My Story

It started with kindness. My mother was ill for a long stretch, and Christians came to visit (a lot of them). The Protestants pushed; the Catholics didn't, and she noticed the difference. She also noticed that they gave without expecting anything back. My family had never belonged to any religion before that (we were agnostic by default, never deliberately), and her illness, and the kindness that came with it, opened a door none of us had been looking for. We converted to Catholicism together.

Even so, I'd always been spiritual in a way that didn't have a home yet. I was certain there was a G-d out there, and I went looking in Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, whatever I could find. Catholicism was simply the first one that let me get serious.

My mother put me in a Catholic high school (genuinely religious, uniforms designed by nuns, the whole thing), and I threw myself into it: Mass, morning prayers on top of the school's own, long stretches of quiet meditation I sought out on my own. I studied hard. And the harder I studied, the more something started to bother me: our religious studies teachers clearly knew less, and cared less, about the Old Testament than the New, even though Mass itself read from both every week, a practice I'd later learn was borrowed from Judaism's own cycle of weekly readings. We read the old part. We just never really learned it.

So I started reading it myself. And the further in I went, the more I found that the New Testament's best material was lifted from the Old, and the more that trail led somewhere specifically Jewish, not just ancient.

By the time Easter came around that year, I'd already organised a Passover seder at school with some friends and a teacher: kosher food ordered in from Hong Kong's JCC, because a girls' school with a small cluster of devout Catholic teenagers turns out to be exactly the kind of place where that's possible. I played piano, so I learned Dayenu and played it at the table. I didn't know it yet, but I already had Hebrew in my mouth and Jewish tradition in my hands.

University came next: law at the University of Hong Kong, one of the best programmes in the city, and one of the most exhausting things I'd done. There were good people there. There was also a hard, cold strain of utilitarianism running through the place, and the gap between the two wasn't subtle. What I was missing, I realised, wasn't talent or opportunity. It was kindness between people, and a place to belong.

I didn't find the second thing among my Hong Kong peers, and I didn't find it among the expat crowd either: corporate, hard-drinking, allergic to anything that wasn't transactional. So I went looking the only way I knew how: by learning. Turkish. Italian. Anything that might lead somewhere.

It led to two Israeli law students on exchange from Hebrew University, living one floor up in my dorm (floors split by gender). We met carving pumpkins at a Halloween party, of all things, barely spoke, and swapped numbers anyway. Not long after, I landed in the hospital with an unexplained inflammation in my abdomen. They visited.

That shouldn't sound remarkable, and in Hong Kong, it was. People there live stacked on top of each other and somehow still manage not to be a community, not for anyone outside your closest circle. Two people I'd known a week and a half showed up anyway, with M&Ms and whatever else at the supermarket happened to be kosher, which, in Hong Kong, is mostly fruit, vegetables, and fish, so they'd clearly worked for it. I was moved more than I let on, and I kept the friendship going once I was back on my feet.

I was back in that hospital every few months after that. And every time, the friendship deepened a little more, not because of anything they said about Judaism, but because of how they simply treated people: straight, unguarded, exactly the way I'd been hoping someone would. The more I knew them, the more I wanted to know what they came from. I'd already studied Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, plenty of Christianity. Judaism was the one tradition I'd never actually heard explained by someone who lived inside it.

What broke something open for me was something simple, and it didn't need one culprit or one moment to matter: Judaism keeps the seventh day (Shabbat, the day G-d rested) and never moved off it. Christianity eventually settled into Sunday, one day later. Centuries after that, Islam settled into Friday, one day earlier. Two later traditions, same starting point, both landing next to the seventh day rather than on it.

That pattern is what stayed with me: not a theory about who moved what or when, but the plain fact of it. If something matters enough to call a religion, I expected it to take itself seriously, generations deep, about the one day everything is supposedly built around. Landing one day off, twice, on exactly that point, read to me less like conviction than convenience. Discovering that didn't just dent my faith. It started pulling the root out. And once I started pulling, more came loose: a lot of what's attributed to Jesus, I learned, traces straight back to the Talmud, which made believing in him as the literal son of G-d, built in part on borrowed material, feel less like faith and more like a story someone had told me wrong.

I was sick often enough that boredom in a hospital bed became its own kind of teacher. I remember learning Hebrew there specifically because there was nothing else to do, and I remember a song an Israeli friend sent me, Modeh Ani by Omer Adam, landing in my ears at almost the exact moment my grandmother died. Modeh Ani is the first prayer a Jew says each morning, on waking. I learned it while losing her.

It hit harder than it should have made sense to. I was sick, frightened, and grieving all at once, and grieving in a complicated way: my grandmother had been a devout Catholic her whole life, and one of her great joys had been visiting Jerusalem. She used to show me what she'd brought back and tell me stories about the trip. Now she was gone, and I was lying in a hospital bed asking myself a question I didn't yet have words for: what was my Jerusalem? What, actually, was my faith?

My parents eventually got me onto a course of Chinese herbal medicine: foul-tasting, and it worked. The next time I should have landed back in that hospital bed, I didn't. I was in Israel instead, on my graduation trip, feeling better than I had in years.

I went to the Kotel. And standing there, I felt something I'd never felt before in my life: I felt like I'd come home.

That should have made no sense. I was born and raised in Hong Kong. This was the Middle East: dry, politically exhausting, nothing like the density of good food stacked block after block back home. I'd never once cared about the region's politics. And still, standing at a wall in a hard, contested country, something in me settled.

I was still officially Catholic. I took pictures of churches for my family's sake, dutifully. But I had no urge left to pray to the G-d I'd grown up with. None. And when I tried to make myself want to, I simply couldn't. That refusal, more than anything else, told me my soul had already made a decision I hadn't caught up to yet. By the time I left Israel, it wasn't a feeling anymore. It was a fact: I had to be Jewish. I just had to.

I cried at the Kotel, hoping desperately that there was a way to make it real. I had no idea what that way was. Hong Kong's Jewish community isn't exactly public, not with security concerns, and not with a religion that doesn't go looking for converts in the first place.

Back home, even getting into a synagogue meant clearing security and answering questions clearly meant to catch an outsider. My actual way in turned out to be a stranger on a train: a Jewish man from Kiryat Sefer, in Hong Kong selling a digital product, who mentioned he'd been to a Haredi shul in the city that doesn't exist anymore. I would never have pictured myself walking into a Haredi shul; I felt too "hardcore" for that, for someone hoping to convert, especially one with no conversion programme I'd ever heard of.

I spoke to him, then to his friend, a musical bachur who helped make the minyan at that same small shul, Shuva Israel. It had one real asset: a rabbi, Hananel, who kept the whole thing cohesive. The community let me in with more patience than I probably deserved, given that I'd simply appeared out of nowhere. It wasn't always comfortable: a single woman in a shul that didn't have many women to begin with made a few people uneasy, myself included sometimes. But Rabbi Hananel held the door open anyway, and taught me things that still surface for me unprompted, years later, usually while I'm learning something that connects back: the Maharal, for instance, a subject he genuinely mastered.

Eventually he introduced me to Ohel Leah Synagogue, the modern Orthodox congregation that founded Hong Kong's Jewish community, and its rabbi, Rabbi Oser. He wasn't initially eager to take on another conversion; Hong Kong has seen enough intermarriage, and enough converts who don't stay religious, that the question "what's the point" isn't unreasonable. He barely knew me; we'd met once, briefly, and he still wasn't sure about me. But he trusted Rabbi Hananel's word enough to set up a meeting anyway, with the beit din in Chicago, the cRc, the Chicago Rabbinical Council, about as respected an authority on conversion as exists in Orthodox life.

At that first meeting, I was asked about a nuanced point running through the Written Torah, the Oral Torah, and halacha together, the kind of question that only resolves if you've actually wrestled with all three. My answer came almost entirely from hard, self-taught study, no formal curriculum behind it, and Rabbi Oser, listening, said "wow" out loud. The beit din didn't stop there; they pushed further with a harder, more nuanced question, the kind that doesn't usually come up in a candidate's very first interview, clearly testing where my knowledge actually ran out.

I wasn't looking for anyone's validation. But coming after months of being all but looked down on by another rabbi (one who eventually demanded conditions that had nothing to do with religion, labour done as a favour, social exclusivity, before he'd even start a conversion), that meeting felt like relief in a way I hadn't expected. It turns out you don't miss much by walking away from whatever smells completely wrong, and just doing the next right thing, trying your best, and trusting that G-d sends the right people to help.

Learning more meant the weight got heavier, not lighter. I still lived with my parents (standard in Hong Kong until marriage, unless work or money buys you otherwise) in an apartment too small to keep kosher quietly. Telling your own parents "I can't eat what you cook anymore" doesn't come out gracefully the first time you say it. I learned, slowly and badly at first, how to hold a boundary with people I loved and who loved me just as much (they just didn't understand it yet), and then how to do the same with people who simply have power over you, like a boss who isn't obligated to care.

My boss at the time was Catholic. I used to go to church with him. He gave me a hard time about Shabbat and the holidays: not cruelly, but pointedly, asking exactly how I planned to make this work without costing the firm anything. It forced me to actually know my own limits instead of discovering them in the moment. I stopped eating out with colleagues and switched to fruit and tea. Being pushed, as it turns out, is how you learn to solve problems instead of waiting for someone else to solve them for you, which, growing up as comfortably as I had, was not a skill I'd ever needed before.

Mornings were their own kind of humbling. I'd open the siddur to a page of Hebrew I could barely sound out (Baruch Atah Hashem, one word at a time), and by the time I finished the morning blessings, everyone around me had already moved on. I remember crying over it, genuinely beaten down, because everyone else had grown up with this language and I was starting from nothing.

What got me through it was something Rabbi Hananel said once, and never quite left me: that he was jealous of us, the gerim and ba'alei teshuva, because learning Hebrew from scratch forces you to actually look at every word. Someone born into it, he said, davens on instinct and stops noticing the words are even there. We don't get that luxury, so we don't get that blind spot either. What we have instead is a harder-won, more personal grip on every single word, one that never stops being ours. It can fade into the background once the words get familiar. But it's always there to come back to, for the rest of your life.

So I leaned into it. Streetwise Hebrew, Guy Sharett's podcast, on repeat. Notes scribbled on the bus, on the ferry, at lunch. Songs. Actual conversations with Israelis at the shul, which for a long time left me quietly depressed because I understood almost none of it, until, near the end of the conversion, I finally could: small talk, introductions, how was your day. Hebrew whenever I wasn't learning Torah, and Torah whenever I wasn't learning Hebrew, squeezed into a corporate job that was demanding but, mercifully, not M&A-demanding.

By the end, my community had folded me in properly: Shabbat with Rabbi Hananel and his family, kindness I don't think most people realise how much a convert actually needs. People will tell you "good for you" without ever offering you a seat at their table, and the difference between the two matters enormously. There's an old story about Timna, who wanted to convert and was turned away by Avraham and Sarah, and whose alienation, the story goes, pushed her towards whatever path she thought would still keep her on Judaism's edges, a path that eventually produced Amalek. That's what rejection does. Kindness, instead, goes a very long way.

I finished the conversion with a week in Chicago, and nearly couldn't find anywhere to stay; the neighbourhood near the beit din wasn't exactly built for visitors. Shabbat.org found me the Garfinkles, who didn't have room themselves but found me a spot with their neighbours, the Myers: strangers taking in a stranger, no questions asked. I finished my conversion at the cRc, which ran the entire process with a level of care and professionalism I've since learned not to take for granted; not every beit din handles that kind of power as carefully. I count myself lucky to have had some of the best people in the world walk me through it.

Back in Hong Kong, finishing my training contract, I spent my free months teaching kids Torah and leading tours through Ohel Leah. One tour turned out to be a group of Christian missionaries, led, unbelievably, by a woman I'd already met once, while she was handing out gifts to secular Israelis as outreach. She hadn't recognised me as Jewish then. She did now, and it clearly threw her.

At the Aron Kodesh, while I pointed out some retired, invalidated Torah scrolls, she launched into something close to lashon hara dressed up as observation: that we're outdated, stuck reading from scrolls, never learning outside the shul walls. I pushed back on the spot: I learn on the bus. People learn with their children at home. People with office jobs carve out learning time there too. None of what she'd said was true. She backed it with a passage near the end of Yeshayahu (Isaiah), about a lion and a lamb, reading it as Jesus against the Jews when it's actually about G-d's relationship with Israel.

She said all of this in Cantonese, standing in someone else's house of worship. And, as it happened, I was probably the only person on that tour who understood every word of it, since most of the community doesn't speak Cantonese at all. Which meant she'd just said something false about her hosts, inside their own synagogue, convinced none of them would ever know. For what it's worth: the shul isn't actually the centre of Jewish life. It never was. The home is.

Right after that tour, I had to go ask the High Court of Hong Kong for an exception: every solicitor qualification ceremony in the city happens on Shabbat, and mine needed to move. I walked in bracing to explain myself from scratch. The clerk looked up and asked if I was the one who'd led the shul tour. She'd been on it. It had stayed with her enough that she said, more or less, you can't make this up. Instead of the fight I'd prepared for, she walked the whole exception through for me, and I got my certificate on a day that wasn't Shabbat, absurdly, almost suspiciously easily.

Three days after becoming a lawyer, I left for a midrasha in Israel, funded anonymously by someone I'll be grateful to for the rest of my life. It was one of the best stretches of my life: genuinely centrist, inside an Orthodox world that still covered real range, with teachers who hosted us for Shabbat, answered anything we asked, and never once tried to make anyone chassidish or push a house style. You chose your own hashkafa there. Nobody chose it for you.

From there, aliyah. In Jerusalem I started ulpan at bet, found it too basic within weeks, jumped to gimmel, and graduated at dalet. In between, I was quietly learning French too, half-hoping to end up with a French husband: I liked French culture more than American, and nearly everyone I'd been introduced to was American, so I was trying to shift the odds.

It didn't work. I married an Israeli instead, born and raised there, fluent in Hebrew and English, and we got there through a comically large amount of mutual misunderstanding, the kind you only notice was funny once you've worked through it. Everything, I believe, is meant to be; G-d puts specific people in your path at a specific time for his own reasons, and all of it serves some good you can't always see yet. He's Moroccan. I'm Chinese. We've collided over culture more times than I can count, and learned more about how to actually be in relationship (Torah's version of it, not just our own instincts) than either of us expected to.

Looking back, almost every stage of this road had a person in it who said yes: a mother who noticed kindness, teachers who answered every question, strangers in Chicago who took in a stranger, a clerk who remembered, someone who funded my studies in Israel without asking for my thanks. I did not earn most of that. I was simply asked to keep asking questions, keep learning and keep walking, and each time I did, another door opened.

Converting is not one decision. It is thousands of small ones, and in my experience the steps that matter most are small: learn one blessing, find one teacher, say yes to one Shabbat invitation, ask one honest question. If something in this story stirred you, take one of those steps this week. You do not need to have everything worked out first.

I hope this story did something for you: inspired you, ideally, but at the very least made you think, the way I thought, hard, day and night, through every stage of deciding to convert and every year afterwards spent catching up on a lifetime of Jewish knowledge I hadn't grown up with. I'm grateful, genuinely, for everything else I did grow up with instead. I think gerim and ba'alei teshuva are built for exactly this: carrying Torah into a thoroughly material, complicated world without flinching from either side of it. That's not a consolation prize for coming late. It's the job.

If you would like to hear another convert's whole story, ask a friend, and give them time. It is a long conversation, and a gift to be asked by someone who wants to know them. And if you would like to learn alongside others, join the Takash WhatsApp group (the link is on the home page) and ask for Chaya Kong. You are welcome.