On "The Asian American Awakening."

Connie Zhou is a friend of mine whom, I believe, I met as a youth group student back in my collegiate ages when I was a staff leader.  In her blog, "The Asian American Awakening: That Moment When You Realize You're Not White," she has written something that is honestly real.  It is an honest retelling of her experiences in light of reality.  For that reason, it is a beautifully written post.  I will not downgrade what she has written by summarizing it; suffice for me to say, it is very much worth your read.

First, I should like to pre-emptively respond to one critique that may be leveled - that this sort of story only exacerbates race divisions.  It only adds to racial hatred.  It only increases the "us vs. them" mentality that divides people.  The more patriotically-inclined among us may intone, "United we stand, divided we fall."  But it is easy to say that from the perspective of those in Power, those who define the categories that divide us.  We did not choose to be Asian American.  We were born human.  The reason why being Black, Asian, Latin@, etc., matter is because social sin, if I may call it that, has attached different valuations and social privileges to each of these.  And that has been the case for millennia.  To undo them is a monumental task, and it may well be a task that can only be accomplished in Resurrection.  But that does not excuse us to work towards reconciliation.  Not by sweeping these experiences under the rug, but by allowing those experiences to confront us.  We cannot have dialogue between races if we don't do it underneath the lynching tree, in the Union Pacific tunnels, in the Japanese internment camps, or on the Border.

Indeed, for Christian theology, where you do theology matters.  Unless you have empirically seen God, you cannot do theology like you do mathematics.  God does not suffer to be understood easily; God is greater than anything humanity can muster.  That is why we can only speak of God from our own experiences.  Connie's "Awakening," if you will, is precisely the location in which Asian American theology grows out of.  It awakens to the realization that there is something about society that fundamentally rejects the intrinsic value of our identity.  I know of Asians who were married with Euro-American partners, and family members extolled it because having a Euro-American partner is like "upgrading" Asianity.  Inherent within this is the idea that to be Asian is somehow lesser than being Euro-American.  This is the essence of Whiteness, and you don't have to be Euro-American to be White.

Asian American theology, therefore, asserts proudly that Jesus is Asian-American.  (Technically, he was Asian... Israel is part of the Asian continent.)  God is Asian-American, just as God is Latin@, just as God is Black, just as God is Euro-American.  But this locating of God within our race is to bring us to realize that God is not removed from our situation.  Thus, this God is fully ours, just as it is fully theirs.  So you're not White.  Fine - the world may reject you because you're not White.  But look!  God is not White!  The things of this world - Whiteness included - will pass; maybe are passing, but God will not.  Thus, Asian American theology invites Asian Americans to hold hands with God, to embrace God, to sit at the lunch table of the Asian American God who is ridiculously smart, but doesn't have a high GPA; who can be king of the world, but is working as a janitor; who could easily get married, but chose a life of chastity.  Such a Jesus, of course, embraces and challenges the Asian American identity.  Jesus, in other words, pushes us to rethink what it means to be Asian American, and to refocus our lives on what really matters, because the world we live in is not the end of the story.

 Now, I take a step back to bring up the point that the notion of Asian-American is White.  This is a racial category that was foisted upon us, not self-declared.  Now, one strategy is to entirely doff it, but this strategy only works if the entire community (that is, America) takes concrete steps to expunge it from consciousness.  In a country where racism is its original sin, this is nearly impossible.  Thus, the other strategy is to wrest it from Whiteness and to re-envision it.  However, as most know, Asia is very diverse.  Are Indians Asian?  What about Indonesians?  Pakistanis?  It's complicated.  Thus, we need to see Asian-America as a "critical syncretic" category.  Our similarities enable conversations to take place between Asian-American groups (e.g. Chinese and Koreans), but to lump us all into Asian-American elides our distinctives.  We don't want that because what is intrinsic to some Asian-American cultures will have to be sidelined for some artificial "Asian-American" construction.  Chop suey, for instance, is not Korean-American.  To affiliate fortune cookies with Japanese-Americans undervalues aspects of Japanese-America that have nothing to do with fortune cookies (essentially, almost all of it).

That is why Asian-American theology needs to be a multiplicity of theological voices.  Han and Jeong are wonderful theological resources... but only for Korean-American communities where this makes sense.  We need more Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Indian-Americans, Filipino-Americans, etc. to begin the hard task of bringing Jesus to bear on who we are, and to bring Jesus into our ethnic homes to do some house cleaning!  Otherwise, nobody wants to stay; everyone wants to move to the White house down the street.  We see the beauty of the Christian faith when different articulations of God join together and find essential similarities.  This is not an easy task, but it is a necessary task, if we are to see an Asian American Christian awakening.