ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY IN A POSTMODERN AND POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT
Postmodernism has stressed the thoroughly historical nature of human existence, and has made it impossible to think about human selves and their individual identities as things that are permanent and fixed. The identity or “who one is,” therefore, is now spoken of as a dynamic reality that is constructed and reconstructed again and again. Stuart Hall points out that cultural identity is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being.’ … Cultural identities come from somewhere, and have histories. Like everything else which is historical, identities undergo constant transformation.”1
While agreeing with the postmodernists in their rejection of the classical substance theory of the self and the modern foundationalist construal of self as transcendent mind, philosopher Paul Schrag believes that the jettisoning of the self understood in these senses does not entail the jettisoning of every sense of self. Schrag argues that in the aftermath of the postmodernist deconstruction of traditional metaphysics and epistemology, “a new self emerges, like the phoenix arising from its ashes—a praxis-oriented self,” defined by the self’s discourse, its actions, its being with others in the community. Schrag elaborates further on the unfixed character of identity by pointing out that one does not construct identity by patching together abstract ideas of cultural values. Identity, according to Schrag, is more like a “happening” that emerges as one speaks, makes decisions, carries out actions in relation to the others. Schrag explains, “it is only when one moves to the level of the discursive event, in which there is an effort to communicate something to someone, that the question ‘Who is speaking?’ takes on relevance and indeed becomes uncircumventable.”2
So, the sense of identity emerges in and through actual discourse and action as the who of the discourse and the who of the action. What, then, constitutes the self’s continuity and coherence? It is the narrative form, answers Schrag, that “comprises the continuing context, the expanding horizon of a retentional background and a protentional foreground, in which and against which our figures of discourse are called into being, play themselves out and conspire in the making of sense.” What is true for human discourse applies also to human action. According to Schrag, “narrative is not simply the telling of a story by the who of discourse, providing a binding textuality of the past and future inscriptions; it is also the emplotment of a personal history through individual and institutional action.”3 Human actions are intelligible only when they are seen through the context of the narrative of a personal history. I will return below to the issue of narrative and identity.
While agreeing with postmodernism on the historical and thus continuously constructed nature of the identity of the human self, post-colonial studies have focused on the culturally hybrid identity of previously or presently colonized peoples. If one works with the assumption that there are “pure cultures,” hybrid or racially mixed persons can be considered as strange and inferior to them. The concept of hybridity can, therefore, be used in a negative way.4 But hybridity can also mean creativity and a new identity. Postcolonial writers, especially Homi Bhabha, have focused particularly on the hybrid identity and culture that emerge in the condition of being an immigrant, oppressed, or colonized minority. The culture of people in such conditions is “bafflingly both alike and different” from their parent or original culture. “It is something like ‘culture’s in-between,’ ” a culture’s liminal and creative edge.5 It is what Bhabha calls the “Third Space,” as in the quotation below. In such situations, Bhabha argues, the colonized person’s intentional construction of a hybrid identity and culture can be an activity of resistance to the dominant culture and also an act of forming a new identity and culture. This new identity and culture would be neither an accommodation to the dominant culture nor a culture inferior to it. In an oft-quoted passage, Bhabha writes:
It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory … may open the way to conceptualization of an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.6
In his 1966 essay entitled “Culture’s In-Between,” Bhabha explains further:
In my own work I have developed the concept of hybridity to describe the construction of cultural authority within conditions of political antagonism or inequality.… Hybrid strategy … makes possible the emergence of an “interstitial” agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy; the outside of the inside: the part in the whole.7
What Bhabha calls “the partial culture” in the above quotation is the culture of a marginalized ethnic minority that is “bafflingly alike and different” from either the dominant culture of the society where they presently live or the culture of their ethnic or ancestral origin.8 Such a minority culture is a “partial culture” in comparison to the cultures that have been around for a long time and that are the “total culture” of a people or a society. Bhabha also calls the “partial culture” of a minority group “culture’s in-between,” culture’s creative opening for change.
Bhabha believes that, in a colonized or oppressed condition, the oppressed group can embrace the creative space of their in-betweenness, and that in that “Third Space” they can work with their “partial” or mixed culture to construct a hybrid culture and identity that have an integrity of their own and are distinguishable from either the oppressor’s culture or the culture of their origin. What emerges from the “Third Space” is a new identity.9 In other words, the newly constructed hybrid identity has an integrity of its own, and resists the hegemony of either side of the binary of white American vs. nonwhite Asian. “Asian American” is different from white American and from Asian, but is not for that reason deficient or inferior. So Bhabha’s “interstitial agency,” noted above, is an agency of resistance. The liminal space in which hybrid identity is constructed is a site of resistance to hegemony of any one of the diverse elements out of which Asian American identity is constructed.
WORKING ON ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY
What does it mean for Asian Americans to construct a hybrid “Asian American” identity in the liminal space of in-betweenness in which we live? Bhabha’s idea of hybridization in the “Third Space” of in-betweenness is a general concept that can be utilized appropriately only if we keep in mind the particular nature of our liminal situation in the United States.
To construct a hybrid Asian American identity in American society is, first of all, to resist the essentialized idea either of America or Asia. The Eurocentric idea of America has been essentialized—that is, made into a permanent truth. Even if Asian Americans have names like Peter and David, or Mary and Sarah, and speak an impeccable English, they are still asked, “Where are you from?” If one is not a white person, he or she is simply not considered as a “real American” in this country.
To affirm that Asian Americans are Americans is an act of rejecting and resisting the dominant group’s notion that only European Americans are “real Americans.” The term American includes Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, English Americans, Italian Americans, and many others. To construct an Asian American identity is to embrace all these different kinds of Americans in our own conception of ourselves. The cultures and histories of the peoples of all the different ancestral backgrounds cannot be, in a mechanical way, the material content of what constitutes the Asian American identity. But none of those peoples can be excluded from the meaning of an Asian American identity. What this means is that Asian American identity could appropriate as our own some aspect of the cultures of all the peoples who belong to America, and that Asian American identity must be permanently open.
A couple of decades ago I was teaching a course on the theologies of marginalized peoples. One day in class, an African American student raised his hand and asked, “Dr. Lee, what do you mean by the term American whenever you use the term Asian American? Are you sure you don’t mean ‘white American’ by the word American?” I just about jumped out of my chair. It did not take me long to realize for the first time that I always had in mind “Asian-white American” whenever I used the term Asian American. I had been excluding that African American student from the meaning of the term American. I had been excluding the long history of African Americans’ suffering and their struggles for freedom and human dignity from what constitutes American history. I confessed to the student and the class that I had been living with the idea of white Americans as the “real Americans,” and that I would never do it again.
Some Asian Americans may internalize the idea of European Americans as “real Americans.” When this happens, Asian Americans will try to “out-white” the whites. But this strategy is bound to fail because, as noted in Chapter 1, the whites will not accept non-white persons as one of them. For nonwhite people, social or structural assimilation does not follow cultural assimilation. To construct an Asian American identity, then, is to resist the idea of European Americans as “real Americans,” both as an idea prevalent in American society and also as an internalized idea in the minds of Asian Americans themselves.
To construct Asian American identity, therefore, is a work of reconstructing or of restoring the meaning of America itself. In fact, Asian Americans who struggled for justice and human rights in the past did so by appealing to the fundamental principles upon which this nation itself was founded. By doing so, Asian Americans endeavored to restore or reconstruct the meaning of America. Japanese Americans’ struggle against the injustice of their internment during World War II was based upon the principles of the U.S. Constitution. The Fair Play Committee at Heart Mountain concentration camp argued that “drafting Nisei from these concentration camps, without restoration of their civil rights and rectification of the tremendous economic losses suffered by them, was not only morally wrong, but legally questionable.” Gary Y. Okihiro points out further that “the Asian American struggle for inclusion within the American community, as migrants and citizens, was principally based upon the guarantee of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.”10 Okihiro observes in his book Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture,
And despite its authorship of the central tenets of democracy, the mainstream has been silent on the publication of its creed. In fact, the margin has held the nation together with its expansive reach; the margin has tested and ensured the guarantees of citizenship; and the margin has been the true defender of American democracy, equality, liberty. From that vantage, we can see the margin as mainstream.11
In telling the story of how Asian Americans and other minorities have contributed to the work of calling to America’s attention its true ideals and goals, Okihiro is constructing a history of Asian Americans. What is usually presented as “American history” does not contain the full history of Asian Americans. Asian Americans are invisible in the history of the country in which they have lived and labored. One telling example is the official photograph of the people gathered to celebrate the completion of the first Transcontinental Railroad across America. Although thousands of Chinese workers were the people who built that railroad, not a single Chinese person can be found in that photograph.12
To construct one’s identity is to make a connection between one’s past, present, and future. Without a past, one cannot understand one’s present and cannot move ahead into the future. Asian Americans’ construction of their identity, therefore, includes the work of excavating out of America’s past the history of Asian Americans. I shall return to the role of the past in the construction of Asian American identity when I discuss the narrative character of identity.
Together with America, Asia is the other primary factor in Asian Americans’ construction of their identity. For first-generation Asian immigrants, Asia, or more specifically their home country, is vividly a part of them. But even for Asian Americans of the younger generations, even if they have never visited their ancestral home country, Asia is still a part of them in small and yet real ways: in their diet, in their physical appearance, in the stories their parents or grandparents tell them or in yet other ways.
In appropriating Asia, just as in the case of America, Asian Americans have to resist the essentialized idea of the “real Asian.” Asia does not stand still but constantly changes. Some culturally conservative first-generation Korean men’s insistence that patriarchy is an element of “real Asianness” must be resisted. The top-down style of parental authority as true Asianness also must be resisted. There is no eternally fixed idea of what it means to be Asian.
Just as the idea of an essentialized Asia must be resisted, it must also be acknowledged that there is never an uninterpreted Asia. In constructing Asian American identity, Asian Americans must resist any interpretations of Asia that are unjust. What I have in mind is the historical fact that Western Christian missionaries brought to various parts of Asia not only the Christian gospel and modernization but also a negative perspective on Asian cultural and religious traditions. In many cases, Asians who embraced the Christian gospel also bought the Western prejudice that some aspects of Asian culture and religions are all pagan and idolatrous practices to be rejected by Christian converts.
In Korea, for example, Christians have done away with the annual family rituals in which the deceased members are remembered and prayers are offered to ancestors requesting their blessing. The rituals certainly contain some elements that involve religious reverence of the ancestors. Therefore, Korean Christian churches certainly may find those religious aspects objectionable. But the entire ceremony did not have to be pronounced idolatrous and banned for church members. Christian churches could have modified the traditional ritual in such a way that those parts which give the appearance of a “worship” of ancestors could be taken out. Then they could have reinterpreted the ritual as a time of remembering and celebrating the family’s continuing spiritual unity and communion with the deceased. Such a reinterpreted ancestor ritual could be grounded on the Christian belief in the communion of saints, saints here on earth and in heaven.
The ancestor ritual involves bowing in front of the photos or names of the deceased. This practice has been condemned as idolatrous, but it does not have to be seen in such a way. Bowing to other persons in Korean, as in many other Asian countries, is a ubiquitous gesture of respect and affection for the other person. And Koreans bow to other persons in all kinds of circumstances and at all kinds of places. Some years ago, when I was visiting Korea, I met a Korean Presbyterian elder of around seventy years of age. He told me that he had many brothers and sisters, but he was the only Christian in his family. And at the ancestor ritual time for his family, everyone would bow in front of the pictures of the deceased parents and grandparents. Everyone, that is, except him, a Presbyterian elder. He alone remained standing. And with a deep sadness, and tears welling in his aging eyes, he told me that at times like that, he would feel that every cell in his body was saying, “Bow, Bow, Bow!” I took his hands in mine, and repeated to him softly but firmly, “Next time, be sure to bow, not to worship, but out of respect, bow. You have bowed a million times to all kinds of persons. What could possibly be wrong if you bowed to your deceased parents and grandparents out of respect and affection?” What, indeed, could be wrong with honoring one’s ancestors? So Asian Americans reinterpret Asia as we think of Asia in constructing and reconstructing our hybrid identity in the liminal space between Asia and America.
How is Christian faith related to Asian Americans’ identity construction? What difference does Asian American Christians’ faith make in the construction of their identity?
The most fundamental way faith is related to identity construction for Asian Americans is that it provides the courage to face the bewildering space of liminality and to do the work of constructing a hybrid identity without relying upon the false security of an essentialized finite principle. Faith is the act of trusting and embracing God’s unconditional acceptance of us as God’s children. Faith, therefore, is the unshakable foundation of one’s sense of dignity and self-esteem. In faith, one affirms the meaningfulness and moral worth of oneself and one’s existence. In and through faith, one stands firm even if the world considers her or him as one without value and worth.
Faith, therefore, is the source of the courage not to be shaken by the uncertain and bewildering space of liminality. Faith is the courage to refuse the temptation to absolutize any one of the finite factors in identity construction and thereby to set up a false source of security. Fumitaka Matsuoka calls Asian Americans’ experience of liminality an experience of “holy insecurity.” “To embrace the ‘holy insecurity’ of a life, or being jook sing [the Cantonese word for a piece of empty bamboo with no roots at either end], that defies any conventional definition,” writes Matsuoka, “means to receive the gift of courage to live in the midst of an unresolved and often ambiguous state of life.”13 So faith is the courage to be liminal, to be in the state of “holy insecurity” of in-betweenness and to do the work of identity construction in that liminal space.
“Interstitial integrity” is what Rita Nakashima Brock calls the ability to construct one’s hybrid identity in a liminal space in which the dominance of any of the factors is not tolerated. Interstitial integrity, therefore, forges an identity without abolishing the ambiguity and openness of the liminal situation of a hybrid identity. In this way, Brock explains, interstitial integrity “allows space for the multiple social locations of identity in a multicultural context.”14
According to Brock, interstitial integrity is a creative energy that insists on “holding the many in one.” In a 2007 essay, entitled “Cooking without Recipes,” Brock writes:
Interstitial integrity is our ability to lie down, spread-eagled, reaching to all the many worlds we have known, all the memories we have been given, tempered in the cauldrons of history and geography in our one body. We find our value in taking our small place in long legacies of incarnating spirit in bodies. Through such legacies, we participate in shaping our many worlds, and we grow in wisdom and beauty and live in the traces we leave in others, so they, too, might cook without recipes.15
Interstitial integrity is also integration, Brock says, in that it has its own “moments of entireness,” and such a moment of entireness is accompanied by the conviction that such an integration, though hybrid in nature, is not “a state of being impaired or lesser than one whose identity is monocultural.”16
Another important point that Brock makes is that interstitial integrity is not simply the ability to cope with the experience of being liminal and peripheral. Interstitial integrity is more. It is the work of “making meaning out of multiple worlds by refusing to disconnect from any one of them, while not pledging alliance to a singular one.”17
“Interstitial integrity” is the courage to refuse to consider any one “moment of entireness” or integration of various parts of oneself as one’s final identity. Brock explains: “this refusal to rest in one place, to reject a narrowing of who we are by either/or decisions, or to be placed always on the periphery, is interstitial integrity.”18
If faith is the source of the moral strength to face the liminal space and to do the work of identity construction in that space, or the ability to maintain an “interstitial integrity,” does faith also make any material difference to the content of the hybrid Asian American identity itself? From where or what does identity construction attain a direction, intentionality, and meaningfulness? The answer, I believe, is that a connection between identity construction and the Christian faith is possible because of the inherently narrative character of both. It is in the form of a narrative that self or identity is given continuity, direction, and purposefulness.
I earlier briefly mentioned Paul Schrag’s argument that narrative gives human discourse and action a unity. It is Stephen Crites, however, in his seminal 1971 essay “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” who pointed out that the very nature of human experience in time is inherently narrative in form. The present moment contains the modality of the past which is determinate and the modality of the future which is indeterminate. How can there be, then, a unity of experience that embraces both the determinateness of the past and the indeterminateness of the future?
Crites’s thesis is that “the tensed unity of these modalities requires narrative form both for its expression … and for its own sense of the meaning of its internal coherence.” Expanding further on this point, Crites says, “But this incipient story, implicit in the very possibility of experience, must be such that it can absorb both the chronicle of memory and the scenario of anticipation, absorb them within a richer narrative form without effacing the difference between the determinacy of the one and the indeterminacy of the other.”19 So “narrative alone can contain the full temporality of experience in a unity of form” and do so without abolishing the distinctiveness of the past and the future. Narrative alone can give time a unity and meaning both in human experience as such and also in personal identity.
A human self is ineluctably in history, with past, present, and future. The sense of who one is or a person’s identity, then, has to make sense out of one’s personal history as a whole. Since history is narrative in form, a person’s sense of himself or herself as a whole has to take a narrative form that can hold the three tenses together. As what constitutes the unity of one’s sense of who one is, narrative gives his or her self coherence and a sense of direction. It is then at this basic level of the self that the Christian faith in narrative form can have its impact and influence. It is as a narrative that the Christian faith has a material influence in and upon human selves.
The Christian tradition is largely in the narrative form. The Story of God, or what Crites calls “the Story within the story,” is that the triune God, whose essence is the eternal disposition to repeat loving community and beauty, creates the world to repeat in time God’s internal communion and beauty and creates human beings to participate in this project of God. The stories of Israel, and the story of the incarnate Son of God Jesus Christ, are the central biblical stories that tell of God’s actions in and through the people of Israel and his incarnate Son.
Many Asian Americans live with the materialistic American Dream story as the narrative that gives their identity a unity and a direction. If an Asian American or an Asian immigrant fails to achieve the American Dream as he or she understands it, and if he or she begins to doubt whether that story is what should govern their lives, they then face a crisis. Such a crisis as this could also be brought about by hearing other stories, such as the Christian stories, which govern some other people’s lives in the United States. This crisis has to do with the unity of the person as a self and the direction of his or her life itself. The old American Dream story may not work anymore, and there is no other story ready at hand to replace it. What is needed is a new story that he or she can appropriate as his or her own. The new story will have to be able to bind together the past, present, and future into a whole and some pattern that is meaningful to him or her. Until a new story takes over as the unifying principle of his or her identity, she or he is in a liminal situation. The liminality of this crisis enables a person to be more open to what is new than he or she might usually be.
If the person, spoken of above, encounters the Christian story (the story of God, the story of Jesus, and the stories of believers) and appropriates it as his or her own, a conversion takes place. For the Christian story to be truly appropriated, the person must know intellectually the Christian narratives but must live out the Christian story in his or her personal and social existence.
An Asian American Christian who is still pursuing the materialistic American Dream, for instance, could be challenged by the narrative of Abraham. In Hebrews 11, we read the following narrative:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.… For he looked to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.… They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11:8, 10, 13–16)
First of all, the term heavenly does not need to be taken as referring to an other-worldly place. Abraham and his descendants were in fact strangers and foreigners in the land of Canaan (Gen. 23:4; Ps. 39:12) and so understood themselves as such. The “better country” Abraham was in search of is not some place beyond history but an actual historical reality that he and his descendants can work for as a concrete historical reality.20
Abraham’s story is particularly pertinent to Asian immigrants who may be wondering what the meaning of their existence in this country is. Abraham’s story can be interpreted as saying that now that the Asian immigrants have left home and are here in America, it is an opportunity to take up the pilgrimage toward “a better country” and work to make America a country that is more according to God’s will. Their situation can be seen as a calling to live as the creative minority in America. Moreover, if Asian American Christians appropriate Abraham’s story as their own, they might see their life’s goal as being to continue to live here “as strangers and foreigners” and work to build a “better America,” “whose architect and builder is God.” In this way, their Christian faith would have something to do with their identity and their life as marginalized and liminal people in America.