By Yehudis Litvak
A Chinese TV reporter applied her investigative methods to the Bible and decided to convert to Judaism before she ever stepped foot in a synagogue.
Growing up in Communist China, Hong Zheng was not familiar with any religion, nor had she ever met a Jew. She’d heard about Jews as a nation. “Chinese people usually have a good impression of the Jewish people,” she says. “They believe that Jews are very good with money.” But she didn’t even know that Jews had their own religion.
When Hong was a teenager, the communist leader Mao Zedong died. His replacement, Deng Xiaoping, was more tolerant towards religion. The only religion easily available to Hong’s family in China was Buddhism.
Spiritual by nature, Hong was drawn to Buddhism. She recalls, “I believed that there was a Superpower in charge of the world and Buddhism offered that.” But she was confused about why Buddhism had so many gods. Why was it necessary to turn to one god for help with fertility and another god for help with finances? “I felt that something was off,” she says. “A country cannot have two kings – that would be chaos. Imagine a world with more than one king!”
Though not fully satisfied with her spiritual life, Hong was very successful professionally. She had graduated university as a registered nurse but found that she did not enjoy western medicine, which was too much about memorization and too little about intuition. Instead, she found a job at the university’s radio station.
After receiving many compliments for her professional “radio voice,” Hong decided to enter a TV show host contest. She won first prize and embarked on a TV career, hosting TV shows, producing her own original shows, and broadcasting daily news. Fed up with the communist nature of Chinese TV shows and the need to know the “right people,” Hong switched to investigative reporting. She enjoyed analyzing various subjects, asking complex questions and getting to the bottom of the subject at hand. She received many awards for her work. Her fame grew and she became a household name in China.
Journey to America
Nevertheless, due to personal and professional challenges, after 13 years in the TV world, Hong decided she needed a break. She signed up for an international conference on freedom of press which was going to take place in Duke University in North Carolina.
This was Hong’s first time in America, and at the time, she did not speak English fluently. The conference organizers hired a Chinese translator for her. “I didn’t feel good about that because I was supposed to represent China,” she says. Hong decided to spend the next six months learning English so she would no longer need translation services at her next conference.
Hong had come to the U.S. on the J-1 exchange scholar visa that was only good for six months. To renew her visa, she had to sign up for another conference.
Providentially, the conference she signed up for was about freedom of religion at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
While Hong studied English and waited for the second conference to begin, a friend introduced her to a Christian minister named Moses. This was Hong’s first encounter with a Christian religious leader and when the minister invited her and her friend over for dinner, she was fascinated to learn about Christianity.
Moses, in turn, was impressed with Hong’s knowledge of Buddhism. They discussed both religions for hours and at the end, Moses said to her, “You are a very spiritual person. G-d is calling you, but you believe in the wrong god.”
The minister’s words stirred the investigative reporter in Hong, and she decided that she needed to learn more about Christianity and investigate which religion was true.
Moses gave Hong a Bible with a Chinese translation, and she began her investigation.
She prayed to the one G-d that she knew ruled the world, even though she wasn’t sure at that point who He was, and she asked Him for guidance. “I had faith that He would show me the right direction,” she recalls.
Investigating Religions
She opened the Bible in a random place. “I was shocked,” she says. “The first sentence I read said, ‘You came from the east.’ Then I was shocked again when I read, ‘But you bow down to idols.’ It was true – I was bowing down every night, 108 times, full body on the floor.” The bowing down is a Buddhist tradition which Hong had practiced for years.
“This is speaking directly to me,” Hong said to herself. “Does this mean Moses was right? Was I believing in the wrong god all this time?”
She continued reading the Bible and came back to Moses with a list of questions. But Moses couldn’t provide Hong with satisfactory answers.
“So, I read more,” she says, “and the more I read the more I felt that the Old Testament made so much sense.”
The New Testament, on the other hand, didn’t meet her strict journalistic standards. For example, Hong read that the Christian messiah claimant had many followers but people in his own hometown did not follow him.
“If you want to investigate about something, you go to the source,” she says. “That’s what I do. I’d investigate from the very bottom all the way up. No matter how you fancy yourself, you can say I’m so and so, but when you go to your hometown, they know who you are. That’s why they didn’t believe him. They didn’t follow him because they knew exactly who he was.”
Hong was also bothered by the fact that, according to the Old Testament, the messiah was supposed to be a descendant of King David, but the New Testament claimed that he was the son of G-d. He couldn’t possibly be both at the same time.
Then Hong learned that Christianity didn’t really become popular until hundreds of years after the supposed messiah’s death. That fact also raised her suspicions as an investigative journalist. “My conclusion was that it was just a story,” she says.
Having ruled out Christianity, Hong looked into other major religions, such as Islam. It did not meet her journalistic standards either.
The Old Testament, on the other hand, continued to draw her in. She found more depth to it than any other religious text. She knew that it was much older than the New Testament and that it has never changed. In response to her many questions, Moses had told her that the Old Testament came from Judaism, which is “the mother of all religions.” Hong wanted to learn more about Jews and Judaism.
She read about the ancestry of the Jewish people in the Bible. She was impressed that Jews could trace their lineage all the way to the beginning of history. She also learned that the burial places of Jewish forefathers and foremothers are known and visited to this day.
In the Bible, Hong read that whoever blessed the Jewish people would be blessed and whoever cursed them would be cursed. That corresponded to the Chinese perception of Jews. “Throughout history, Jews have been successful in everything they touched,” she thought to herself. “G-d blesses the Jewish people.” The nations that have given Jews shelter throughout the exile have prospered while those that persecuted the Jews have disappeared.
And she was also intrigued by Judaism’s unique claim that the entire nation heard G-d speak directly, as opposed to other religions that required a leap of faith in accepting the claim that a single prophet heard G-d speak.
“The more I investigated Judaism, the more I was blown away,” she says.
Hong eventually concluded that the Old Testament was not just a story book but a book that documented history. The people described in the Old Testament impressed her as genuinely holy. She felt that she wanted to become one of the chosen people and have a share of that holiness.
She says, “If I was going to pursue something, I might as well do it right. So, I decided to convert to Judaism.”
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
Reprinted from the current website of aish.com
