My Friends Have a Car in Louisiana

By Michael Stalcup

My friends have a car in Louisiana
that they say we can use
for the year they’re away.

We just have to go get it
and drive it home
safely. We don’t even think

about having my wife
drive back alone, but
for the first time

the thought strikes:
I might not be safe
on my own either,

my Asian face and skin
a sin
in this America.

Photo by processingly on Unsplash

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Michael Stalcup is a Thai-American missionary living in Bangkok, Thailand. His poems have been published in Sojourners Magazine, First Things, PAX, Red Letter Christians, and elsewhere. He co-teaches Spirit & Scribe, a workshop integrating spiritual formation and writing craft. You can find more of his work at michaelstalcup.com.

To the Employee at the DMV

By Emi Kanda

To the employee at the DMV:
I’m glad you like your Samsung watch
And your Toyota,
But those are two different products
From two different countries.
And I didn’t make either of those
So, no need to thank me.

To my ex-boyfriend’s mom
“With the Vietnamese hairstylist” (God bless her heart):
Boba without boba is a smoothie
That thing over there, is a mango,
And my Thanksgiving is still traditional
If we have eggrolls, mashed potatoes, and turkey.

To that guy on Hinge
(Fairytales did NOT prepare me for dating apps):
I’m not wasting time on no sick person,
So please, stay away,
If you’ve got Covid, or pneumonia, or the yellow fever.

To my Filipino coworkers
Who choose to see me for my heart
And not by the fact that I don’t speak their mother tongue:
Thank you for not making me feel othered,
Othered like I did in college.

Clearly not blue eyed and blonde,
But not embraced among those who only
Ate with Asians,
Sat with Asians,
Dated Asians,
Seemingly only spoke with Asians,
I was othered. A stranger to my own race.
Between the one who wants a Korean girl so she speaks the same language as his mother
And the California hipster chasing perfect, fair skin and freckles,
Who was left to be attracted to me?

Othered because I did not realize not everyone
Gets asked, “where are you from?” and has to rack their brain
To decipher what that question means.
Am I from Chicago? Illinois? The United States?
Do you mean to say, “I can’t tell what type of Asian you are?”
‘Cause I’m Japanese and Filipino, put it together,
I’m a spicy jalapeño, baby.

Othered because I cannot trust you are into me for me
If you post pictures with your Asian friend group
And studied abroad in China
Forgive me for reading into things,
But how am I supposed to know better?
(Mistrust isn’t from naivete, it’s from experience.)

Othered because I cannot trust I am into you for you,
And I’ll blame the TV instead of my own cultural shame
For telling me to wait for a white Prince Charming.
Maybe I can shake off the utter fear of having children,
If they can be what my heart has decided is most desirable:
Beautiful, Hapa children.

(This is messed up, I know, but bear with me
As I bare my heart
Because I will probably never see you again
So somehow, you are safer for me to tell my story.)

Othered because my ethnicity is not my identity
My parents lived to assimilate and fit in,
Cut off their languages from me (for me?),
Married outside of the homogenous norm
To them, my race is the reason
I made the school play, was accepted to that university
In their own use of the diversity token
They leave me minimized to what I cannot change, unremarkable,
Unseen.

And I am Starbucks, crop tops, avocado toast American,
Distancing myself because I am embarrassed of those Asian stereotypes,
And yet,
Not so basic,
As I want to be.

I am pumpkin spice lattes,
But also matcha green tea.
I am honor-shame culture,
But choose to grow, to be vulnerable, to fight the barriers to speak.

I am words of affirmation
Met instead with acts of service,
Navigating love languages and language barriers,
Fed by grandmothers
Who cook dish after traditional dish for me
(Even though there’s only a few I’ll really eat)
But hey – that’s love. So, I take it with me.

I am a proud product of grandparents
Who uprooted their lives for their children,
And of their children first learning to know God, love God,
Holding on to their marriage
By the skin of their teeth.
Though unintended,
I’m left with baggage,
General sins and structures –
I am desperately trying to break free.

I am a tool by which God is prying open closed doors
And shattering locked chains,
I am breaking free from the cycle
By going to therapy, making a budget,
Living in my own home –
I hope one day my sisters can join me.

I am privilege that my family could never dream of having,
Because every sacrifice they made
Pain that they endured
Barrier they overcame,
Was for me.

A step,
A step,
One terrifying step at a time
To acknowledge and name, then to grieve and reclaim this
“Otheredness”
So one day I can rejoice in all God has created me and my tan skin to be.
Because in Jesus,
In Jesus,
I am understood, from my head to my foot,
He made me Emi:
Asian American,
And free.

Photo by Nứt on Unsplash

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Emi Kanda loves good food, vulnerability, and Jesus. She grew up in a beautifully diverse suburb of Chicago and graduated from Wheaton College with a BS in Applied Health Science and a minor in Spanish. Emi is a relational, justice-oriented Christian who finds deep value in her vocation as a case worker for underprivileged communities and a high school youth group staffer. You can tune in to her shenanigans, devotionals, and Chicago-based resource highlights on Instagram.

Book Review: Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran

By Raymond Chang

R

ace is a complicated reality. The racial structures and hierarchies have been in place for so long that its permutations and manifestations are on the one hand, predictable and obvious, but on the other hand, complex and highly nuanced. Therefore, I appreciate people who are charging the way forward on race scholarship – especially from a Christian perspective.

Dr. Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism is a seminal text for those who are interested in understanding how the construction of race systematically justified domination and exploitation and how the mere existence of Asian Americans complicates the racial discourse as we know it. Tran calls all people, but more specifically Christians, towards a more faithful Christian ethic that is not beholden to the powers and principalities that preserve and promote the racial hierarchies through racial capitalism, but instead lead us towards a vision of the church that is truer to a vision of God’s Kingdom.

This is a necessary companion to Dr. Willie Jennings’ The Christian Imagination. If you found yourself blessed and transformed by the work of Jennings, you will be deeply impacted by the work of Tran. If you haven’t read Jennings, pick up both. They should be required readings in every seminary and Christian college.

Purchase your copy here today: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0197617913/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1

Here is an excerpt from Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism:

I grew up at a time in America when racism was both accepted and expected. America in the 1970s and 1980s was coming to terms with the civil rights movement, and hence awakening to the nation’s long history of colonialism, settler expansion, land enclosure, genocide, chattel slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, lynching, internment, segregation, and so on. For many parts of American life, civil rights and all that the movement stirred bore little significance, and life for them went on as it always had. At least that seemed the case for the people around me.

As a recent immigrant from Vietnam, the force of this followed me throughout my childhood. The period witnessed America’s war on drugs and the growth of the carceral state, of the ghettoization of urban life and the evisceration of rural communities, each exercised through systemic racist domination of housing, education, employment, the environment, and everything that sustains life. The period also saw the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, that political economy (with its left-branded identity politics and contraction of class considerations) born of the belief that the market and the state needed each other if elites were to survive eventualities like the civil rights movement and all it symbolized. Heady days to be sure.

Being a young Vietnamese immigrant in this period was pretty simple. You survived. In my case, that meant hiding and running from the racial bullying that chased me everywhere as our family migrated through poverty in pursuit of whatever version of the American Dream distantly directed our lives. Words like “Nip” and “Chink” daily told me who I was, that I did not belong, and that my kind were not wanted. I ended up in a lot of fistfights, sometimes after kids called me “Bruce Lee”—apparently, the irony escaped me. Back then, you did what you needed to do. Now when I think about the violence, it terrifies me, both the need to survive and the things done to survive.

In the preceding decades, before my family’s arrival, America had fought three costly wars with people who looked like me, first with Japan, then with Korea, and finally Vietnam, each with diminishing success.  As soldiers returned home to America in 1975, 120,000 Vietnamese war refugees, my family included, came with them. Even as a child I could tell that it was hard for most Americans to understand what to do with the Vietnamese showing up in their neighborhoods, schools, and churches. To them, we Asians seemed to sit somewhere between American defeat and American redemption, embodying the whole range of what the Vietnam War came to represent. Defeat or redemption—depending on the day, life as an immigrant could go either way.

As a child I suffered being Asian American at a time when Asian Americans were viewed as perilous. I had few friends, having already moved thirteen times during our first decade in America. By then I had experienced enough accepted and expected racism that race would forever color my life. I had been taught by Americans (non-White as much as White, I should say) that being Asian American was bad. I had been taught by my family that being Asian American was good, and indeed, worth fighting for, literally and otherwise. If I learned to detest those Asian Americans who looked down on Asian Americans, who were embarrassed by their own kind, likely I was projecting my own tendency for a socially taught self-hatred.

Things began to shift as my family found some semblance of financial security. My brother and sister made their way to university and college, which eased, no matter how hard I made it on myself, my own way into university and the middle class. My mom’s success as a real estate agent allowed me to stay at the same high school for four years—an eternity compared to all the change we had seen prior to that. Although my high school academic record could not outrun the difficult early years, those four years created enough of a foundation for me to find my academic and professional footing in college, and eventually within American Christianity.

Early in high school, I had a friend named Cliff. Actually, Cliff was my only friend. Among the poorer kids at Katella High School, we found each other in large part because we each had no one else. Cliff and I had only each other, but that hardly mattered to us. We made a life of it, playing games we made up, the rules of which only we knew, catching bugs in the stream running through the apartment complex where I lived, riding on the handlebars of a bike we somehow both owned, together making do as kids often do. Cliff was poor, really poor.

At the time, Cliff and his family lived in—or rather, out of—the Motel Tampico, all their worldly possessions kept in trash bags for easier transport when the motel kicked them out, as it regularly did, because they couldn’t pay the weekly rent, which they regularly couldn’t. Cliff was one of the very few Black kids at Katella, which was mostly White, increasingly Latinx, with a handful of Asian Americans, typical of many Southern Californian schools at the time.

Cliff and I had a lot in common, but some of the differences were pretty pronounced. While my family was, like many immigrant families, moving out of poverty, his family seemed stuck in a system that seemed intent on keeping Black people poor. I could look around and find others who looked like me at Katella—some, to be sure, members of gangs or dropping out of high school, but also among the academic types headed for college. Cliff looked around and saw no one like him, and the images offered by the broader society made his prospects pretty dim. We were both poor, but I, despite myself, had lots of opportunities. Cliff, despite himself, had few.

Over the years, like many friends, we drifted apart. Cliff’s family moved in and out of the motel and I found a home among the college-bound kids. Still, we always had that connection, of having found a place with each other when we had no place with others. Whenever we ran into each other, I felt that connection. Still now—decades later—I feel it.

At one point, I believe I was fifteen, Cliff asked me for help. He was being harassed by a group of racist skinheads at Katella. He told me that they regularly chased him after school, bullied him on campus, making learning impossible, and that he was scared. I remember he cried as he told me. I had seen these kids around. They never bothered me, probably because I wasn’t Black and because as a fringe group, they didn’t bother the more established groups like the kids I hung around at that point. It greatly distressed me that skinheads were picking on Cliff, but I did not know what to do. If the teachers Cliff told were powerless to protect him, what could I do? I felt as scared and helpless as I had all those years growing up and moving around. So, I did nothing. Or nothing significant. I think I told Cliff that the skinheads would move on and find someone else to pick on and that he would be okay. I told him, in other words, that he needed to survive and that he would.

Later we lost touch. I never found out what happened, never bothered to ask, perhaps scared that things had gotten worse, likely frightened by the responsibility that would come with the answers. Maybe the skinheads backed off. Perhaps Cliff ’s family moved on from Katella and his troubles. I don’t know. I only know that I did nothing, when I might have done something.

I’ve often thought about that childhood, its desperations and terrors, when thinking about whether the current conversation on race and racism gets us very far, or if it instead leaves us cornered. For a long time as an academic, the conversation’s antiracism served me well enough. I fell in, which meant focusing on racial identity, pushing for diversity, working through a White/ Black binary, and contenting myself with the idea that those it ignored would eventually get a hearing. I put aside any sense that American antiracism marginalized those already marginalized by racism or that Asian Americans troubled its dominant narratives.

Despite the internal contradictions, I held to the antiracist line of thought for the simple reason that I had already committed so much to it. I gave a ton of energy to writing about and working on issues of racial equity and diversity in my scholarship and at my university. I occupied roles in the institution that allowed me to mentor scores of students, and I made it a point to work with non-white students as often as I could. I considered it a responsibility and a privilege to use whatever advantage I had to benefit the cause of racial minorities, assuming leadership positions, serving on committees, building relationships, pressing administrators.

While neither my scholarship nor my roles specifically focused on race and racism, those topics and texts came up consistently, as they always had. I created my department’s first course on race and racism, led institutional efforts against racial bias, sent emails to provosts and presidents, pushed for hiring and retaining minority faculty. I even won the university’s “Diversity Award,” something I joked rotated between the handful of us active faculty of color. All in service to an antiracism that I thought I could not fail to follow.

Over time, however, it became harder to ignore suspicions that the way we talk about race and racism, where so much is given to racial identity, is problematic, that there is something off about the idea that who I am reduces to what I am racially. Racial identity as a basis of common life increasingly struck me as at once too easy and too hard, too easily settled and too conceptually unwieldy. I also worried that our vaunted hopes for cross-racial solidarity rested on a mistake—a belief in distinct racial kinds—that would in the end defeat itself. Mostly I thought it odd that antiracists showed so much confidence in racial identity.

But these were unformed thoughts kicking around inside my head amid what felt like settled agreements about how we should talk about race and racism. This dominant narrative held as antiracism’s sine qua non the establishing, securing, and asserting of racial identity, its self-interpreting and self-realizing singularity. It took its cues from urbane notions of diversity and representation and specialized in wokeness and whiteness, sophisticated discourses pressed into service by ordinary processes like research agendas and institutional diversity awards. Like everyone in the academy, I wanted this story to be true and just assumed that it was, no matter the minority reports suggesting otherwise. What else could I believe considering what I had already given myself to? I also sensed that others had questions, but that the reigning academic orthodoxy made it difficult for those questions to find the light of day.

The questions reached a tipping point, especially after a deep dive into the literature confirmed old suspicions and illuminated unexplored pathways. Black Marxism was a revelation, combining rigorous critical analysis with practiced commitments to liberation. So was an ethnographic turn in religious studies, which mixed easily with long-standing theological investments in radical democratic theory and the procedures of ordinary language philosophy.

Once there, provocations like that of Jay Caspian Kang opened things up: “‘Asian-American’ is a mostly meaningless term. Nobody grows up speaking Asian-American, nobody sits down to Asian-American food with their Asian-American parents and nobody goes on pilgrimages back to their motherland of Asian-America.” As did Paul Gilroy riffing on “strategic” uses of race: “I feel uncomfortable with that idea, because once some of these images, some of these rhetorics, some of these political ideas are out of the box, they are loose in the world. And it’s delusional to imagine that you can orchestrate them, even for the good.”

Now on a different path, it became increasingly clear to me that something was wrong, that our collective thinking about race and racism had grown stale, even decadent, and that the hope of developing an effectively liberative agenda that began and ended with racial identity was not only a losing proposition but a cursed one. I wondered about a different conversation, or at least other ways of entering into the current one, prior pathways that had been forgotten (or prematurely dismissed) and new thinking yet to be had.

Pondering the options, I knew enough to know that the answer could not be postracialism and its blindness to the realities of racialization. Critical theory had shown us how race had been ideologically invented for the purpose of dominative exploitation. The lesson to be learned from that discovery could not be willful ignorance of the ongoing consequences of domination. But neither could it be a renewed commitment to racial identity. The latter fails to grasp the meaning of race ideology just as the former draws the wrong conclusion from it. We would need something beyond the Scylla of postracialism and the Charybdis of doubling down on racial identity.

Pressing beyond the limited options, this book reframes conversations about race and racism from racial identity to political economy. In framing matters in terms of political economy, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism reaches back to a trusted mode of analysis that has been obscured by the prevailing antiracist orthodoxy. Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived.

Accordingly, this book invites readers into a different life with race and racism, reimagining what they are and are doing. What that life involves is laid out in the following pages. Present throughout are my family and our migration from poverty to wealth, our version of that dream still directing our lives. Informing the book’s many arguments are America’s wars with Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, and the nation’s long history of colonialism, settler expansion, land enclosure, genocide, chattel slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, lynching, internment, segregation, and so on. And there is Cliff, my powerlessness and cowardice then, and the desperations we bear and the hopes we risk. This book circles back on a story, of doing something, of acknowledging some- thing, or failing to, in light of a story I have come to live.

To view the recent conversation with Jonathan Tran by Raymond Chang and Isaiah Jeong:

Photo courtesy of Oxford University Press

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Pastor Raymond Chang is the president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, a pastor, and writer. He regularly preaches God’s Word and speaks throughout the country on issues pertaining to Christianity and culture, race and faith. He has lived throughout the world (Korea, Guatemala, Panama, Spain, China), traveled to nearly 50 countries, and currently lives in Chicagoland, serving as a campus minister at Wheaton College. Prior to entering vocational ministry, Raymond worked in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, and served in the Peace Corps in Panama. He is currently pursuing his PhD. He is married to Jessica Chang, who serves as the chief advancement and partnerships officer of the Field School.

AACC Summer 2021 Reading List

By AACC Staff & Friends

S

ummer is in full force. We hope you find the time to do the things you love during these warm summer days, such as relaxing with a well-written book! Whether you’re in the mood for a tear-jerking memoir, an enchanting fictional trilogy, or a thought-provoking theological work, AACC writers and editors have compiled a list of books from a variety of AAPI authors to enrich your summer reading. At AACC, we want to highlight and recommend books that amplify Asian American voices and speak to our experiences. In this list, you will find books from a diverse range of authors and genres that will inspire and encourage you. We hope that you will find one of these books to be a welcome addition to your summer reading list.

Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura

In Art and Faith, Makoto Fujimura explores the reality of God as the first and ultimate Creator, and the impact of this truth on our creativity as an expression of God’s extravagant and abundant love in creation. He describes how believers are uniquely invited and empowered to “co-create” with our heavenly creator as his image bearers, filled with the hope of redemption and vision of the new Creation. Drawing on the Scriptures as well as Japanese Kintsugi and other artistic and literary traditions, Fujimura suggests that this spiritual act of “making” offers deeper insight into the nature of life and the loving character of God. Regardless of your vocation, this book will encourage and inspire you to new levels of worship through creativity.

-  Grace Liu 

Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead To Lasting Connections Across Cultures by Michelle Ami Reyes

Michelle Ami Reyes brings a fresh, thoughtful, and wise voice to the ongoing conversation about bridging divides between racial and ethnic groups. Becoming All Things is a challenging read—but it's the necessary kind of challenge that provokes thought and reflection, causes me to ask why I'm reacting or pushing back on what I'm reading, and prompts me to really account for my everyday thoughts and actions. It made me uncomfortable, and I'm glad it did. This book is truly helpful and has already prompted some good conversation with friends, in addition to prompting me to begin to engage differently with folks who aren't yet friends, but could be someday.

- Jenilyn Swett

Three Mile an Hour God by Kosuke Koyama

Three Mile an Hour God by Kosuke Koyama is for the person that feels overwhelmed with the prospect of committing to an entire book. Koyama, a Japanese missionary who lived in Thailand, writes his reflections on various passages throughout the Bible. Chapters range from anywhere to 1-3 pages. It's the perfect book to slowly read over the summer, and slowness is a theme that runs throughout the entire book. Koyama begins his reflections with the reminder that God does not run. God walks, slowly, at the average walking speed of three miles an hour. His reflections touch on several topics ranging from syncretism to our dependence on technology. Throughout, Koyama reminds us that even as God slowly walks with us, we miss out on the beauty of life if we also don't slow our pace.

-  Justin Nitta 

SunLit Lands Trilogy by Matt Mikalatos

Matt Mikalatos’ SunLit Lands trilogy seamlessly bridges biblical theology, social realities, and the pursuit of justice. Set in a magical land full of dragons, mermaids, and shark people, this Christian fantasy series connects the problems of the SunLit Lands to our own, including the historical realities of slavery, immigration, and more. With fun, witty, relatable storytelling Mikalatos paints a picture of the world we so desperately need to understand.

- Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is the posthumously published memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a promising neurosurgeon on the verge of completing his residency at Stanford when his life and future is thrown into uncertainty as he is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. In the face of mortality, Kalanithi’s future and life goals are brought into question as he wrestles with the perennial question, what makes life worth living? In the spirit of writers such as the preacher of Ecclesiastes and Leo Tolstoy, Kalanithi offers a lesson in living through the vantage point of death. Wonderfully profound, theologically rich, and emotionally engaging, When Breath Becomes Air is a must-read and welcome addition to any summer reading list.

- Joshua Huver

A History of the Philippines: From Indio Bravos to Filipinos by Luis H. Francia

How old were you when you learned about the Philippine-American War or that the Philippines was colonized by Spain and then the United States? This book dives into the history of the Philippines from pre-colonial days to the present. Though this is an amazing resource for a Filipinx wanting to learn about their ethnic heritage, this is a book for everyone. By including perspectives and parts of stories that were left out of our history textbooks in the US, it challenges the way we view European and American history and adds insight to discussions about racism, colonialism, militarism, and even missiology.

-  Esther Guy

Halo-Halo: A poetic mix of culture, history, identity, revelation, and revolution by Justine Ramos

This book is a work of art. Through her slam-style poetry, Ramos gives insight into the experiences and psyche of the Filipinx diaspora. At times, her words feel like lament. Other times, like revolutionary anthems. Ramos doesn’t just describe, she makes you feel. For example, in her poem, Ferdinand Magellan, she talks about sitting in a history class as the teacher talks about the famous explorer being “killed by savages in the Philippines,” and you can feel the tension in her body and the wrestling with her identity as the other students in the class stare at her.

- Esther Guy

From A Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology by Sang Hyun Lee

From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology by Korean-American Theologian Sang Hyun Lee beautifully weaves together Asian American existence with many key theological topics. Lee ultimately witnesses to the God who possesses an Asian American face, who is present in solidarity with Asian Americans, and who loves Asian Americans in and through their particularities. Not only does Lee give full voice to the trauma and pain of Asian American’s (marginality), but also to the beautiful discipleship that can take place in Asian American existence (liminality). Personally, this text helped me realize that my Asianness is not something God desires to erase like American society, but rather, my Asianness is something deeply loved by God. It is Lee's advocating work, embodied in this text, that is credited for the creation of the Asian American Program at Princeton Seminary. I believe this book is a must-read for Asian American Christians.

- Isaiah R. Hobus 

Prey Tell: Why we silence women who tell the truth and how everyone can speak up by Tiffany Bluhm 

In recent years, it’s become evident that the systems in place that are designed to silence women who are victims of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault are not simply outliers and subversive means of oppression in a larger culture of goodness, but rather, the water in which we all swim. Tiffany Bluhm’s book Prey Tell not only examines why and how this has come to be, both in church settings and beyond, but also concludes with a model of true allyship, pulling in the biblical precedent of Nathan’s boldness in confronting David with his own abuses of power. Weaving in personal stories and gospel truths, this book is a confrontation and a call to action anchored in biblical ethos and logos that every person should take to heart.

- Denise Kruse

Photo by Link Hoang on Unsplash