One thing led to another, and this seed has bloomed into a book that will be released into the world! We Mend with Gold: An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American Christianity, will be out with Broadleaf Books on April 7th, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the many, many people who guided me through the process and were crucial to this book’s existence, including those who let me tell parts of their stories here.

I’ve been so moved to hear from early readers who received review copies from my publisher that they’ve resonated deeply with the book and have found it to be a validating, valuable, and invigorating companion as they reflect on their spiritual journeys and seek a path that integrates their heritage, upholds their intellectual integrity and moral conscience, and leads us to deeper love for God and neighbor.

Preorder numbers are critical for helping bookstores and libraries determine whether to carry the book, so please consider preordering before April 7 at Bookshop.org (the proceeds go to whichever favorite indie bookstore you select) or wherever you get your books for yourself or a friend!

I’m also going on a small book tour to get the word out about We Mend with Gold, and I would absolutely love to see you if you’re nearby. Check out the schedule below, and please note that all events are free except the P&T Knitwear event, which is ticketed—but first 20 registrants are free with the code GOLD20, so snag yours now here!

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Publisher’s Weekly generously gave We Mend with Gold a starred review, and I’m also grateful for the early endorsements of many mentors and heroes.

Other ways to support the book:

• Invite others to read it with you! I’ll gladly drop in virtually to do a private Q&A with you and your book group.

• Leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon to help other readers determine whether the book might be for them

• Tell five friends who might need this book about it, or spread the word in your church / social / community / work spaces

• Ask your public library to carry it

I hope to see you soon if you’re in any of the book tour areas, and hope above all that the words in We Mend with Gold might be a balm and an encouragement.

With gratitude,

Kristin

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For most of my adult life, I’ve attended the same church. It’s a church I love deeply, but I can’t help being curious—what would it look like to be part of a more radical church, one whose DNA is imprinted more prominently with walking alongside the least of these, working against inequalities, and aligning itself with God’s preferential option for the poor?

While National Book Award-shortlisted CIRCLE OF HOPE: A RECKONING WITH LOVE, POWER, AND JUSTICE IN AN AMERICAN CHURCH by Eliza Griswold isn’t meant to answer that question, it nevertheless gave me a glimpse into an alternate universe. Through Griswold’s skillful immersion reporting, in which she embeds herself in the Circle of Hope community for several years, readers gain access into this Philadelphia-based congregation founded in the 1990s by Rod and Gwen White, the kind of evangelical leftists (technically Anabaptists) who might be called hippies for Christ (they lived in a Christian commune in California prior to their Philly days). Shane Claiborne was a prominent church member, to give you a taste of its social justice orientation. Over time, Circle of Hope expanded into four connected congregations with four different pastors, and here’s where the story gains friction.

Tensions first flare when Rod White steps down from formal leadership, but the four remaining pastors—Julie, Rachel, Jonny, and Ben—feel he has not quite ceded power sufficiently (a complicated catch: Ben is his son, and is hurt by the blame cast on his father). Alongside this, the pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020 happen, and differences in opinion among the four about how to handle COVID precautions as well as conversations about race inflame already-festering wounds, especially as they combine into a joint, live-streamed Sunday service and have to lead their four congregations as one body.

Two things struck me from this narrative. The first is how quickly the lack of hierarchy among Julie, Rachel, Jonny, and Ben became a problem. Collaborative decision-making without a clear process, hours-long Zoom meetings rehashing the same arguments (my worst nightmare), and the resulting roundabout power struggles seem to have caused the downfall of Circle of Hope (spoiler: the church no longer exists) as much as any substantial divisions about matters of race. Perhaps it’s not hierarchy that they needed, but an explicit system for how to resolve disagreements and run meetings. Failures of organization and process: unsexy, but critical.

The second thing that came across was the prominence of ego, especially among the two men. Jonny is the only person of color among the pastors (according to the U.S. Census Bureau, he’s white, but he grew up facing racist comments as an Egyptian American kid and Griswold refers to him as a POC) and ends up clashing with Ben frequently. To try to cast blame is to miss the point of Griswold’s book (I wrote in my notes, “Everyone’s right!”), but the weaponization of identity seemed rather stark. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, as I think certain voices should be privileged in certain conversations—but with this privilege comes responsibility. For what it’s worth, Circle of Hope’s (few) Black members did not fall neatly on one side of the Ben/Jonny dispute or even the racial reckoning disagreements.

You’ll have to read the book to get a better glimpse into the nuances of how this all went down; Pulitzer Prize-winner Griswold relays the story in a gripping way, though I had a pit in my stomach the entire time. The feeling I was left with as I finished reading was a deep sadness. That this church, founded as a spark of resistance against capitalist, individualist America (and an increasingly capitalistic, individualistic American church), a church dedicated to living amidst and ministering to the poor, could get consumed by internecine squabbles—it’s a testament to how we’re all sinful, how we all need Jesus, and how sometimes even loving Jesus together isn’t enough to overcome that first bit.

It was with some skepticism that I then turned to Hahrie Han’s UNDIVIDED: THE QUEST FOR RACIAL SOLIDARITY IN AN AMERICAN CHURCH. Like Griswold, Han follows the trajectory of four people, members of a very different community named Crossroads, a predominantly-white evangelical megachurch in Cincinatti. On the surface, this seems like a much less promising milieu in which to do racial justice work. Yet, roused by the stirring speech and leadership of a Black pastor, Chuck Mingo, and a group of dedicated congregants, Crossroads develops a 6-week antiracism program named Undivided that lays the groundwork for heart transformation.

In her work as a political scientist, Han first stumbles upon Crossroads when she’s investigating an unusual phenomenon: in 2016, Cincinatti voters passed a ballot measure supporting universal preschool (focused on poor, and in this case Black, communities), even when many of them also voted for Trump. Why? Again and again, sources point her to Undivided as the catalyst for drumming up support for this ballot initiative.

As Han tries to tease out what makes Undivided distinctive—how it succeeds where so many other DEI trainings fail—she finds that it facilitates the development of vulnerable relationships across race via its racially-mixed small group structure that calls for authenticity and honesty. It supplies knowledge by teaching participants about systemic racism, but it also builds the foundation for longterm relationships that will keep participants accountable to the goal of racial justice even after the program ends.

Han beautifully recounts specifics of how Undivided changes participants’ lives, from a white Ohio prisons communications officer who eventually feels he must resign to avoid compromising his commitment to racial justice, to a white social worker who speaks up and is ostracized when she sees racist systems affecting clients at her rural county job. The way they tell their stories, their belief in God’s grace gave them courage to risk jobs and relationships.

There’s something distinctive about Crossroads as a church, too. It’s founded on a notion of “belonging before belief,” a refrain that resonates strongly with how Jesus approached life, and one that can teach us not just how to be inclusive church communities, but how to go about the work of antiracism. How quickly we cast people out for not having the “right” beliefs—not only from religious institutions, but also from secular spaces governed by their own set of ideas about which convictions are legitimate versus which are not.

Of note, not everyone who comes through Undivided leaves irrevocably altered. Some groups don’t gel. The broader church of Crossroads and its leadership offer inconsistent support for (and sometimes directly oppose) Undivided’s racial justice initiatives. It’s a self-selected set of folks who participate in Undivided, not the whole church, making it a different endeavor altogether than what Circle of Hope faced.

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Yet I can’t help making some comparisons between Crossroads/Undivided and Circle of Hope. Having been formed by both types of spaces—Midwest colorblindness and East Coast elite—the major difference that I see is that in the Undivided community, the combination of white humility and Black forbearance was essential to moving forward together. In the success stories, we see white people come ready to listen and learn and not defend themselves. We see Black participants willing to forgive off-color remarks and being slow to take offense (though also firmly stating when something is not okay). There is no hewing to political correctness. There is no pressure to speak in the academic tones of woke discourse. There is no posturing to be the one who’s “right.” There is merely people meeting one another as humans who want to understand one another better.

Does this imply that people of color yet again carry the burden of being patient, compromising, and bearing with slights? I know that’s troubling to many, especially since it’s past time for our country and our churches to repent of and make reparations for racism. But what other way forward is there? Will white folks get there on their own (I doubt it)? Not all BIPOC folks are called to do this kind of deeply relational work of changing hearts one at a time: We also need the prophetic voices and activists, the provocateurs and the firebrands. And need I say once again the crucial ingredient of white humility? But thank God for those who, like Pastor Chuck and the Undivided participants, stick it out on the unglamorous long road of obedience, walking alongside people who don’t initially “get it” but then slowly over time start to understand the pervasiveness and destructiveness of racism.

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Current antiracism discourse, especially what I see promoted by white progressives, does not value Christlikeness—and this, I worry makes it ineffective. Being a servant, not reacting to insults, loving our enemies—all of this runs counter to today’s demands, especially in online spaces (though you just have look back to the Civil Rights era to find no shortage of leaders who tried to model their lives on Jesus). What would it look like to let our words and actions to be formed first by Christ? I fear this post makes it sound like I don’t believe in the aims of antiracism; I do, with all my heart. But these two books show that how we get there matters.

I would love for more people to read both of these books so you can tell me what you think! I’m worried that I’ve drawn the wrong lessons from these dual narratives, so please let me know if you’ve come to different interpretations.

It’s hard to change hearts and minds under a tone of condescension and condemnation, so we need to remember, in church and in antiracism spaces: Belonging before belief. I’ll close with a quote from UNDIVIDED that I’ve been turning over in my head: “What is justice but the belief that everyone deserves grace?”

In solidarity,

Kristin

P.S. Thank you FSG Books/Macmillan Audio and Knopf /Penguin Random House Audio for the gifted copies of these frame-shifting books! If you want the CliffNotes version of Griswold’s book, here’s her New Yorker article, but honestly, you should read both of these books in full. They’re fantastic.

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Lament is having a heyday in some evangelical and post-evangelical subcultures, and for good reason. It’s a corrective to the triumphalism of American Christianity as well as a necessary response to the pain and evil of both current day and historical events.

Those who are suffering have always known the power of lament, though.

I can’t claim that I’ve ever truly suffered, given that my life has always been comfortable. Yet minimizing my own struggles because I don’t want to appear callous to the world’s tragedies is not an honest accounting, either. Emotional pain and mental anguish and physical exhaustion and spiritual desolation are real, and we would feel less alone if we talked about these things more.

Freshman year of college—honestly, most of college—was one such time for me. In my last post, I wrote about taking a course called The English Bible during my freshman fall, and how it almost broke my faith, though over the course of years, the disillusionment it granted me became a path to a more authentic belief.

But one thing it did give me in the moment was the New Revised Standard Version of Lamentations Chapter 3. I had never read the NRSV edition of the Bible before, and in my evangelical upbringing, I’d only heard verses 22-23 taken out of context as a praise of God’s goodness: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning, great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23 NIV).

But read in context, they were so much more powerful.

Consider the verses leading up to them, in particular:

“He has filled me with bitterness, he has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’ The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.” -Lamentations 3:15-20 NRSV

That passage gave words to the turmoil of my soul in those days: bereft, yes, and bowed down. Throw in some wormwood and gall for good measure. I don’t know if I had ever encountered such honesty in Scripture—not that other parts weren’t true, but the writer of Lamentations offered up a kind of vulnerability I had never seen before.

For a long while, this was one of the only passages of the Bible that I could stomach reading. And I could stomach reading—indeed, I could find hope in—the verses immediately following that passage only because I trusted the devastated soul who wrote verses 15-20.

Verses 21 reminds me of the modulation from minor key to major key, setting up verses 22-23:

“But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” -Lamentations 3:21-23 NRSV

That entire chapter of Lamentations remains one of my favorite passages of Scripture. I return to it, over and over, in times of sadness or unbelief or hopelessness.

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Thus, it was with great anticipation that I finally read Soong-Chan Rah’s Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, a meditation on Lamentations, earlier this year. First published in 2015, this is yet another book that illustrates how Rah has often been ahead of his times.

He writes that the American church has lost touch with the Scriptural imperative to lament. Instead, we focus solely on celebration and praise, leading to an unbalanced and dishonest spirituality.

Our disconnection from lament is a disconnection from history, as well as a discomfort with unpleasant emotions, be they shame, guilt, or sadness. We deny that others have suffered, particularly the Indigenous peoples from whom our nation’s lands were stolen and the Black people upon whose unpaid labor our nation’s wealth was amassed.

We don’t lament over our country’s sinful foundations and the American church’s complicity because we don’t want to admit that we’ve been beneficiaries (those of us who aren’t Indigenous or Black, that is). We like to think that we are self-made people, historically untethered, starting from the ground up. Self-examination is not our nation’s favorite pasttime.

Yet Rah forces us to look critically at the ills of our nation and at our own role in them:

We are content to stay on the plane of abstraction because it does not implicate our own selves. Rah writes,

“We write checks to end human trafficking but lack concern for how our demand for cheap, disposable clothing generates a larger system of exploitation. We forget that hunger in Africa has any connection to the history of Western coloniailism from which we in the West have significantly benefitted. We are oblivious to the need for corporate responsibility to address colonial abuses in previous centuries. ...We abstract injustice, allowing ourselves to believe we no longer have a direct hand in it.”

Throughout the book, he reminds us that there is a better way, as modeled by the writer of Lamentations, to remember our sullied history, confess our complicity, lament and grieve over the pain that has been caused, and make reparations. If we allowed more voices to shape the discourse in the American church about race and history, the church wouldn’t be stuck in such a willfully ignorant place.

Mirroring exactly what Rah argues in the book, growing up, I had only been taught the glory of Lamentations 3:22-23, without the teeth-gnashing and torment of the first part of the chapter.

We want the joy without the suffering, the celebration without the grind. We want to skip ahead to the good parts.

But separated from the human anguish of verses 1-21, verses 22-23 can read like a platitude. They’re a Hallmark greeting card, divested of their moral courage.

Lamentations doesn’t try to silence the suffering. It gives space for grievance and rage and bitterness. If the author of Lamentations eventually arrives at faith, it’s a hard-won faith, a faith that has traveled to the abyss and back.

—

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Recently, I read Anna Gazmarian’s book, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, in which she mentions Rah’s Prophetic Lament in passing. Her memoir feels fitting to review alongside Rah’s book, because it also contends with the church’s failure to deal well with suffering—in Gazmarian’s case, with doubt and mental illness.

While I enjoyed her capable storytelling and appreciated her shining a light on mental illness (and related strongly with how allergic she became to certain Christian ways of speaking), I wanted more substance, especially about why she didn’t entirely turn away from faith. I wish she had looked to Christians of color more for spiritual nourishment, but I understand that may not be part of her story, as important as it is to mine—it just seems like a missed opportunity to highlight how there have always been saints who resist being co-opted by the halls of power. Then again, this is not a very political analysis of power in the church; it’s truly just Gazmarian telling her moving story. I appreciate that she normalizes doubt and mental health struggles, and her openness about her treatment journey for bipolar disorder is refreshing (especially for a book about faith).

This would be an excellent introduction for someone who is starting to question evangelicalism and could use a friendly, relatable voice to journey with. After you read Devout, I’d recommend all of Rachel Held Evans’ books, Soong-Chan Rah’s The Next Evangelicalism, and—oh wait, I already put together a whole post of these recs.

Which authors have been helpful for you in your doubt / lament / faith journey?

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Recalling my freshman year of college fills me with a sort of pity for the naive, idealistic, bright-eyed girl from Iowa who believed that goodness and integrity were values that reigned supreme. How excruciatingly slowly Harvard will disabuse you of this notion, I want to tell her.

But disillusionment, which for many years felt like A Very Bad Thing, now feels like a necessary part of my journey: a triple disillusionment regarding the way the world works, the faith of my youth, and the Asian American Dream, a shattering of the false in order to clear soil for planting new seeds.

One accelerant towards that disillusionment was a class I took my freshman fall. When I found out I could fulfill a core English requirement by taking The English Bible, I immediately signed up. Read my Bible like a good Christian while getting course credit? Win-win!

Projecting over the heads of hundreds of students, Professor Robert Kiely’s sonorous voice filled the lecture hall with expositions of Genesis, Ruth, and the Gospels. I was captivated by his storytelling and exegesis; he read and interacted with Scripture from an entirely different posture than the pastors and Bible study leaders of my childhood. Professor Kiely held Scripture in high regard; even, perhaps, considered it the Word of God, but he did not teach it as literally true.

He resembled no Christian I had met before, as he didn’t view Scripture as infallible, but he had a reverence for the Bible that I couldn’t place. He taught us about the various potential human writers of Scripture and the similarities of the Hebrew Bible to other ancient texts. I couldn’t figure him out. (I later found out that he’s a Benedictine oblate, which goes to show how narrowly my evangelical-informed mind viewed the Christian world).

Yet given how calcified my conceptions were at the time of truth vs. heresy, Biblically-sound vs. unorthodox, and right vs. wrong, Professor Kiely’s persuasive reading of Jonah as fable and Job as parable shook the pillars of my faith: What if the Bible wasn’t literally true? Given Protestants’ disproportionate emphasis on the Bible as a (if not the) primary way God is revealed to us, this sent me spiraling. What could I even trust any more?

My relationship with the Bible changed after that course. The problem was that despite my doubts about its reliability, I didn’t want to discard it entirely. There were passages that continued to astound me with their wisdom, beauty, and grace. And Scripture contains the story of Jesus, who remained a life-altering presence. I just couldn’t get behind the inductive Bible study that was popular in evangelical spaces at the time (and today), where we’d use different color pens to highlight key words and patterns and attempt to draw meaning from the fact that the word “drink” is mentioned four times here and “sheep” is mentioned four times there. I went through the motions regardless because I wasn’t taught any other model of interacting with Scripture.

Over the years, there have been some limited ways that I’ve found that help me read the Bible in a life-giving way, but it’s still been difficult to contend with passages in Scripture that seem to excuse genocide or violence or patriarchy.

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Enter Marilynne Robinson’s recent book, Reading Genesis. Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel Gilead, has long been one of my all-time favorite writers. From the beginning of Reading Genesis, she names theodicy as the primary problem that readers of Scripture must wrestle with. Drawing parallels and contrasts between Scripture and two Babylonian texts that are often compared to Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, Robinson shows that it is actually revolutionary for the Bible to describe a God who is good and who cares for humans.

Evil and pain are prevalent both in today’s world and in the world of Genesis, but what separates the Hebrew Bible from other ancient texts is the promulgation of a singular, loving, Creator. Yet how does the Bible reconcile an omnipotent and benevolent God with the persistence of evil? Whereas the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish never claim goodness for their gods, Scripture insists on it.

Robinson doesn’t seem interested in proofs. She invites the reader into her interpretation of Scripture, but is comfortable admitting where mystery lingers. Her answer to the question of theodicy, then, is that we humans do not have the ability to see God’s intentions. What appears to be tragic and awful now may work out for good—but perhaps not on a human timescale.

Robinson’s perspective reminds me of the Chinese parable, 塞翁失馬, first recorded in the Huainanzi in the 2nd century BCE, about a farmer who loses his horse. You may have heard of it: A farmer’s horse runs away, and his neighbors pity him, saying, What bad luck! But the farmer’s father says, Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck? And in a series of events, the farmer’s fortune flip-flops, such that what initially appears to be a devastating event turns out to be life-saving.

The Daoist 無爲 (wu wei, or non-action) posture exemplifies acceptance and serenity in the face of inconstant circumstances. In Robinson’s take, our equanimity comes not merely from knowing that the capricious winds of fortune may reverse day to day, week to week, or year to year, but in trusting that God has both benevolent intentions towards humankind and that God has the power to carry out those intentions, as invisible as God’s hands may be to our eyes.

We don’t always see this play out even within the stories of the Bible. Neither the shocking evil nor the hapless blunders that are made in many of the narratives in Genesis are not a reflection of God, but of humanity—a result of God’s hands-off approach.

Thus, those thorny passage of Scripture are not prescriptive, but rather they are an accounting of the events of the time and the imperfect people involved. For example, Robinson explains Lot’s behavior—offering his young daughters to an angry mob hungry for sex in lieu of letting the mob hurt Lot’s guests—as “a failure to know what righteousness would be in this situation.” This line is so powerful because it is relatable; we’ve all been there. We can look at Lot’s decision and shudder, but who of us hasn’t been in an impossible moral quandary before? Still, Robinson makes clear that God is not condoning Lot’s choice in this story; after all, Scripture is a record of humanity—fallible, willful, and wrong as often as it is faithful, humble, and good.

I wonder if part of my discomfort in my younger years with the nuanced and gritty narratives of Scripture was the result of Christian nationalism whitewashing the origin stories of our country, leading to the belief that everything good must be completely good. Triumphalism and exceptionalism reigned in my conception of America, and thus, shouldn’t those hold true of God’s people, the Israelites?

But God is not a Christian nationalist (or any nationalist) kind of God. Rather than being interested in saving face, God allows Scripture to accurately portray the very mixed record of humanity, even the foibiles of the people God calls God’s own.

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In fact, God’s responses to these human failures is what Robinson highlights most in Reading Genesis. It’s striking that God does not punish the wrongdoers of Scripture as they deserve, and this happens again and again throughout Genesis.

For those of us who can easily see grace in the story of Jesus but find it harder to unearth in the Old Testament, Robinson shows with example after example how God holds back in order to allow humanity to persist and to meet God.

Listening to Reading Genesis (I partly listened and partly read the physical book), I felt something within me revive, akin to how I felt when I first read Rachel Held Evans, but Robinson reached to the literary part of my soul. Robinson writes about Scripture with elegance and wisdom, her sentences complex and precise in a way that reminds me of Jonathan Tran’s, their intellects barely able to be contained in language.

It’s been 20 years since I first heard Scripture spoken of as literature. Whereas at the time, considering Scripture as literature almost broke my faith, ironically, now, reading the Bible as literature the way Robinson does helps me accept Genesis for what it is, not a series of prescriptive commands nor a record of heroic men, but the story of the faithful presence and the forebearance of a loving Creator who does not treat us as our misdeeds deserve. Over the years, my receptiveness to traditional Biblical commentary has diminished, turned off, I suppose, by too many contrived arguments or pat answers or tenuous connections, so I’m grateful that Robinson helps me approach the text with an open heart. I can trust her, it feels, because she’s not bending herself out of shape to prove a point.

Robinson writes, “I am as intent on magnifying the Lord as if I were a painter or composer, but my first obligation in commenting on the text is to be faithful to the text.”

This honesty—both regarding her intentions and her obligations—is compelling.

“No one wants to be found among the credulous,” Robinson writes, and I feel this in my bones. I am grateful for the disillusionment of my young adult days because the credulity of my youth was built on not asking tough questions, the kind of credulity that was fated to shatter. Yet here I am, found among the credulous once again, and I’m okay with it. It’s a credulousness borne of lonely wandering and throwing my tennis ball of a question at God again and again and again and having it bounce back and back and back and peering into canyons and crevasses and chasms and finally accepting that there is no certainty, there will always be mysteries, and that I have to make a choice.

Somewhere within me, I have hope that goodness will prevail. It’s the core message of Robinson’s Reading Genesis, which has renewed that hope in me. Even when it seems impossible, even when we can’t imagine how.

Someday.

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Mimi Khúc opens her treatise on Asian American unwellness with a bold claim: that current psychiatric models of mental health are failing us, especially along the axes of race and ableism. Instead, she offers up what she calls a pedagogy of unwellness to emphasize that “being unwell is not a failure, that our unwellness is not our fault, that we live in a world that differentially abandons us.”

Grounded in the years she worked as an adjunct professor in the Asian American studies program at the University of Maryland, her treatise sheds particular insight into the pressures of academia. Off the bat, she names suicide as the ultimate price of our society’s unwillingness to grapple with the violent structures underlying mental unwellness (Asian Americans have the highest rate of suicidal ideation among college students by race).

Especially as my own kids approach their teen years, I appreciate this openness, knowing how, to widely varying degrees, my friends and I ruminated on the idea at that age (and for some of us, beyond). “People want to die because their lives feel unlivable,” Khúc writes. “Suicide is not an ‘insane’ response to a ‘sane’ world; it’s a desperate response to an unbearable existence.”

Universities are designed to generate unwellness, she argues, and from personal experience, it’s hard to disagree. This quote struck me:

Unwellness is to be a good student (!). Yes, this tracks. As a pre-med in college, I drove myself into the dirt. The glossier my transcript and CV became, the more splintered and ragged and utterly exhausted my soul and spirit grew. I fed my ambition with my very self. Was it worth it? can only be asked because I survived.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but we are socialized into it. Khúc writes, “Our love language is buying into the ideology of the American Dream, working ourselves to death, and asking our children to work themselves to death to achieve ideal personhood in that ideology. Our love language is model minoritization.” These are bold claims, and while I know of families for whom this is not true, it hits in the gut for many others.

Crucial to Khúc’s argument, though, is that this pressure to succeed and perform is not intrinsic to Asian culture or Asian families. Rather, these dynamics are created by the fractures of migration and the need to survive economically in a new land:

But nothing satisfies this debt. In its own twisted logic, the more successful the child is, the greater the debt that accrues (because you owe that success to your parents). The debt is always there, hanging over your head.

We can work hard at this for a time. We can give up parts of ourselves to conform. We decide how much agency we can go without. Some of us find a “livable balance,” as she calls it. But finding a livable balance is “not the same thing as ‘getting out.’ When students ask about getting out, they are asking not about a difference in degree but a difference in kind, not about being less indebted but being actually debt free.”

Therein lies the explosive, controversial challenge that Khúc issues to us:

We don’t just hurt them once (this would be cast as one-time misbehavior), but over and over again, “a sustained commitment to injury,” because this is the only way of getting out. The intention is not to inflict pain; the intention is to assert selfhood, but the pain is a byproduct.

Julia Lee writes about this tension in her seminal book, Biting the Hand: “Announcing that ‘I want to be a poet!’ or ‘I want to be an actor!’ is like saying [to your parents], ‘I want to kill you and throw your body into a river.’ What do I say to these students? Do what you want and risk killing your parents? Or do what your parents say and risk killing yourself?”

Khúc is clear: We choose life for ourselves. This causes many of us to cringe. We love our parents. Our parents love us. How can we betray them? How can we hurt them?

But let’s examine this love. Khúc quotes her friend erin: “The fact of parental love does not obviate the need for us to examine and understand the nature of its power, its logic and technologies.” We have to ask ourselves, “What does love look and feel like in Asian American families? Is this the kind of love we want?”

The second generation is constantly asked to be grateful for (and attempt to repay) the first generation’s suffering, but does the first generation recognize the suffering of the second generation? Unless there’s a “wake-up call” (like a suicide attempt), the answer is often no.

Khúc acknowledges that she hasn’t fully figured out how to have these kinds of conversations with her parents (and frankly, parents aren’t always willing to listen). In the meantime, she advises divesting from model minoritization as survival, and creating healthier boundaries.

I’ll add that we need to break the cycle as we become parents ourselves. I find myself constantly relearning what qualities I want to encourage in my children. If unchecked, my tendency is to push my kids harder: if they’re not metaphorically out of breath, they’re not working hard enough. After all, this is how I was raised: vast heaping quantities of hard work, muscling past limits, not giving up. And perhaps there is value to that.

But if we’re constantly twisting the screws till the board cracks, there will be permanent damage. I, for one, am not unscathed. Is this what I want for my children?

—

Dear Elia pairs well with Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, Tessa Hulls’ Feeding Ghosts, and Julia Lee’s Biting the Hand, memoirs that examine Asian American mental health, parental relationships, and/or social identity in vulnerable, thoughtful ways.

I’d love to know what you think: To live healthy, whole lives, must we hurt our immigrant parents? How have you navigated this? Have you found a “livable balance” or is that “balance” eating away at your selfhood? Have your parents been receptive to conversations about this? How do you handle parenting, if you have children?

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In first grade, I was part of our local Girl Scouts troop for all of one year. We met in the basement of the Presbytarian church down the street from my elementary school, and I remember almost nothing from those weekly gatherings, other than I liked earning badges.

One moment is seared into my memory, though. We were crafting wooden peg dolls, adding hair, painting on eyes, and gluing on fabric to make dresses. The volunteer mom helping with the activity handed me curly dark locks to adhere to my doll’s head. Being a very shy, don’t-rock-the-boat kind of kid, it took all my gumption to indicate to her that I didn’t want the dark hair. I wanted the blonde hair for my doll.

“Are you sure?” she asked, somewhat quizzically. In this version of my memory, I paint her as a kind, supportive mom who wanted me to appreciate my own beauty. Childhood me was very sure. I wanted to take home the prettiest doll possible, and even at six years of age, I knew that meant she had to have blonde hair. In any case, my shiny, straight black hair looked nothing like the dark brown mess of tangles the mom had initially offered.

That doll lived in my room for years. I didn’t have many frivolous toys growing up, so I treasured the objects that I had. Yet the doll brought up complicated feelings each time I looked at it. Her blondeness reminded me of my own lack.

I don’t know how, at age six, I had already picked up on the superiority of blonde hair (and, by extension, whiteness). Not until many years later did I encounter a fashion magazines or start listening to pop music, so I can only ascribe this consciousness as coming from the very air of my Midwestern town (and, by extension, America). Kids—even oblivious ones like me—have a deep knowledge of what’s valued in society.

Last week, as I was re-reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (first on audio, since she narrates the book herself, then on paper), I was reminded why Morrison is the greatest American writer of my lifetime. She captures this self-contempt—what we now call internalized racism—with clarity, empathy, and nuance through the character of Pecola Breedlove.

Pecola’s yearning for blue eyes, like my idealization of blonde hair, is rooted in a basic understanding that this is what America esteems; this is what it takes to earn recognition. Yet our similarities end there, because Pecola also needs those blue eyes to defend her against poverty, sexual assault, degradation, and anti-Blackness—forces with which I’ve never had to contend. Morrison wrote in the foreword that she chose the character of Pecola because a young Black girl is the most vulnerable of all of society’s members. By scaffolding Pecola’s story with the backstories of Pecola’s mother, father, and neighbors, she demonstrates how systemic power imbalances and individual responses sow generational trauma. It’s not just Pecola, she implies. This is a pervasive problem with how our entire society operates.

Andy Crouch once wrote of Mark Helprin’s 1991 800-page novel, A Soldier of the Great War, “I thought later, and still am tempted to think, that I would never fully trust any pastor who had not read it.” He caveats this statement, acknowledging that there are so many good books in the world that it would be unreasonable to make this claim. His comment got under my skin, though (after all, Crouch is an evangelical mover-and-shaker and his words matter), so several years ago, I read A Soldier of the Great War to see if it’s really all that. It’s a solid novel, and I can see why Crouch likes it—it’s rare that God and faith are mentioned with sincerity in literary fiction, and Helprin serves up a decidedly moral world.

But I can’t help but wonder: What if pastors were encouraged, instead, to read Toni Morrison?

Helprin resonates with evangelical leaders like Crouch because most of them, demographically speaking, can recognize themselves in him and his characters. What if they read Morrison? In the foreword to The Bluest Eye, she writes that the need to assert racial beauty is a reaction “against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.” One way to fight that outside gaze is by choosing her language in such a way that “full comprehension” of The Bluest Eye relies on “codes embedded in black culture.” How would it feel for non-Black pastors to read Morrison and be the Other, to be on the outside?

Morrison’s work is every bit as informed by her faith (she identified as Catholic for most of her life) as Helprin (who is Jewish), and her novels are rigorous, earnest, and wrestle with the deepest tensions of human behavior and existence. Yet she exceeds Helprin in laying bare the power dynamics of our world. Where Helprin’s protagonist grapples with abstract questions of beauty, love, and mortality (all valuable, to be sure), Morrison’s characters also contend with subjugation, racism, and injustice, not against the dramatic backdrop of World War I, but in their daily lives in Lorain, Ohio. There’s something electric in how starkly Morrison paints these invisible forces, forces that I wish more pastors addressed in their sermons.

It often comes down to a question of power.

I was in a conversation with a faith leader whom I respect, expressing that I felt morally conflicted attending my church, when he pushed back, explaining the importance of differentiation and how I needed to be comfortable holding a different opinion on certain issues than the church leadership. I wanted to tell him, it’s not about differentiation. I’m comfortable being friends with people with whom I disagree. But this is a question of power.

Church leaders have power: power to shape opinions, power to make policy, power to signal who’s welcome and who’s not. My advocacy to church leaders is not about my need to make everyone believe the same things I do, but rather springs out of a hope that those in power will choose the path that (in my mind) lifts up the marginalized and the outcasts.

I’m not sure if this faith leader was truly unaware of the huge power imbalances at play when he counseled me to essentially agree to disagree, but I find that those with power often don’t want to acknowledge power dynamics. To counteract this, I’ve tried to be aware of my own power in relationships and in organizations, because while I joke that I’m a nobody (aren’t we all?), I hold power in many ways: through my job, my education, my financial resources, my connections, and my citizenship. Pretending that I don’t have power only hurts those who would benefit from my solidarity.

We don’t like to talk about power, but it exists. And reading Toni Morrison makes us confront that power. One of her greatest fears with The Bluest Eye was that readers would be led “into the comfort of pitying [Pecola] rather than into an interrogation of themselves.” Let’s interrogate ourselves, where we fit into these power structures, and how we can level them.

As Morrison said, “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

What’s your favorite Toni Morrison novel?

P.S. I love this ode to Morrison.

P.P.S. If you’re a pastor and you’ve read Toni Morrison, yay! Don’t come at me! I’m not saying that pastors don’t ever read her, but I wish that more would. Also if you read her in high school, that doesn’t count.

P.P.P.S. I realize the irony of mentioning Andy Crouch in a post about power as he has written a book about power and yes, I’ve read it. My mention of Crouch is solely about his Helprin comment.

P.P.P.P.S. The Bluest Eye is about *so much more* than what I’m able to discuss in one essay, so if you haven’t read it, please do!

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My first publications

When I started becoming more serious about writing for public consumption last summer, Sojourners and Christianity Today were two publications that I dreamed of writing for someday: Sojourners because of its longstanding commitment to faith and social justice, and CT because it remains the most influential media outlet in the evangelical community. While my relationship to said evangelical community is complicated, I hold deep optimism that the pen contains power, and my roots are still a part of me.

Last week, two articles I’ve been working on were published. The first, for Sojourners, is an exploration of Asian American Christianity inspired by Jonathan Tran’s book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism. If you’re interested in reading it, you can find it here, entitled, “Searching for a Faithful Response to My ‘Privileged Otherness’”.

I was floored to see that the article was accompanied both in the print magazine and online by these gorgeous illustrations from the incredibly talented Julia Kuo, who really captured the spirit and setting of the piece. If you’re not familiar with Kuo, please check out her work! She illustrated RISE: A POP HISTORY OF ASIAN AMERICA FROM THE NINETIES TILL NOW, among many other books. What a gift!

The other article that came out last week in Christianity Today is the most vulnerable piece I’ve ever written. It’s about adoptive parenting, and I’m thankful that both adoptees and adoptive parents have reached out to let me know they resonate with it, because I’m still feeling very raw about sharing the depths of my monstrous soul with the world. My hope with writing honestly about this is to rip away the curtain of silence and shame that comes from parenting struggles. We need a more nuanced conversation about adoption, especially in Christian spaces, and I hope this moves the needle a bit on that. You can find the essay here, entitled “Adoption Was Beautiful, Precious, and God-Ordained. Then I Adopted.”

If you know anyone who has adopted, please feel free to share. It can be a lonely journey.

A writing announcement

The other major news to share is that I signed with an agent, the indomitable Jevon Bolden of Embolden Media Group, to represent my book, We Mend With Gold: An Asian American Spiritual Manifesto. Jevon is a champion for underheard voices in faith spaces, and I’m thrilled to work with her and become part of the Embolden family. Writing a book is a long road, but I’m so glad to now have a partner along the way.

A little sketch

Those of you who are on IG have already seen this, but I’ve included it here for everyone else. Enjoy!

May we make room for the laughter.
May we make room for the crying.

May there be abundance in our spirits.
May there be expansiveness in our days.

Breathe in: I am present in this moment.
Breathe out: I have time to feel deeply.

Until next time,

Kristin

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What a gift to have my grandmother still with us - I so wish that she lived nearby.

So much is encompassed in that “Does it matter?” - it’s another story for another time, but my dad has his reasons for feeling alienated from China and Hong Kong. He’s very Westernized and has never looked back. Yet this sentiment explains so much about why I never grew up hearing our ancestral stories, why I had to learn Asian history and literature on my own, and why my sense of ethnic identity has always been nebulous. I’ve craved specificity my whole life.

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It matters.

As Angela Y. Davis writes, “Deprivation of ancestry affects the present and the future.”

Due to my lack of consciousness about my ancestry, I haven’t known how to place myself other than as abstractedly Cantonese. The stories I read by and about Hakka people were interesting, but I couldn’t claim them as my own.

This impulse to clarify one’s roots and construct a more well-defined family tree is not unique. Lisa Sharon Harper wrote an entire book (Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World and How to Repair It All) in which she utilizes DNA testing, family stories, and personal research to trace her lineage back to her earliest U.S.-based ancestors, unearthing powerful stories about her indigenous and enslaved forebearers. At some point in life, most of us want to know, Where did I come from? Who came before me? Correct or not, we feel that our origins might explain something about our lives, our inclinations, and our purpose in this world.

Without knowing myself, where I came from, the struggles of my ancestors, and the broader sociopolitical context in which I exist, I can’t bring those unrecognized parts of myself to God. Knowing my history helps me stand rooted in my origins, recognize generational and communal trauma, repent, and heal. For those of us whose cultural heritage has been deemed irrelevant to or detracting from our spiritual lives (thanks to “color-blind” theology, which translates to white normative theology), reintegrating our racial and ethnic identity with our faith breathes new life into how we see and experience Jesus.

Theologian Hak Joon Lee writes, “Detached from identity (personal and cultural), faith is likely to wither away or be discarded.” Perhaps this isn’t true for everyone, but I’ve witnessed this in my own life: the dessication, as well as the resuscitation.

Whether you believe in God or not, there’s a potency to being able to identify our roots, to recognize from whence we draw our ancestral sap and nourishment. Ruptures in lineage and heritage - often due to violence, war, conquest, imperialism, and other aberrant human impulses - have stolen so much from so many of us. My hope for you today is that you might be reminded of, or told anew, a family story that gives you succor, strength, guidance, or peace for the weeks ahead. We all need it, don’t we?

From the newest member of the Hakka clan….yours truly,

Kristin

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You know that mug that says “Introverted but willing to discuss books?” That’s me, but you could replace books with Enneagram types. Combine them, and I could talk for hours. There are surprisingly few (and not very robust) recommendation lists like this, so here’s my take. Don’t know your Enneagram type? Try any of the free quizzes floating around, but also make sure you read the type descriptions on the Enneagram Institute website. When you come across the description that feels like staring into the depths of your own soul: that’s your type.

This is not to say that you will only enjoy books that correspond to your own Enneagram type - some of my favorite books are ones I’ve categorized as type 2 or type 5 or type 7. But it’s a fun exercise to try to capture the vibes of these books as Enneagram types, whether it’s due to the themes they address or due to protagonists who exude a certain kind of energy.

If you’re an IG friend, you’ve gotten a sneak peek already, but here’s the extended version with little blurbs about my top picks in each category. I hope you find some good ones to add to your list!

Enneagram 1 books feature protagonists who advocate for a better world or take a principled stand, even when it costs them.

There’s the Korean American college activist in Ryan Lee Wong’s Which Side Are You On who wants to drop out of school to work on Black Lives Matter full time, the young gay Black man in Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me who forsakes his inheritance to become an HIV/AIDS activist in NYC, and the medical student in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night whose conscience is torn by the Sri Lankan civil war.

The titular night watchman in Louise Erdrich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Night Watchman travels to D.C. to advocate for his tribe; a 20th high school reunion forces the protagonist of Alejandro Varela’s National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon to confront the societal and public health ills of Latino immigrant life in the suburbs; and the unforgettable daughter of Palestinian refugees in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World must decide how to respond to Israeli occupation.

Enneagram 2 books are all about caregiving, the ways we look out for one another and extend care.

While the depiction of opioid addiction and misogyny in Tiffany McDaniel’s On the Savage Side can be brutal, the friendship amongst the young women offers sparks of light and hope. Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance is a moving portrayal of how intergenerational love - not just trauma - can be passed down. The way the sister in Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Hurt You cares for her neurodivergent brother with deep and fierce love, the help a Greek girl extends to a washed-up refugee in Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise, the environmental caretaking in Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper, the tender affection among the characters in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams - all of these radiate Enneagram 2 vibes to me.

Enneagram 3 books are about striving and ambition.

The main character of Rachel Heng’s sweeping history of Singapore, The Great Reclamation, must decide between political career advancement and a childhood love. The Jeremy Lin-like NBA player and his K-drama producer girlfriend in Matthew Salesses’ The Sense of Wonder are at the top of their game, but still face racism and sexism. The pioneering female aviator in Maggie Shipstead’s Booker Prize finalist Great Circle won’t let any obstacle stand in the way of her goals. And the status-conscious wedding planner in Xochitl Gonzalez’s fun novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, has to decide whether her approach to love is really working.

Enneagram 4 books are all about unique characters who channel creativity and moodiness in equal measures.

The painter in Audrey Magee’s Booker Prize-longlisted The Colony is obsessed with capturing the light and the water just right, not caring who he might hurt along the way. Blandine, the protagonist of Tess Gunty’s National Book Award winning The Rabbit Hutch, is a modern mystic à la Hildegarde of Bingen and intelligent beyond her years. The teenage swimmer in Jade Song’s Chlorine tries to turn into a literal mermaid (cw: body horror). A classic younger sister, Jayne’s life in NYC is falling apart in Mary H.K. Choi’s Yolk - but can she be there for her older sister when she’s most needed?

Enneagram 5 books are cerebral and introspective.

Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac and When We Cease to Understand the World are both fictional, literary explorations of the history of science that reveal that science isn’t neutral and that technological advancement isn’t always good for the world. Weike Wang’s quirky humor in Chemistry as well as Joan is Okay captures emotionally stunted Chinese American female protagonists whose science-propelled careers may or may not be the right fit for them. The neuroscience PhD candidate in Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom wrestles with both faith and science (you should just read everything Gyasi writes, she’s impeccable). Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read is to be found in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, with his isolated protagonist in the American West. And Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize winner The Remains of the Day is a poignant story of an English butler whose staidness may have cost him the most important thing in life.

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Enneagram 6 books are steeped in loyalty and the bonds that create stability and safety.

Five strangers find refuge in an NGO compound in Sudan as war swirls around them in Fatin Abbas’ pitch-perfect Ghost Season. The multigenerational families in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois and Kirstin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds have varying levels of dysfunction, but there’s an underlying connectedness that acts as a safety net in both novels. Sarah Thankam Mathews’ National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different imagines the community of found family among a group of millenials trying to make it during the economic malaise of the late aughts. And both Claire Jiménez’s What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez and Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest examine the fractures and endurance of immigrant families.

Enneagram 7 books are, above all, joyful. There’s an element of whimsy, delight, or pleasure in each of these picks.

Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow might be the most fun, heartwarming-but-not-saccharine, treat of a book I’ve ever read as it details a Russian count’s house arrest in the Metropol hotel, but Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow would surely give it a run for its money in its tale of friendship and collaboration over the decades among two video game designers. Kathryn Ma’s The Chinese Groove is an uplifting, fresh take on the modern immigrant narrative, while Daniel Mason’s North Woods frolics across centuries to spin the captivating yarn of a rural Massachusetts house and its strange, varied inhabitants.

Enneagram 8 books are about power, dominance, and conflict.

R.F. Kuang’s searing fantasy The Poppy War reimagines China’s 20th century history, particularly in relation to Japan. The menopausal women in Kirsten Miller’s The Change harness magical powers to investigate the murders of teenage girls in their Long Island community - and take revenge. Rita Chang-Eppig’s Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea might read like fantasy, but it’s based on the true tale of a Chinese pirate queen.

I’d never read an Asian American book that was so unapologetic until coming across Elaine Castillo’s blazing America is Not the Heart. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah forces the reader to confront mass incarceration, racism, the prison-industrial complex, and violence in his National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars. Naomi Alderman’s The Power has one of the most interesting premises of recent years: What happens if women suddenly become more physically powerful than men?

Enneagram 9 books exude a longing for peace and reconciliation.

Putsata Reang’s Ma and Me (memoir) and Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be (novel) both center around queer Asian immigrant children hoping for acceptance from their parents. In a similar vein, Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us depicts the estranged son of an Indian American Muslim family and how he wrestles with religion, tradition, and autonomy.

Whether during the bloodbath of Partition in Melody Razak’s Moth, amidst the violence of Chicago’s high rise projects in Toya Wolfe’s Last Summer on State Street, or under the shadow of tensions between the Black and Korean communities in Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, these protagonists hope for and work towards the cessation of hostilities.

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OK, I’m curious: What’s your Enneagram type and what do you love (or hate) about it? What are some books that you’d nominate for the categories above? And come at me: Do you agree or disagree with my picks? I want to hear your thoughts!

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Let’s dive in:

I think of myself as American; Asian American, yes, but ultimately American. Living abroad for even short amounts of time has shown me how very American I am - for better or worse - culturally, socially, and mentally. There are parts of American life that I actively resist, but other parts that I hold dear. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to be “more loyal” to another country (though I’d challenge the construct of loyalty to country for many reasons). It baffles me that other Americans don’t view me as fundamentally American. Fellow Asian Americans, how do you feel about this question?

In light of this perception of loyalty, perhaps it’s not surprising that 34% of Americans aren’t even “somewhat comfortable” with having an Asian American president or vice president.

Even sadder is that 23% of Americans wouldn’t be at least “somewhat comfortable” with having an Asian American family member. That’s almost 1 in 4 Americans.

These findings also gave me a lot to ruminate on:

Surprisingly, it’s younger Americans who have greater distrust of Asian Americans. In one of the more personally troubling findings of the survey, 46% of respondents aged 16-24 (and 37% of respondents aged 25-44) felt that Asian Americans deserved greater scrutiny if working in areas critical to U.S. global competitiveness, versus only 17% of respondents aged 65 and older. As China is perceived as ever more of an economic and military threat to the U.S., it has a direct impact on how Chinese Americans and Asian Americans more broadly are perceived. It feels like we’re moving in the wrong direction in terms of acceptance of Asian Americans as true and equal Americans.

Given the attitudes captured above, perhaps it’s no surprise that only 22% of Asian Americans feel that we belong and are accepted in the U.S.:

It’s not just Asian Americans who feel like they don’t belong and aren’t accepted; Hispanic Americans and Black Americans had similar rates of feeling out of place. Seeing these rates compared to that of white Americans is a stark reminder of the differential experiences we have and the invisible, heavy, subconscious weight that some of us carry as we move about our days.

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Switching gears a bit, I’ve been mulling over something that Viet Thanh Nguyen mentioned in his recent Norton Lecture about how a phenomenal work of literature is lucky to sell 500,000 copies, but millions of people will watch a crappy TV show. It made me ponder the power of Hollywood to shape perceptions, which is relevant to these findings:

And the corollary results for women:

I’m out of the loop with TV and movies, so I didn’t realize that even in 2023, the dominant roles for Asian American actors are still so highly stereotyped. Given these portrayals, maybe it’s not shocking that 26% of respondents couldn’t name a single famous Asian American and that the top two real-life people they named are known for their martial arts movies. That Jackie Chan isn’t even an American (he’s a Hong Kong resident) and that Bruce Lee died 50 years ago reinforces the lack of societal consciousness regarding Asian Americans in public life.

There’s so much more data in the survey addressing important topics like awareness of Asian American history, race relations, and future directions, so please explore further on the TAAF website.

When confronted with this kind of data, my natural inclination is that of my upbringing: Be better. Beat them at their own game. Work twice as hard to prove that you deserve to be here. Assimilate to become that just-right, palatable flavor of vanilla.

But we’ve moved beyond that, right? I reject the conditional acceptance that’s extended to us as long as we adhere to the model minority mold. I reject the implication that I’m less of an American because my ancestors came from another country (except for indigenous folks, everyone’s ancestors came from elsewhere). I reject the demand to tone down my spiciness or Asianness to make the majority feel comfortable.

I recognize that it’s easy for me to say these things because of my privilege: the privilege of having a job where my Chinese heritage is useful rather than a liability, the privilege of living in a city with a sizeable Asian population, the privilege of having learned a decent amount of Asian and Asian American history as an adult, the privilege of feeling settled and giving zero ****s.

So I’m saying these things because not everyone can. I don’t know how to fix any of this on a large scale, other than the basics: Teach Asian American history in public schools. Read diverse books and consume TV shows and movies made by and for minoritized people. Live, learn, work, and worship in community with people unlike ourselves.

All easier said than done. But we have to try.

What are your takeaways from these findings? What surprises you? What doesn’t?

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On a crisp fall day not unlike today during my senior year of college, a dear friend and I walked around a lake at a retreat center while we shared the doubts that had begun nibbling at the edges of our faith. A halo of red and orange leaves glowed above us, while our feet crunched a path paved with gold.

It was hard to take the beauty at face value, though, because for both of us, the faith that we’d been told was indestructable, trustworthy, and most of all, good, was starting to feel fragile, unreliable, and not so good after all. We had questions about hell. We had questions about why where someone was born - a key determinant in what religions they might be exposed to - could determine their eternal destiny. We had questions about the place of queer people and women in the church.

And even though we were at a Christian retreat center with our college fellowship, we didn’t feel like we could ask these questions out loud.

My friend eventually left the faith, while I hung on by a thread for the next decade.

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is what books helped me when I was in this headspace (to some extent, I’m still there). That would take several posts to answer in full, but here, I want to start by pointing people to some of the more accessible writing that helped me push back against the cultural forces that have defined Christianity (especially evangelical Christianity) in narrow, constricting, and distorted terms and gave me space to imagine that I might have a place in God’s family. I’ve structured this as a quick recommendations list to make it easy to identify where to start based on how you’re feeling.

Please share with others, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that having doubts or questions in evangelical spaces can be an isolating experience that most people go through secretly. The goal of all my writing is to bring hope and liberation to just one person who’s disconsolate, and I hope these recs will reach that person today.

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• If conservative evangelical church culture was everything you knew growing up…and still has a grip on you: Anything by Rachel Held Evans, starting with Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions or Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Learning to Love the Bible Again.

  Having grown up adjacent to fundamentalism, Evans truly gets it. She wrestles with the big questions with humor, humility, and wit, giving the reader companionship on the journey rather than pat answers.

• If you’re a woman who wonders if there’s a place for you in an institution that bars you from leadership: The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr.

  Barr, an academic historian, outlines the historical roots of “Christian” patriarchy, demonstrating how modern evangelicalism has attempted to frame complementarian theology as Biblical fact, to the detriment of all.

• If the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy has you scratching your head: If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?: Black Lives Matter & Biblical Authority by Angela N. Parker

  Parker charts her indoctrination into the “correct”, “objective,” “neutral” methods of Biblical interpretation at Duke Divinity School and in evangelical circles, and rips to shreds the argument that there is such a thing.

• If you’re a Black Christian in white spaces: Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by Danté Stewart.

  In this memoir, Stewart documents his journey of shedding his Blackness to ingratiate himself into white Reformed churches. His prose is riveting, powerful, and candid. This is a modern reckoning with the white supremacy of the American church.

  

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• If you felt despondent that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 and wonder how Focus on the Family and the Religious Right came to dominate American Christianity: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.

  Du Mez traces how the political and cultural forces of Christian nationalism have transformed American evangelicalism into something unrecognizable to the Jesus of the Bible.

• If “daily devos” don’t work for you: Drew Jackson’s God Speaks Through Wombs and Touch The Earth.

  Jackson’s poetry collections, inspired by the book of Luke, are deeply informed by his experiences as a Black man and pastor. He draws connections to systemic ills in modern life, and his poetry is accessible even to those who don’t often read poetry.

  

• If you’re disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the evangelical church: The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong-Chan Rah

  With clear, visionary prose, Rah calls out the American evangelical church for how it has become captive to individualism, materialism, and racism and encourages the church to learn from African American, Native, and immigrant communities to correct these transgressions.

  

• If you’re a contemplative who doesn’t vibe with the energy of many evangelical spaces: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley.

  Introspective and melodic, Riley’s reflections on her family’s stories and her embodied self affirm the dignity of our human bodies, the realities of our painful histories, and the place of mystery in considering the divine.

• If you’re an Asian American Christian who feels invisible in a multiethnic church: Tell Me The Dream Again: Reflections on Family, Ethnicity, & the Sacred Work of Belonging by Tasha Jun.

  With gentle storytelling, Jun explores how she reconciled her biracial Korean American identity with her faith, finally recognizing it not as a liability, but as a beautiful part of her story and song.

Want more? Let me know if you have a specific topic or book rec that you’re looking for. And please feel free to share this post with a friend or two who might need it.

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I strongly believe in the power of literature to change hearts and minds, but I can only recall two instances in my own life where media has moved me to direct action - at least, where the one-to-one correlation was immediate and visible. Once was after reading Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, which prompted me to return my attention to people affected by incarceration after years away and to get involved in letter writing.

The other instance was watching the movie Hotel Rwanda in 2004 and being shaken to my core at how the international community turned away from the slaughter and genocide of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi civilians. Never again was the pledge that the movie asked us to make. Emerging from the theater, I knew I could not sit by and watch as a different genocide unfolded in Darfur.

Since those days of political activism, I’ve remained invested in the next chapter, loosely following the contours of what’s happening in Sudan and Rwanda through friends who are Sudanese immigrants, the occasional news article, or alerts from Human Rights Watch.

The follow-up, as it turns out, is complex. Here are just a few snippets:

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• In 2020, Paul Rusesabagina, the hotelier who sheltered a thousand Rwandans during the genocide and was the star of Hotel Rwanda, was kidnapped by the Rwandan regime while flying from Burundi to Doha and imprisoned for a 25-year sentence. He was recently released after his sentence was commuted by President Paul Kagame earlier this year, due in no small part to international pressure.

  

• President Kagame, once hailed as a hero by the global community for his role in helping end the Rwandan genocide through his military leadership, has turned out to be an authoritarian ruler whose actions and policies - including the assassinations of political rivals, the absence of free and fair elections, lack of free speech, and backing rebels perpetrating war crimes in and looting precious metals from neighboring Congo - are controversial at best.

  

• I’m currently reading Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, which investigates one of the political assassinations tied to Kagame - that of Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s former head of external intelligence, who was murdered in 2013 in South Africa, where he was living in exile. Wrong builds a portrait of Kagame as a ruthless dictator and frames the story of this murder within the larger, interlocking histories of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

  

• I’m a more critical reader now than I was when I read Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower, a paradigm-changing book about government corruption that I read in 2011 while living in Kenya. Excellent book that I still recommend, but reading it in combination with witnessing firsthand some of the graft that happens in NGO settings was demoralizing, and I wish I had balanced it out with other perspectives.

• Now, as I’m reading Do Not Disturb, I first ask myself what the role of a white, Western journalist who has made a career off of reporting on African regimes is in writing this story. That’s not automatic shade: I have huge respect for journalists, and this type of investigative reporting comes at personal cost and risk. Having posed the question, I do think there’s a role for an outsider to report on Rwanda, given the suppression of a free press and of political dissent within the country. It’s lethal for Rwandans to say anything critical about Kagame, so someone like Wrong might be the only way this story gets told. One strength of Do Not Disturb is its honesty regarding how easily duped Westerners were by Kagame and the RPF’s smoke and mirrors routine, diverting journalists’ attention away from atrocities and propping up a portrait of poster child democracy.

  • Theogene Rudasingwa, former chief of staff to Kagame, tells Wrong that “playing the guilt card to silence criticism of Kigali’s foreign and domestic policy was always a key part of his diplomatic tool kit.” Rudasingwa states, “It really intimidates people. The Americans, the Brits, they become cowed by guilt.” He adds, “There’s the genocide and ‘Never again’ - therefore we have a passport to do whatever we can to prevent a repeat - and then there’s, ‘Where were you?’ It’s really a very cynical ploy.”

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• Switching gears from Rwanda to Sudan: The news in Darfur is sobering. Villages have been torched to the ground, women raped, and livestock and crops destroyed, in a torrent of targeted violence that the UK has labeled ethnic cleansing. What originated in 2003 is blazing with increasing intensity now. Where is the rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth for these Darfurians? In the locus of our collective concern we have declared them, yet again, disposable.

  

• Fatin Abbas’ Ghost Season was one of the best books I read in 2022, and it’s a rare novel that gives readers a glimpse into the dynamics of Sudan, including when Westerners and NGOs are added to the mix. I can’t pass up an opportunity to recommend it - it has lovely writing, characters you come to love, and powerful pacing. And who doesn’t need to learn more about Sudan?

  

• Finally, domestically: I’ve lived in America long enough that I shouldn’t be shocked, yet I’m still floored that Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy has been banned by the Yorkville, IL School Board from being used in a high school English course for being “too controversial.” The book relays Stevenson’s work as a lawyer working in Alabama to free the wrongfully convicted - especially poor Black men - on death row. It’s a must-read, truthfully, and if people can’t handle it, it’s a sobering assessment of the state of our society.

So what to make of this collection of miscellany that I’ve just served up? It’s easy to become cynical about our ability to 1) Know the full story and 2) Make a difference. The idealism of youth dims as realpolitik casts its shadow, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The people who I admire most are the wise elders who’ve maintained a resilient hopefulness, as well as the passionate young adults who understand nuance and the value of listening.

A couple of things that have helped me in this tug-of-war between cynicism and idealism (especially sobered by the toxicities of a savior mentality):

1. I don’t have to concern myself with everything, but I do have to care about something. The vastness of the world’s problems can be paralyzing, and sometimes numbing ourselves to others’ pain seems like the only defense mechanism. The impossibility of the staying well-informed about every single issue can be an excuse to not care at all. Picking issues that uniquely resonate or capture my heart helps guard against complacency as well as guilt.

2. Commit to non-zero action. Coined by friend Phil Saylor, “non-zero action” is a new favorite phrase. As ordinary citizens, none of us is singlehandedly going to solve world hunger, the climate crisis, or housing policy injustice. But doing one small thing to contribute in a positive way on the issues we care about is not only feasible, it can introduce us to a whole community of others who care and are working together to enact change.

Lastly, I want to highlight Dorcas Cheng-Tozun’s Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways, a book that offers pathways of working towards a more equitable world that aren’t the traditional protest-movement ones. In this book (which I’m hoping to read soon), Cheng-Tozun celebrates how we can serve as connectors, creatives, record keepers, builders, equippers, and researchers in the fight for justice - don’t those categories already pique your interest?

Friends, I’d love to hear: What has helped you not lose hope? What are some of the things you care most deeply about? What types of non-zero action have been most sustainable for you?

In solidarity,

Kristin

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As I was reading Howard Thurman’s classic 1949 treatise Jesus and the Disinherited this week, I was struck by how his voice pierces even seventy years later. Although I had bought it in the used section of the Harvard Book Store months ago (what a find!) expecting choice words favoring the poor over the oppressed, Thurman isn’t interested in easy us vs. them harangues.

Perhaps it’s a sign of our polarized times that I was so ready for a screed lambasting the rich and the powerful, or perhaps it’s just a sign of my corrupted heart. Thurman, who served as a mentor to many leaders of the civil rights movement, is certainly clear-eyed about the unjust structures that leave certain groups dehumanized and destitute, but in this book he asks a different question: What does Jesus’ life and example actually offer to those who have been boxed in?

While I deliberately avoid drawing any parallels here to the tragedies unfolding in Israel and Gaza because there are no perfect comparisons, Thurman’s words accompanied me as I processed the conflict, violence, rage, retaliation, grief, and bleak hopelessness of the past week. More than that, though, they convicted me of the seeds of bitterness and resentment that I allow to germinate within my own heart - however justified that they may seem - that lead me to devalue others.

I hope that his words will bring comfort in their affirmation of human dignity, and also challenge you to deeper empathy and forgiveness.

The state of the world

Thurman is adamant that the arrangements of power in this world are very wrong. In his day, the situation at the forefront was segregation in the U.S., but he also draws attention to other unequal structures such as the caste system in India or the colonization of Korea by Japan. What I find interesting, though, is that he doesn’t let underlying injustice color our moral equations.

In a world of the strong and the weak, the twisted relationships that govern life become normalized, and what’s normalized becomes seen as right…or even righteous.

In this state of affairs, three main “hounds of hell” pursue the disinherited: fear, deception, and hatred. While these attitudes seem justified given the unfairness of the world, Thurman pushes us to examine the corrosive influence of each of these in turn, and shows how Jesus offers an alternative path that still honors the humanity in each person.

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Fear

Victims of systemic discrimination live under the threat of violence, to which they have no recourse. They suffer constant reminders of their vulnerability and inferiority.

Thurman writes, “Under such circumstances, there is but a step from being despised to despising oneself.”

It is natural for the weak to fear the strong. Yet fear also mediates the attitude of the strong towards the weak, for it is because of fear that the strong desperately keep the weak in their place - and feel warranted in their actions.

Although the weak’s fear of the strong is a logical defense mechanism, Thurman deems it “death for the self,” because to fear a man is to place him in a place of pre-eminence that should belong to God alone. Thurman contends that “the core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God,” and this knowledge of identity and belonging in God gives humans a “new courage, fearlessness, and power.”

This profound sense of self-worth and personal dignity is not enough to rectify the injustices the strong perpetuate over the weak, “but without it, nothing else is of value.” Thurman sees Jesus’ affirmation of each person’s dignity as a foundational assurance that makes the human spirit unconquerable even under threat of violence.

Deception

Deception is a longstanding strategy by which the weak protect themselves against the strong. We cheer in stories when the underdog outwits the villain even by means of subterfuge, and why wouldn’t we?

While Thurman understands why the disinherited turn to deception (how can there be honesty where there is no real community?), he counsels that practicing deceit numbs our sense of morality.

Instead, he boldly asks each person to live with “a complete and devastating sincerity,” for sincerity and genuineness in human-to-human interactions is commensurate to being genuine in one’s interaction with God. Acknowledging that sincerity is no defense mechanism against the powerful, Thurman nevertheless argues that faced with the genuine sincerity of the disinherited, the strong will be caught off guard:

The cynical side of me finds this awfully hopeful, for wouldn’t the dominant just crush the weak in this scenario? Yet Thurman writes not about what frees the dispossessed from the yoke of human oppression, but from the internal rot of moral dissolution.

Hatred

Hate, resentment, and bitterness are more than understandable for a people that faced centuries of enslavement, torture, rape, and kidnapping followed by a false freedom that still kept them bound by unjust laws.

Yet even in 1949, Thurman counsels that “hatred destroys finally the core of life of the hater. …Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. …The logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral values.”

A radical option

What options, then, are the dispossessed left with? If not to live in fear, deception, and hatred - which will erode their very humanity - how then should they proceed?

Both in Thurman’s time and in today’s culture, many would agree that the disinherited are warranted in scrabbling in whatever ways they can to get what they can for themselves and their families and to get back at the powerful. So what if they use deceit or violence - it’s no worse than what’s been done to them for decades.

Rather than accept the prevailing logic of the times, Thurman points to the example of Jesus inviting Matthew to become part of his tightest-knit group of followers. Matthew, a tax collector, was despised by his fellow Jews for robbing them in service of the Romans. Tax collectors were wealthy off the backs of their compatriots: they were easy to hate, and roundly condemned. Yet Jesus extends a hand of friendship and forgiveness. He acknowledges in Matthew a common humanity and an intrinsic worthiness.

I can hear the murmurs:

Wait, Jesus, surely you don’t mean him? Don’t you know what he’s done? How he’s ruined my family? How he lives in comfort while we suffer? How he’s betrayed his own people to ingratiate himself to our persecutors while skimming off the top for himself?

But Jesus sees Matthew’s soul with a kindness and clarity that no one else can.

To awaken the tax collector (or any oppressor) to their identity as a child of God, we have to first ourselves recognize them as such. Thurman argues this is the only way out of the violent stalemate and calcified dynamics of weak versus strong. Most challenging is the impossible task of forgiving the oppressor - a miraculous and courageous feat.

Jesus’ call to forgive carries moral weight because he lived it. He understands the subjugation of Black Americans in the 1940s because he experienced subjugation as a poor Jew in the Roman Empire. Thus Jesus’ preaching comes not from a detached and distant place, but is borne of the muck and mire and humiliation of having lived as a refugee, an itinerant, an unwanted guest, and a minoritized person whose culture and existence was under threat.

Why is the onus on the disinherited to be the bigger person, to recognize the image of God in their oppressor, and to forgive? Thurman isn’t letting the oppressor off the hook, but in this manifesto he is specifically tests out how Jesus is germane to the dispossessed. Let others preach to the oppressors.

While forgiveness may seem like a capitulation, or indeed like weakness, Thurman sees it as the only way to preserving moral integrity, which to him, is more important than righting the wrongs of this world. In the final calculus, it may indeed be the only way to right the wrongs of this world.

It’s not that Thurman cares not for the survival and dignity of the disinherited - he cares very much - but he ultimately urges them to find it in the eyes of God.

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In today’s world

My natural bent towards cynicism makes me despair as to whether any of us can do what Thurman asks, especially those who have been systematically victimized by generations of brutality. Yet I look to the civil rights movement, and I see a people mobilized to seek justice that “rolls down like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” I see a people who have not let hopelessness overtake them. I see a people who persevere, who will not allow others to dehumanize them, but who will also not allow amorality to hollow out their souls from within.

May God bring our generation a Howard Thurman who can speak into this moment.

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Share The Embers

I spent the rest of the 3-hour plane ride questioning myself. Perhaps our food really was that stinky. Perhaps she had a very sensitive nose. Perhaps putting it away was the considerate thing to do. Perhaps I was too easily intimidated by another person’s demands.

Did this woman know how common it is for Asian Americans to be shamed for their food, so common that it has its own name - the lunchbox moment? If not, was the onus on her to read / listen to / befriend people of color so that she might escape her own ignorance…or was the onus on me to teach her about it?

Even if she was right that our food was smelly, would she have been nicer about it if she’d known of the long history of white people shaming Asian food? Or would she not have cared? She looked younger than me, so shouldn’t she have some awareness of these dynamics?

Her comment had embarrassed me, not because I was ashamed of our dumplings but because she made it sound like I had purposely subjected the whole plane to our noxious fumes.

Our dumplings did not smell bad.

Our dumplings were legitimate food.

In the light of day, these statements seem so obvious as to be absurd, yet that lady made me second-guess them for an entire plane ride.

I couldn’t let her leave the plane thinking that what she had said was okay, but what should I say? I didn’t want to speak up out of anger - in fact, I didn’t want to do it at all - but out of love, both for her (not wanting her to expose her own ignorance in future situations) and for other people of color (so they wouldn’t have to deal with comments like this, if she were willing to change her ways).

This is what it means to love my neighbor, I thought. It means pushing through my own discomfort, my own hurt, and my deeply held desire to not be confrontational to try to help her understand why her comments were insensitive and possibly even racist.

Because even if she hadn’t intended them to be racist, isn’t that what they were?

Her comments fall squarely into the category of microaggressions, which as one definition puts it, are “everyday slights, insults, putdowns, invalidations, and offensive behaviors that people experience in daily interactions with generally well-intentioned individuals who may be unaware that they have engaged in demeaning ways.”

Various alternatives to the moniker microaggressions have been suggested, from “subtle acts of exclusion” to “racist abuse,” in order to connote the cumulative harm that they cause.

One sign that microaggressions do cause long-term harm: I’m still thinking about her, whereas I’m 100% sure she has forgotten about me.

As the plane started descending into Logan Airport, I psyched myself up to say something to the lady. I knew we’d only have a moment as we all deplaned, so I needed to keep it short and sweet.

• “I know you didn’t mean it that way, but what you said about our food was racist.”

• “Please Google ‘lunchbox moment’ when you get home.”

I settled on the latter.

As we touched down, the lady started chatting with two little girls who were sitting behind her, bantering with them. She told them she was a nurse. My heart sank. I didn’t want to interrupt their conversation. My courage failed me.

I’ve been carrying this with me ever since.

What would have been the right thing to do in that situation? To remain quiet, whether out of contrition for bringing pungent food onto an airplane, or out of cowardice, or out of resignation that she didn’t mean to be hurtful? To speak up, whether out of indignation, or out of love for my neighbor?

I don’t know what the right thing would have been, but I know I didn’t do it. Because if I had done the right thing, would I still feel so torn up about it?

One thing that I knew I had address: What my children took from this. They had witnessed the whole scenario. They had witnessed me boxing back up the dumplings. They had witnessed me shrinking into myself. They had witnessed my silence.

As we drove home from the airport, I told them, “What that lady said about our dumplings wasn’t right. It’s not okay to tell someone else that their food is smelly. And I shouldn’t have let her bully me into putting it away.”

Yeah, okay, mom, they said.

What would you have done? What is the loving thing to do in this situation?