Unapologetic Selfhood with Matta Zheng
In a photo series titled “DESPERATE BELONGING,” one of the images features a figure in a qipao and black heels standing expressionless on the sidewalk of a wide street in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Their face is painted entirely white, their eyes colored with the same magenta pigment as their lips.
Two elderly Asian women are passing on the figure’s right, gazing at the figure with wrinkled eyebrows. It is the height of the pandemic, and both women are wearing blue surgical masks that conceal their precise emotions: Are they angered by this figure’s presence? Confused? Frightened?
The figure in the photo series is Matta Zheng, also known by their drag artist name, Oblong Oriental (长方东方). Currently, Zheng is a second-year student at the Harvard Divinity School and a queer spiritual adviser at the Office of BGLTQ Student Life.
When Zheng created the photo series, they were a college student at Stanford. Their appearance — a marriage of Beijing opera and American drag — was designed to disrupt the streets of Chinatown simply by existing as this “totally queer thing — queer object — queer subject,” Zheng says. For Zheng, the moment captured in this photograph “was about belonging and unbelonging, being neither here nor there — neither fully accepted by the LGBT community or the Chinese immigrant world.”
Zheng’s firm belief in belonging that does not compromise the self has shaped their interests — drag performance, queer affirmation, spirituality, and palliative care, to name a few. This eclectic collection, like Zheng themself, refuses to be sorted into society’s traditional categories for personhood. Though their pursuits are vastly different from each other, they are all rooted in Zheng’s goal to alleviate the type of suffering that they witnessed and experienced growing up.
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The Sacramento that Zheng grew up in was bland and arid and unforgivingly conservative — “just like the movie ‘Lady Bird,’” they say.
Though there was a lot of joy, Zheng describes that the suffering in this period of their life was more pronounced. Their journey of realizing their queerness, which began when they were a preteen, was marked by pain and rejection. They were raised by parents who bore their own residual traumas from living through the Cultural Revolution. It was “very, very, very hard” for Zheng’s family to even understand their queerness, they say, let alone accept it.
In Zheng’s final two years of high school, they received the Davis Scholarship to study at a boarding school in Southern Wales, the United World College of the Atlantic. Suddenly, Zheng was removed from the isolation of Sacramento and brought into a culturally diverse student body, where they could grow into their queer identity. By their final year at the United World College, Zheng had become the leader of the LGBTQ+ student club, and they decided to organize a drag show.
It turned out to be an incredible success: Dozens of people from different countries performed to roaring applause on a fully booked stage. For the final act, Zheng performed drag for the first time, 5,000 miles away from their hometown. Afterward, they delivered a speech where they finally openly expressed their queer pride to the audience. It was in this moment, watching all their classmates cheering on their performance, that they realized that queerness was central to their existence.
“That felt like a real determinative moment where I realized being with my queer people and living my life in a way that was deeply, deeply rooted in that queerness was going to be essential,” Zheng recalls. “It was going to be the most surefire way to make my life meaningful, colorful, and fun.”
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It was also in rainy southern Wales that Zheng developed a sincere interest in Buddhism, which would become deeply intertwined with their queerness.
At 15, Zheng first learned of Buddhism by reading “The Sea of Fertility,” a tetralogy written by Yukio Mishima, a renowned Japanese author who is believed to have been gay. Zheng was immediately drawn to Mishima’s central idea that people encounter their loved ones repeatedly in different forms and lifetimes through the process of reincarnation.
In Wales, Zheng learned more about Buddhism from classmates who had lived in Buddhist nations, whose encouragement and affirmation pushed Zheng to dive deeper into their spirituality when they entered college. At Stanford, Zheng started the university’s first queer spirituality program, through which they provided pan-faith spiritual care for queer students. Because many queer students did not have access to supportive faith communities, the group grew quickly and became very active.
Zheng felt deeply fulfilled when working on the program. To them, it felt like a synthesis of all the parts of themself — affirming the different kinds of bizarreness that they had displayed during their “DESPERATE BELONGING” drag performance.
“I don’t have to break myself up in these ways,” Zheng says. “I don’t have to create these artificial divisions like, oh, that’s professional Matta and that’s spiritual Matta. Actually, I felt so called to this work – they could be the same person. I could be the same person all the way through.”
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On weekday afternoons, a friendly, colorful sign sits outside of the basement of Thayer Hall, signaling that the Office of BGLTQ Student Life is open for students to stop by. On many of these afternoons, Zheng can be found in the office, where they started working this year as the queer spiritual adviser for undergraduates. They don’t like to stay behind their desk; they’re usually in one of the lounges or sitting on the carpet, wherever the students are.
After graduating from Stanford in 2022, Zheng began pursuing a three-year degree at the Harvard Divinity School, with a focus on Buddhism. Outside of their coursework, they spend about 10 to 15 hours a week at the office offering counseling to students.
“When students come to me — many, if not all the times — they’re really suffering because they’re worried, they’re concerned, or maybe they even believe that their person is fundamentally wrong in some way. Fundamentally broken or aberrant. It’s heartbreaking to hear that,” Zheng says. “I am able, when it’s appropriate and when it works, to affirm to them in no uncertain language, in the fullest ways that I can, their full humanity, their full perfection, their full wholeness.”
Oftentimes, they say, the student does not truly believe this when they hear it from Zheng for the first time. It takes many sessions for the student to internalize it.
“When the conditions and the causes are right, something does budge in the life-limiting feeling that something is wrong,” Zheng says. “It’s so beautiful to witness a person take a step back spiritually and just realize that it’s so much easier to not think that ‘I am wrong, I am messed up, and I am incorrect. And I am so much happier and life is so much more meaningful. Life is so much more worth living without that burden on my shoulders.’”
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During the past summer, Zheng began training to become a hospital chaplain. As part of the clinical team, they followed patients dying of brain cancer, incapacitated by mental illness, or hospitalized due to severe trauma. They often accompanied families who stayed at their unconscious loved ones’ bedsides for weeks as they died.
“These families were caught in this incredibly uncertain place where they weren’t sure if, and, or when their loved one would transition to death,” Zheng says. “A lot of these questions, I realized, can’t be answered with biomedicine. A lot of these sufferings can’t be healed with biomedicine.”
Zheng has always had a desire to work in the field of medicine, despite discouragement from their father and sister, who are both physicians and emphasized the high stress and intensity of medical work. They initially pursued healthcare policy during college before turning to do more queer spiritual work. However, training as a hospital chaplain led Zheng to realize that they would still like to work with patients.
“I wanted the illness experience to also be met on the level of the human spirit, rather than just on the level of pathology,” Zheng explains.
After graduating from the Divinity School, Zheng intends to complete their chaplaincy training, and afterward, potentially pursue an M.D.-Ph.D. The Ph.D. would be in medical anthropology, a field they were introduced to by a close mentor at Stanford; Zheng is interested in studying how end-of-life spaces are changing with the growing elderly population. Alternatively, Zheng might train as a Buddhist monastic or Dharma master, although, of course, they know that enlightenment cannot be planned for.
Though their future is in flux, Zheng is living a full and meaningful present. The first thing they do every morning is take their dog Bardo on a morning walk. They spend their free time between the Divinity School community and anthropology events. Though they haven’t gotten the chance to do drag since they moved to Cambridge, they hope to continue performing in various public events related to queerness and anti-racism.
“Right now, things are uncertain,” Zheng says. “There’s so many amazing things that catch my interest and ignite my heart. So I’m really just trying to avail myself to everything that arrives to me.”