Building a Place to Call Home

Larissa Kwong AbaziaHome carries a significant meaning for all people. It is often the place that we go to when we need comfort, familiarity, security and love. As an Asian-American woman, I have numerous stories of struggling with its meaning for myself. Perhaps this is because I have never felt quite at home in my own skin. I can’t easily struggle with who I am as a person because it isn’t just internal reflection of who I believe and know I am, but involves outside forces that are out of my control. 

I will inevitably be asked, “No, where are you really from?” or “What are you?” or “Oh, so where are your parents from?” And questions like these will almost always be followed by, “Do you speak Chinese?” You would think that, by now, I would be comfortable answering these questions because they happen sometimes on a daily basis. But there always seems to be an apologetic undertone in my voice, as if I am ashamed of who I am because I have never been to China and don’t speak more than five words of Cantonese.  “Well, you should learn,” they say to me with a smile. No matter where we go as Asian Americans, our outward appearances give others the sense that we are foreigners, perpetual foreigners in America, whether we are first or fifth generation in America.

Last year the REYWT Core Team had the pleasure of meeting with Unzu Lee for a bible study based on the Asian-American woman’s primer, Coming Home:  Asian American Women Doing Theology. She began our conversation with readings from the beginning of Moses’ life in Egypt. Moses was saved twice as a young child. First, he escaped Pharaoh’s decree to kill all the male Hebrew babies by being hidden by his mother. Secondly, he was taken from the river by Pharaoh’s daughter who raised him as her own.  But because of these turns in his life, Moses lived in a borderland of his own: he was neither at the center of society as an Egyptian nor at the margins alongside “his kinsfolk,” the Hebrews. We can see that home was a mixture of an unsettling, in-between existence for this young man.

But Unzu soon shared that what once was a problem became an asset to our young hero in 3:1-12. While tending to Jethro’s flock, the voice of God comes in a burning bush to acknowledge the suffering of the Israelites and calls Moses to deliver them from the hands of Pharaoh. What a call! Moses is not so certain he is the right man for the job, but despite all of his arguments, God names him to bring freedom to the people. This young man who came from a “problem” origin was now able to use his subversive power, the inability to be placed in a box or defined by any category, to save the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt. From his point of “inbetweenness,” Moses is able to embrace a both/and existence and save his people from the powerful hands of Pharaoh.

As Asian-American women, we stand amidst the deafening silence of our existence. 

Our gender and race … clash in more ways than one.  In racialized America, where being American means being racially white, Asian-American women are perceived as perpetual foreigners who will someday go home — even if they are fifth- or sixth-generation Americans. Our presence is invisible, our citizenship unrecognized and our loyalty questionable. We are outsiders … [and] We are silenced by our gender.

We are most often silenced because we are maintained as the “model minority.” We are expected to be intelligent, law-abiding citizens that do not experience the oppressive nature of racism or expose the reality of this myth. And as women, we are kept silent by the expectation that we are to be “invisible” and obedient. Lee’s primer outlines the historical foundations of the struggle of Asian American women. She illustrates the groundwork that has already been laid and the need to continue the movement to end the silence within our communities. From this place, we can seek a home for ourselves and those coming after us.

And so where will we find a place to call home? Amidst the deafening silence of our existence in society, we join in communities and seek to build a place of our own in open, affirming dialogue. It is here, within the deafening silence, that we find ourselves akin to Moses, living in the borderland and unable to feel claimed. But from this place we can be revolutionary, powerful women who break the bonds of our oppression and are finally brought to a place that we can call home, a place all our own. It is a place defined by a both/and existence where we are embraced by God for our uniqueness.  It is a place where Asian American women can uplift who they are and break through the silence to a new place that has yet only been imagined.  It is a place where we can embrace that we are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God.