My last name “Pei” is about as Chinese as you can get, contrary to what you might think if you’ve ever visited a “Pei Wei” restaurant.  The name itself is pretty uncommon, which in the recent past has made me extra curious about its origins.  My aunt recently traced it back to a village in China, where apparently all Peis originate.  They even have a saying on a big banner, translated as, “all the Peis have only one ancestry.”  So if you share my last name, we might actually be related!  However, I am not related to the famous architect I.M. Pei.

Even having “Pei” as a last name in America reminds me that I’m a little bit different.  Just last week, a nurse asked me, “And may I ask how exactly do you pronounce your last name?”  I get that question often, and I can understand why.  There are two very embarrassing (or funny if you see it that way) ways to mispronounce the name.  Hint: one rhymes with “tie”, and the other rhymes with “tee.”  Every time I make a restaurant reservation, I think about spelling my name as “P-E-Y,” just so they don’t mess it up.  But not as “Pay,” which would be funny for other reasons. ; )

My first name (Adrian) is a surprising choice for such a Chinese last name.  I think it has European roots, and only in the recent past has become more popular as a boy’s name (yes, I still get people who yell, “Yo Adrian!” btw, did you know that Rocky also thanks God in his speech?!).  Considering my parents’ background, though, the choice makes more sense.  My mother grew up in Vietnam, attended a French school, and learned seven languages throughout her life.  She was one of the most active members on the multicultural boards of my schools.  My father grew up in Japan, and was a bridge-builder in his work between the U.S. and Japan.  Despite the fact that he had to teach himself English, he and my mother both adapted to their lives in the States, and brought with them a love and respect for culture.

And that was what shaped me, though I didn’t know it at the time.  Because of my father’s work, I lived on three continents (born in upstate New York, then moved to England for one year, then Japan for three years) before I was five years old.  My parents chose to spend all their pleasure money on family travel, so I got to visit Australia, France, Italy, Greece, and even Micronesia while growing up!  We made good friends with our Iranian, Korean, and Indian neighbors.  And on any given night, my mother would cook anything from shepherd’s pie to sukiyaki to tacos.

But despite all this richness to draw and learn from, I don’t think I knew what to do with it.  In high school, we didn’t talk about our cultural backgrounds and uniqueness.  All we cared about was fitting in, according to what was popular.  And was being Asian American “cool”?  To be honest, that was the furthest thing from my mind, and from what I saw in society.  Most of the time, I found myself wanting to convince my Caucasian friends that I was just like them: that I listened to the same music, played and watched the same sports, and talked and acted like they did.  Though I couldn’t put words to it, I was living the reality of a minority in America, whose very status forces him or her to wrestle with an extra layer of identity issues.  I’m not like everyone I see around me, so is that okay?  Why do I have to work so hard to be known and accepted?  Why do people call me names, look at me strangely, or treat me in special ways?    

What do we do with these questions and feelings?  To some degree, it’s a normal part of growing up.  But part of me looks back on my childhood with a measure of sadness, wishing I had been able to make greater sense of the anger and depression I sometimes experienced.  I wish I had seen all the learning and growth I was missing, in the unique stories of each person around me.  I wish those things had been honored, and platformed.

So now I’m an adult in my thirties, and one of my biggest lessons is that I don’t have to wish, or wait, any longer.  In the landscape of this country and these times, we do have an opportunity to bring awareness to, and fight for the things we care about.  Even more, it’s a responsibility, and an honor!

I believe we’re doing that in my work, as I serve on the Leadership Development team of the Asian American ministry of Cru, specifically heading up the field of Creative Arts and Resources.  At Epic Movement, we are moving towards raising up young leaders who are culturally-aware, emotionally mature, and missionally-minded.  College students are some of the leaders of the next generation, and we are seeing future artists and business-people who don’t feel they have to deny their cultural heritage, but are embracing the unique strength that it brings to their life and mission.  That’s exciting.

At some point as well, I threw off some of my natural introverted and self-conscious tendencies, and started to simply write.  Writing is a powerful vehicle of expression, when you live on the margins of society.  I began blogging about topics that ate at me, and that I felt needed to be explored.  I collaborated with other ethnic ministries to write an article about how minorities relate to the majority culture.

And of course, there’s this Next Gener.Asian Church blog.  I love that this is a collaboration of different voices, which provides so much more color and dialogue than a lone voice.  There’s something powerful about the communal aspect of Asian American culture, and to know that we are stronger as we put our minds and stories together.  We can disagree and debate passionately, but we have each other’s backs at the end of the day.

I’ve had the chance to meet most of the contributors to this blog in some fashion, and I can say that they aren’t just writers, but they are leaders.  They care deeply about the past, present, and future of Asian American Christianity, and are living out that passion and integrity in their work and lives.  I have great respect for all of them.

Which for lack of a better transition, brings me to my middle name, “Su-Chen.”  Literally translated, it means “honest scholar.”  That’s what I try to live up to.  Whether or not you know me, well or not, I will always strive to be honest and sincere in my words and life.

And for the “scholar” part, I do believe there is something sacred about the written word.  I was talking to David Park about this, and he mentioned how we have a freedom to express ourselves here, that isn’t tied to money or jobs or other motives.  But we also talked about how we have a responsibility, knowing that people are reading and in a way, our dialogue with everyone here is being recorded — even if informally in the pages of Asian American history.  As a reader, you are part of this as you write in.  What will we learn, or stumble upon in the process?  It’s up to us… let’s find out!

Looking forward to connecting with you more here, or getting to know you better on Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail!

Adrian

I. Your “Called” Name (what you go by):  

Legal name: Anh-Khoa Nguyen.  Nickname: Kevin ; personal family name: Khoa (qua)
Nationality: Vietnamese-Texan

Kevin was picked up when I was trying to order pizza from Pizza Hut while in Texas.  The guy asked how to spell my name.  I mean, how hard is it to spell “K – H – O – A”, right?  Those are not hard letters to hear over the phone.  After several attempts – I couldn’t take it anymore — “Dude, my name is Kevin”.  Finally, I can have my pizza.

II. Insert an informal photo of you that shows your personality or you having fun or traveling:

Coming from Dallas, Texas – now relocated in LA, I had a chance to go back and do what Texans do.  FISH.  But that doesn’t mean I know how to fish.  But look at this HUGE STRIPED BASS I caught.  AMAZING!  Not really the fish was floating by, dead, when I caught it. Notice the white eyes.  I REALLY CANT FISH – can’t even cast a reel. 

My family during this Christmas season.  Lovely wife, Huong Nguyen, of 7.5 years + a 21 month old boy, Khoi Nguyen.  So your questions:  How did we meet?  Instead of a photo slide show at our wedding, we thought we try out a Silent Film of “Our Love Story”.  Since we were living in LA, there were lots of  hungry, unemployed directors everywhere.

III. Your Educational Background/Degrees/Schools:

Biola University, Talbot School of Theology
Doctor of Philosophy, Candidacy
Concentration: Leadership in Higher Ed Administration

Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary
Master of Arts
Concentration: Christian Leadership

University of Texas at Dallas
Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering
Concentration: Telecommunication , Wireless Technology

IV. Personal Information You’d Like To Share:

A.  I have my own food blog – FEED FATDOG.  I only take pictures of something EXCEPTIONAL!

B.  My son looks like me….

I love “active” sports.  Basketball, football, baseball.  I play basketball.  Golf is NOT an active sport.  I am finally jumping on the bandwagon of enjoyment.  Here is a 15 second video of how awesome I am — I got a “birdie”. I am a TEXAS homer.  I love the Cowboys, Rangers, Mavericks.  I hate the LA sport teams

V. Work Experiences

This is where my personality will match my career.  It’s all over the place, but I still believe God has a reason why I do what I do.

Ministry – church planter, leadership pastor at Cornerstone Bible Community Church.  Been in Chino Hills, CA for 3 years.

Vocation – went to school to be an Electrical Engineer, but go figure, I wanted to be a people’s person. I ended up in management for Sales/Marketing with Cingular à AT&T mobility.  Background and expertise is in organizational leadership.

Higher Ed Academics – this is the newest part of my passions.  I wanted to focus in Christian studies and management, so I went out for a PhD in Leadership and Higher Ed administration.  Currently teaching at California Baptist University and Talbot Seminary.  Love to help impact lives and help them find their fullest potential.

But you know what I really love most in all of these bits and pieces of my life I just shared?  All of this is what God has uniquely crafted in who I am and what gifts I have to offer to the church.  All my skills, all my interests, all my passions, all my experiences — they all belong to the Creator who he has predestined me to do good work (Eph 2:10), whether it be for the AA church or for somewhere else in Timbucktoo.  I am affirmed and confident that my life testimony will impact someone out there, and for this reason, MY LIFE MISSION STATEMENT is:

“I desire to assist those who assist the Kingdom”.  If you are one of those people who assist the kingdom, I want to offer you all my love, joys, pains, passions, and experiences.

There’s always more to add but this is a good start.   You can always follow me here.  I love to keep in touch.

Facebook | Linkedin

Blessings,

KN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-rs2Zb95Dw

To launch this new season, we’ll have a round of introductions from each of the contributors. By sharing our back stories, we hope this humanizes and personalizes our voices as we drill-down into issues regarding faith and culture.

Most of us Asian Americans have been asked the question, “Where are you from?” And that’s sometimes followed by “Where are you really from?” when wanting to find out someone’s ethnic identity. This can be annoying or offensive for some.

Let’s re-frame that question. I’ll share where I’m from, and where I’m coming from.

My name is DJ Chuang and I’m from Orange County, California. Moved here 4 years ago from metro Washington DC. I came to America when I was 8 years old; my family immigrated from Taiwan; I’m the oldest of 3 boys. My parents are Chinese, so our family was fairly traditional and not religious. Our family ran a motel business in a humble small Virginia town. Life was practical, routine and mundane, and I thought that’s all there was to life: you go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have children, lather, rinse and repeat. A very predictable narrative. Intuitively, I yearned for something more in life.

I discovered this as I learned about the Christian faith during my college years. After working as an engineer for a few years, I sensed a disconnect between my (English-speaking) Asian American friends and the typical church — be it the ethnic Asian church or mainstream mostly-Caucasian church.

Thus began my life journey to see if God might use me to make a difference. I took a leap of faith and went to seminary. I pastored for 5 years — 2 years in an ethnic Chinese church and 3 years in a multi-Asian/multi-ethnic church plant. I started blogging. I worked with a private family foundation to develop Asian American leadership.

Now I’m well into my 40s, and the same issues keep recurring about the bicultural tensions of being Asian and American, both at the same time. The mainstreaming of Asian America hasn’t resolved this dilemma (cf. 20-something freddiew describing the sigh from his Asian parents).

Supposedly, there is a surge of Asian American participation in college ministries and American churches, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at Christian media and books and conferences. I’d like to think that being Asian American can be much more than just being Asian or just being American.

I believe how we live out our Christian faith is much more than prayer and Bible study and church attending and serving. There is a whole cultural and relational layer that’s has to be contextualized and incarnationalized into our lived theology. That is, an Asian American Christian marriage and an Asian American Christian family will look different in its practical theology because of its cultural and relational context.

More specifically, 2 issues I’m particularly passionate about (or, burdened for) are: 1stly, how we relate to one another. How can Asian American Christians better demonstrate reconciliation, conflict resolution, forgiveness, and restoring relationships? And, 2ndly, how we can accept and value the average Asian American person and the broken-hearted too. There’s an ugly side of Asian cultures that devalues those who don’t get the top grades, have superb performance, and/or attaining social status, not to mention those who are struggling with life, be it mental illness, addictions, hurts, and hangups. In Christ, we have nothing to prove and no one to impress. That’s good news! And we have a long ways to live that out as Asians and Asian Americans.

I’m glad there’s a place online like Next Gener.Asian Church to have these vital conversations to flesh out our faith in a richer and more fully-textured manner. There’s much to talk about — let’s get on with it!

• The degree of similarity between the native- and foreign-born, although low by historical standards, has held steady since 1990. Assimilation declined during the 1980s, remained stable through the 1990s, and has actually increased slightly over the past few years
• Economic and civic assimilation often occurs without significant cultural assimilation.
• Immigrants from developed countries are not necessarily more assimilated. Immigrants born in Korea, which the World Bank classifies as a high-income country, have a collective assimilation index value lower than that of immigrants from Cuba or the Philippines, which are classified as low-income countries. Several factors can explain this pattern, among them the fact that immigrants from developed countries do not necessarily become naturalized citizens more rapidly than those from the developing world. The United States often attracts immigrants who belonged to the economic elite of their origin country.
  
• Immigrants from Vietnam, Cuba, and the Philippines enjoy some of the highest rates of assimilation. However, these groups assimilate more rapidly in some respects than others. For example, they are far more assimilated economically than they are culturally. Curiously, all of the countries mentioned have experienced U.S. military occupation.
  
• This pattern implies that policies restricting bilingual education, or requiring that government business be conducted in English, will have little impact on economic or civic assimilation. Indeed, erecting linguistic barriers to civic participation might actually retard assimilation along noncultural lines. Some observers may believe that policies promoting cultural homogenization are desirable. What should be clear, however, is that such policies do not appear to promote civic or economic assimilation.
  

I was recently at the ANACEFC annual conference and got to sit in on a session where as a group the leaders wrestled with many questions together. It was really refreshing to do this in an Asian setting out of a seminary context. It was also interesting as a Korean American to listen to the concerns of Chinese American pastors and church leaders. We are surprisingly similar yet with some differences. First of all, let me express my respect and admiration for my Chinese American brothers and sisters who have a greater capacity and tolerance for differences than I have witnessed in Korean settings. I was also encouraged by the presence of women at the highest levels of this conference. And lastly, as we tackled questions together, I was impressed by the presence of dialogue as a problem-solving tool even as we discussed passionately and laughed together over difficult questions.

I would like to share some of their discussion questions with you in the hope that discussion can happen here that might help us all. Please feel free to jump in…

• How do we embrace and empower the second generation ministry?
• Is it really necessary to delete or change the word, “Chinese” in the name of the church? Is it more appropriate to adopt the usage of term “a church of Cantonese, English and Mandarin Ministries” and avoid the term, “a church of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin congregations.“
• With respect of a church of multiple ministries, what is the role of the Senior Pastor? Give your views on the structure of pastoral staff.
• How do we effectively resolve conflicts between pastors, boat members, and pastors, among board members, boar dan members of the church and etc.?

Found the above on YouTube and found it to be a classic example of how Asian Americans and their parents talk in a way that doesn’t fit the definition of communication. And of course, while it is parody, it certainly sounds similar to some of the conversations I’ve had with my own parents. In some ways, it’s not just about our parents learning English, it’s about trying to keep up with this emerging, techno-illogical world that literally has only been blown up in the last two decades. It is the rare parent that can keep up with a serious discussion about the changing nature of work in the digital economy, expectations about the predictive capacity of the SAT for success, and whether or not having a secretary constitutes as a bragging right. Sometimes all they care about are their videos. And we, our YouTube.

Here’s the thing, I know Asian American brothers and sisters who can analyze the junk out of the stock market, or a book of financial reports, or a research project, or even theology…or even Asian American churches. But my heart remains a closed, unanalyzed place. And the miscarriages, the marital strife, the wilderness season when I dropped out of college, the wrestling with pornography, my temper tantrums, and oh my fears, my fears and doubts. And my hatreds. I am just getting to know me.

And therein lies one of the chief problems with talking about what is wrong with the Asian American church, is that I am part of the problem, and I barely know how to talk about myself. And neither do many of my brothers and sisters.

Download the PDF or read each section on their blog:

• Sixth Posture = “Equal and Empowered Partnership” and Moving Forward
• Fifth Posture = “Unity as Assimilation”
• Fourth Posture = “Duty and Pleasing”
• Third Posture = “Silent and Resigned”
• Second Posture = “Angry and Wounded”
• First Posture = “Unaware”
• Introduction

there’s been more than one story talking about the calm and order in post-tsunami japan.  columnists are pointing out the lack of looting and lawlessness; kristof even prophesied the strength of japanese society when the earthquake hit.  the unspoken comparison, of course, is what happened five and half years ago in new orleans.  but the most memorable post-katrina quote, courtesy of kanye west, helps us understand why the social fabric of japan is woven differently:  ”george bush hates black people.”

japan thrives because of its homogeneity.  and they’re not the only nations.  when the annual list of best nations is published, invariably, homogenous nations like denmark top the list.  and the challenge of the “other” has reached its breaking point all over western europe.  the leaders of germany, france, italy, and the united kingdom have all declared that multiculturalism has failed and is unwanted.

but america clings to the idea that our society is stronger because  of the melting pot salad bowl, or at least we say we do.  until the “other” starts to irritate us… like those asians in the library.

and are things really different in the church?  rebecca kim chronicles how campus fellowships experienced their own white flight when asians started outnumbering them in her book, god’s whiz kids.  church growth experts have consistently warned that the pursuit of diversity compromises growing numbers.  even the utopian church of acts 2 devolved into alarming ethnic strife by acts 6.

but the Bible (well, it’s mostly the new testament) stubbornly clings to this idea that the church should be comprised of all people—gender, race, culture, sexuality, and class.  it would be easier to be monocultural, but the apostles’ solution was not to divide into a jewish and gentile church, nor was it to force gentiles to adopt jewish practices.  if we could just ignore those that don’t look or think like us, it certainly would be more efficient and effective.  but our crucified and resurrected LORD rarely seems to take that route.