Forty-five years of looking west

Michael Macfarlane introduces Lady Linda Wong Davies as part of a familiar arc. Her father belonged to a generation of Chinese Malaysian entrepreneurs who built international businesses, and great fortunes, Macfarlane notes, eventually begin to shape culture. The KT Wong Foundation, which she founded in memory of her father, is the visible result. Her own account of how she arrived there is more personal, and it describes an experience shared by many in the Chinese diaspora.

Families across Southeast Asia, Asia and the Americas were busy building, she says, and many of her generation and those slightly younger were educated overseas, in the West. Only later did they realise that their roots and heritage came from where they were born, or from what she calls their cultural DNA. She describes this as a great but slow transformation for many of them, herself included.

I went through the first 45 years of my life just really looking to the west, you know, and it's now nearly 19 years since I started my foundation.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

The sentence carries a striking proportion. Her cultural work between China and the rest of the world began after more than four decades oriented elsewhere. The foundation grew out of a rediscovery, and its mission of cultural exchange in both directions reflects someone who has stood on both sides.

Expertise in someone else's heritage

The clearest illustration comes when Macfarlane asks what culture is for. Wong Davies admits she had never really considered the question in the abstract. Instead she describes her own range. As a person of Chinese descent she is at home in Southeast Asian culture and in her Chinese upbringing, and equally comfortable, she says, in a room like the one in which they were speaking. In a previous life she was the chatelaine of an 18th-century manor castle, and she made it her business to know Irish and Georgian pictures and furniture, down to dating them.

And yet within my own culture, it was just still quite superficial.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

It is an unusually candid admission, and a recognisable one. Many internationally educated heirs can speak fluently about the art and history of the places where they studied or settled, while their knowledge of their own family's civilisation remains thin. For Wong Davies the imbalance became a prompt. She set out to go deeper into 5,000 years of Chinese history, while acknowledging that the dynasties alone confuse most people, Chinese people included.

Rediscovery as research

What she found shaped the foundation's outlook. The lesson she draws from the dynasties is that Chinese civilisation survived through change. Chinese culture, in her account, takes in what it sees, including Western influences that now arrive through the internet and travel, and evolves them into something of its own. She has watched this over 19 years in food, fashion, art, music and design, sometimes through strange early combinations, and says that China is now far more confident in its own aesthetic values than even five or six years ago.

A diaspora heir rediscovering this inheritance is in an interesting position. She returns to a culture that has itself been changing, and that is increasingly confident in its own voice. Her rediscovery is therefore of something living, and her role becomes one of exchange. The foundation's projects reflect that. Zhang Huan, an artist who had never been to an opera, was asked to direct and design Handel's Semele. Chinese lantern makers built the animals for a children's production of Britten's Noah's Flood. In each case the patron's knowledge of both cultures made the pairing possible.

Wong Davies is also clear that the diaspora's horizons now extend beyond China and the West. She is based in Africa, and she points out that China is heavily involved there without always understanding that Africa is 54 different countries, much as China itself contains many minority peoples.

Passion, then a goal

When Macfarlane asks what she would say to someone from a wealthy or business-owning family who is inspired by her path, Wong Davies resists the easy answer.

Well, first of all, I suppose it's about passion, but passion is not necessarily the thing that's going to lead to your goal and what is the goal at the end of it? And that needs study, it needs introspection.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

Her own story fits the advice. The rediscovery of her heritage was itself an act of study, and it preceded the foundation's work. She adds that mistakes will be made in the first flush of any endeavour, and that a patron must be extremely pragmatic about legacy, asking whether the work will help further generations.

Her own measure of success is modest and specific. Musicians have come up to her, she says, to tell her that a production she staged helped them pursue an ambition their families had not supported, and that they are now singing. They told her she had helped them open that door.

For heirs who, like her, were raised looking outward, Wong Davies offers an encouraging example. Discovering one's own heritage late need not be a handicap. Her years of fluency in another culture became the means of building a bridge back to her own, and the knowledge she gathered on the way gave her something to carry in both directions.