Interview: Tracy Yip

Tracy Yip talks with Sharon Dewey Hetke about growing up in a Hong Kong family of 7 girls and 1 boy, about the loss of her young husband and about the power of Jesus’ words to heal the wounds of the past and to enable her to walk through present sorrows.

TAP: You are from Hong Kong; how did you end up in Toronto, completing your dissertation at Wycliffe College?

TY: My husband, Kin Wah Wong, was an Anglican priest in Hong Kong in a church of around one thousand people. He asked for a sabbatical, and the archbishop of Hong Kong granted him one from 2009 to 2012.  So we came to Toronto, to visit a new country and city. But during the second year of our stay – my sons were only 12 and 15 – my husband found that he was losing his balance and having a problem with falling. And he could not ride a bicycle.

So he went to see our family doctor who referred him to Toronto General Hospital. At first we thought he was having a stroke, but he was a very healthy person and we had a very healthy diet. After MRI tests they found out that my husband was suffering from a neurological disease called MSA or Multiple System Atrophy. Parts of his brain were degenerating, getting older. So in the beginning, I really didn’t know what would happen to him. And then I just found that he couldn’t walk properly; he was like Spider-Man – he had to touch the wall for support in order to walk properly. We were living on the second floor of the Wycliffe dorm, and there’s a stairway. So, every time he held my arm, and I would almost have a bruise because he had to hold me so tight. But I understood that because he needed help. And so I supported him to walk physically as well as psychologically to walk through many sad times. He was working on his Doctor of Ministry, but he finished with his Theology of Ministry degree, with grace from Toronto School of Theology.

TAP: And then you decided to return to Hong Kong?

TY: Kin Wah and I had gone to a retreat at Loyola House Jesuit Centre in Guelph. He cried, and God spoke to him, and we decided to go back to Hong Kong. This was in 2014. Once we were there, he continued with his work of writing online devotionals, and I helped him because he had trouble with his fingers. Finally over the next few years he had trouble swallowing, and many, many kinds of problems because the nerve control in his muscles didn’t work.  He passed away in 2018 on the day after Good Friday, Holy Saturday.

So it was a poetic day for me: I felt that God spoke to me on the day he died. He had been hospitalized earlier in Holy Week because of very serious bedsores. I could almost see the bone. This happened because he sat on the wheelchair so long, and he was a middle-aged man, so he was quite heavy, and he could not move.

And on the second day he was in hospital, I had been working in the Anglican counseling center and I don’t know why but I suddenly began to weep. I called his friends and told them Kin Wah could not come to Maundy Thursday service because he was in the hospital. I asked, “Can you guys come to visit him in hospital?” He really missed his ministry as an Anglican priest.  So over the night, nine clergy came to visit him, and also the archbishop visited him. I went back home at 8:00 PM that night and in the morning about 5:00am, the nurse called me and they sort of deceived me…they said his blood pressure was very low. But when I arrived at the hospital, he actually had already passed away.

TAP: Did his dying on Holy Saturday have special meaning for you?

TY: During my husband’s training as a priest in England, we were living in the Close of Salisbury, a cathedral town near Stonehenge. When we were very young, I participated in all kinds of liturgies in Holy week. And I remember that at 5:00am on Saturday the Salisbury cathedral would have a vigil. So I realized that I felt like Kin Wah got to suffer with Jesus, but also we had the hope in his resurrection after suffering.

TAP: How did this experience of losing your husband affect your relationship with God?

TY: The night he died, after all the administrative things to do with his death, I sat in my living room and I meditated in front of a picture of Jesus. And I felt that Jesus spoke to me. I had been feeling guilty because I didn’t sleep over in the hospital. But Jesus said to me, “Tracy, for the last moments of his life, let me journey with him back to heaven.” So, I felt comfort. Also, I realized that because most of my friends in Hong Kong are clergy, Saturday they are free to help me. If he had died on Good Friday or Sunday, all of my friends would have been very busy. So I felt like God also cared for me and loved me as a spouse.

Ironically, I was rewarded with a transformed experience with God through my commitment to walk with my disabled husband when he was fragile. It was a sad experience, but if he chose to end his life by assisted dying, I would not have my faith deepened and my relationship with God strengthened. Spiritually, his suffering has blessed me and many other parishioners for whom he pastorally cared in his ministry. When we accept the sad experience and follow Jesus to work it through, we find Light in the darkness.

TAP: Can you tell me a bit about your background, growing up in a traditional Chinese family?

TY: Kin Wah was seven years older than me; I married at 23. I’m also a very traditional Chinese woman so I was very dependent on him. But when he got sick, I had to learn to be more independent and that was hard for me. I have my own story: I come from a family of eight children; I’m number six. And my parents are a very traditional Chinese family, which means that the girls are not important, but only the sons. But my mother could not give birth to a boy and so they had seven daughters and finally my brother is the last one of the family. I can’t make you understand how unusual this is – usually my friends only have two children. But my parents have eight children because my mom really wanted a son, so she continued to give birth.

I’m the number six, so I felt as a woman I was not important. For example, my brother has two properties in Hong Kong, inherited from the family, but we have none. On the other hand, I want to be fair: my mother encouraged us to receive as much education as possible.  But as a woman I always felt inferior.  And so I was very happy to marry Kin Wah. However, he was from a low income family. My family is a merchant family, and my parents are wealthier than my husband’s. But he had a good heart, he was a good pastor and a good father. So, we loved one another and were genuine with one another through our marriage of 27 years. (He died at 57.)

TAP: Obviously from the difficulties in your own family, and not feeling equally valued as a girl, you have had to find a lot of healing.  How has the Gospel, the Christian faith brought you into a different understanding?   

TY: I am thinking about the transformative power of the Gospel shown in the signs done by Jesus. Jesus performed the first sign in his life in the presence of his mother: changing water into wine at Cana (John 2:1-11). In response to Mary’s request, Jesus names her “woman” which signifies that Mary is not only his mother but a disciple of God. As a woman, Mary is not as well-educated as a man in first century Palestine, but she had the privilege to participate in Jesus’s first sign. Moreover, the Samaritan woman at the well became an evangelist (John 4:7-30), and Mary Magdalene was the first person who encountered the resurrected Jesus (John 20:1-16). Jesus assures me that women are loved by him. They are neither second class nor unimportant in His sight. When women encountered Jesus, their lives were transformed and their identities were shaped by the word of Jesus. These gospel messages helped me understand that even though my culture might not value the girls in the family, this is not the “family culture” of the gospel. Jesus embraces people of different genders and social classes and restored equality among them in God’s family. We need to have our old learning undone, and to walk with Jesus to experience our new identity as his beloved daughters and sons in Christ.

TAP: When did you decide to return to Canada?

TY: By 2019, I was busy with a lot of teaching jobs and also parenting talks, and counselling. Then came the democratic movement. There were over a million people demonstrating on the street to ask for more democracy from the Chinese government. However, the Chinese government reacted strongly and now they are all in control. Last Friday I got a message from my Catholic friend and she told me that all the school’s classrooms can no longer be used for Bible Study or Sunday School. (Many churches in Hong Kong are attached to the school so on Sunday they used the classrooms for Bible study.) We are worried that next they won’t be able to use the hall for morning assembly. If the government continues to control freedom of speech and freedom of religion, that could be the next restriction. So because of the changes that were coming, in 2019 I felt like I had to return to Toronto, where my sons live.

TAP: You have just completed the requirements for your Doctor of Ministry. What was your dissertation topic?

TY: I have been writing about embracing fictive kinships, with a study on a single mothers’ group in the Hong Kong Anglican church. The title is: Embracing Fictive Kinship in the Church Family: A Study of Fictive Kinship in a Single Mothers’ Group in the Hong Kong Anglican Church.

TAP: What is a fictive kinship?

TY: It’s a social science term that refers to individuals unrelated by birth or marriage who label and treat one another as kin. So to make it simple it is like a brother and sister relationship in the Christian community. Paul’s letters talk about family and also use a lot of fictive kinship language. He called Timothy his beloved son, and also said that he missed him. He kissed him and he cried for him. There is an affectionate aspect of their relationship, even though Paul and Timothy are not biologically related. There are a lot of fictive kinships in the New Testament.  I come from a social science background and this concept of fictive kinship is commonly used by social science. You could say that I have been studying the theology of family.

As a marriage counselor, I had been looking at family in a narrower way – biological families, helping couples who were having relationship problems. And then when I studied theology, I found that actually in the Bible, the idea of family is more embracing. Jesus says that whoever follows me is my sister and brother. So, from the perspective of God’s eye, everyone in God’s family is a family member. And Jesus reached out to the least important – the children at the time who were not important and also the marginalized woman at the well.

TAP: And do you think that you have been led to family counselling, and even your academic work on fictive kinships, partly because of this difficult background and the healing process you went through?

TY: I am sure I am not the only one who has had a difficult family experience. I met battered women and wives in counselling rooms who told me that they tolerated domestic violence because of their preconception about women’s inferiority in the family. But the gospel expands and restores our distorted perceptions. This is also why I was intrigued by the fictive kinship studies in the New Testament and from the theology of the family. The Bible endorses the value of family but it also invites us to see beyond our biological families. Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35).   TAP