Home is where the heart is

Growing up in China sometimes feels like a lifetime ago for Peterborough resident, Faustina Yang. But now, a proud and happy British citizen, she is also the founder and leader of four charitable organisations Peterborough Mums UK, Hampton Tiddlers, Chinese Community in Peterborough and Chinese Women in Peterborough. Last year she co- founded Community Champions Alliance and, keen to maintain links with her homeland she uses her skills and enthusiasm to support not just the Chinese community in the city, but anyone and everyone else who needs it...

Tell us a bit about your life growing up in China.
First of all…

[Here, Faustina pauses – and it becomes clear this question isn’t an easy one for her to answer.]

First of all, I wasn’t wanted when I was born. My parents wanted a boy. They even gave me a boy’s name. I still have his name on my passport… They kept trying for a boy, and as a result, I have three younger sisters. That broke our family and we became very poor. My father could never get a promotion and my mother didn’t have a job, so we had a really, really poor childhood, because of the one-child policy. As a result, my younger two sisters had to be adopted by different families – we gave them money to raise them and later reclaimed them by adding them officially to our list of citizens in the residential book. My second sister came back and went to Wuhan, but my youngest sister decided to stay where she was because she had established a career. So, yeah… it broke the family, and it was tough. I didn’t have shoes from shops, my mum hand-made our shoes, and they were not waterproof on rainy days, I was always in hand-me-down clothes from other families…

Photo taken by Chinese Community in Peterborough Volunteer Photographer Shirley Zhang, Chinese Women on a day out for friendship and fun

But after junior school, I was judged to be one of the best in my school and was chosen to attend a boarding school run by the National Railway Company. A lot was paid for by the railway company, but I still had to pay for my food – I had less than one pound a week for that (it was 10 yuan, at the time one pound is 15 yuan) so I was always starving because I was growing. My classmates, who were from one- child policy families, would bring extra food from home and share it with me – their parents told them to sit with me to eat as I always had a good appetite, eating anything on the plate! I’m always grateful for my classmates, even after so many years…

Coming to England must have felt like a major opportunity then – perhaps even something of an adventure…?
During my time at university, I had part-time jobs teaching English and maths through private tuitions, and these helped me pay for my university fees. After that, I taught at one of the best schools in Hubei province. The Chinese Education Bureau selected 200 excellent teachers from across the country and out of the 200 teachers from different provinces, they chose 30 to go to the University of Nottingham for further education, and I was one of them. I had a wonderful time in Nottingham and loved the university, the people and my home- stay family. When I first arrived, I was welcomed so warmly by Jenny and Phillip, who treated me like their own daughter, washing and ironing my clothes, cooking meals for me, packing my lunches and making me a full English breakfast every day! They even took me out for a meal each week! After that I had to return to the school in China, as required by the government, but because
I was one of the best teachers in the province I won another opportunity, to go to America for further education, funded by the city Education Bureau. For various reasons… this didn’t work out.

Fortunately, while studying in Nottingham I’d made connections and built relationships, so I was sponsored to work in the UK as part of the Chinese liaison for the railway industry. I returned to the UK in 2005 – and I’ve been here ever since! I met my husband and got married, and our child will be 12 years old in July.

Volunteer Photographer Shirley Zhang – Peterborough Mums UK on a wellbeing walk along Embankment in Peterborough

So that opportunity to study in Nottingham, it really changed the course of your life?
It did. It really did! It opened my eyes, my horizon, to different cultures.

What led you from Nottingham to Peterborough?
I was in London from 2005 until 2009 working at City University London – in the Business Systems Department – then I went to work at a bank in Canary Wharf.

You were doing extremely well then, by this point?
Yes, it was a really good job – I was part of a team handling trillions of dollars in foreign exchange settlements every day. I met my now-husband, and then he told me about a job in Peterborough – I said ‘no’ because I had just bought my own place, I had a view of the O2 I didn’t want to give up! But, in the end I did go, of course. I got a job with AB Mauri then moved to AB Sugar, which were both Associated British Foods companies, with operations internationally in 55 countries, including China.

Do you think that the start you had in life, in China, is partly what made you want to start reaching out to help others once you had settled in Peterborough?
I know what poverty is like, and I know what it feels like to be excluded, to be discriminated against – and it’s made me more compassionate, more resilient, a stronger person, I think. In my early years I fought so hard to be accepted, to improve, and to show that I’m better than just a girl who behaved well. When I became a mum, it changed my whole world and it finally made me accept myself as a woman, you know? It was wonderful to finally realise it – as a woman, I can be a mum! It just changed my whole life…

The community work actually started because I was going to children’s centres in Hampton and making friends, but all of a sudden the council announced they were going to close six children’s centres, including the one at Hampton. We joined forces with many other mums in the city, we campaigned, we collected thousands and thousands of signatures in shops, restaurants, everywhere we could. We went on BBC radio, BBC TV, we attended Full Council meetings, cabinet meetings. But in the end, they still closed the centres.

Everybody was very emotional about it of course, as was I, but eventually I said to the council, “Look, what’s done is done. Help us set up our own playgroup.” They agreed, and as a result we got volunteer training, DBS checks, volunteer management training from PCVS, and ultimately turned something negative into something positive. We’ve given 20,000 to 30,000 volunteering hours in the last ten years, and we’ve run hundreds of sessions and benefited more than 6,000 people. We were also given the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service in 2019. We didn’t celebrate because at the time, I didn’t realise how prestigious the award was, I just said, “Please come to our playgroup and join one of our stay-and-play sessions.” Lord Lieutenant Julie Spence sat on the play mat talking and playing with the children! It feels like how it should be, in a way – that’s the place that made the award happen, in the thick of it all with the children!

Photo taken by Chinese Community
in Peterborough Volunteer Photographer Shirley Zhang, promoting tai chi for wellbeing in front of Town Hall to wider diverse communities

And that was really just the beginning, wasn’t it?
Yes! In 2013, I searched for groups supporting mums for Peterborough but couldn’t find any. So, I set up the Peterborough Mums’ group on Facebook – the first online mums’ group in Peterborough – which has now grown to over 8000 members. We have an online team that monitors and checks posts to prevent spamming, to flag any risks of safeguarding, domestic abuse, and provide signposting and support. The group is very active with an average of 30 posts per day, each receiving around 30 or 40 comments. In addition to the online group, we also organised table tennis sessions for women and girls, funded by Table Tennis England and then Cambridgeshire Community Foundation. (We even had the media team from Table Tennis England visiting us at our sessions to promote our success!) This year we also launched wellbeing walks and cafe meet-ups (funded by PCVS and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System) – recognising that being a mum is a full-time job. These activities provide stress-free opportunities for mums to come together, go for walks, and chat over tea and coffee. It’s a casual and inclusive environment where children, prams, dogs, and pets are all welcome! We’ve also been funded by PECT to buy wildflower seeds – great for the bees!

We recently recruited seven new volunteers from seven different countries, including UK, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, China, Malaysia, Norway and Romania. The group is incredibly diverse – members come primarily from Peterborough but we also attract people from Stamford, Spalding and Lincoln.

How has all this affected your life?
It’s made me accept myself and has given me a purpose – it’s something that makes me feel worthwhile. The Chinese Community in Peterborough – another group I founded – it was created partly because my daughter is half-English, she lives in England, but I didn’t want her to grow up knowing nothing about the Chinese language and culture. The project has
achieved a lot since I started it – this year we received the King’s Award at the Cathedral. But also, the last four years in particular have been really hard. We’ve experienced hate crimes and discrimination because we’re Chinese. The community members faced a lot of barriers,
not just isolation or the cost of living, but also language barriers – but we’ve worked really hard to overcome it. We have various online groups, a healthy eating group, an allotment group, English lessons group, maths lessons group, karaoke group, and a safe exercising group which includes Tai Chi, yoga and many more. We also teach people how to deal with shopping and banking online, take a deep dive into digital skills, and we offer finance workshops to help manage finances. Our tai chi lessons are taught by world famous masters and world tai chi champions, they are offered to wider diverse communities, inclusive to all abilities, ethnicities, ages. Our online lessons and recordings benefited nearly 10,000 people nationwide – even reaching people internationally. Our face-to-face lessons have been running for two years, firstly at Thistlemoor Medical Centre, now at the beautiful, historic Peterborough Cathedral.

Jenny Leach and Jade Griffiths from Table Tennis England visited Peterborough Mums UK table tennis club for women and girls. Featured in Table Tennis England news.
Photo captured by Marie-Anne Ventoura for Table Tennis England.

I work as an HR specialist, and a Community Engagement Specialist with the NHS, and as well as trying to maintain so many community groups, the demand for support was so high it led to burnout. I was hospitalised for three days and three nights. Sitting in the hospital bed, I thought, ‘This isn’t right that community leaders are out there with so much on their shoulders but getting little or no support. I’ve got to do something!’ I am someone who sees a need and acts on it. After one year of planning, many conversations with experts and mentors, I founded another group – together with founding trustees Gillian Beasley and Ian Jackson – the Community Champions Alliance in July 2023. We registered the charity in October 2023 and also received £10,000 in funding from Big Lottery to kick-start it.

It’s the only initiative of its kind in the entire UK – from the community leaders, led by community leaders, for community leaders. It’s a revolution sparked by the hearts and souls of community leaders!

We conducted skills and needs assessments, as well as mapping exercises with other organisations, local colleges and universities to determine the support available for community leaders, because they are on the front line, supporting others – it’s important to ensure they’re equipped with the knowledge and experience they need – they’re the unsung heroes after all, the ones who bear the weight of others’ burdens, and it’s imperative they’re armed with the tools and support they deserve. Now, we have community leaders from various backgrounds and diverse cultures, and these leaders are working together to design and build a community that is more inclusive, united and supportive.

And in this journey of collaboration and resilience, I find myself at last – proud, not just of what we’ve accomplished, but of the boundless potential we continue to unlock, one community at a time. Like the old Chinese saying: One stone at a time, together we can move mountains.

To discover more about the community groups Faustina has set up, to find out how you can help or benefit, visit these links:

• https://www.facebook.com/people/Peterborough-Mums-UK-public-page/61557985401829/
• https://www.facebook.com/hampton.tiddlers
• https://www.facebook.com/ChineseCommunityinPeterborough/
• https://www.facebook.com/ChineseWomeninPeterborough
• https://www.facebook.com/CommunityChampionsAlliance