This essay is a product of the Collegeville Institute’s Emerging Writers Mentorship Program, a 9-month program for writers who address matters of faith in their work. Each participant has the opportunity to publish their work at Bearings Online. Click here to read more essays from Emerging Writers.
As a young Asian American Christian, I was filled with longing. I looked at other communities of worship and wanted what they had. Compared to the theologies of the European reformers whom we revered, we Asian Americans appeared lacking, even illiterate, in doctrine and creed. Measured against the liturgies of African American churches and the vitality of their music, which we adored, we appeared dull and counterfeit.
What is our style? What can we offer? I attempted to answer these questions repeatedly, sometimes with friends who were equally curious. In our childish zeal, we added vaguely Asian sounding melodies into our worship. We sat around our instruments and attempted to write songs in the Pentatonic scale used in traditional Korean music, that is until we wisely determined that our music sounded like a recreation of the Mulan soundtrack. It hardly moved us, a group of second generation Americans, children of immigrants who themselves didn’t listen to music with instruments like the erhu and gayageum. We had internalized our foreignness so completely that the search for our own identities led us to unfamiliar places. We were lost, without guides, eager to find a “sound” and expression unique to us the way perhaps Black spirituals might feel unique to a Black church.
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What is our worship? What can we offer the wider Church? I began seminary with these questions. But my theological education tossed me up in the air and spun me around the way pizza makers play with dough. I began with an addiction to tidy conclusions and resolutions. But I found myself three years later trained in the art of asking meaningful questions that often didn’t come with closure. By graduation, I was far more habituated to silence and uncertainty, familiar with the spirituality of “I don’t know,” happier to journey through life in the company of my questions.
Julie Yeeun Kim (far right in pink hanbok) with her family at a Korean American Christmas service in 1997 at their first church in the U.S.
Six months into my seminary degree, the Covid-19 pandemic erupted. While the rest of the world learned how to navigate a pandemic, people in Asian diasporas around the world like the United States learned how to co-navigate racism. Almost overnight, we had an urgent need for knowledge about race, ethnicity, and anti-Asian violence. Suddenly, the search for an Asian American “sound” felt pointless, idiotic, a florid distraction from real crisis. Why were they hurting us? Screw the style–do Asian Americans have a place in this country? A story? What does God have to say about this violence and discrimination?
Many pastors and leaders of churches did not say a word about the violence against Asian Americans, even if their congregations were 99% Asian American. Some of the very people who sat with me and daydreamed about Asian American worship avoided talking about our nearly daily confrontations with hate and contempt. We were sheep without a shepherd in our moment of panic.
I was shocked to run up against indifference among Asian Americans. In multiple conversations I was asked, “What did you expect?” Month after month, their detachment evoked in me a mix of rage, grief, and confusion. How could something that so deeply provoked and offended me be so coolly shrugged off by another? In the face of their persistent apathy, I questioned my sanity. Had I gone mad?
My people did not know how to care.
Then one day, I understood. I hadn’t gone crazy. On the contrary, my panicked responses were appropriate. I wasn’t crazy, but neither were those who dismissed me. I finally realized that my people did not know how to care. After centuries of being cast as silent outsiders in this country, our ability to recognize when we were being violated and to interpret and express anger had been disabled. We had internalized our powerlessness and insignificance, like a child who learns to stop crying because no one cares and nothing changes. We suffered from a functional despair.
We were sheep without a shepherd, for most of our shepherds had been taught by their seminaries, mentors, and theological books that what was happening to us was irrelevant or too political to engage. As my anger dissolved into understanding, I gave up trying to convince anyone of anything and joined God’s call to lament.
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What is our story? What do we have worth offering? These are hardly questions to answer but wounds to dress, a consciousness to awaken. The questions are simultaneously beautiful and awful. For one, it assumes that all people contribute something valuable to the body of Christ, and Asian Americans are no exception.
photo by sincerely media for unsplash
Where many Christians err is in assuming that the gifts of a worshiping community emerge without a story and situation, as commodities for consumption and hollow replication. Yet Black spirituals are not merely nice words set to pretty sounds by just any musician who sat down one day and created a product. They are theological and liturgical expressions birthed from a particular pain bound to a particular context. Similarly, liberation theologies developed in the 20th century in reaction to poverty, violence, and disenfranchisement. They called for a return to the God of Exodus who liberates and contends with oppressors, a God forgotten by a comfortable, privileged Church. Through liberation theology, people confronted the pain of their immediate situations and brought it to God. Like Jacob, they wrestled with God, and the fruit of their struggle became their gifts to the world.
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What is our story? Have we wrestled with God? As a whole, we Asian American Christians have not done the hard work of articulating our racial, ethnic pain and bringing it before God. We offer up all kinds of spiritual things, yet we treat our identities as inappropriate, irrelevant to our faith, forgetting that we stand beneath the all-exposing, all-enclosing light of Christ in these very bodies. It’s ironic that when we were blamed for Covid-19, we did not pray to the scapegoated Christ to help us. We are called perpetual foreigners in this country–our country–yet we rarely ask the reconciling God of Jews and Gentiles to mend this breach.
We treat our identities as inappropriate, irrelevant to our faith.
As a whole, we have not taken our existence as diasporic people in racialized bodies seriously enough, choosing instead to spurn our stories along with our grief. We’ve been split in two—severed the way hyphens rupture identities held up in difficult balance: Asian-Americans, with little peace between our two parts. We’ve normalized discrimination, internalized racism, and pledged allegiance to a God we unconsciously believe sees us as strangers, too. We have been content to be spectators in our own homes, mimickers of our neighbors and borrowers of their blessings.
Yet we must wake up to our social and political realities as Asian Americans and, like Jacob, demand our blessings from God. We must demand from God in the presence of our enemies our full inclusion and humanity. Until we do this, we will have no gifts to give. Will the Asian American Church awaken? Will we confront the many pieces of our identities, troubled and scorned as they seem, so that we may worship God out of the fullness and wholeness of who we are?
What is our unique expression? What can we offer? I don’t know the details yet, but I’m certain we’ll find them as we wrestle with God, if only we have the courage.
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Julie Y. Kim, I am touched by your brief, profound reflections. I attempted to grapple with the Divine through my doctoral dissertation on a Christian Marathi poet in South Asia, Rev. Narayan Vaman Tilak (1861-1919) who grappled with his hyphenated Indian-Christian identity in India. Marathi speaking Christians in India and the diaspora, including in the USA, will celebrate his death anniversary tomorrow, 9th May. Researching his life quest and prolific writings has impacted my own life quest as a hyphenated Asian American-Christian. I believe I understand the importance you give to story, identity, questioning, and responding to one’s situatedness authentically as an Asian American. We form part of a minority community as Asian Americans, true. Your East Asian American identity as a Christian is very unlike mine as a South Asian American identity as a Christian. Yet we are clubbed together by being racialized by Whiteness, by our strange belonging as “new immigrants” to a “comfortable, privileged Church.” Our churches in the US demonstrate over and over that they knows little or nothing of our pain and suffering, of our feeling alienated from “their” Christian identity which has often made bedfellows with White Supremacists even in our own day. They often seem to be marching to the beat of a different drum. I was a Resident Scholar at Collegeville Ecumenical Institute in 1998-99 and sensed in my own case the hardship which people like you/us deal with in our thinking, practice, and worship. Thank you for sharing yourself so beautifully in this article.