Meet Luyi Chen

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Luyi Chen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Luyi below.

Luyi , we are so deeply grateful to you for opening up about your journey with mental health in the hops that it can help someone who might be going through something similar. Can you talk to us about your mental health journey and how you overcame or persisted despite any issues? For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.

A few years ago, prior to the pandemic, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Up until that point, I thought that’s how everyone else felt and acted too. One of the strange silver linings of the pandemic period is that it allowed me to blend in and feel normal with my OCD tendencies for health, hygiene, and cleanliness and develop greater awareness of it.

For the first time, I realized that high-functioning anxiety had become a way of life for me. The pro is that it made me very proactive, organized, action-oriented, and high-achieving. The con is that, internally, I felt stressed and overwhelmed having to put up with the façade. I tend to over-prepare, over-plan, and overthink, which can be mentally exhausting and debilitating.

As a certified peer specialist, I share my mental health lived experience openly in my work and with my friends and family. I truly believe that it has helped me to overcome my conditions and not let anxiety take over my life. Sharing my experience makes me feel heard, seen, and less alone. It also helps me feel empowered and I hope it can help empower others as well.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I was born and raised in Shanghai, China and consider myself part of the Chinese American 1.5 generation since I came here in my teens and spent most of my formative years in New York City. Being a bicultural individual, like many fellow New Yorkers, I have had struggles with identity; with fitting in and belonging to either culture. For example, I’ve always had a passion for cooking and baking, and for years and years, I rarely tried making traditional food from my own culture. I’ve made fettuccini from scratch with my pasta machine; tried different combinations of grains for making the perfect dosa (a type of crepe); and perfected Basque burnt cheesecake and Dutch Baby pancakes. At that time, I wanted to be more Americanized which means staying away from my culture and cooking Chinese food.

During the pandemic, I started cooking more and more Chinese food, learning traditional recipes from my family. Shortly, I graduated to making a very delicate, flaky mooncake with juicy pork filling that’s a regional specialty from Shanghai where my family is from. Doing that made me feel very in touch with my roots and reinforced that deeply embedded cultural traditions of food can be a language of love for one’s self as well as a powerful connection to our past.

In my professional occupation, I work for NYC Health Department as a mental health educator. I develop curricula and facilitate workshops and trainings promoting mental health awareness to help normalize the conversation about New Yorkers’ mental health. In the past two years, I was grateful to have the opportunity to start a new program on promoting mental health for Asian Americans. In our new training curriculum, I put my heart and soul into sharing unique challenges our communities face and how our mental health can be impacted.
By helping fellow members of my community normalizing the conversation of mental health, I feel even closer to my true self and empowered by my biculturalism.

Through my personal growth (including years of therapy), awareness, and my work experiences in the field of mental health, I have learned to embrace the limbo of being in-between two cultures, and find peace with both my Chinese and acquired American heritage. It’s also important to learn that our journeys don’t have to look the same as everyone else’s. Our sense of belonging can be fluid and can shift and deepen as we grow.

On my Instagram, I like to share recipes and craft uncomplicated, culturally diverse food from seasonal ingredients and what I happen to have in my fridge and pantry. Occasionally, I challenge myself to make something more difficult and unique to experiment. Most recently, I tried abalone sashimi for the first time. What I’m most excited about now is continuing on my journey to learn more traditional, Chinese, home-style recipes. My grandmother passed away after I left Shanghai. I wish I had the opportunity to cook with her more and absorb her knowledge. Luckily, I am learning through my mother and aunts who spent more time with her. During Duan Wu, aka the Dragon Boat Festival, I have fond memories of my grandmother making zongzi, which is a bamboo leaf-wrapped sticky rice with fillings. Her zongzi was the most unique I’ve ever seen or had, marrying the Cantonese style-use of salted egg yolks, Shiitake mushrooms, and dried shrimp with the Shanghainese style-use of soy sauce in sticky rice. Together, this creates delicious layers of umami flavor with a wonderful texture.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

One of the things that keeps me going is curiosity, which has always been the leading force in my life in everything I do. Without curiosity, one cannot fully appreciate the richness of human experiences. Many things in life are fascinating to me, especially in the areas of science and art. Whether it’s my love for plants and learning how to optimize care for them or my desire to further hone my watercolor painting techniques, I’m always excited to learn and challenge myself. When I come across an amazing dish I’ve never had, my mind immediately begins to think about how it’s made, what goes into the recipe, and how I could re-create it or improve upon it myself.

Another quality is resilience. A friend of mine described me as resilient when I was in the midst of my divorce. Before that, I never thought of myself as a resilient person. Over the years, my resilience has helped me not only to function in the face of adversities but also adapt and grow because of them.

There are an infinite amount of human experiences and many different ways of pursuing life’s journey—there’s no one, right way. Having that perspective allows me to be open-minded and adaptable to others, and encourages understanding and empathy.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?

When I feel overwhelmed, I take a moment and step away from what I’m doing. Sometimes, I do simple breathing or mindfulness exercises, sometimes I meditate, or all of the above. If I have the time, I try doing something with my hands, like the tactile feel of touching soil when repotting plants, or the mixing of dough when making bread; there’s something about these processes that’s very enjoyable if you truly let yourself feel them.

If time is limited, the quickest way to keep myself grounded is to use the 5-4-3-2-1 technique. It helps to bring oneself to the here and now by naming things with our five senses.

I also love to listen to the sounds of the rainforest, with all the birds and wildlife and water falling; it transports me back to Costa Rica — one of my favorite places on Earth, for its rich biodiversity and rustic traditions of food.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed in our busy lives because there are so many things to do and be curious about and it’s difficult to make the time. But that’s part of the challenge: it’s about balance, and we have to keep moving forward in mindful and connected ways.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luyi.real.kitchen/