd be thousands of miles away from my parents in China for the year, with little chance of a conversation for support or advice.

My fear evaporated when a jolly stout man with thick glasses and a wide grin emerged from a hunchback car and introduced himself as “Ferdie.” He spoke English so slowly to make sure I understood that it almost sounded comical. When we started chatting, he immediately complimented me on my proficiency in English and commented that he wished his Chinese was as good. Although I knew my English was limited, he somehow made me feel confident. To my bewilderment, we actually talked the entire hour on our way to Taft, my ASSIST school, which was a first for me with a foreigner.

As it turned out, Ferdie Wandelt was the Director of Admission at Taft, one of the most influential faculty members on campus, although I could hardly tell from his down-to earth demeanor at our first encounter. He invited me to dinner at his house that evening before taking me to my dorm. I met his beautiful wife Joanna, their energetic young son Christopher, and their lovely teenage daughter, Allison. Christopher was enamored of my soccer skills in the backyard and Allison complemented the American accent in my broken English. My home stay family, the Moore's, were also invited; their son David would be my classmate at Taft.

The Moore's were from Scotland, and their warm welcome immediately put me at ease, even though I had a hard time understanding their strong accent. As Christopher fought with Joanna about putting on his dental braces and Allison asked if she could skip dinner to go to McDonald's with her friends, the conversation turned to the challenges of raising children. The Moore’s confided that they were preoccupied with the career choices of their older daughter, who was graduating from college. Throughout the conversation, they enlisted my opinions on the different subjects and waited patiently as I struggled to find the right words to express my ideas. I was amazed that they not only included me, a teenager, in the discussion (which never happened back home when adults were talking) but also were genuinely interested in what I thought.

Later that night, after I arrived at my dorm and lay down on my bed, I was utterly confused, trying to piece together and make sense of the day's experience. On one hand, everything was so foreign. No question about it. On the other hand, everything seemed so familiar. People in America laugh the same laughs and dread the same dreads as people in China. Life was not perfect even for them in a country considered “heaven on earth.” “Is that possible?” I thought. If so, where did they find room in their hearts to welcome me, a teenager with poor English half way around the globe, with such enthusiasm? Stranger yet, how did their enthusiasm affect me, make my self-consciousness disappear, and find the confidence to share my views across a fairly large culture, language and generation gap?

I could barely formulate these questions that evening as a 17-year-old and it took me another 33 years to find some rudimentary answers. We all fight our own struggles in this life, guarding our virtues and fending off our demons. When we get past our obsession with our achievements and insecurities and open our hearts to others, we let ourselves and others bathe in the tender rays of shared humanity, as warm as the setting autumn sun we all felt, that afternoon many years ago on Ferdie and Joanna's porch. It is in moments like this, we realize that we are not separated and alone. We are one. That is my most lasting memory of ASSIST. Happy 50th Anniversary!

About Yi-Ming:
Yi-Ming Yang was born and raised in Beijing, China. He came to the U.S. as an ASSIST Scholar in 1986 and spent his ASSIST year at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. Upon his return to China after his ASSIST year, he entered Peking University and majored in pre-med. He later enrolled in Peking Union Medical College in China, before coming back to America as a graduate student. He eventually obtained his MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1996 and went on to complete his residency training in internal medicine and fellowship training in cardiology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Yi-Ming is currently the Associate Director of Peripheral Intervention and Director of Chinese Cardiovascular Services at Lenox Hill Hospital/Northwell Health System in New York City. Yi-Ming is a past member of the ASSIST Board of Directors and a past member of the Board of Trustees at the Taft School. He lives with his wife, Sue, and their son, Kevin, in NYC.