Although I would love to write about Tuesday night’s conversations, there is something far more immediate in my mind and heart — fear.

I live in a blue-collar neighborhood with the majority of my neighbors being South Asian with a few African Americans and a few token whites. My wife and I have lived here for four years now and habitually complain only of the traffic driving into and out of town, as Atlanta boasts some of worst traffic in the country, but that all changed yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday, at approximately 2pm, after the local public high school bus dropped off the neighbor hood kids, a fifteen year old Pakistani girl walked into her home to find a large black male in her kitchen in the act of robbery. She was assaulted, bound, and raped with a bag over her head and lacerated in the face with a knife. She was released out the front door as the man ran out the back where there is a small wooded area that goes to the street. By three o’clock, she had been rushed to the emergency room, several police cars had surrounded this corner of the subdivision and K9 police were tracking in the woods behind her home. The suspect has not been found.

This all occurred two doors down from my house. While the heinous crime was being committed, I was sitting in front of my computer working on a graphics project and was finally stirred by my dog growling at the commotion going on in front of my house. I stepped out to see half the neighborhood around the perimeter of yellow police tape “Do Not Cross” that began from my next door neighbor to three houses away from my house. All the details were relayed to me in gruesome, unflinching reality by high school students whom I had become acquainted with by playing driveway basketball over the four summers I had spent in the neighborhood. Her house was the one in the middle. She had come running out of her house with blood coming from her face. It took the police twenty minutes to get here and the ambulance another ten after that. The police were questioning neighbors or on their phones as women in saris watched on just outside the flimsy yellow ribbon.

Alarmingly so, this horrible crime brought out news of other recent break-ins and assaults. Just two nights earlier, two doors down on the other side of my house, a burglary had occured. In fact, when I spoke to the woman who lived there with only her high school daughter, I discovered that she had been robbed four times in the four years she lived here. Two weeks earlier, another woman had been assaulted at 8am in her home. Five incidents had happened in the neighborhood in the past two months all told. And whatever anxiety had been hopeful before was now flowing freely in the streets. “What is the management company doing?” “Why don’t we have a neighborhood watch program?” “How much is a security system?” “They should be a gate and a barbed wire fence around the front and the back!” And slowly, like dye spreading its icy fingers further into the water, the fear began to spread. I had no idea whether I should tell my wife or not.

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If you’re in the Atlanta area, consider this an invitation. If not, I’ll be taking a lot of notes tonight as the Atlanta Emerging Cohort meets tonight to discuss the following:

Faith, ethnicity, and culture

David Park has arranged for us to meet at Cafe Mozart off of Venture Drive/Pleasant Hill Road in Duluth. David and others are beginning to imagine a post korean-church and the role of a 2 generation pan-Asian church in america. It should be a good conversation, and worth the ride north to consider how our tradition biases and invigorates our faith practices.

Here are some questions to get us started:

• Diversity in church as a goal or a by-product?
• How might missional communities acknowledge cultural gifts without minimizing differences?
  
• What is the role of the mono-ethnic church?

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In the aftermath of the YS/Zondervan “Skits That Teach” fiasco (h/t to Soong Chan Rah on a well-executed campaign to address the issues), I think that we saw some interesting systemic problems with racism, the church, and interestingly enough, the boundaries of responsible, creative writing. Emergingtruth has found another interesting twist in this tale, that of Ms. Camy Tang. I think Camy’s case and perspective brings up another interesting facet to the discussion of race, culture, and the Christian faith — that of how Asian American Christians present themselves to us fellow Asian Americans and how they present themselves to “others.”

In short, I think we are sending harsher criticism Ms. Tang’s way because she is Christian. Obviously, if Margaret Cho had done the same thing, we would’ve shrugged it off because the C.H.O is, after all, “notorious”. Is she wrong because she takes on a more “white” perspective? Is she less a Christian and/or less an Asian?

If Ms. Tang was sold out to Jesus, she wouldn’t have sold her Asian American brothers and sisters in Christ out; But she did, and therefore she’s “sold out” and is an immature (at best) or ignorant (at worst) Christian who is unaware of how the dominant culture has manipulated this “loud Asian chick” who thinks she is writing “loud Asian chick lit”. Is that the complicated logic that we’re asking writers and artists to be aware of before they create?

I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, but there is some cognitive dissonance there. And I assure you it’s larger than Ms. Tang and her upcoming novel. I’m trying to put my finger on it…and I pulled out the following post that I had bookmarked a while back. It’s particularly more interesting in light Ms. Tang’s recent post and many reactions to it.

mixedasian.blogspot.com/2003_10_05_mixedasian_archive.html#106546637279705821

With their universalist aim, Asian-American churches have brought together not only East Asians (and the occasional Southeast Asian) of different ethnic backgrounds but of different levels of Americanization: FOBs, FOB-wannabes, adoptees, and more — kids who are all over the chart on various axes of assimilation. And it assimilates them not into mainstream American culture, as so many Americans think of their church doing for pagans, but rather, it assimilates them into church culture, and often, a culture specific to the given group of believers. What are the contents of this culture? Keep reading:

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I read this article recently, which practically brought me to tears, especially with this picture (click here for slideshow):

This practice of binding the feet of women was around for almost 1,000 years in China. And to my utter fright, the reasons for such a practice were aesthetic?!

Years of suffering were required to finally achieve the ideal three-inch long foot and the diminuitive shape of a crescent moon so lyrically described by Chinese poets as the quintessence of a refined female form, much like the western image of a perfectly proportioned 36-24-36 inch figure. Many women found themselves under enormous pressure to rriatch this idealized form, particularly those with positions of wealth or status. This was true of women we spoke to in both urban and rural areas, where even today women over the age of sixty with feet longer than four inches are rare.

And from a different source, we find that this binding had deeper social significance:

In a society with a cult of female chastity, one primary purpose of footbinding was to limit mobility, radically modifying the means by which females were permitted to become a part of the world at large. Painfully and forcibly reducing a little girl’s foot at the precise point in her life when she was expected to begin understanding the Confucian discipline of maintaining a “mindful body” reinforced her acceptance of the practice.[21] A woman’s dependency on her family was made utterly manifest in her disabled feet, and she was fully expected to acquire considerable control over her pain, reflecting the ideals of civility, a mindful body and concealment. One of the primary allures of footbinding lay in its concealment, and to be acceptable a pair of small feet had to be covered by binder, socks and shoes, doused in perfurne and scented powder, and then hidden under layers of leggings and skirts.[22] Women also attended to their feet in the strictest privacy, often washing their feet separately from the rest of their body to shield themselves and others from contamination.[23] Only those privileged to the utmost intimacy were allowed to view the processes of cleansing and care, and women wore special bed slippers even if otherwise nude.[24] Much of footbinding’s aura derived from this concealment of the physicality of the foot, mirroring the privacy requirements society and family placed on the individual.

Why bring this up now if the practice was banned in 1911? We’re not barbaric anymore now, are we? This was oh so long ago, right?

You’d be dead wrong. For starters, there are few things as trans-national or transcultural as the oppression of women. You can make a historical argument or a socio-econonimc argument for it, but I believe that it is largely a spiritual issue, namely Satan’s hatred of women. Think about it, if human beings are made in the image of God, and it is through women that humans are brought into the world, I think that the enemy does everything he can in order to subvert, distort, wound, and pervert the woman. It manifests itself in so many ways across so many cultures I can hardly list them here.

Our twisted notions of beauty at all costs are pushing Asian women to the cosmetic brink of extinction, read the following link: (h/t – the Metropolitician). Whether we have conflicting notions about women in ministry or not (an excellent and honest post by elderj, btw), Asian American Christian men must break the silence of Adam.

God calls on men to speak into darkness that sometimes stays dark, even after we speak….Lighting our own fires is a natural tendency in every fallen man. And that tendency is clearly visible, not only in the relational crises of life but also in our everyday style of relating. Men who routinely light fires rather than trust God reveal their lack of manliness most significantly in the way they engage other people, particularly women.

As an Asian American man who is and will one day bear the image of Christ then, this premise that the form of woman must be made lesser or distorted must be expelled from my thinking, because we should be ready to lay down our lives for her — she is that valuable and precious. Feminity does not bestow masculinity upon me, but neither is my masculinity added to in my subversion or control of her. She must be able to say of me, “His banner over me is love.” In short, the ties that bind must break and be broken with love.

Recently, thecuttingtruth cited the unmanliness of Asian men, and I assert that our “manliness” is derived not out our neediness or control, but our ability to stop binding the feet of our women and speak up for them.

The campaign against bound feet initiated by Sun Yat-sen one century ago set free Chinese women from binding cloth. However, China needs a new campaign to set women free from conservative concepts in the new century and let them enjoy complete equality with men, said Li Huiying, another expert on women studies.

A key piece to the above quote is this: Sun Yat-sen was a Christian. That is an Asian man that I admire deeply out of our common Lord and Savior. And I am confident that what was loosened on earth will be loosened in heaven as well. To my sisters in Christ and in race, do not chase the standards of beauty of this world nor conform yourselves to those idols — but do run and chase after God because your feet will never be bound by me.

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People in healthcare use the term “continuum of care” to describe how various aspects of the system serve the individual patient. The doctor prescribes, the nurse monitors and educates, the therapist rehabilitates, the pharmacist fills, the chaplain counsels and so on and so forth. All these entities, complex in themselves, serve the unified purpose of providing the patient has the best care possible.

Obviously, this doesn’t work nearly as smoothly as a continuum in practical application, but in a country that spends more on health care than any other nation in the world, you can be sure that some steps to address the inefficiencies in care delivery and quality are taking place.

A key paradigm shift has been in the way they measure the quality of care.

To oversimplify, care has traditionally been measured in terms of outcomes, i.e. you check into the hospital with a certain condition, and you come out either better or worse. Your state when you leave is your outcome, and of course, you’re expected to be better when you leave than when you came in. Your outcome was the biggest statement about the quality of care, and it was the standard upon which insurances paid and hospitals made their name.

But the tide seems to be turning to a new sort of measure, here’s why. Outcomes can reveal whether your status has improved or not improved, but not why. So, while we might be able to discern that your outcome of heart failure was [Read more...]

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We Asians love the notion of luck, prosperity, and blessing.

This year, 2007, is a prime year for babies. That’s right, it’s the year of the Golden Pig, not just any pig.

“A person born this year is likely to be a good parent. He may be easy to anger, but he is intelligent, honest, courageous, completes projects, gallant, and sincere. People born in these years are honest and straightforward. They can be relied on to see things through. They tend to be popular and make lasting friendship and are good neighbors.

Wow, that’s unlike any other baby I’ve ever heard of (and yes, I think wooden rabbits tend to be very sarcastic). And consequently, whether you give any creedence to this at all or not, it seems to be showing measurable impact in the motherlands — 10% increase in the birth rate! But one line that I found very interesting was this line from this Chinese mother-to-be, “I choose to believe it rather than miss a good opportunity.”

Ah yes, superstition as a form of insurance, that’s nice.

I wonder how many Asian Americans would honestly admit that attending church was  a form of taking the safer side of Pascal’s wager.

Here is where many Asian pastors need to stop playing the role of Aaron and more the role of Moses — tear down the calf, er pig, obliterate it into a fine powder and make us drink it. Quit playing the shaman, and play the prophet. Stop playing the health and wealth card and throw down some tablets lest our churches continue to wander in this desert . We make a mockery of the Word when we trust in our gold.  Those letters behind our names, that ordination, that board certification, that raise, the BMW, the half-milllion dollar home, the Ivy-league degree, the security alarm system, the portfolio, the next great accomplishment…is only capital if we invest it in Kingdom economics. Otherwise, it’s a waste, we will consume it and it will turn to waste. That’s the beautiful image of the execution of the golden calf, literally all that gold turned to powder and defecated out in the middle of the desert — a most unholy crap.

“I choose to believe rather than miss a good opportunity?” Good luck with that, I’m eating golden pork for Lent.

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My wife, having been Hindu for much of her life before she became Christian, has helped me a great deal in sharing her fresh insight as she looks at Christians and the ways in which we live and espouse our faith. For instance, not long after becoming Christian, she asked me, “Why does the church building have walls? Shouldn’t everyone hear and see them worship?”

I had never heard that question before and I had no answer other than to say, “I think it’s because people don’t want to see what’s going on inside.” But in the years that have passed, I have often wondered if the people inside have not truly wanted those outside to come in.

I know that it can often be hard to listen to questions and challenges to the status quo of the church, but I think it is always a good time to listen. We may find that what we have been trying to communicate all this time has not been what we had intended. And that even by the observations of “new believers” (as though you could even earn seniority) can be extraordinarily helpful. Walter Brueggemann has characterized it as such: that we undergo a process of orientation, disorientation, and then finally a re-orientation in our spiritual formation.

Perhaps it is good then that we have a time of disorientation, not because we feel that deconstruction is to become normative, but that through it, we have the ability to seek answers to our own questions, and more importantly, question the answers of others.

I admire this young man for speaking so boldly. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I do think he might be closer to re-orientation than most Asian Americans. Many Asian Americans choose not to even broach the questions.

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