Finding inner acceptance: a profile of Anandi Zhang

Auroville Today: Where were you born?

I was born in south-west China in a place called Chongqing. Chong means ‘double’, qing means ‘celebration’, so my hometown means ‘double celebration’. I took it as some kind of spiritual symbolism. I was born on a farm and my parents were farmers. However, they were tired of farming because it was hard and not economically sustainable, so they motivated me by saying if I didn’t study well, I would end up being a farmer, too.

I was born after the Cultural Revolution but my parents and grandparents suffered greatly during it as there was drought and famine. At one time they had nothing to eat except the bark of trees and a kind of soil which filled the stomach, but which made people sick.

So for several generations there was a lot of suffering, but then the whole economic landscape changed, and people indulged themselves in a lot of things as a kind of psychological compensation.

How were you educated?

I was educated in the public school system and did very well in my studies. From middle school onwards, English is mandatory for all students, and as I was fortunate to have teachers who have a passion for English, I developed an interest in it, and chose English as my major. I graduated when I was 18.

Then I started to teach English to students in public schools. In some ways, it is very much like the Indian school system because there are very frequent exams and the teachers would drill the information into the brains of the students. The main subjects are Chinese, English, maths, physics and chemistry. We ignored sports, music, and other arts because the whole focus was to do better in exams to reach the next level of education. So it was not at all an integral education.

We also had large classes: at one time, I was teaching over 100 students in one class! Clearly, we didn’t have the patience or time to cater to the psychological needs of individual students. It was mass production.

However, over the past two or three decades, classical, artistic, natural, home-schooling and other alternative ways of education have sprouted and grown very much. Many more options are now available and more conscious ways of bringing up a child are being tried out.

Was there any form of political indoctrination?

We had a flag raising ceremony in the school, and for some it was an occasion to express patriotism, but for many it was simply a form. There was some education to cultivate certain virtues and to love the country, but this was not done in a very experiential, interactive way.

Why did you stop teaching?

For a number of different reasons. I realised I was killing my own creativity, I was finding no joy in the teaching and I felt I was wasting my students’ time. Also, I had this inner questioning about life, I was always searching for the truth, and I felt I needed a bigger perspective on life than the kind teaching was giving me. I moved to Beijing in 2006 and joined a translation company which won the bid to provide the translation service for the 2008 Olympic Games. We were translating from English into Chinese and vice versa for clients in many different fields, and we had to do it in a very professional way. It was a very good training for me.

During this period I felt I was opening up more and more, my former personality was cracking open. I was reading many books about spirituality and the New Age movement by authors like Eckhart Tolle and J.K. Krishnamurti. I was also reading classic works not only from China but also from ancient Egypt and Greece. (China is quite open in this respect: translation is a big industry.) I’ve always liked books because they have been an opening for me to a whole universe of different cultures over millennia.

After some time, I started to freelance with my translation work, which gave me full freedom in terms of time and place. I could do my work from virtually anywhere in the world where there was Internet, and I could travel and get to know new people at the same time. I started travelling within China, and then in Bali, Thailand and South Africa. It was a transformative experience. When I visited different cultures and spiritual centres, I realised there’s a whole dimension, a whole way of living, that I didn’t know about and that is not at all written about in the mainstream media.

At one point I felt ready for travelling wider in the world and chose India as the first country to begin.

When did Auroville come into the picture?

I landed in Mumbai because I already had a contact with an Indian friend, and stayed with his family for half a month. They had a big picture of Ramana Maharshi on the wall as his whole family was devotees. I felt a strong connection with this picture, and when they saw that, they told me I should go to Ramana’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai. I stayed in the ashram for one week and during that time I met the nephew of Ramana Maharshi. I also attended the chanting, meditation, and climbed the mountain. One day I went into the library and a title ‘came’ to me; it was a biography of The Mother. That’s when I first read about the Mother and Auroville.

My first feeling was how ignorant I had been that I had not known about Auroville, because the dream of human unity has always been inside me, and this experiment had already been going on for over 40 years. Now, I said, I must go there.

It was 2014. I stayed in Center Guest House for one week before I had to go back to China. Next year I came back again and started to volunteer at Matrimandir. In 2016 I came back to start the entry process and joined in 2017. I haven’t left since because I knew this was a very important step in my life, a great turning point – basically I’m leaving everything behind in choosing this – and I wanted to experience it to the full.

What have you been doing since joining?

When I came back, I did the Newcomer programme and then joined the Aspiration team which runs these programmes. I also volunteered at Discipline Farm and in the Botanical Gardens.

You were returning to your farming roots?

Exactly. With my farming background I had developed green fingers, and wherever I travelled I had a deep connection with the land. When I was growing up, I didn’t like my background as a farmer’s daughter. I despised it because I felt it was low status. Later on, I found it was necessary to go back to my roots because after spending years in big cities I felt I was lacking something. Living in high-rise buildings I had no connection with the soil, the land, and my health was deteriorating.

Working in the Aspiration team also opened me up a lot because I Iearned the basics of organization and how to receive Newcomers. However, although I already had an opening to different cultures, one part of me was still quite introverted. I had a need to express myself, but however much I tried, I could not express the totality of what wanted to be expressed.

So I tried other forms of expression, like poetry and body movement. Poetry has always been in me: at one point it was a lifesaver. In my childhood, on my way to and from school, I would hop and sing about how I felt and what I saw at that moment.

Last year when there was lockdown I started to read Savitri and the sense of poetry came back to me. I had impressions or inspirations which I put into words [see box].

One day I went to Pitanga Cultural Centre. It was early morning and the sun was shining through the fine hair roots of the Banyan tree. I felt totally inspired and decided it would be good if we Aurovilians could greet each other every morning in a special way in this City of Dawn. So I started putting little poems on Auronet as my way of saying ‘Good morning, Auroville’.

For some time I was also doing therapy in Quiet Healing Centre. I was tapping energetic points on peoples’ bodies to soothe them and heal deep wounds. I’ve also been working in the kindergartens and for some time with the Residents Assembly Service.

Right now I’m doing freelancing translation again. I have been coordinating a multilingual translation of Sri Aurobindo’s five dreams, and I’m working with a scholar in China checking the digital version of the sixteen volumes of Hu Hsu’s collected works. Hu Hsu was a great scholar who spent 27 years in the Ashram and translated a number of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s works into Chinese, and these are the works we are starting with. I’ve also made a compilation of what Sri Aurobindo and Mother said about Chinese wisdom, and this will be published soon.

Have you had to overcome any particular challenges in Auroville?

In the first few years I cried a lot! In recent years I had become very sensitive to the kind of exchanges that happen on the energetic level, and I felt a certain lack of acceptance from some people. I was born a girl and my parents wanted a boy, so I never felt I was accepted by them for who I am. Later on in Auroville, I felt this trauma coming up again because some people had certain views about China, and they stereotyped me even before getting to know me.

Two or three years ago, after going through a major traumatic experience, I felt perhaps it’s my soul that wants to go through these conflicts because I needed a lot of healing. And I asked myself, can I grow in a more authentic way without having to engage in confrontation with others? Can I just deal with it silently?

I have been quite introspective since childhood. So reading Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, along with writing poetry, helped me deal with this. I told myself that if I wanted to change the community or the perception of others, that is a longer project. Our biggest contribution to the community is actually our inner work. So now I feel a responsibility to heal myself, to find inner acceptance. Even if the whole world doesn’t accept me, I need to accept myself.

For years I have struggled to break free of my family and the social roles I have been assigned, and I really cherish where I am now. Before, when I didn’t feel I’d been fully accepted in my family, in my society, or in Auroville, I would confront people or I would withdraw into my own world. They were fight or flight reactions. It’s taken me a long time to recognise this and to find another way of dealing with it. I also made myself a promise that however bad I feel about how another person is treating me, I will see their beauty, their merits, shining through them and find something worth learning from them.

If we can integrate what we have rejected, or escaped from, in our own history, our own cultural background, we become a vaster version of ourselves, and this allows us to work with people very different from ourselves. In fact, if one is following Sri Aurobindo and Mother one cannot remain small any more because they are vast. They tried to share their experience with us, but they leave a vast openness for each of us to explore in our own way. I feel this is true love.

Nevertheless, at one time I felt very challenged and I was wondering if I should stay in Auroville. I wanted to find out why I was here, so I went to the Ashram and stayed in Golconde for one week. While there, I met people who have been following Sri Aurobindo and The Mother for a long, long time and they had a wonderful sense of calm and sweetness. So I felt this was something I wanted to bring to my life in Auroville. 

I also sat in the Garden of Existence at Matrimandir for some time until the sense of fundamental existence, of fundamental acceptance, came to me. These are moments when, feeling challenged, I felt saved by the Grace, by the hand which is really upholding everything.

So now, when I look at our difficulties as a community, I have a different stance. I see it has its own process which is being worked out, and everyone is playing different roles and is driven by different energies, and every moment there can be a new way of looking at things.

In fact, I see what is happening now as a great spiritual opportunity. If we can take all the past and present traumas and put them into the furnace, then the real transformation can happen. Ultimately, I have a firm belief and great hope for the future of Auroville because we carry that Dream in ourselves.