Growing up in the US in the early 2000s, the global community felt smaller than ever to me. Most of the news that I was hearing on a daily basis was about Americans across the globe, waging war in the Middle East, meeting with leaders across Africa and Asia, and growing relationships between North and South America. In the growing global sphere, both my parents of primarily Irish descent did their best to keep me grounded in our family’s roots, especially with our Roman Catholic faith. However, my father and mother were always interested in my siblings and me growing up: as athletes, as worldly people, and certainly as academics.
It was this desire for their children to be lifelong learners that ignited the spark that grew into a lifelong passion. My father began a new job around 2010, and one day he came home with some cool news. He told my siblings and me over dinner that his new work gave him a town library card, and he shared that it allowed you to learn different foreign languages on the computer. Being the internet-obsessed 10-year-old that I was, I immediately went to put his library card to good use, and my first big choice was presented to me: what language do I want to learn? There were around 11 different options and many seemed interesting; Arabic looked interesting, but I was also somewhat drawn towards Italian given my faith.
After asking myself “What looks like the craziest language I could try to learn?” I landed on Mandarin Chinese. I began learning the basics of Mandarin, fascinated by the wholly unique writing system, how foreign it seemed to the English I grew up learning, and how beautiful the language seemed to be. Despite the simplicity of learning phrases like 你好, 朋友, and 再见, each character seemed to me like a calligraphic work of art. To the shock of nobody who attempted to learn Mandarin cold with no teacher, I began to struggle when it reached more complex points of grammar and sentence structure. That is, until I had the opportunity to study a foreign language in sixth grade.
My options were Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese for the beginning of the school year. From my siblings’ experience, my brother was struggling with French during his first year of high school, while my sister was into Spanish for two years with rarely a compliment given about the subject. Therefore, I felt I should keep at Mandarin. Despite the difficulty it presented on the surface, I enjoyed the little I already learned. What’s the harm?
Little did I know that my journey learning Mandarin would continue well past the years I was required to take a foreign language as a student. I finished middle school and continued learning Mandarin into my years at high school. It also happened that my high school Chinese language experience was finally able to be used, as for the first time I was interacting with Chinese students on a somewhat regular basis. This included exchange students, here to study in the US, but also recent Chinese immigrants who left China in the wake of the one-child policy pushing many families to migrate in order to not halt the growth of their family.
Now not only was I learning about the language, but also the people and the cultures that grew this long, linguistic tradition. On top of this, for the first time since the Cold War, China and the US seemed poised against one another, with rhetoric from one nation frequently attacking the other, sparking interesting discussions among myself and many of the Chinese students. Between Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, New Year’s dance performances, as well as far more rigorous classwork, my interest and familiarity with Chinese culture had never been greater.
I planned on pursuing a degree in International Relations and wanted to work for the US Foreign Service or maybe serve at a consulate in China, until something changed my path completely: I was personally called to serve God. I had what I could only describe as a personal revelation, where Christ came to me and asked me to serve him, causing me to immediately switch my major focus from International Relations to Theology. One thing that remained despite this dramatic revelation was my desire to continue learning Mandarin. So I found schools that offered both, which led me to the University of San Francisco.
It was studying during college that my two loves: my love for God and my love for learning Mandarin seemed the most at odds for me, as I could never understand how I could be able to support both of these interests as a career. I was pursuing Christian theology to a much higher degree, and so the few career paths that I could envision were unlikely to include my Mandarin language or cultural knowledge. Conversely, if I wanted to pursue deeper into my minor in Chinese language and culture, I could think of even fewer opportunities to bring my Catholic faith to bear. Considering that proselytizing by foreigners is explicitly forbidden in China, I was content for my Chinese skills to become a hobby; a unique fun fact about me that people would never guess about me considering my blond hair and Irish heritage.
This changed as well when one day, when sitting in the Theology department lounge, I received an email from my thesis advisor, forwarding me a newsletter from the US–China Catholic Association (USCCA). This seemed like such a wonderful blend of two things I was deeply passionate about, and after exchanging emails back and forth with their director, I was discussing potentially moving to Shanghai to teach. While that situation did not pan out as expected, I stayed in touch, helping out at one of the conferences that took place on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic (which unfortunately, also stopped my plan to study abroad for a semester right in its tracks).
I graduated college and not knowing where to go next, I returned to my job that I had over the summer during my college breaks. I bounced around a few different career paths in my head during this time. Law school, teaching English, and nature conservation all came to mind as things I may enjoy and/or excel at, but the option that really called out to me was presented to me when I was contacted by a former high school teacher asking me to apply as a Campus Minister at my former high school. It was during the interview that I felt one of my deep desires could be fulfilled in this job: being able to serve others and not only demonstrate my faith, but teach it to students as well.
During this first year of both learning to teach in addition to developing my curriculum, I was able to interact with students from all across Massachusetts, and significantly those who were from China staying with host families in the area. Many of them were interested in why I pursued Chinese all through college, and speaking to them in addition to cultural events helped remind me of this desire I still had: to somehow find a way to incorporate my other desire into my work, that desire to continue my studies in Mandarin, Chinese history and culture. It was then that I again heard from the USCCA, as a new leadership team had seen my interest in their previous programs. We reconnected and after some more emails and conversations over Zoom, that Summer I attended their 29th International conference in Chicago.
Up until this point in my life, it always felt that my love for Theology and Chinese were together an odd combination, or potentially a fluke of random chance. To say this conference changed my perspective on that would be a vast understatement. I finally met over 100 people who not only shared a similar interest and desires, but had so many unique ways in which they were living out this same calling we shared, in cities across the US, China, and Taiwan. I ran out of business cards to exchange on the first day of the conference and tore up half of my conference program exchanging contact information in the following days with people. I was enthralled that so many people had these same interests and were building bridges and their own ministries through varied ways and traditions.
I returned home both exhausted and full of excitement. It felt like the culmination of years of study, finally connecting these two unique callings for the first time. The gratitude that I felt for my Father (both in heaven and my biological father here on earth) was total, as it was both of their guidance that granted me the opportunity to meet the people who brought me to where I am today. To be able to bridge these topics together in a deeply meaningful way, for me, has been its own reward. Even with the growing tension that may appear between those in China and the US, in my mind, the two have never been closer because God has created a powerful connection for me that I believe can never be separated.
Despite many previous attempts on my own to try to find a way to serve both of these wishes that I carried, patience proved to be the most valuable to me. To those still working to find their own path forward, the Gospel of Matthew says it better than I could: “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come” (Matthew 24:42, NABRE).
Image credit: Javi Sánchez via Adobe Stock
Andrew McNeil
Andrew McNeil has been studying Chinese language and culture since age 11. Following a calling from God to serve others, Andrew obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Theology and a minor in Chinese Language/Culture at the University of San Francisco in 2021. Andrew currently serves as Campus Minister and Religious Studies …View Full Bio
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