Yet the beauty of it is learning that all of those pieces, even the painful ones, fit perfectly together to create the masterpiece that is me. Stories, pain, conflict, joy, resilience, creativity, courage, and even anger have all brushed their unique strokes and colors onto the canvas of my life and invite me into an opportunity to become whole as I welcome all of the pieces of myself.
Attending seminary and studying theology can (and should be!) a beautiful experience, as you are literally dedicating your time, energy, and soul to contemplating the highest possible object of thought—our God.
It is not uncommon for many Asian Americans to come into the academy in an evangelical context and, well, the complaint is typically something along these lines, “They wanted me for my different perspective but they want me to sing the same tune as everyone else. They just want me to do it [sing the tune], looking the way that I do.”
Anti-Asian racism with the rise of COVID-19 and concurrent racism in the classroom thrusted me into the world of racial justice, a topic my home communities had not prepared me to engage. I found myself scrambling up the steep learning curve of student activism. Luckily, I was not alone.
Asian American theological scholarship should name and challenge the White normativity of conventional theological scholarship. It must allow Asian American seminarians to critically engage conventional theological scholarship instead of passively absorbing it as if it is objective and universal.
I found myself wading in a nascent but already rich tradition of theological scholarship that took my history and my future seriously. It dawned on me that there was no part of my life I could hide away from God’s reach. And for the first time in a long time, I wanted to be an Asian American Christian.