Introduction: An Asian American Voice for the Christian Millennial Community
About Me
Like any other Asian American child growing up in an immigrant home, my parents wanted me to either be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a businessman. They worked in a 9–10 job, 7 days a week. They made sufficient money through labor-intensive restaurant work to make sure that food was on our plates and clothes on our backs. We were certainly not tattered, but it was at the cost of their being tottered. These jobs were our gateways to the ideal American dream: get a job that was not so labor intensive and quadruple the amount our parents made while working only 5 days. If this was their goal, they probably should have been more strategic in accomplishing it.
The first mistake they made in diverging my path from wealth was sending me to the church when I was young. Christ says in The Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”, and we also find the saying “you cannot love both God and money.” I had developed a natural resistance against a life of riches because of the spiritual downfall that might result. The second mistake that they made was conceding to my decision to attend a liberal arts college. If you want your children to be rich, and you send them to one of the best liberal arts colleges in the state, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot. Long story short, I fell in love with all things liberal arts — reading, writing and all the -ologies. On top of that, I followed a call to go into church ministry for pastoral work.
My cultural immersion experience occurred gradually. I grew up in the largest Chinese American church in all of the Midwest (Chicago). I was introduced to multi-culturalism in a multi-lingual church, though it was internal and therefore not so apparent to me in my youth. Multi-culturalism only became apparent when I began high school, where people came in a sundry of skin tones and dialects. All this happened in one of the most racially segregated cities in all of the United States. I became most aware of cultural diversities and differences — transitioning from subconscious experience to conscious realization — when I first stepped foot onto my college campus. Wheaton College composed of a predominantly white student body. When I made attempts to identify myself amidst the sea of faces, bodies, and personalities, I was lost in my tracks. I was an outcast. The norms of Chinese culture were not norms here. I was back to square one.
There, I realized that I had been deeply impacted by what I will coin the Chinatown Effect, which I will refer back to in later posts. I had been contained in a mono-cultural bubble, and in this microcosm I was taught to reversely exclude foreign cultures from tainting my own. We preserved the Chinese culture so purely within my upbringing that we were left culturally incompetent in a world of many cultures. We lived with deep-seated racism, though it was veiled with niceties and pleasantries on the surface, because it felt as if our ethnic grouping could not break into the wider community of our cities. Chinatown is an ethnic hub that resulted from exclusion and ridicule in the history of its genesis. The sentiments are much more covert now, but still ever-present.
Simultaneously, I discovered how much I am a child of my generation — a millennial. I am influenced by millennial content and spoke in millennial rhetoric. I am inclined towards individuality and I strive for independence. I believe in dreams and passions, and I possess an entrepreneurial spirit; a spirit of novelty. These are undeniable parts of me due to the influence of the underlying messages of the media.
I launched into my pastoral career, adding in another layer of cultural diversity. I became a youth pastor at a Filipino church in New Jersey. When I first took the position, I had no idea what I would be committing to. Filipinos have to be considered one of the most global peoples I know. They are people scattered across the world in every inhabited continent. Since my tenure at this church, I have connected to Filipinos in Chicago, in the Northeast, in the Philippines, in Australia, and in Canada. I am now currently a Volunteer Teaching Pastor in a Filipino congregation in Queens, New York. I have become intricately woven into the global story of the Filipino and Filipino American community of our generation. There is no turning back. I couldn’t make an exit out of this narrative even if I wanted it. Neither is it something I want.
So who am I? I am an Asian American — not only one who appears to be one, or one who speaks as one; but one who is invested in the meaning of being one. I am deeply Asian — raised with values rooted in Confucianism. I am American — constant in my discovery of what being American has meant in the past through the definitions and descriptions of authors like John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and in my discovery of what it means to be one in society today. I am Christian — called by Christ to be a preacher of his gospel, believing that all I have, know, and am has been written out by him in his goodness, sovereignty, truth, and steadfast love. I believe that nothing I make sense of in this life can come to the ultimate truth of redemption unless it is laid down before the cross. The cross makes sense of all things from beginning to end. Lastly, I am a millennial — one who has unwittingly internalized themes of resistance, resentment, the hermeneutics of suspicion, pluralism, relativism, globalism, and novelty. This worldview has been spoon-fed to me before my mind was mature enough to parse through rights and wrongs. And for most of these pieces of my worldview, I do not condemn them as inherently evil. What I do believe is that humanity can distort them to become evil, but that many of these themes can ultimately be redeemed for both truth and love.
About the Content
The content of this blog is basically what I have described in my profile. My hope is to be able to represent a refined Asian American voice within the wider community of Christian Millennial writers. What does faith look like for a second generation Chinese American who has been converted to faith after years of being raised with Confucian principles of virtue and practical living? What does faith look like for the American immigrant who struggles with identifying as truly American? How are theological themes seen through the lens of one standing on the matrix of both Chinese and white evangelical culture? How can the values of millennial culture be seen in parallel with Asian culture in America? Where should Asian Americans stand in tense cultural conversations of our times — racism, black and white America, the sexual revolution, immigration, etc.? These and more are along the lines of the content I hope to scale.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said that Sunday mornings was the most segregated hour of America. I feel this threat of segregation more than brothers and sisters of other racial groups primarily because I come out of a shame-based culture. What do I mean by that? Every culture has both shame and guilt because every culture has what they understand to be proper etiquette and a legal system that defines right from wrong, good from evil. My culture specifically infuses a shame-inclined disposition into their people from a very young age. It could be a lack of tact or the implementation of overbearingly high standards of success. It could be a combination of both, and it could be more than just the two. Nonetheless, it is a reality for us.
The result of a shame-based culture in the United States, where the superiority-inferiority complex is quite palpable, is to become what we are not. Asians get surgeries to acquire facial features, they abandon ethnic language, and they exchange ethnic principles for the principles of the status quo, all to become more accepted. Asians will dissociate themselves from their ethnic heritage because it is not celebrated as beautiful (but pejoratively exotic). The shame it leads to within wider society is simply too much.
In creating a refined Asian American voice, what I mean is that I would partner with the small community of like-minded people already in the endeavor, to celebrate the heritage and rich culture of Asian Americans. I hope to join hands with others in resurrecting it into beauty from the ashes of inferiority. My aim is not to be seen as one speaking primarily to an Asian American audience, but as one speaking for an Asian American audience in the broader population of those who find themselves identifying as Christian, Millennial, and/or American. In a segregated society, with a segregated kingdom of God, have we also begun to allow segregated voices and segregated writing communities? The content of our gospel does not suggest separation. It suggests multi-ethnicity and multi-culturalism. It is a gospel that is multi-lingual. It is for the Jew, the Greek, the barbarians, for the wise, for the foolish, it is for the sick, the oppressed, the abandoned, the beaten down. It is a gospel for the Chinese, the Filipinos, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Indians, the Native Americans, as much as it has been for the Spanish, the British, the French, and the Americans.
About the Strategy of Content Creation
The goal I will be setting for myself is to write 1–2 times each month.
I am not about the quantity of content as much as I hope to produce content of good quality. That is, I hope to produce content that has been ruminated upon for prolonged periods of time, well researched, well-written, fluid, and relevant to you.
I will be writing on any local or global current events that I deem relevant to the Christian community, the Asian American community, and the Millennial community. I will write also on theological ideas that may be interpreted differently on a conceptual and practical level for the Asian American worldview while keeping the integrity of orthodoxy. I will write on the intersection of faith and culture as it pertains to the American church today. I intend on clarifying the Asian American worldview. I also hope not to deprive this blog from thoughts on social issues primarily within the American context.
An Additional Note
I have been blogging for a good bit of time now, but have never been serious about content production. My writing was publicized on various blogs, but it was primarily for my own joy and development. I never had to clarify my audience. So when I felt the need to put this blog together formally, I had to ask myself why.
I have always been passionate about the written word. The Bible not only affirms that words have power, but it also identifies God in flesh as the Word. I believe that when words are wielded carefully and intentionally, it is a revelation of truth and love once unknown. It abides by the principle of ex nihilo, and marks us as co-creators with the Godhead. In creating, we find ourselves dancing with the Author in his narrative of constant creation. Words are meant to tell truth.
I do not only feel the need to represent a voice of a community of people that I find under-represented in the writing community, but I also sense a responsibility for communicating truth in a world of journalism that seems, at times, to have digressed from substance-based content.
I hope for this blog to strive towards redemption in order to send redemptive ripples into the writing community in our cities. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will the voice of the Asian American Christian Millennial, but every effort adds to the momentum built.
Thank you for reading! If the content I envision for this blog is one in which you believe you are interested, if you’re intrigued to discover more, if you believe it is necessary for the communities around you or your social networks, or if you simply want to support me in this endeavor, please follow, like, comment, and share as you see fit.
