SOME PEOPLE READ an article that changes how they boil an egg or make a salad. Allison Heiliczer read an article that changed the direction of her life.
She was a 16-year-old New Yorker who had just moved to California, when she picked up a magazine and started reading a profile of a Japanese-American family called the Chinos, who sold farm produce.
Something inside her—she has no idea what—told her to contact them. She did so, and got a job working with them. Like many cross-cultural families, they had lived a dramatic life—but it was something else, their core values, and the way the family gelled together, that intrigued the young woman. Was it just this family? Or was it something about their East Asian origins?
JOURNEY TO ASIA
She eventually found out when she had a chance to visit Asia, and fell in love with life in that part of the world. She later wrote about the delights of discovering Hong Kong: “Walking down the streets in my adopted city was an adventure for my senses—the bright neon signs, elegant Chinese writing on the billboards, and an endless row of storefronts, of dried fish and goods, Chinese medicine, fresh meat, and produce.”
Fortunately, her husband, who is a specialist in fighting money laundering, also enjoyed living in this part of the world. So, for more than 15 years, Allison Heiliczer has worked in East Asia, mostly in Hong Kong and Singapore. Other people from the west often visit her and ask: “When are you going home?”
“I am home,” she replies.
‘SOMETHING WAS DIFFERENT HERE’
But coming to east Asia was just beginning. Like any new arrival, she could see society from the outside. Yet to really contribute, as a trained therapist, she had to get under the skin of people in this region. “I came out here with a toddler’s understanding that something was different here,” she said in a recent interview.
Starting work as a therapist with a chain of clinics, she was shocked at what she learned from her clients about their lives and the challenges they faced—which were often markedly different from her expectations from working in the west.
As one would expect, people here worked hard, and many were high achievers. But Asia’s fast-rising cities had gone from “poor” to “developed” very quickly, and people here suffered horrendous amounts of stress. The suicide rate in Asia was 30 per cent higher than in other regions of the world, she noted.
And with Hong Kong and Singapore being expensive cities, both partners in local marriages usually had to go out to work—and relationships often became very strained.
YOU THOUGHT ASIANS WERE RESERVED?
Therapy was a relatively recent addition to the mental health offerings in East Asia, which meant there was a real hunger for what she offered. And the people who hired her tended to be high-achieving people who were anxious to unburden themselves to a friendly ear. And unburden themselves they did.
You thought Asians were reserved and hated to talk about their private lives? Not to Allison Heiliczer. The intelligent, softly spoken woman soon displayed a serious skill in connecting with people, including those reluctant to try “talk therapy”. Gaining a high level of success in couples therapy, she was soon much in demand, listening to extraordinary stories of conflict and high drama not just in the boardrooms but in the bedrooms of powerful people in Hong Kong and Singapore.
There was the Indonesian-Chinese businessman who needed help when his serial infidelities were exposed; there was the Singaporean woman who kept a spreadsheet of her western lovers’ earnings and the sizes of certain body parts; there was the Hong Kong man who consulted his feng shui master about whether to stay married; and dozens more eyebrow-raising stories.
SOME OF THE STORIES WERE SHOCKING
Some of the stories were quite shocking. Lucky for both sides, Allison was a spunky New Yorker who could not be ruffled by anything—and knew exactly how to respond calmly.
Over the past decade or so, she has amassed valuable insights into how the movers and shakers of Asia think—and she was soon signed up by Penguin Random House to write about it. The result of that is an extraordinary volume, “Rethink the Couch”, which includes many case histories (with the names changed, naturally). You can read a review of the book by clicking this line.
In the meantime, Allison says that she too is still working on her relationship with East Asia—in good relationships, there’s always more to learn, she says.
Of course, it’s not always been easy to be an American in East Asia, during a period when the US has been firing off sanctions at both mainland China and Hong Kong.
But there has always been a gulf between the US political classes, who tend to be hostile, and the US business community, which wants positive relations between east and west. Allison’s ability to focus on the positive, and surmount barriers that divide people, is something that works on multiple levels.
And in that regard, she realizes that Asian wisdom has a lot to offer. As Confucius said in The Analects, “All people are siblings.”
Images from Allison Heiliczer unless otherwise specified.