ABC's Wong Finds Herself in Asia Job : Television: The Beijing reporter's meeting with her grandmother in rural China launched a search for roots and a career as well.

By ELISABETH GRINSPOON

Jan. 4, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

BEIJING — Deborah Wong, ABC-TV’s Beijing correspondent, was 18 when she first met her paternal grandmother. That was in 1980, in the rural reaches of China’s Shandong Province.

Wong credits that strange first meeting with launching her search for her Chinese roots and eventually her entry into journalism in Asia, where she has become one of the network’s emerging overseas stars.

At their first meeting, the grandmother, only 4-feet-11 and illiterate, and the granddaughter, a lanky 5-foot-8 American raised in the Chicago suburbs, stared at each other with mutual bewilderment.

“We’d look at each other and both of us realized the huge gulf there was between us. There was absolutely nothing I had in common with this woman,” recalled Wong.

The grandmother, her feet bound in the ancient, now outlawed, practice, had never ridden in an automobile until Wong and her father took her with them to the United States to live.

Sitting in bed together back in Chicago, the two women compared feet. The feet became a metaphor for the gap between them, physically and culturally.

“She would stick her feet out--these tiny little feet--and I have huge feet. We’d put them next to each other and compare them. Suddenly, after generations of bound feet, my feet were just springing forward in liberation. She would laugh at how big mine were, and I would laugh at how small hers were.”

Curiosity about her grandmother, her life and her land, drew Wong back to China. Wong began studying Chinese her sophomore year at Wesleyan College. Her junior year in a Duke University program took her to Nanjing for four months and Beijing for two. Then she went on her own to teach English in Hangzhou for the second half of the year.

Wong, who was born in 1962 in East Chicago, Ind., says that as a teen-ager, she never felt completely American and she dreamed that going to China would be like going home.

“I decided that the way to ‘pass’ (as a native) was to wear white cotton shirts and blue cotton pants and little green army sneakers and put my hair in a braid.”

But in the early ‘80s, the beginning of China’s reform period, the Chinese had just shed their uniform of dull gray, green and blue Mao suits. Women in cities were eagerly experimenting with fashion and makeup; they were wearing platform shoes, polyester and permed hair. So, people noticed immediately that Wong, dressed as a Chinese peasant girl, was in a costume.

Wong says she learned a painful lesson on that trip--that the part of herself that she was searching for was not in China. She learned that she, as a Chinese American, was considered an outsider and that outsiders are never really accepted in Chinese culture.

In 1988, she began working for WGBH, the Boston public television station, as a correspondent and a fill-in anchor woman. After a year, she was offered the job of National Public Radio’s correspondent in Hong Kong. Wong’s father, who had escaped with her mother from Mainland China in 1949, was not pleased to learn that she was moving to Asia. She said he told her: “I’ve spent all of my life trying to get out of that hell hole, out of the village to the U.S., where I’ve made a good life for you children. Why would you want to go back there?”

So it took him a while to get used to the idea, but Wong says he is now very supportive of her work.

While Wong was in Hong Kong, covering Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East for National Public Radio, Peter Jennings of ABC News became one of her biggest fans. Jennings decided to recruit Wong to strengthen ABC’s Asia coverage.

“We went after her, and we were lucky to get her,” Jennings said. “She is marvelously intelligent. She adapted to television very quickly, much more readily than most print or even radio reporters. Everything we’ve asked her to do--whether it’s in Asia, where she is very comfortable, or elsewhere--she’s done with depth and sensitivity.”

Wong understands the difficulties of working as a correspondent in Communist China, where there is always suspicion and fear of journalists.

She knows that as a TV journalist, she can never completely blend in. No longer trying to imitate a Chinese peasant girl, Wong looks the complete professional. On camera, she wears makeup, but otherwise she often wears none. She is garrulous and her style is unembarrassed.

Although Wong says that she wants to have a good time while she is in China working as ABC’s Beijing correspondent, she also has some serious goals.

“I really want to work on my Chinese, do some stories that I’m proud of, see a bit more of the country and get to know the Chinese as well as I can.”

Where will Wong go next? “I think at some point you have to go home, and I love the United States. I love the open space, the clean air, I love the beach. I love Americans. I want to go home at some point.”