The Scars of Not Belonging Turn into a Life of Connecting Others

by Deb Liu

Deb Liu is the CEO of Ancestry.com, a company that helps users track their genealogy and discover their family history. The daughter of Asian immigrants, as a child Deb experienced the loneliness of feeling like she didn’t belong. She shares the story of how she processed that pain into doing important work to connect people—just as she had longed herself to be connected for most of her life.

ALL OF MY RELATIVES lived in a small area in Queens, New York. My first six years, I grew up really close to everybody around me. I spoke Chinese with my family. It never occurred to me that I was different from anyone else.

Then when I was six, my parents decided to move to South Carolina. At the time, Asians made up less than one-percent of the population there, and it was very difficult to be different. Some people would come up to us on the street and say, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” People would tell me that I was strange, that the food I ate was strange, that I looked different. I felt so alienated, and I let it deeply affect how I looked at the world.

At first, I got more quiet. I thought to myself, If no one notices me, maybe they will stop making comments. Then I realized that I was really good at school, and I told myself, When I graduate high school, I will be valedictorian. I worked incredibly hard, and that’s what happened. I had the sense I was going to show everybody in that small town that I was going to make something of myself.

I think I've always wanted to build connection. So when I had the opportunity to work at Facebook and Ancestry, I had the opportunity to grow companies and products and work with people who are about connecting the world. I kept achieving and achieving—including creating multibillion dollar businesses at Facebook. And then one day, Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook at the time, said to me, “You can stop fighting now.”

I realized what I had been doing was taking the negative energy from others who had made me feel different or “less than” and used it as rocket fuel. But as you know, rocket fuel is extremely combustible, and it can burn up everything around it. I realized the thing that got me where I needed to go was no longer going to work for me, and I had to change my narrative. I had to say, Why am I doing all these things?

Am I doing it for the glorification of God, or am I doing it because I’m angry?

I think we have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for. Think of the people who have changed entire societies and changed people’s lives—both good and bad—with the choices they’ve made. Each moment you have in life is a choice. It’s a choice to lift others up or to tear others down, to create value in the world or to consume value in the world. So choose the thing that’s going to give you the opportunity to influence things for the better in your life and others.

Adapted for print from the Jesus Calling Podcast. Put your phone in Camera mode and hover over this code to hear more of Deb’s story!

Deb’s book Take Back Your Power is available wherever books are sold.