What we do for love. Thirty years ago Pei-Liang Chang moved from her native Taipei, Taiwan (pop. 2.6 million), to Meadville, PA, to live with her soon-to-be husband, Mike Keeley, not thinking twice about what it would take to make a home in this small, rust-belt snow-belt town. When she first visited, Mike eagerly showed her around. “He wanted me to see downtown,” she says, already laughing at the memory. “He drove a little and then we turned back. I said, ‘I thought we were going to downtown.’ That was it, he said.”
She laughs a lot about those early years. How the true crime stories on American t.v. made her wonder if she was going to get murdered in her new home, how she’d sometimes forget to pronounce the ending sounds of certain English words and get blank stares. The laughter, infectious and filling the room, suggests how far she’s come: she can poke fun at her young immigrant self. She’s also too practical and forward-facing to make a lot of room for regret or the memory of hardship. But living here was very hard at first—the isolation, the snow, her difference—and it’s never gotten just easy.
“All my life is here,” she says at one point, and at another, “I always call myself transient.”
She and Mike met at Brooklyn College as grad students, while Mike was on leave from Allegheny, where he had already taught for two years. Pei-Liang finished her program (an MA in Industrial Psychology) a year before Mike finished his (an MFA in t.v. production), so she returned to a job in Taiwan, taking with her a promise ring from him but also her own unsentimental practicality. “Part of me was thinking, if we get married, great, but if it doesn’t happen, maybe I’ll be heartbroken, but that’s it, you know.”
No hearts were broken. They married, their daughter Zoey was born three and a half years later, and the family has made a full, busy, and loving life here. Pei-Liang threw herself into motherhood and soon started putting her degree to professional use, working for the neglected and vulnerable. She managed care for abused women at the local women’s shelter, later directed the human resource office at a children’s home in the area, and has since been a school psychologist in two different school districts and the area Intermediate Unit, which serves special needs students in the district. She gets energy from helping others, she says. She also declares, in a typical burst of candor and laughter, that “because I want to be loved, I’ll turn around and give people more love, in thinking maybe they’ll love me!”
If Pei-Liang leads with her heart, she also keeps it out of harm’s way, or tries to. In 1993, when she moved permanently to the States and went through Immigration at the Detroit airport, the Immigration officer looked her in the face and said, “go find a job, don’t be a burden.” She left the office in tears. In the early years in town, she says, “people stared at me. I told Michael, ‘They’re staring at me.’ He said, “because you’re pretty.’ I said, ‘you know that’s not the reason.’” Every now and then she’d encounter blatant racism–a guy on the street calling her an ethnic slur, for example–but she’d “brushed it off,” as she says. “That guy was just uneducated.”
None of the hundreds of students she’s worked with, including the “at-risk” kids, have ever made her feel “foreign,” but she can still be caught up short by the adults in the room. Just a few years ago, in a discussion about school vouchers with a supervisor at one of her schools, Pei-Liang said she thought vouchers were a bad idea because they took taxpayer funds away from public education. Surprisingly, her supervisor, a public school administrator, disagreed, and ended the discussion by saying, “well, you always have a choice to go back to your country if you don’t like it here,” and walked away.
But stories of mistreatment have to be pried out of her. Pei-Liang is no complainer. To her friends she is endless fun, a person of bright energy and frank affection. She and Mike host a Chinese New Year’s party most years. She cooks too much food–all of it amazing--and when two of her friends bring their karaoke machine, Pei-Liang gets her licks in, belting out songs like “I Will Always Love You” in complete abandon.
All her life is here.
And what of her homeland? Before COVID she went back to visit family nearly every year, but Mike hasn’t been there since the 90’s and their daughter, now 27, has never been. When Zoey was three, Mike and Pei-Liang drove her to Pittsburgh every Sunday for Chinese language lessons. “She hated it,” Pei-Liang says, “so we gave it up.” Zoey does know all about Chinese culture and traditions from her mother, and ended up taking three years of Chinese in college—“her pronunciation is pretty good”--but, like her father, she cannot really speak it. “That’s okay. That’s okay.”
Ironically, being Taiwanese seems to have helped Pei-Liang minimize such regrets. Growing up on an island five miles from mainland China, with the shadow of invasion always over your head, makes regret and worry unaffordable. She calls it “island thinking,” living just in the present. “China could just spit at us and we could drown!” She laughs again. “What are you going to do?”
What Pei-Liang Chang has done is make a beautiful present here and a community of friendships. Retirement is not too far off. Zoey and her fiance Kyle live in Maryland, but Pei-Liang and Mike don’t plan to go anywhere. They’re thinking of buying a little land outside of town. Turns out Pei-Liang has built a future here, too.
