Born in the early 1960s, Zhuang-Zhong was raised in a turbulent time in Chinese history that had repercussions affecting the lives of her family and the country’s billion residents. Her parents were physics professors at the South China Institute of Technology in Guangzhou and lived on the campus, as was normal for faculty. However, after Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution took hold the country, her idyllic life in Guangzhou was interrupted. Intellectuals such as her parents were viewed suspiciously. Eventually her father was separated from the family and sent to work on a collective farm while her mother worked as a weaver.
By the late 1970s, after the death of Chairman Mao, her parents returned to teaching in a more open Chinese culture. Her father came to the U.S. as a visiting professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. While there, he toured the Upper Peninsula and met Dr. Jon Saari, professor at Northern Michigan University and the founder of Marquette’s chapter of the U.S. China Peoples Friendship Association. By this time, Zhuang-Zhong was in college in China and her father suggested she come to America to study. She was sponsored by the Friendship Association to come to NMU and arrived in 1982. This was not a simple thing for Zhuang-Zhong to do. She had only travelled by herself once in her life, and that was within China and she had never left the country. Where it was becoming increasingly common for Chinese students to travel abroad for their studies, obtaining permission to leave was not easy and she was searched before she left the country. She knew no one at NMU, though she quickly befriended three other students from Asia. Still, she flourished as a student and also met her future husband, Paul Lehmberg, at the university.
(Above) ZZ’s family photographs
(Above) NMU International Students Organization 1980s.
ZZ visiting parents and brother in China during the 1980s.
