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Coming Home
Reflection by Irene Pak
Irene PakThe title for the Unzu Lee’s primer is Coming Home: Asian American Women Doing Theology, and as I reflected on what coming home means for me as an Asian-American woman before reading the primer, I realized that home in terms of my own identity has always meant a place of in between. I was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, and even when I state that, folks still want to know where I’m “really” from and where home “really” is for me. By that, they usually mean, “What is your ethnicity/racial background?” and even after telling them that my parents are from Korea, there is still sometimes the misunderstanding that that is where I will “go back” to, where “home” is for me. I know I am not alone in this, and I think for me, that question is really disconcerting because in a sense, by asking me that question even after stating that I was born and raised in the United States, that question implies that I don’t actually belong here.
Other Asian-American women’s perspective of “Home:”
Comfortable enough in America, Chinatown, and even Hong Kong or Taiwan, we seem to belong everywhere. And because of this, we might also belong nowhere. “Home,” it seems, ends up being a mixed-up notion that must be redefined if it is to have meaning for many of us.
—Author Pheobe Eng, in Warrior Lessons
“Asian America” is a frame of mind, a spiritual place that is located neither in Asia nor America, but hovering somewhere above, between and around the hearts and souls of the people who belong to it. Especially those of us who were born here — we feel alienated in America and estranged in the countries are parents came from — Asian America is the closest thing to a place to call home.
—Dina Gan, Editor and Chief of aMagazine
Keeping this concept of “home” in mind as a framework, Unzu gives us some biblical examples of women doing theology and then takes us through the WHO, WHY, and HOW of Asian-American women doing theology. WHO are Asian-American women doing theology? The ethnic identification categories in a U.S. census included Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Cambodian, Pakistani, Laotian, Hmong, Thai, Indonesian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Burmese and other Asian including those who are multiracial. Because of this, it seems like it would be impossible to have a unified voice or experience or theology and yet, the concept of being a perpetual foreigner in the United States is a shared experience. Again, that concept of “home,” as neither here nor there, is a shared experience.
WHY? Why do Asian-American women do theology? We speak because we often fall between the cracks. Unzu writes, “When race is discussed, it is usually the male experience that comes to the center of discussion. As women of color, we are invisible. When gender is discussed, white women’s experience takes the center stage. As women of color, we are marginalized. So very often, conversations on racism are still framed in black and white, leaving everyone else out.” Our presence is too often invisible and therefore there is a need for Asian-American women to articulate our questions and understandings in our own voices.
HOW? How do we engage in theological discussion that leads us to say what we say? Asian-American women doing theology is done as a communal practice, a collaboration. We are not being isolationists and not just talking about it, but with doing it. As a subject of doing theology, we place Asian-American women at the center, and use personal experiences as a major source. Understanding that not one person’s experience can be universalized, rather using experiences in Christian tradition, the Bible, and Asian-American traditions. This includes practices that are inherited, modified and invented by Asian Americans. It is very contextual and is a response to emerging aspirations of downtrodden women, so many forms of oppression are taken seriously. These are some examples of how Asian-American women are doing theology.
Lee then goes on to tell some of those stories and reveals some those contexts that Asian-American women have in the United States and as Christians.
- We expect to hear the question “Where do you come from?” until we die
- We are hailed as a model minority on one hand, and told to go home on the other hand
- We are treated with suspicion because of the way we look and easily targeted for suspicious behavior when the United States feels threatened by actions of Asians or Asian governments. A good example of that is the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII in this country.
- Personally, people still tell me that I speak English well even though I was born and raised here. They tell me how my parent’s accent is cute or that they can’t understand it even though their English is great and have lived in the United States for over 30 years.
It becomes more complicated for an Asian American of mixed racial heritage.
In the ways that we have defined ourselves, Unzu talks about how the act of self-naming, self-definition is the beginning of the process of recovery of one’s God-given image, and that some of us are moving away from a dichotomous understanding of ourselves as either Asian or American and finding “home” in the hybrid identity as Asian-American: not two different identities totaled together, but rather a whole new identity that is self-defined and differently framed. “Paying attention to the spaces between oppression and liberation, sin and salvation, brokenness and wholeness, and seek integrity of our selfhood in between these spaces in order to find our selfhood rather than in a culture that values clarity and objective rational truth.” It is my observation that perhaps home really is just in the presence of God, entering into that space, which is everywhere, even in the cracks and places in between.
— Irene Pak is the Young Adult Intern for Racial Justice and Advocacy. She is a recent graduate of McCormick Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, and is originally from Ogden, Utah. |
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