By Katie Nguyen Palomares
T
asha Jun’s book, Tell Me the Dream Again: Reflections on Family, Ethnicity, & the Sacred Work of Belonging, has something to share with anyone who picks up its pages. For me in particular, reading as a Mixed Vietnamese/White woman, I found myself nodding along collecting more language to describe the shared experiences of being Mixed AAPI in the States.
I also found myself leaning into moments that Jun describes that are distinct experiences from my own: moments like navigating motherhood with Mixed children, presenting with East Asian features, visiting the home your family is from. Jun shares her reflections on moments both shared and understood by the Mixed community at large and with fierce authenticity, also moments that are special to her own background.
A thread that Jun weaves throughout her story that really hit home for me was the importance and sacredness of food. She describes beginning to make tteokguk for her family. It’s not that she didn’t grow up eating it—but she describes that it wasn’t until well into her adulthood that she learned more about its significance in celebrating Lunar New Year or how to make it. When she shares about what the act of cooking it for her family means to her, she says that, “[e]ach time it feels like an act of resistance, rebuilding, and redemption” (Jun, p. 66, emphasis added).
When I got to this part of the book, I felt the whole of my body empathize with this sacred work of reclaiming. I didn’t grow up with consistent contact with the Vietnamese part of my family. I certainly have memories of eating bowls and bowls of bún bò, various rice and noodle dishes, and an endless supply of my bà nội’s eggrolls.
I remember experiencing a similar feeling of rebuilding, redemption, and for me, a sense of reclamation when I learned my bà nội’s eggroll recipe when I was in college. I would have whole “eggroll parties” where everyone brought a different ingredient that went into them, chop it all up together, and I would teach my friends how to roll the eggrolls while I fried them up, and we would eat them as I fried them. Just like my bà nội would do.
There’s a certain sense of home and ancestry that comes along with learning to cook certain meals from your family’s culture and background that I think many Asian Americans can identify with in diverse and unique ways. Whether 1st gen cooking a meal to remind them of home, 2nd gen learning to cook the meals your family would make when you were young, or 3rd gen leaning into learning more about your family story.
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. I would highly recommend this to anyone beginning to lean into the journey of becoming more of who you are, and learning more about where and who you come from.
Tell Me The Dream Again is a masterful, thoughtful, and honest sharing of Jun’s lifelong journey of what it looks like to ask and lean into those hard questions of identity, belonging, and home. Perhaps most powerfully, Jun courageously invites her readers to walk with her through her reflections of sitting in the in-between of all the intersections of her faith, the two different cultures she carries in her family tree, and how she can step fully into each part of who she is as a way to encourage her readers along the way that we too have beauty and courage to be found if we lean into our own journeys.
I love this call she makes in book as a reminder to all of her readers:
Sharing our stories brings other people’s stories into the light. Maybe you need to share your story with a big crowd, or maybe with just one other person. Maybe you will sing or scribble down poetry or raise your voice for justice in a way that challenges and creates opportunities for change. Maybe the sharing of your story will cause a jolting, uncomfortable response, or maybe the impact will be quiet and slow, an almost invisible awakening at work. No matter what it looks like, every story shared in love is an act of courage and kindness that will connect people and multiply good. (p. 130, emphasis added)
Ultimately, Jun takes us all on a journey of what holy curiosity can look like not only when it comes to unlocking and unleashing the fullness of who you are, but even in what it looks like to question and to have the holy imagination to make space for your entire identity in every room.
Photo curtesy of Tyndale Momentum
Katie is a Mixed Vietnamese/White pastor, writer, and speaker in Austin. She works with Kingdom Capital Network as the Program Manager serving and empowering small business owners to make a kingdom impact in their communities and with AACC as the Marketing/Comms Coordinator and part of the Editorial team. She earned her M.A. in Christian Leadership from DTS and B.A. in English with teacher certification from Texas State. She also consumes books like they’re chips, can often be found bouldering on indoor rocks with her husband, or enjoying a good cup of coffee and conversation!