The following comes from a clip out of ESPN.com’s Daily Dime…

It was roughly a month ago that we reveled in the some of the overt signs that Yao Ming believes in himself as a franchise player more than ever.

The evidence then: Yao’s willingness to joke and bang and make you believe, through his body language, that he’s no longer awed by Shaquille O’Neal, all of which came through on the night he rung up 34 points and 14 rebounds against Shaq and Alonzo Mourning in Miami.

The latest evidence: Yao’s very Americanized reactions to a couple of big baskets in a recent road win over the Clippers.

Which was your favorite? Mine was Yao pounding his heart with his right fist after an and-one bucket … but there’s also a popular video clip circulating online that shows Yao celebrating a crucial late turnaround jumper by bellowing: “You can’t [expletive] stop me.”

Count them as two more examples of things we didn’t see from Yao in his first few seasons.

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I can’t help but wonder if this is a comparable motif to Asians working in American Christianity. I once asked around some non-Asians to see if they could think of any prominent Asians or Asian Americans at the forefront of Christian leadership and the best answer I got was Paul Young-gi Cho. His claim to fame? Building the world’s largest church in Seoul. But let’s be honest, we’re wondering if he’s gone off the deep end.

When I asked some Asian Americans the same question, I got a couple of quizzical looks. At the forefront of Christian leadership? Well, no names yet. But doing substantial work to our specific demographic, yes. There’s Ken Fong on the West Coast and there’s uh…lots of churches on the East Coast. And Paul Tokunaga has written a book on Asian American leadership…and uh…you said forefront? Yeah, uh…

No offense to the many pastors out there, but I was thinking to myself, so nobody plays in the big leagues? I mean the Red Sox pay top dollar for Matsuzaka, but Asian pastors are a dime a dozen?

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This year, Christmas feels different.

Maybe, just maybe, I’m learning to break down the walls of my episodic life and somehow lay golden thread in the different arenas that I live and work in.

Stephen Mansfield once said something that I have internalized and processed that is to the effect of this: Our destinies in Christ cannot be fulfilled in a vacuum. They unfold in our commitment to partake in the destinies of others.

Instead of a simple wrestling with my faith and working out my salvation with fear and trembling as solely an individual process, this sense of destiny that is somehow counter to this Western culture appeals to my Asian sensibility of community and solidarity. My destiny, who Christ made me to be, will only be fully expressed by my investment in the destinies of others around me. Perhaps this is numbingly elementary for others, but how many hours I spent in my adolescence and 20s worrying about who I am to be and what I am to become, only to realize that the answer was all the while, very much around me.

And this Christmas, I am moved by others who are exercising out their destiny, giving with a purpose, helping immigrant children, and other remarkable stories of giving.

But after a great lunch today with this friend, I realize the challenge of this season is that generosity and giving must not be a “seasonal” thing. It must be incorporated into our very lifestyles, our internal and external cultures, if you will. As my friend Melvin so eloquently put it over lunch, “We need systems, not [just] generosity. Your generosity won’t solve the problem of poverty, we’ll always have poverty. What we need is a re-distribution of power.”

Wow, now how’s that for a Christmas card line? — “Happy Holidays — Re-distribute your wealth! And don’t forget the power!”

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I ran across this blog today and my soul ached. (Thanks to JoseonIllin for the link).

While I have been building wonderful and promising relationships with African-American brothers here, I was so ashamed to know that the stereotyping and ridiculing of Black people is happening in my motherland.

As a Korean-American I know what it is like to be ridiculed and humiliated by people who I do not resemble, and while as an Asian American, I seek solidarity and acceptance among Asians, I will stand up against my own people when they belittle others. As a Christian, there is no irony in the fact that I find my own culture detestable where they have not upheld justice and shalom. And this despite the fact that they send out so many missionaries and are so “well-churched”!

I know that at best, this petition may make the Korean media more politically correct and at worst, actors and PDs (Korean acronym for producers) may be miffed and incite more antagonism to foreigners in Korea, but perhaps this is what we as Christians need to hear to engage our own culture, our own prejudice, and our injustices more. As much as America is not a “Christian” nation any more, neither are you Korea. Wake up! I’m so angry right now I can hardly type…

Read Michael Hurt’s blog post, watch the video and please sign the petition. While the video is in Korean and the racial slur is made on a comedy program (ring a bell Rosie?), the letter that follows outlines a racism insidious in Korean culture in no uncertain terms.

And Michael, I know it’s not much, but as someone from a people that I had been taught to loathe apologized to me once, I’d like to say as a Korean, I’m very, very sorry.

There are a few things Asian Americans don’t like to talk about. Sex is one of them.

There are a few things that Christians have to be sure to talk about. Sex is one of them.

This is a dilemma in which our culture should not be allowed to win. The church needs to address this and keep addressing it. This article published today says that a whopping 95% of Americans had premarital sex. 95%! And if you think I’m just bashing Americans, think again. In 2001, 49% of Beijing high school students thought that premarital sex was OK. That was in 2001. Imagine their attitudes about sex now almost six years later. And the numbers don’t stop there.

Check out this online poll where it lists 36% of its respondents listed the ages of 16-18 as [Read more...]

Ah yes, The Cutting Truth strikes again with a post that I’m glad to see written. It’s true, I find it difficult to think of a single Asian American Christian male that I personally know and think, “that dude is one badass mofo, and I want to be just like him.”

Last week, I met with a good friend who confided in me that sometimes he can’t stand the “niceness” of the church — he wanted to feel dangerous, to go to that edge, what was the exact phrase…ah yes, “About once a week, I have this urge to get in a fight…just for the rush.”

I looked at him dead in the eye and nodded, “I know exactly what you mean.”

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This is what I’m talking about! Thanks to John Lamb who passed on this great article to me — click here for video. I really enjoyed reading this one (there are a few points where I emphasize things). This is where I believe we as Asians can really contribute to our immigrant brothers and sisters, especially in the latter half of the article where they were aware of the economic disparities and the social friction, but this is where God’s love wins out. Wonderful, wonderful news in this season of Advent. But I have a question, if Korean immigrants did this for fellow immigrants, what do we as children of immigrants have to offer for our fellow 2nd generations?

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From NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>
Date Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:40:36 -0600

Korean congregation serves Hispanic/Latino ‘street angels’

NOTE: A UMTV report and photographs are available at http://umns.umc.org.

By James Melchiorre*

ENGLEWOOD, N.J. (UMNS) – Steve Chung would drive past the day laborers lined up on the streets of Palisades Park, N.J., each day, a Bible verse from the Gospel of Matthew constantly on his mind.

“Whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me,” is how Chung recalls the words.

“That Bible verse kept pounding my heart.”

An immigrant from Korea, Chung felt a kinship with the Latino immigrant workers.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he admits, “so I keep praying for 100 days. And when I prayed, God gave me the idea that they’re all angels.”

Soon afterward, Street Angels was born.

Chung coordinates the program at the Korean Community Church of New Jersey, a United Methodist congregation in Englewood, just across the Hudson River from New York City.

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You know how you catch the last part of an ongoing conversation and they weren’t even talking to you?

At work recently, my manager was talking to someone else and he ended with the phrase, “…that was the chink in the armor.”

I spun around in my chair and said, “What did you call me?!” It sparked surprise and then laughter in the people within earshot.

But this is a double-edged sword, where I can make a racial joke, but it bothers me when others make that joke. It’s like someone not black trying to make use of the “N” word. It simply doesn’t work, does it? And here Rosie O’Donnell is juxtaposed by making a racist joke against Chinese on the one hand and quick to spot homophobia on the other.

Now I’m not saying that Rosie is a terrible racist for doing this. After all, she got her start as a stand-up comedian. And let’s be frank, comedy is really the place for racial and cultural commentary, right? I mean, if I were to be objective, perhaps I’m simply mad at Rosie for not working at her Chinese impersonation as hard as Russell Peters.

Racial/cultural comics are a hot item from Margaret Cho to Dat Phan to many, many others. And despite their desires to transcend their cultural joke material (which after all, pigeonholes people into a caricature), it seems almost an obligatory rite of passage that they make commentary on what it’s like to be Asian in America. It’s something that hails back to Richard Pryor and Red Foxx (in terms of how they commercialized and humorized Black angst), and it’s an interesting phenomenon accelerated by media that perhaps has as much or more impact on how we come to view ourselves than our immediate social circles. In other words, these voices with those faces, do more than comment on Asian-ness in America, they define it and they help me determine who is capable of speaking for me and who is incapable of speaking for me.

But ultimately the part that bothers me most, laughter notwithstanding, is that in doing so, the “Other” (people who are not like me and the land that is not my motherland) have a significant role in determining what I think of my “Self”. Granted, there are many spokespersons (comedians included) who speak for my Self, but the Other seems more free to be themselves than I can be my Self. Sure, now that we’re in the egalitarian 21st century, I can delineate what the Other can say about me, and I can reciprocate the attitude of exclusivism or even imperialism that they can, but by then, I have wanted for too long to be the Other and not my Self.

Indeed there are many chinks in my armor — and so for a laugh, I will take the offense as often it seems my only defense. I will in essence, laugh at my Self for I do not know how to hate the Other and love them too. Race matters indeed, to disagree is laughable.

Thank God that Jesus died for Asians as well, I would not know where else that freedom might come from. To God, the Great Other, may you mold my Self.

In the spirit of deconstructing the holidays (it’s not become a tradition, if you should think that I’ve gone that far, but it is one of the luxuries that we have since we are without children yet), my wife and I talk about how some of these vestiges of Christmas are not understood, and perhaps more importantly, how these cultural stories cloak the true celebration of the birth of Christ in an increasingly anti-Christian society.

We seem to free associate these notions of goodwill and cheer while withholding the fact that we needed and still need a Savior. In our conversations, my wife picked on Santa Claus as one of these such diversions from the birth of Jesus and made the point, “When children find out that Santa isn’t real, and they associate it with Christmas, how much more does that cloud up the notion of Jesus being real?” While Christ Mass is being relegated to one of the many religious holidays that take place at this time of year, I think it is important to bring out the case where we should make the case out of such pluralism, the original story of Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, directly reflects a person and faith of Jesus Christ, and is not American nor commercial. Here is where we can develop the narrative of Christmas and re-infuse it with meaning that speaks against the postmodern tendency to re-invent, re-create, and ultimately forget who we are and where we came from. The power of telling story comes from our ability as Christians to re-tell the story.

The notion that God empowered us with a memory is I believe the stake in Nietzsche’s heart, that we will never be satisfied as a vegetable or a cow. Our lives have profound meaning and we live desperately like it matters. I learned this important lesson under the pastorhood of Stephen Mansfield of the Mansfield Group. In his blog, he posts this story of the real Santa Claus. So enjoy the read, and put the “holy” back in holidays.

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Nicholas was born of wealthy parents in Patara of Lycia, in what is today the nation of

Turkey. He was converted to Christianity early in his life and during the persecutions under the Roman Emperor Diocletian he was imprisoned. Though thousands of believers were martyred, Nicholas was miraculously released. Following a trip to the Holy Land, Nicholas settled in Myra, a city near his native Patara, where he became a pastor and then the Bishop. He was probably involved in the Council of Nicea of 325 A.D. which gave the Church the Nicene Creed.

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I’m shamelessly stealing this from one of the posts from The Cutting Truth, as I believe that a ministry like this cannot get enough publicity. My heart is breaking so much in this Advent season. I preached last year a Christmas sermon that my wife reminded me of today as we ventured out to the mall for the first time in this season of commercial madness. She said, “You said, ‘To give when we fully expect to receive is no generosity at all. We are simply exchanging materials.’ I don’t want to play America’s version of Christmas anymore.” I had forgotten that I had said any such thing, but man, we wrestled with that today.

Indeed, may our hearts long for real giving like this…and I believe this worship song, “Open the Eyes of My Heart”…is sung by the children themselves. I too, want to see you Lord. I want to see you.

I read this painful story today and here I feel the need to mix up the story (not in its entirety) a bit in order to diagnose what led up to the fire, in an order that I feel makes better sense of what is happening with this family. I can’t imagine what this has done to their faith, but I believe this story speaks to the brokenness that is in many of our Asian American homes. While this tragedy seems to have not ended yet for the Lee family, my hope and prayer is that we would able to heal the open wounds of our generation.

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Things were rough for the Lee family that summer of 1989.

Han Tak and his wife, Esther Lee, had lived apart seven years while he got his start in the United States. She and their two girls stayed in Seoul.

Now the family was together in New York City and tension was high.

There were long hours at the Lees’ clothing store on Seventh Avenue near Madison Square Garden, where all the family worked. And Han Tak was too strict with the girls — too traditional, too many rules, Esther recalls as she traces the journey of her troubled marriage.

Worst of all, Ji Yun, 20 and the oldest child, was ill again after a few years of calm.

Manic depression had surfaced a year or so after they immigrated. Medication had helped, so well that she got into a prestigious art college to paint, but things were unraveling again.

“She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. She couldn’t be still,” says Esther, sitting in her quiet apartment in Fort Lee, N.J. A painting by Ji Yun — flowers, a blur of purple, white and green — sits next to the lone couch. “I was exhausted.”

Their Pentecostal pastor thought prayer might help. It seemed like a respite: a trip out to the countryside, hours from the city, a quiet, cool retreat with preachers and prayer.

So Lee woke early on that summer Saturday and father and daughter set off. They drove across the bridges out of New York, out on the interstate to rural Pennsylvania, to the church camp and its small, wooden cabins. And they prayed, with one and then two pastors, until the wee hours of the morning.

That’s when everything went much, much worse.

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