A "Trans-Asian American" Ecclesiology?

There it is (the building behind the lamp post): the first Asian/Asian-American church in North America.  Located in the heart of the first Chinatown in the Western Hemisphere, the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown was founded in 1853.  The history here is fuzzy, but after PCCSF was the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Oakland (1860).  Following migrations eastward, Chinese churches appeared in New Orleans (Chinese Presbyterian Church, Kenner - 1882), New York (First Chinese Presbyterian Church - 1885), and Chicago (CCUC - 1903).  FCPC is interesting, not just because I attended it, but because its founding pastor, Rev. Huie, was commissioned from the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Oakland.

The history of Chinese churches are interesting, no doubt, and it'd be an interesting project to retell their stories.  But time does march onwards.  The Church in America has become variegated in many ways.  Within Asian American Christianity, the Korean American community, mirroring the influence of Christianity in South Korea, has emerged to be the dominant ethnic-Asian American church community.  As churches comprised of humans, however, the Asian American church is not spared from problems.  Of course, they suffer from the same problems that many non-Asian American churches suffer from; divisiveness, church politics, lack of engagement with social injustice, etc.

I would, however, like to reflect a bit on some problems that are quite specific to the Asian American Christian community.  No doubt, they may have other iterations in Black, Latin@, Euro-American church communities, but I will not participate in essentialism by issuing blanket descriptions.  I'd like to mention 2 for now.

The first is what I would call "Lye Orientalism," named after UC Berkeley critical theorist Colleen Lye.  This is to be contrasted with the more common rendition of orientalism - that by Palestinian-American critical theorist Edward Saïd.  Saïdian orientalism, which may perhaps reflect a bit Saïd's Middle-Eastern background, focuses on Asians as being exotic.  The notion conjures up images of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.  Consider, for instance, the Disney movie Aladdin, which I will promptly spoil right now.  Princess Jasmine is rather scantily clad for a Middle Eastern female member of the royal family; come to think of it, why Aladdin (a.k.a. Prince Ali Ababwa) is dressed more conservatively than her is something I don't quite understand.  But therein lies the Saïdian orientalist image of the sexy, exotic Asian girl.  More broadly Saïdian orientalism construes the Asian female subject as exotic, unusual, submissive, and perhaps attractive in their exoticness.  I may even take a step further and suggest that perhaps an underlying imaginary that fuels the sex industry and the sexual exploitation of young children in Southeast Asia is orientalism.  It also construes the Asian male as hypersexual, morally debased, a threat to local employment.  In 19th century America, this was epitomized in the Yellow Peril movement, warning young American girls to stay away from Chinese men (God only knows what would happen if you turn your eyes away!).  And when Union Pacific Railroad started preferring Chinese coolies over American workers (it was cheaper to hire Chinese coolies), they became threats to American employment.  And plus, they never quite assimilated; indeed perhaps they are inassimilable.

Lye's orientalism doesn't discredit Saïd's.  Indeed, we see remnants of such orientalists attitudes today.  In 2011, private Danny Chen (American-born Chinese and U.S. Citizen) was brutally hazed and racially assaulted by his fellow soldiers while serving his nation in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  There are many more.  But there is a complicated wrinkle to it; Yellow Peril is also joined with "Yellow Admiration."  East Asians are seen as being very productive and excellent participants in a free market world.  Yet, this was a measured admiration; we saw it before Japan entered a decade-long "lost decade"; there were fears of Japan overtaking the USA as the world's largest economy.  Today, there remain fears of China doing the same.  Thus, Asian Americans possess the unfortunate aura of being "American but not really."  In the advent of transnationalism and a flatter world, we see Asian Americans caught in between two worlds, but not disturbed by this location.  We are, in other words, "Americans but not really" but also "Asians but not really."  And we're not too perturbed about it.

What is the specific problem?  A key argument is that this orientalism flies in the face of the Christian commitment to love God and our neighbors.  Let us be clear what we're talking about here.  To love God is inseparable from loving our neighbors.  Nobody has ever seen or beheld God, and so our understanding of "loving God" can only mirror our love of our neighbors, whom we can see and experience.  And our love of our neighbors can only mirror our love of ourselves.  And this love is absolutely indispensable to a theology of the church.  To oversimplify, no love means no church.  The Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI imaged the Church as a moon that reflects the light of Christ.  Few would deny that central to this light is love.  And this is not a selective love, but the love that the author of Ephesians describes as being high, wide, deep, and long; indeed a love that surpasses knowledge. (Eph. 3:18-19)

Orientalism, flatly insisted, places limits on that love.  It proclaims love that is high... with exceptions, wide... with exceptions.  It is not a love that births the freedom Christians enjoy in the Holy Spirit, but a love that shackles others into artificially-constructed categories.  And such "love" easily can be abused and ab-used.  I "love" so long as the Other fits into my categories of what that Other is supposed to be like.  Or, I love Asian Americans - look at how amazing they are coming to Jesus!  If Blacks were more like Asians...  Such is an example of an ab-use of love; love that justifies a hatred of another Other.  Indeed, that many of us probably can't see race, but can see productivity irregardless of context, is a symptom of this.  Or, as I am tempted to think, original sin.

Assuredly, to resist orientalism is not the raison d'etre of the Church any more than good works is the raison d'etre of the Christian.  But it is a problem that nonetheless must be named, for to name a sin is to bring it from the hiding places of the heart of society and into the light.  A church that follows God finds orientalism unacceptable.  Yet, I worry that Asian American churches often just play along with orientalist assumptions.  In other words, we want to be White.  (Note my use of Euro-American earlier to denote people of European descent... White is an artificial racial construct that is not synonymous with a racial background.)  We want to be people accepted as powerful, to be in control of the forces of his world so that our futures are, indeed, in our favor; the marginalized be damned, with the occasional World Vision 30-Hour Famine commitment.  We're not "one of them."

And this reflects in our choice of vocations.  Asians are easily stereotyped, and we're not doing much to dispel them.  Of course, Korean Americans pastors are many, but it may not be too surprising that Korean American pastors command amazing respect in their communities.  Female pastors, Chinese pastors, etc., on the other hand, exist seemingly just on a "maintaining the church" basis.  We don't feed our own pastors; we hired them, they feed us or else.  Instrumentalist ministry, if I may term it as such.  This is the church living into orientalism.  We love the MDs, PhDs, whatever-D's in our midst.  We love the elite graduates of elite schools in our midst.  And we love... except Jake who didn't do well in school.

The second is what I may term "imperialist essentialism."  Gayatri Spivak, in her groundbreaking essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" coined the term "strategic essentialism" to denote a paradox.  Essentialism is the unwarranted lumping together of identities and characteristics that sublate uniquenesses.  While not preferable, it is at the same time, a useful strategy in combating injustices that are shared by the lumped-together group.  "Asian American" may be a useful strategic essentialist move so the rights and subjectivities of Asian Americans can be affirmed en masse.

But the problem comes when this essentialism no longer has strategic value, but is maintained nonetheless.  A book I read recently made the startling assumption that Asian Americans share similar problems and even the same looks!  And from there, the author proceeds to pose the possibility of an Asian American hermeneutics.  This is, unfortunately, a grave essentialist mistake!  We may share similar problems on the outset, but few of us can claim to be Japanese, Korean, and Chinese at the same time to understand the dynamics of the issues.  And what is Asia, really?  Are Indians included?  Are Israelis?  (They're technically Asians.)  Shame on the author!  Shame, indeed!  When essentialism fails to have strategic value, but is retained, it turns into a tool that inadvertently plays into artificial stereotypes.

This has theological implications.  I have long complained that what passes often for "Asian American theology" was really Korean American theology.  This issue was glanced over in the first generations of Asian American theology - again, the theology of Roy Sano, Fumitaka Matsuoka, etc., are thinking of strategic essentialism and resisting it.  But the Asian America of today is vastly complex.  Are we marginalized?  Not really in the very real sense of the term.  We live in between/betwixt worlds, yes, but today this is not a particularly oppressive spatial location, even if it's a bit nebulous existentially.  For one, if "Asia" meant China, South Korea, or Japan, we are honestly caught in between two Empires.  This is not the same for Filipino-Americans or Cambodian-Americans.  By sublating differences and papering over them with a simple paragraph of "look how similar we are," our reflections are less useful than they may be on the outset.

Furthermore, synonymizing Asian American theology with Korean American theology excludes Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc., theological voices, as if their theological voices are not worth listening to.  In fact, if we carry it further, it may imply that the Chinese, Japanese, etc., are not "capable of Christianity," that this religion is foreign to them.  Again, where is the "love" in this?  Is this not a case of "orientalism from within"?  Now, I'm not discrediting Korean American theology - being the largest Asian American Christian community in the United States, it is important.  But it is important as Korean American theology.  What I am asking for is an Asian American theology that is "trans-Asian American."  It is not "pan-Asian" because we're not unifying over the lowest common denominators of our cultures.  It is "trans-Asian" in that it is a "critical syncretic" formation of theologies that create a nebulous "identity" of Asian America, an identity that continues to evolve and change, but one that also affirms the subjectivity of various constituent parts of that Asian American identity.

Thus, a "trans-Asian American" ecclesiology seeks to ask the question, what does it mean for Christ to constitute the Asian American church?  It seeks to make the claim that the Christ we mirror is a Christ that all people can call theirs.  The Christ we mirror loves Asian Americans who don't excel in school, who loves Taiwanese, Cantonese, Mainland Chinese equally (!), etc.  Mirroring this love has, however, ecclesiological implications and raises important questions.  Are language-based denominations ecclesiologically appropriate?  How do they relate to each other theologically when the cultural-philosophical differences between them, not to mention the troubled history in some cases, are so difficult to bridge?  How should Asian American congregations relate to other Asian American churches? (e.g. Chinese and Malaysian; Korean and Japanese; etc.)  And how should Asian American churches relate to churches in the worldwide communion?  If we dispense with the assumption of the authority of Tradition, the answer is not forthcoming.