Boen Wang
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Boen Wang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
August, 1989. My dad is in an airport. He's flown from Beijing to Tokyo to San Francisco to Denver to Oklahoma City, almost missing his flight multiple times because he can't understand the announcements in English. He is here to get a PhD from the University of Oklahoma.
He's here for a new life, a life where he doesn't sit chain-smoking cigarettes at his boring job in a Jeep factory while living in a tiny room with no running water or heating or cooling. He wants a life where something changes. It's the middle of the night in the Oklahoma City airport. He had sent a letter to the university with the date and time of his arrival, so that someone could pick him up.
He scans the crowd, looking for someone holding a sign with his name on it, but finds no one. One by one, the crowd thins out, until my dad is stuck in the middle of this airport, in the middle of this foreign country. A stranger in a strange land.
So you were alone?
This nice gentleman, the first white American my dad ever talks to, introduces himself as Dave. Dave isn't his real name. I changed it to protect his privacy.
A warm smile.
Dave takes my dad to his car and drives half an hour south to his home in Norman, the college town that surrounds the University of Oklahoma. My dad meets Dave's wife, and finally, having reached the end of his trans-Pacific ordeal...
Dave is a Christian, the leader of a local church's Chinese ministry. Dave gives my dad a Bible. the first English-language book he studies from cover to cover, and invites him to a weekly Bible study and Sunday service. In time, my dad will accept Christ. So will my mom, after she arrives in America later that year. My parents will raise me and my older sister as Christians.
We will attend church every Sunday, in Oklahoma and then in Philly, where my dad finds a job and where I grow up. It's the perfect conversion story, the sort of testimony you'd share in front of an audience at church. My parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when the Communist Party suppressed any expression of religion. They were atheists by default.
Their conversion here in America goes against everything they learned in China. The only problem with this story is me. After 22 years of Christianity, I left and never came back. Have you ever felt depressed? Perhaps a bit blue? Did you ever have an existential crisis and start to question the very foundation of your faith? I am raised in the church.
I go to Sunday school and worship service and youth group and Bible study, which I come to lead. Every break, I go to a retreat that's held at a camp near Lancaster, out in Amish country. When I'm 17, I make this promo video for our upcoming spring youth retreat. Maybe you have doubts about your faith. Maybe you've been a Christian for many years, but you're still uncertain about some things.
Maybe you're new to Christianity and have a lot of questions. Either way, you should take the opportunity to go to the Spring Youth Retreat. Don't believe me? Just listen to these satisfied customers.
In retrospect, this sounds like a cry for help. I'm totally not trapped in a cult, haha. Being immersed for decades in this not-cult didn't just shape my behavior. It rewired my brain. Like even today, when I'm washing the dishes, I'll be thinking about how this scrub daddy I'm using is falling apart, and I should probably get some new sponges from the supermarket.
And Jesus Christ, remember that time at the food bazaar in Flatbush when I almost ran my shopping cart into that old lady and she yelled at me? God, I'm such a worthless piece of shit. But anyway, I should probably go to Giant Eagle to get some sponges.
And Jesus Christ, remember that time when I met up with the Arts Council guy at the 61C Cafe across the street from the Giant Eagle and we said goodbye, but then we were walking the same way and awkwardly made more conversation until we reached his car? God, I'm such a worthless piece of shit.
But anyway, I should email the landlord about how the dishwasher doesn't work so I don't have to hand wash these dishes. It hasn't worked this entire time. And Jesus Christ, it's been almost a year since I moved into this apartment and I still haven't emailed him. God, why am I such a procrastinator? I'm such a worthless piece of shit. Sometimes I whisper it to myself.
This is the main thing I learned from Christianity, that I'm a worthless piece of shit. And listen, I know that that's not the main message of the gospel. I know Jesus teaches us that we're redeemed by his sacrifice, that we're all children of God. But all that nice, feel-good stuff bounced right off of me.
What was drilled into my mind and what I really internalized is that while I'm a child of God, I'm also a child of Adam, who ate the forbidden fruit offered to him by Eve and whose original sin I inherit. Christians remind you of it all the time. I was at a wedding where the groom's brother told the newlyweds they need to never forget that they're broken sinners. At a celebration of the couple.
So I learned to hate myself. I need to punish myself every moment of every waking hour of every day for my sinfulness, which morphs into a need to punish myself for anything I've ever done that's vaguely embarrassing. For years, I hated talking about myself because I hated myself. If I'm at a social event and meet someone new, I'll be like, So where do you live? How long have you been there for?
How do you like it? Where are you from? What school did you go to? And if someone asks me a question, like what I do for a living, I'm like You know, I make like podcasts or whatever. It's stupid. And then I do rhetorical jujitsu and redirect back to the other person. What do you do for a living? How'd you get into that? How do you like it? Humility is a big part of Christianity.
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