As an Asian male who is a follower of Christ, I repent.

Please forgive me for being part of a culture that does not know how validate and see Asian women as beautiful and significant. While I have always considered myself open-minded and hardly a misogynist, I have become viscerally aware of how simply thinking this is not enough. I need to say this because I believe my culture inside and outside my faith has said that you are lesser. As a man, I’ve been born with a sense of entitlement and preference that you may have never had. I rarely evaluate my looks in order to justify my voice in the conversation. In every case, I believe that we have robbed you and told you that you are not beautiful, only useful; faithful, but easily dismissed. We are and have been stupendously wrong.

You are more than faithful. You are beautiful. Your hair, your eyes, your teeth, your skin, and everything about you is beautiful.

You don’t need to be blonde, you don’t need to be voluptuous, you don’t need to be anything that God didn’t make you to be. I’m sorry if we made you feel that way, we’ve been too busy trying to prove ourselves as well.

But I see you now — and God has seen you always in your true colors.

My friend John Lamb took some time with me this afternoon to chat about immigration issues. I was very convicted by our conversation and challenged by my own ignorance (my parents were immigrants!). I think there is something that is deep at the heart of this that perhaps will help me understand why our churches are the way they are and perhaps address some of systemic barriers there are to the gospel, not only in our mother culture, but in the country that fostered them.

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John: I feel like God has given me His heart on this issue [of immigration] but when I speak about it I feel like it’s my agitation not His. MLK said not to judge on issues like this and to speak in love and I believe that’s right

me: i don’t think i know how you feel about immigration. could you tell me where your heart is on that issue?

John: here it is, succinctly: unconditional love

me: yeah thanks wow too succinct? does that mean amnesty? sorry, i don’t really know what even the common positions are re: immigration

John: amnesty means someone has done something wrong. when we isolate people just because they’re foreigners or poor (immigration law does that), we’re the ones in the wrong and we need amnesty.

who are God’s most favored and protected types of people – the people that if you mess with them you mess with God? I’ll get you started: widows, orphans…

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While I’ve never had to make a defense for having a tongue ring, watching this elicited a familiar twinge of pain when “Blue” expresses her hurt as she recalls her mother yelling at her in Vietnamese, “Are you crazy? Are you my child?” And I remember what it felt like to demand my independence when I was her age; “I am 19 now, right? I’m an adult!” I also thought that it was appropriate that the roommate (off-camera and coincidentally white) divulged that Blue had always been “silently defiant” and that struck a chord with me as well. Just listening to her go back and forth trying to defend who she is and what she’s done and yet wrestling with those feelings of inadequacy and the knowledge that she is disappointing her mother. In one stretch, Blue runs the whole gamut of emotions, “I feel bad…It’s OK, Hi mom, I have a tongue ring…Sorry — Deal with it. I feel bad now. OK Mom, don’t kill me. Don’t yell at me…”

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The following is a juxtaposition of two excerpts from two different NYTimes articles regarding North Korea. The first is about how freedom can be bought, the second is how freedom can be sold. In both cases, money and security plays its part in freedom and submission [emphasis mine]. The largest realization that I have made in the last few days is that no matter how wealthy we have become or where we are, our dilemma is no different:

In a country whose borders were sealed until a decade ago, defectors once risked not only their own lives but those of the family members they left behind, who were often thrown into harsh prison camps as retribution. Today, state security is no longer the main obstacle to fleeing, according to defectors, North Korean brokers, South Korean Christian missionaries and other experts. Now, it is cash.

“Money now trumps ideology for an increasing number of North Koreans, and that has allowed this underground railroad to flourish,” said Peter M. Beck, the Northeast Asia project director in Seoul, South Korea, of the International Crisis Group, which has extensively researched the subject in several Asian countries and is publishing a report. “The biggest barrier to leaving North Korea is just money. If you have enough money, you can get out quite easily. It speaks to the marketization of North Korea, especially since economic reforms were implemented in 2002. Anything can be bought in the North now.”

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My wife is Indian-American, born into a Hindu family of the highest Brahmin caste.

When I met her in college, she was growing in devotion to her religion, abstaining from meat and learning the significance of the subtler nuances of Hinduism. While as a high school student, I had classmates of Hindu or Sikh background, I’d never gone to dinner with them or been invited to a bharatanatyam recital or read any of their texts. After all, our educational system is entrenched in the Western worldview, and even though “multiculturalism” was the hot buzzword at the time, it really promoted token representation, not real culture.

In any case, the fact that my family’s spiritual and material livelihood was grounded in Christianity and with my Korean heritage being as engrained in me as her South Indian was in her, we were about six months into our relationship when I realized that this was not Romeo and Juliet, this was something more complex. Other than our college selection, we had very little common ground. If we had met on eHarmony, we would have clicked “Next”. So I called it off. In the spirit of Korean melodrama, I sent her off with explicit instructions to fall in love with the possible. “No one loves for heartache” was the prevailing thought in my 19-year-old brain, and I tried never to look back.

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Sorry for the poor headline and accompanying picture. Even my ever-supportive wife rolled her eyes at me hard when I told her about the potential blog post last night.

To cut to the chase, I was speaking with pastor friend of mine whom I have known for twelve years. As I shared with him my aspirations for seminary and further theological study, he submitted that I should pay a great deal of attention to the component of mentoring and being able to have a community of people to walk with in ministry, saying that this aspect of ministry would be equal to, if not more important than the theological eduation. But that puts me in a bit of a pinch, I mean how do you pick a seminary without knowing if you’re going to have a mentor in the area or not?

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Chris Broussard is a sports columnist for ESPN (Yes, I pay for it — I already told you I love the NBA). I would have to say that I read ESPN’s Insider articles daily, it’s a habit that I acquired while playing fantasy basketball (just above poker, I contend), and while it sounds crazy to say in this day and age that I love pro basketball, there is nothing quite like a league of absolute physical freaks who can be astoundingly graceful and coordinated while exhibiting such raw athletic power without pads (the occasional thug excepted).

I’ve come to realize that we as Asian Americans owe a great debt to African Americans for our civil rights and present luxuries, if not our own “model minority” status. And yet, as my good friend Josh points out, we are still very much estranged. I think part of this must be taken on by prominent Asian Americans who are willing to fill “social concerns” here (a la Sivin Kit‘s verbiage), and while our civil rights came as a byproduct from blacks, perhaps it’s time for us Asian Americans who have, by and large, higher incomes, better educations, more economic opportunities, move “leverage” to repay our Black Americans by sticking up for them as well.

I particularly want to press into Asian American Christians because our notions of justice and equality should be tied into the Judeo-Christian concept of shalom, or peace, which demands a justice that restores, replenishes, rescues, and fights oppression. To ignore this duty is something that I want to say is a disservice to the God we serve and the gifts we’ve been given as a people.

The following excerpt is from an article from Chris’ blog [emphasis mine], where he calls out for black athletes to take a stance against Donald Sterling (the owner of the LA Clippers because Sterling had apparently refused black tenants in his buildings). As a side note, the NBA did not intervene because it was considered a non-NBA related activity, but I believe that the onus is upon Koreans who have gain, to demand equality for our brothers.

I’d like to see today’s black athletes (and entertainers) be more aggressive in using their status and resources to tackle the problems, racial and otherwise, that confront African-Americans.

I often hear the contrasting viewpoint that “white athletes aren’t called on to speak out for the white community.” But we must realize that the historical and contemporary situations of white and black Americans are complete opposites. [Read more...]

This morning, I discovered Ham Sok Hon, also known as the Korean “Gandhi” (I’m not a big fan after reading his bio, but you don’t have to take my word for it either. Then again, I don’t really like Gandhi either — that’s another post). He wrote this poem in 1962 and it still resounds today, especially today. Ham was referring to the invasion and occupation by Japan, the brutal war between North and South, and the long struggle for democracy in the South. He wrote: “The Challenge of Korea,”

How long it was, the tedious winter night?
While I was waiting in the dark corner of the dressing room,
Many nations came and went without heeding me;
They trampled me under their feet, and pushed me aside.

While I think Ham was writing this for Korea as a whole nation, I think North Korea sees itself as the one who has been trampled and pushed.

While nations look to punish North Korea with sanctions in order to bring Kim Jong-Il to the discussion table, the dictator seems more perturbed than ever, considering such overtures for diplomacy “a declaration of war”. From my viewpoint, he is tired of the weight of a hungry and destitute nation and he is willing to hold his nation hostage with a big bomb in order to perpetuate the country. Surely, the irony cannot be missed.

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A close friend I have known since I was 11 years old now runs one of the finest fusion restaurants in Gainesville, Florida, named Dragonfly Sushi & Sake Company. When he started the restaurant in his mid-20s, it was a huge risk (and risk is such a small word for how great and terrifying it can feel) and the restaurant was of enormous personal and professional cost to him and his partner as he started it.

I don’t think we had much of a chance to speak for the first two years he had the restaurant. He was married to his work through that time working on every facet of food, ambience, management, seeking out capital — forsaking evenings, weekends, family vacations, personal relationships, literally everything it seemed. When we did get the chance to speak, my heart welled up with admiration for this friend, and I could tell that he was really becoming quite the savant when it came to the restaurant business, business in general, and in many ways, life.

When I told him of my concern for his life and the way the restaurant seemed to dictate every hour of every day, including holidays and most especially his evenings. He replied, “This may not last that long. Restaurants don’t usually tend to have a long life cycle — 7 years is usually the window of opportunity.”

“So you’re going to do this for 7 years?”

“We’ll see. We’ll see what happens, everything is just working out the way it is and if another opportunity opens, we’ll see when we get there, but we don’t ever want to assume we will last 7 years, most likely we will have to reinvent ourselves.”

Reinvention is not seen as a terrible thing to my friend, it is seen as an opportunity, whether driven by the market or his capabilities, it is an inevitability.

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