The faith that helped our parents and our families survive in this country can sometimes be at odds with the growing faith of the younger generation that looks around and is asking, “How can my faith impact the world around me?” It’s a complicated question.
Throughout her book, Jun continues to pull on the theme of coming home to yourself—and the way that journey looked for her uniquely as a biracial Korean woman growing up in the States.
In order to fix the divisions in our churches and our country, we not only have to understand what is broken but how it is broken.
“Finding your own way in social justice work requires courage, creativity, wisdom, and an openness to possibility. It requires shaking off the unhealthy and unrealistic expectations of others. It asks us to embrace our differences as beautiful and our unique personalities and perspectives as gifts, rather than comparing ourselves to others.”
Sam’s former profession as a storyteller is apparent as he vividly paints a picture as though you are there with him in his humble beginnings and follow him through his highs and lows.
For Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we recommend picking up a book (or two) to help you learn about a perspective that may be unfamiliar to you, or perhaps makes you feel more seen in your own identify and experience.
Whenever a racial tragedy happens in our country or around the world for that matter, our posture of heart as a family is to first respond with lament. My family laments every time a life is lost because every person’s life has value and meaning.
Invisible courageously offers full witness to the invisibility of Asian women and to a God who sees. Kim ultimately asks her reader to reimagine faith in the God who makes all visible, whose spirit is in all people, and whose reign never ceases–defining our today.
What if there was a way to see our different callings as women - as mothers, wives, academics, and ministry leaders - not as forces pulling us in different directions, but as a single effort working toward a common goal? That is, in many ways, the question that Power Women seeks to answer.
By Raymond Chang
R
ace is a complicated reality. The racial structures and hierarchies have been in place for so long that its permutations and manifestations are on the one hand, predictable and obvious, but on the other hand, complex and highly nuanced. Therefore, I appreciate people who are charging the way forward on race scholarship – especially from a Christian perspective.
Dr. Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism is a seminal text for those who are interested in understanding how the construction of race systematically justified domination and exploitation and how the mere existence of Asian Americans complicates the racial discourse as we know it. Tran calls all people, but more specifically Christians, towards a more faithful Christian ethic that is not beholden to the powers and principalities that preserve and promote the racial hierarchies through racial capitalism, but instead lead us towards a vision of the church that is truer to a vision of God’s Kingdom.
This is a necessary companion to Dr. Willie Jennings’ The Christian Imagination. If you found yourself blessed and transformed by the work of Jennings, you will be deeply impacted by the work of Tran. If you haven’t read Jennings, pick up both. They should be required readings in every seminary and Christian college.
Purchase your copy here today: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0197617913/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1
Here is an excerpt from Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism:
I grew up at a time in America when racism was both accepted and expected. America in the 1970s and 1980s was coming to terms with the civil rights movement, and hence awakening to the nation’s long history of colonialism, settler expansion, land enclosure, genocide, chattel slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, lynching, internment, segregation, and so on. For many parts of American life, civil rights and all that the movement stirred bore little significance, and life for them went on as it always had. At least that seemed the case for the people around me.
As a recent immigrant from Vietnam, the force of this followed me throughout my childhood. The period witnessed America’s war on drugs and the growth of the carceral state, of the ghettoization of urban life and the evisceration of rural communities, each exercised through systemic racist domination of housing, education, employment, the environment, and everything that sustains life. The period also saw the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, that political economy (with its left-branded identity politics and contraction of class considerations) born of the belief that the market and the state needed each other if elites were to survive eventualities like the civil rights movement and all it symbolized. Heady days to be sure.
Being a young Vietnamese immigrant in this period was pretty simple. You survived. In my case, that meant hiding and running from the racial bullying that chased me everywhere as our family migrated through poverty in pursuit of whatever version of the American Dream distantly directed our lives. Words like “Nip” and “Chink” daily told me who I was, that I did not belong, and that my kind were not wanted. I ended up in a lot of fistfights, sometimes after kids called me “Bruce Lee”—apparently, the irony escaped me. Back then, you did what you needed to do. Now when I think about the violence, it terrifies me, both the need to survive and the things done to survive.
In the preceding decades, before my family’s arrival, America had fought three costly wars with people who looked like me, first with Japan, then with Korea, and finally Vietnam, each with diminishing success. As soldiers returned home to America in 1975, 120,000 Vietnamese war refugees, my family included, came with them. Even as a child I could tell that it was hard for most Americans to understand what to do with the Vietnamese showing up in their neighborhoods, schools, and churches. To them, we Asians seemed to sit somewhere between American defeat and American redemption, embodying the whole range of what the Vietnam War came to represent. Defeat or redemption—depending on the day, life as an immigrant could go either way.
As a child I suffered being Asian American at a time when Asian Americans were viewed as perilous. I had few friends, having already moved thirteen times during our first decade in America. By then I had experienced enough accepted and expected racism that race would forever color my life. I had been taught by Americans (non-White as much as White, I should say) that being Asian American was bad. I had been taught by my family that being Asian American was good, and indeed, worth fighting for, literally and otherwise. If I learned to detest those Asian Americans who looked down on Asian Americans, who were embarrassed by their own kind, likely I was projecting my own tendency for a socially taught self-hatred.
Things began to shift as my family found some semblance of financial security. My brother and sister made their way to university and college, which eased, no matter how hard I made it on myself, my own way into university and the middle class. My mom’s success as a real estate agent allowed me to stay at the same high school for four years—an eternity compared to all the change we had seen prior to that. Although my high school academic record could not outrun the difficult early years, those four years created enough of a foundation for me to find my academic and professional footing in college, and eventually within American Christianity.
Early in high school, I had a friend named Cliff. Actually, Cliff was my only friend. Among the poorer kids at Katella High School, we found each other in large part because we each had no one else. Cliff and I had only each other, but that hardly mattered to us. We made a life of it, playing games we made up, the rules of which only we knew, catching bugs in the stream running through the apartment complex where I lived, riding on the handlebars of a bike we somehow both owned, together making do as kids often do. Cliff was poor, really poor.
At the time, Cliff and his family lived in—or rather, out of—the Motel Tampico, all their worldly possessions kept in trash bags for easier transport when the motel kicked them out, as it regularly did, because they couldn’t pay the weekly rent, which they regularly couldn’t. Cliff was one of the very few Black kids at Katella, which was mostly White, increasingly Latinx, with a handful of Asian Americans, typical of many Southern Californian schools at the time.
Cliff and I had a lot in common, but some of the differences were pretty pronounced. While my family was, like many immigrant families, moving out of poverty, his family seemed stuck in a system that seemed intent on keeping Black people poor. I could look around and find others who looked like me at Katella—some, to be sure, members of gangs or dropping out of high school, but also among the academic types headed for college. Cliff looked around and saw no one like him, and the images offered by the broader society made his prospects pretty dim. We were both poor, but I, despite myself, had lots of opportunities. Cliff, despite himself, had few.
Over the years, like many friends, we drifted apart. Cliff’s family moved in and out of the motel and I found a home among the college-bound kids. Still, we always had that connection, of having found a place with each other when we had no place with others. Whenever we ran into each other, I felt that connection. Still now—decades later—I feel it.
At one point, I believe I was fifteen, Cliff asked me for help. He was being harassed by a group of racist skinheads at Katella. He told me that they regularly chased him after school, bullied him on campus, making learning impossible, and that he was scared. I remember he cried as he told me. I had seen these kids around. They never bothered me, probably because I wasn’t Black and because as a fringe group, they didn’t bother the more established groups like the kids I hung around at that point. It greatly distressed me that skinheads were picking on Cliff, but I did not know what to do. If the teachers Cliff told were powerless to protect him, what could I do? I felt as scared and helpless as I had all those years growing up and moving around. So, I did nothing. Or nothing significant. I think I told Cliff that the skinheads would move on and find someone else to pick on and that he would be okay. I told him, in other words, that he needed to survive and that he would.
Later we lost touch. I never found out what happened, never bothered to ask, perhaps scared that things had gotten worse, likely frightened by the responsibility that would come with the answers. Maybe the skinheads backed off. Perhaps Cliff ’s family moved on from Katella and his troubles. I don’t know. I only know that I did nothing, when I might have done something.
I’ve often thought about that childhood, its desperations and terrors, when thinking about whether the current conversation on race and racism gets us very far, or if it instead leaves us cornered. For a long time as an academic, the conversation’s antiracism served me well enough. I fell in, which meant focusing on racial identity, pushing for diversity, working through a White/ Black binary, and contenting myself with the idea that those it ignored would eventually get a hearing. I put aside any sense that American antiracism marginalized those already marginalized by racism or that Asian Americans troubled its dominant narratives.
Despite the internal contradictions, I held to the antiracist line of thought for the simple reason that I had already committed so much to it. I gave a ton of energy to writing about and working on issues of racial equity and diversity in my scholarship and at my university. I occupied roles in the institution that allowed me to mentor scores of students, and I made it a point to work with non-white students as often as I could. I considered it a responsibility and a privilege to use whatever advantage I had to benefit the cause of racial minorities, assuming leadership positions, serving on committees, building relationships, pressing administrators.
While neither my scholarship nor my roles specifically focused on race and racism, those topics and texts came up consistently, as they always had. I created my department’s first course on race and racism, led institutional efforts against racial bias, sent emails to provosts and presidents, pushed for hiring and retaining minority faculty. I even won the university’s “Diversity Award,” something I joked rotated between the handful of us active faculty of color. All in service to an antiracism that I thought I could not fail to follow.
Over time, however, it became harder to ignore suspicions that the way we talk about race and racism, where so much is given to racial identity, is problematic, that there is something off about the idea that who I am reduces to what I am racially. Racial identity as a basis of common life increasingly struck me as at once too easy and too hard, too easily settled and too conceptually unwieldy. I also worried that our vaunted hopes for cross-racial solidarity rested on a mistake—a belief in distinct racial kinds—that would in the end defeat itself. Mostly I thought it odd that antiracists showed so much confidence in racial identity.
But these were unformed thoughts kicking around inside my head amid what felt like settled agreements about how we should talk about race and racism. This dominant narrative held as antiracism’s sine qua non the establishing, securing, and asserting of racial identity, its self-interpreting and self-realizing singularity. It took its cues from urbane notions of diversity and representation and specialized in wokeness and whiteness, sophisticated discourses pressed into service by ordinary processes like research agendas and institutional diversity awards. Like everyone in the academy, I wanted this story to be true and just assumed that it was, no matter the minority reports suggesting otherwise. What else could I believe considering what I had already given myself to? I also sensed that others had questions, but that the reigning academic orthodoxy made it difficult for those questions to find the light of day.
The questions reached a tipping point, especially after a deep dive into the literature confirmed old suspicions and illuminated unexplored pathways. Black Marxism was a revelation, combining rigorous critical analysis with practiced commitments to liberation. So was an ethnographic turn in religious studies, which mixed easily with long-standing theological investments in radical democratic theory and the procedures of ordinary language philosophy.
Once there, provocations like that of Jay Caspian Kang opened things up: “‘Asian-American’ is a mostly meaningless term. Nobody grows up speaking Asian-American, nobody sits down to Asian-American food with their Asian-American parents and nobody goes on pilgrimages back to their motherland of Asian-America.” As did Paul Gilroy riffing on “strategic” uses of race: “I feel uncomfortable with that idea, because once some of these images, some of these rhetorics, some of these political ideas are out of the box, they are loose in the world. And it’s delusional to imagine that you can orchestrate them, even for the good.”
Now on a different path, it became increasingly clear to me that something was wrong, that our collective thinking about race and racism had grown stale, even decadent, and that the hope of developing an effectively liberative agenda that began and ended with racial identity was not only a losing proposition but a cursed one. I wondered about a different conversation, or at least other ways of entering into the current one, prior pathways that had been forgotten (or prematurely dismissed) and new thinking yet to be had.
Pondering the options, I knew enough to know that the answer could not be postracialism and its blindness to the realities of racialization. Critical theory had shown us how race had been ideologically invented for the purpose of dominative exploitation. The lesson to be learned from that discovery could not be willful ignorance of the ongoing consequences of domination. But neither could it be a renewed commitment to racial identity. The latter fails to grasp the meaning of race ideology just as the former draws the wrong conclusion from it. We would need something beyond the Scylla of postracialism and the Charybdis of doubling down on racial identity.
Pressing beyond the limited options, this book reframes conversations about race and racism from racial identity to political economy. In framing matters in terms of political economy, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism reaches back to a trusted mode of analysis that has been obscured by the prevailing antiracist orthodoxy. Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived.
Accordingly, this book invites readers into a different life with race and racism, reimagining what they are and are doing. What that life involves is laid out in the following pages. Present throughout are my family and our migration from poverty to wealth, our version of that dream still directing our lives. Informing the book’s many arguments are America’s wars with Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, and the nation’s long history of colonialism, settler expansion, land enclosure, genocide, chattel slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, lynching, internment, segregation, and so on. And there is Cliff, my powerlessness and cowardice then, and the desperations we bear and the hopes we risk. This book circles back on a story, of doing something, of acknowledging some- thing, or failing to, in light of a story I have come to live.
To view the recent conversation with Jonathan Tran by Raymond Chang and Isaiah Jeong:
Photo courtesy of Oxford University Press
Pastor Raymond Chang is the president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, a pastor, and writer. He regularly preaches God’s Word and speaks throughout the country on issues pertaining to Christianity and culture, race and faith. He has lived throughout the world (Korea, Guatemala, Panama, Spain, China), traveled to nearly 50 countries, and currently lives in Chicagoland, serving as a campus minister at Wheaton College. Prior to entering vocational ministry, Raymond worked in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, and served in the Peace Corps in Panama. He is currently pursuing his PhD. He is married to Jessica Chang, who serves as the chief advancement and partnerships officer of the Field School.
Even if God's goodness to me didn't look the way that I thought it should, I'm going to worship him because he's worthy of worship.
By AACC Staff & Friends
S
ummer is in full force. We hope you find the time to do the things you love during these warm summer days, such as relaxing with a well-written book! Whether you’re in the mood for a tear-jerking memoir, an enchanting fictional trilogy, or a thought-provoking theological work, AACC writers and editors have compiled a list of books from a variety of AAPI authors to enrich your summer reading. At AACC, we want to highlight and recommend books that amplify Asian American voices and speak to our experiences. In this list, you will find books from a diverse range of authors and genres that will inspire and encourage you. We hope that you will find one of these books to be a welcome addition to your summer reading list.
Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura
In Art and Faith, Makoto Fujimura explores the reality of God as the first and ultimate Creator, and the impact of this truth on our creativity as an expression of God’s extravagant and abundant love in creation. He describes how believers are uniquely invited and empowered to “co-create” with our heavenly creator as his image bearers, filled with the hope of redemption and vision of the new Creation. Drawing on the Scriptures as well as Japanese Kintsugi and other artistic and literary traditions, Fujimura suggests that this spiritual act of “making” offers deeper insight into the nature of life and the loving character of God. Regardless of your vocation, this book will encourage and inspire you to new levels of worship through creativity.
- Grace Liu
Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead To Lasting Connections Across Cultures by Michelle Ami Reyes
Michelle Ami Reyes brings a fresh, thoughtful, and wise voice to the ongoing conversation about bridging divides between racial and ethnic groups. Becoming All Things is a challenging read—but it's the necessary kind of challenge that provokes thought and reflection, causes me to ask why I'm reacting or pushing back on what I'm reading, and prompts me to really account for my everyday thoughts and actions. It made me uncomfortable, and I'm glad it did. This book is truly helpful and has already prompted some good conversation with friends, in addition to prompting me to begin to engage differently with folks who aren't yet friends, but could be someday.
- Jenilyn Swett
Three Mile an Hour God by Kosuke Koyama
Three Mile an Hour God by Kosuke Koyama is for the person that feels overwhelmed with the prospect of committing to an entire book. Koyama, a Japanese missionary who lived in Thailand, writes his reflections on various passages throughout the Bible. Chapters range from anywhere to 1-3 pages. It's the perfect book to slowly read over the summer, and slowness is a theme that runs throughout the entire book. Koyama begins his reflections with the reminder that God does not run. God walks, slowly, at the average walking speed of three miles an hour. His reflections touch on several topics ranging from syncretism to our dependence on technology. Throughout, Koyama reminds us that even as God slowly walks with us, we miss out on the beauty of life if we also don't slow our pace.
- Justin Nitta
SunLit Lands Trilogy by Matt Mikalatos
Matt Mikalatos’ SunLit Lands trilogy seamlessly bridges biblical theology, social realities, and the pursuit of justice. Set in a magical land full of dragons, mermaids, and shark people, this Christian fantasy series connects the problems of the SunLit Lands to our own, including the historical realities of slavery, immigration, and more. With fun, witty, relatable storytelling Mikalatos paints a picture of the world we so desperately need to understand.
- Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
When Breath Becomes Air is the posthumously published memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a promising neurosurgeon on the verge of completing his residency at Stanford when his life and future is thrown into uncertainty as he is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. In the face of mortality, Kalanithi’s future and life goals are brought into question as he wrestles with the perennial question, what makes life worth living? In the spirit of writers such as the preacher of Ecclesiastes and Leo Tolstoy, Kalanithi offers a lesson in living through the vantage point of death. Wonderfully profound, theologically rich, and emotionally engaging, When Breath Becomes Air is a must-read and welcome addition to any summer reading list.
- Joshua Huver
A History of the Philippines: From Indio Bravos to Filipinos by Luis H. Francia
How old were you when you learned about the Philippine-American War or that the Philippines was colonized by Spain and then the United States? This book dives into the history of the Philippines from pre-colonial days to the present. Though this is an amazing resource for a Filipinx wanting to learn about their ethnic heritage, this is a book for everyone. By including perspectives and parts of stories that were left out of our history textbooks in the US, it challenges the way we view European and American history and adds insight to discussions about racism, colonialism, militarism, and even missiology.
- Esther Guy
Halo-Halo: A poetic mix of culture, history, identity, revelation, and revolution by Justine Ramos
This book is a work of art. Through her slam-style poetry, Ramos gives insight into the experiences and psyche of the Filipinx diaspora. At times, her words feel like lament. Other times, like revolutionary anthems. Ramos doesn’t just describe, she makes you feel. For example, in her poem, Ferdinand Magellan, she talks about sitting in a history class as the teacher talks about the famous explorer being “killed by savages in the Philippines,” and you can feel the tension in her body and the wrestling with her identity as the other students in the class stare at her.
- Esther Guy
From A Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology by Sang Hyun Lee
From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology by Korean-American Theologian Sang Hyun Lee beautifully weaves together Asian American existence with many key theological topics. Lee ultimately witnesses to the God who possesses an Asian American face, who is present in solidarity with Asian Americans, and who loves Asian Americans in and through their particularities. Not only does Lee give full voice to the trauma and pain of Asian American’s (marginality), but also to the beautiful discipleship that can take place in Asian American existence (liminality). Personally, this text helped me realize that my Asianness is not something God desires to erase like American society, but rather, my Asianness is something deeply loved by God. It is Lee's advocating work, embodied in this text, that is credited for the creation of the Asian American Program at Princeton Seminary. I believe this book is a must-read for Asian American Christians.
- Isaiah R. Hobus
Prey Tell: Why we silence women who tell the truth and how everyone can speak up by Tiffany Bluhm
In recent years, it’s become evident that the systems in place that are designed to silence women who are victims of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault are not simply outliers and subversive means of oppression in a larger culture of goodness, but rather, the water in which we all swim. Tiffany Bluhm’s book Prey Tell not only examines why and how this has come to be, both in church settings and beyond, but also concludes with a model of true allyship, pulling in the biblical precedent of Nathan’s boldness in confronting David with his own abuses of power. Weaving in personal stories and gospel truths, this book is a confrontation and a call to action anchored in biblical ethos and logos that every person should take to heart.
- Denise Kruse
Photo by Link Hoang on Unsplash
By Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes
I
cannot recall a single Asian character in the Christian fantasy novels I read as a child. Growing up, I lived on a steady diet of elves, dwarves, orcs, and fauns who lived in realms where the battle between good and evil always had a distinctly Black-white aura. Falling into the trappings of correlating moral attributes with certain skin tones, the Christian fantasy that many of us know and even love has not served us well when it comes to nuanced conversations about race, multiculturalism, and even justice. Instead, we were taught that blackness represents the darkness of this world, and light and white crown the protagonists and saviors. As a result, the erasure of a wide spectrum of peoples, including Asians, went unquestioned.
We haven’t made much progress in the Christian fantasy genre over the past 70 years. Though non-Christian Asian fantasy literature has risen in popularity over the past decade with the release of Cindy Pon’s debut novel, Silver Phoenix, in 2009, even this sub-genre has struggled to gain recognition due to its lack of perceived relevance. Stories that feature Asian main characters and take place in settings directly influenced and shaped by Asian cultures are often deemed non-American and thus niche. In other words, there is a belief that readers will not want to escape to a world with Asian heroes, because they do not believe it is an accurate depiction of their actual world. Sadly, with its continued commitment to European mythology, Christian fantasy lags even further behind in its depictions of inclusion and belonging.
Matt Mikalatos’ Sunlit Lands series, however, shines as a bright exception. Its multicultural world explores good and evil, racism and justice with not only a Black protagonist named Darius Walker but a Chinese American hero, Jason Wu, who must work together to bring leadership and a new vision for a better Sunlit Lands where all people are equal and can flourish. Darius and Jason need each other. These two characters break the unjust system plaguing the Sunlit Lands together and pave the path to a more just future. Instead of competing with their struggles, they make space for each other’s stories and pains, and it’s their friendship and solidarity that enables their plan to succeed. I’ve written about the second installment, The Heartwood Crown (2019), and I had the joy of reading an early version of the third and final book, The Story King, which releases today, Tuesday, June 8, 2021. **Please note there are spoilers below**
In The Story King, the Sunlit Lands are in disarray. The dominant group, a fair-skinned people called the Elenil, are seeking to reinstate their power over the other creatures in the land, including the gray-skinned Scim, who they have enslaved and oppressed for centuries. An Elenil dictator, Hanali, now sits on the throne and is not only more ruthless than his predecessor, but is seeking to restore “order” through genocide. A band of human teenagers are caught in the midst of this war, each wrestling with what true justice looks like. How can the Elenil and the Scim as well as humans live in peace with one another? What sins of the past need to be addressed and what parts of their society need to be changed? In many ways, these are the same questions we are asking in our own racially divided nation right now.
Throughout this final installment, Jason Wu rises as a leader in the Sunlit Lands with a unique role to play in bringing forth justice. Interestingly, Jason doesn’t fit the stereotypes of Asian Americans—he’s loud, doesn't do what he’s told, and is always honest, usually to a fault. He is neither cast as a perpetual foreigner nor a model minority, but rather a goofy teenage boy with a love for mischief, playful banter, and chocolate pudding. Yet Jason also wrestles with some of the deepest pains and struggles within the Asian American experience—he feels unequal, unworthy, unwanted, and much of his sarcasm and goofiness masks these insecurities. For this reason, in the first two books, Jason is more of a comedic sidekick. He knows how to annoy the Elenil, get under their skin, trick them, and misdirect their efforts. The Story King, however, flips the script and finally gives Jason the character development we’ve been longing for. Before the final battle, Baileya, Jason’s fiancée, sends him out into the desert so he can learn to love his story and by extension learn to love himself. Baileya sees Jason’s full potential and knows the power he will hold if he can both embrace his own narrative and understand how he fits within the larger story.
The path to justice looks different from one community to the next. For the Asian American community, learning about our past and growing in our racial consciousness is essential to our ability to speak up and advocate on behalf of the poor, the widow, and the orphan. In fact, tapping into lost or hidden memories—usually caused by a mysterious illness or mental health issues—has become a common trope in Asian fantasy novels. We must learn our own history and our place within it before we can rise.
There is a biblical precedent to seeing the bigger picture. God encourages Abram in Genesis 13:14 to “Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west.” His words are a divine challenge to look ahead and behind, to the left and to the right; to see all sides of a story and to understand your own position in it. This is what we see Jason learn to do in The Story King. He gains a bigger picture of Asian America, but also of his own family’s story. By the time Jason completes his time in the desert and learns his whole story, he develops a self-confidence that empowers him to embrace his real name, Wu Song; his physical appearance; his unique perspective on justice; and his place in the world.
Not only that, but Jason becomes king of the Southern Courts, thereby positioning himself as a true leader in the final fight for justice. This is one of the most significant elements of The Story King in my opinion as it challenges the fantasy genre, and Christian fantasy in particular, to not only include Asian characters, but to have them lead. According to researchers at the University of California, Riverside, Asian Americans are still seen as less ideal than white Americans when it comes to serving as leaders in the US. The counter-cultural and truly delightful narrative in The Story King, conversely, is that Asian American leaders are central to conversations on justice and systemic change. It’s precisely because Jason falls outside the Black-white divide that he is able to bridge the gap between dominant and subdominant cultures, between the Elenil and the Scim. In fact, Jason’s leadership catalyzes education and bridge building, albeit in his quirky, unconventional ways, which include chocolate pudding, something called Wendy juice, and chants for “snack time.” Moreover, the people of the southern court, shape-shifters who appear as lizard-like in their original form, want to be like Jason and many take on his appearance so that there are in fact many Jasons by the end of the book. These copycats are not intended to communicate that all Asians look the same, but rather that Asian voices and leadership are not only worth following but worth emulating as well.
In the midst of skyrocketing anti-Asian racism due to COVID-19 over the past year, this book is a breath of fresh air. I hope that we will see many more Asian characters and heroes in future Christian fantasy novels. The story of Jason who ends up as king, who marries the queen, who helps bring justice to the land, and lives happily ever after is a story we all need right now.
Photo courtesy of Tyndale House Publishers
Photo by Gülfer ERGİN on Unsplash
Michelle Ami Reyes, PhD, is the Vice President of the AACC. She is also the author of Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Connections Across Cultures.
By Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes
T
he Christian life is not about what you can do—your rights and privileges—but what you’re willing to give up to lovingly serve others. This ethos should guide our approach, as followers of Jesus, to conversations around cultural appropriation. In 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul says twice, “‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say—but not everything is beneficial. ‘I have the right to do anything’—but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others” (6:12; 10:23–24). When addressing topics like food and other cultural activities, the principles of building up and benefiting the community are of utmost priority.
Some of us are likely guilty of overemphasizing cultural experiences. We enjoy eating at ethnic restaurants; many of us take gap years after college and travel overseas; some of us have explicitly non-Western décor in our homes and apartments. These can all be good things when we’re seeking to learn about and honor other people’s cultures and put ourselves in the position of a student. My suspicion, however, is that we can often be drawn to other people’s cultures and foods simply because they are beautiful, exciting, and different and feel eye-opening. When this happens, our priority becomes more about how much fun we can have, how “pretty” we’ve decorated our space, or how the experience is supposed to change us as a person, which is an incredibly individualistic approach to culture. We lose the focus on context and the importance of building relationships, and that’s a problem. This is why we need to reconsider our actions and practices. Just because we can celebrate any cultural holiday, visit any country around the world, or cook or buy any kind of food doesn’t mean we should; at the very least, we may need to consider if there is a better approach.
The reality in the first century was that some Christians were asserting their right to eat whatever they wanted, but they were overlooking the context of the food and its original meaning (i.e., that it had been sacrificed to idols). Their actions confused people and even turned them away from the faith. This is the issue that Paul seeks to address in 1 Corinthians, and it remains relevant today. Our enjoyment of food or other elements of a culture can sometimes be entirely divorced from any connection with the people of that culture, and this is a reality that creates genuine hurt and misunderstanding with damaging effects on people and communities of color. For example, people say they love chips and queso or breakfast tacos, but they don’t have any interest in engaging with real-life Mexicans. People buy toy tepees for their kids without any thought or care of how this looks and feels to local Native American communities. I’ve even seen white people organize their own Holi party, an Indian holiday that celebrates the coming of spring, with pictures on social media of them throwing paint at each other, as is customary on that day. But do any of them have a single Indian friend? Were Indians even invited to their party, let alone asked to organize it? Not so much. The point is that real-life relationships must drive our impulse and desire to connect across cultures. We need to take conscious steps to engage communities of people and reconsider the consequences of superficial engagement with another person’s culture.
To be clear, I’m not saying that if you are not Mexican, you can’t eat at a taqueria (or if you’re a white chef, you can’t make a flauta). I’m not saying that if you’re not Indian, you can’t eat chicken tikka masala. But I’m asking you to take a step further. Consider why you participate in or engage with cultural activities or food outside your own culture. As Christians, our focus should be whether the foods we eat and drink, as well as the clothes we wear, the music we listen to and the decorations in our homes, build up the community they represent. There’s no law that says you can’t attend a Chinese New Year festival or wear a cable-knit cardigan with a tribal design. But ask yourself: Does my participation in or use of these things benefit that people group?
This brings me back to our discussion on accommodation and appropriation. The lesson that we learn from Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:1–11:1 is that our participation in food and other cultural activities should only be done in context and for the purpose of gaining greater access to people’s lives and, even more importantly, for their good. Being “woke” (i.e., well informed on issues of culture and race) is not an authentic mark of a true Christian. Instead, as Paul makes clear in the pivotal thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, love must be our defining marker. And to love someone means that you seek their advantage. In 1 Corinthians, we see that the Greek word for “benefit” implies “bringing together,” but its meaning in the discussion of 6:12 and 10:23–24 means to build up. Paul’s frequent use of this word throughout his letter in deliberate rhetoric is an appeal to advantage. When we love someone, we proactively speak and act in ways that are for their advantage. That is true love. Paul says that “knowledge puffs up while love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). In other words, make sure that your words and actions are for the loving benefit of your neighbors.
This is why we must engage with other cultures on more than an aesthetic level. Consider what America might be like if people loved Mexicans as much as they loved tacos. How would our society be different if people loved the Black community as much as they loved their music (e.g., hip-hop, R&B, blues, etc.)? When we are engaging with real people across a cultural spectrum, our cultural knowledge will naturally increase. As we listen to real people, we learn what brings them both joy and pain. We learn what is sacred to them, whether values or objects, and why we should not borrow these for our own purposes and agendas. If someone tells you they feel their culture is being appropriated, don’t get mad. Listen, seek to understand, and be willing to take a different step forward.
We shouldn’t pick and choose between people and their cultural artifacts. If we want to truly enjoy another culture— their lifestyle, narratives, clothing, country, music, and food—we first need to bond with someone of that culture. We will need to eat with them, learn to have fun with them, and seek to better understand what affects them, what bothers them, and what they feel is unfair. Our focus is on people and what matters to them, not utilizing objects for our benefit or enjoyment.
Taken from Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead To Lasting Connections Across Cultures by Michelle Ami Reyes. Copyright © April 2021 by Michelle Ami Reyes. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com.
Michelle Ami Reyes, PhD, is the Vice President of the AACC. She is also the author of Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Connections Across Cultures.
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