THE NEW LIMINALITY AND ASIAN AMERICAN DISCIPLESHIP
After their conversion to the Christian faith, Asian American Christians are still liminal, in-between, and peripheral. Their liminality is now a “new liminality,” however. Their liminality is not new in the sense that it is different from their liminality before their conversion to the Christian faith, but in the sense that it is now an intentional liminality that Christians deliberately appropriate as their own.
Asian American Christians choose intentionally the liminal social location or choose to remain in their de facto liminal location. They do so because they now belong to the “family of God,” the values of which are different from those of the world. Jesus demanded his followers to be totally egalitarian and nonpatriarchal. Jesus asked his disciples to be “poor in spirit” and taught that it was difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. To follow this Jesus, one must distance oneself from the center of the world and live in liminality, in the periphery. This is why Pastor David Gibbons of the New Song Community Church in Los Angeles realized that to follow Christ inevitably makes one countercultural and asked his people to become a church of the “misfits.” Paul makes the point very clearly: “Do not be conformed to this world [or this age], but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2).
The transformation that Paul talks about occurs in and through the redeeming communitas with God in Christ that the believer experiences as she or he enters the infinite liminality of Jesus on the cross. The Holy Spirit enables the believer to believe and indwells in the believer as she or he strives to live a Christian life. An Asian American Christians’ act of distancing himself or herself from the dominant power centers of the world would not be possible without the continuing help of the Holy Spirit.
Asian American Christians who now have a set of values different from the people at the dominant center are already located strategically at the periphery of American culture and society. Peripheral location is now no longer simply de facto but intentional and by choice. A question arises: Would it be wrong for an Asian American Christian to achieve a high-ranking and prestigious position within the structure of the dominant center? It would certainly be a good thing for the society as a whole if such a person could be an effective member of the dominant center without sacrificing his or her Christian values. If a person could do that, he or she would be an effective change agent for the dominant group. But it is more likely that it would be highly difficult to follow the rules of the dominant center without compromising one’s Christian values. As discussed earlier, the periphery may be the better place from which Christians try to challenge the dominant center and attempt to change it. To be in the world but at its edge is the most strategic posture for Asian American Christians.
So liminality for Asian American Christians after their conversion to Christ is a new liminality, first of all, in that it is now intentional and by choice. Liminality after conversion is new also in the sense that the transforming experience of the communitas with Christ on the cross has empowered the Asian American Christian to exercise the creative potentials of his or her liminality in spite of the demoralizing effects of continuing marginalization. There has been a freeing of the suppressed and frustrated potentials of liminality. What Asian American Christians do in exercising their liminal creativity is part of their new existence as Christians. It is their discipleship.
What does this exercise of the liminal creativity mean concretely? Consider the examples below.
Lisa Lowe has described the diversity of what constitutes “Asian American” as “heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity.”1 To live with an “Asian American” identity is to be open to a variety of cultural and other factors that explicitly or implicitly make up what the term Asian American means. Asians are heterogeneous and multiple. Asians have come from the Far East and India, and all the countries in between. The process of critically receiving and rearticulating the cultures from all those nations and cultures without setting some as inferior or superior to others and without exoticizing from the dominant white American perspective is indeed a daunting task. But precisely this is the task facing Asian Americans who would construct an authentic self-identity. One can try to accomplish only a little at a time. But one must by all means be open to them all without giving preference to the familiar or more predominant. Asian American identity must remain porous and open.
The American side of Asian American identity is no less complex. Some racial ethnic minority persons as well as some white Americans think that Americans are white Americans, and American culture is white American culture. Many persons know, of course, that this is not the truth. We Asian American Christians must remember that “American” includes Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans, as well as European Americans. All these peoples and their cultures must figure in Asian Americans’ construction of their identity. To do so, Asian Americans must first be open to them and their cultural traditions.
That we must be open to all these peoples is not simply a humanist or commonsense assertion. For us Asian American Christians, our faith demands such an openness. In fact, the Christian faith radicalizes the demand for Asian American Christians’ openness to other peoples. What the Christian faith requires of a Christian is an openness to all the peoples in God’s world and not just to those who could be categorized as Asians and Americans. The demand is based on the challenge of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ that those who receive this revelation broaden and open up their remembering. Jesus Christ is the Lord over and in all human history. Therefore, those who are in Christ have entered a lifelong venture of remembering all peoples’ history as their history. As H. Richard Niebuhr wrote in The Meaning of Revelation:
[Christ] is the man through whom the whole human history becomes our history. Now there is nothing that is alien to us. All wanderings of all peoples, all the sins of men [sic] in all places become parts of our past through him.… Through Christ we become immigrants into the empire of God which extends all over the world and learn to remember the history of that empire, that is of men [sic] in all times and places, as our history.2
Niebuhr, from his christological and radically monotheistic perspective, is giving expression to basically the same point the prophet Jeremiah made out of his conviction regarding God as the creator of all that is. According to Jeremiah, Babylon, where Israelites were taken exiles, is also a land God has made and is under God’s rule. Israelites, therefore, should not hesitate to live there and make their home there. Jeremiah writes to the Hebrew exiles:
Build houses there and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer. 29:5–7)
The circumstances are, of course, different. Israelites in Babylon were exiles; Asian American Christians came to America voluntarily or were born here. But Jeremiah’s message applies just the same for Asian Americans. America is part of God’s creation. And Asian Americans, as well as all other peoples in America, are God’s children. They can all make America their home. Asian American Christians are those who are open to this perspective.
For some first-generation Asian immigrants, it is excruciatingly difficult to cut ties with their homeland and to settle in their newly adopted country. Second-and later-generation Asian Americans sometimes wonder if they are welcome to live in a country that is the only country they have known as their own. To both groups, Jeremiah is saying that America can be your home, because it belongs to God. Niebuhr’s quotation above also implies that it is the responsibility and calling of Asian American Christians to consider America their own homeland because Christ is and has been at work in American history as its Lord. Asian American spirituality affirms that America can be our home. We are here to stay. And who is meant here by “we” is open.
Communitas with others is a way of relating to others with respect for all their differences, in other words, respect for others in all their otherness. Asian Americans’ Christian posture to all others, I would contend, is a readiness to initiate the experience of communitas with all others whom they encounter. The “others” here would include the members of the “dominant” group in the United States as well as the “others” who are marginalized by some members of the dominant group.
Some years ago, I had a speaking engagement in Washington, D.C. The flight was seriously late. When I arrived at my hotel, it was past midnight. I was hungry, but the room service was closed. So I went downstairs just to see what I could find for food. The only place that was lit up was the bar, and so I walked in there. The bartender was also leaving, but I saw a lone gentleman sitting on a barstool. The bartender gave me a glass of water. So I sat on a stool next to the gentleman with a drink, and we naturally struck up a conversation.
Here we were out of social structure, in a liminal space. The gentleman told me many things, and finally told me that he was a Vietnam veteran and was torn inwardly about whether or not he would visit the Vietnam War Memorial the next day. He said he wanted to go very badly, but at the same time was deeply afraid to go. He said he did not know how he would respond when he saw his friends’ names on the wall. I gently suggested that he should go and that the experience would be good. A few months after I came home, I received a letter from this gentleman who turned out to be a high-ranking executive at a corporation. He wrote that he did go to the memorial, and that the experience was very healing. In liminality, communitas had occurred.
I indulge in telling my experiences because they may remind you, the reader, of the communitas you have experienced. These communitas experiences occur often across racial and ethnic lines, and they could become seeds of alliances, or “solidarity.”
And then, there are experiences of momentary, brief experiences of communitas with white individuals. I live in a township where most of the residents commute to New York City and are quite accustomed to a great diversity of people. The briefest moments of communitas I am speaking about happen usually in the parking lot of a small local shopping mall. This parking lot evidently is a liminal space. Many individual white men and women greet me with a warm smile in the eyes. It’s never clear whether I greeted them first, or whether they are positively responding to my silent greeting. At any rate, there is a very brief moment of an expression of goodwill, even delight and pleasure, or what Mark Kline Taylor has aptly called the attitude of “admiration of the other in her, his, or their particular differences.”3 This is, of course, quite a contrast to the long and cold stares I sometimes get when visiting stores farther away from metropolitan areas.
These brief moments of warm greeting, I believe, are the seeds of communitas. They are assurances that more full-blown communitas is possible. If communitas is possible, alliance or solidarity is also possible.
Anselm Kyungsuk Min, in his brilliant book Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism, has eloquently argued that in a world where a great number of diverse people have to live together, the most urgent task is for people to learn to regard others in their otherness and also learn to live and work together in a “solidarity of others.” In emphasizing the “solidarity of others,” Min is critical of postmodernism’s overemphasis on difference. Min writes: “The real issue is not only how each group is going to preserve its otherness and integrity against the ever-present encroachment and domination of an hegemonic group, but also whether and how we as others can and should yet live together by jointly producing those conditions of solidarity that rule out such domination and concretize some sense of the common good.”4 In conceiving the manner of others living together, Min prefers the term solidarity to communion, because the latter implies, he argues, “a state of union already achieved and an interpersonal, face-to-face relationship.” Min continues: “Insofar as all historical relations are always in the dialectical process of change and transcend by far the intimate, interpersonal relations, communion is inadequate and misleading as a historical, social category.”5 I agree with Min that a “larger” category than communion is needed to talk about the alliance of people in the struggle for justice. Solidarity or alliance would be more appropriate. I must also point out, however, that communion in the sense of Victor Turner’s communitas is not “a state of union” already achieved but, rather, a state of union constantly happening again and again in a dialectical relationship with the condition of liminality.
How is the solidarity of others made possible? Min finds the ultimate model of solidarity with others in the Christian conception of God as the Trinity: “God is a community, a solidarity, of three persons, truly different as persons yet truly united as divine.” As the principle of unity in diversity, the Holy Spirit “unites the Father and the Son in their mutual otherness in a communion of Others, and reconciles finite others with the Father by uniting them to the Son in his fellowship with the Father.” “The Spirit is active,” asserts Min, “wherever there is a movement of self-transcendence toward communion and solidarity on all levels, cosmic, interpersonal, ecclesial, and historical.”6
How can the others who should be respected in all of their otherness brought together in a relationship of solidarity? Min says that persons must “transcend” themselves in forming solidarity with others, and also that “decentering” of concerns of one’s own group is required for solidarity with others.7
Min’s language is similar to the language of liminality. To “transcend” oneself and to be “decentered” refer to a going beyond a boundary, a structure. To leave one’s boundary is to enter into a liminal space. Min’s description of the emergence of solidarity is similar to my earlier discussion of the rise of communitas out of liminality. The courage to become liminal for the sake of the solidarity of others is another aspect of Asian American spirituality.
RESISTANCE AND THE “HAPPINESS THAT FORGETS NOTHING”
The perspective from a liminal place and the egalitarian ethos of communitas both enable the liminal person to raise critical questions about the existing order of human relatedness in the larger society. So liminality and communitas encourage liminal persons to resist the unjust aspects of their social existence. Being in Christ gives the believer the courage to stand up against marginalizing forces that oppress human life.
In the previous chapter on the church, I spoke about the prophetic responsibility of Asian American Christians primarily as a group. Here I turn to the prophetic responsibility of Christians as individuals, although the corporate and individual responsibilities are intertwined.
Individual Christians’ resistance to the forces of marginalization must begin with themselves. That is to say, there is plenty of marginalizing and dehumanizing going on internally within a human self. The internal oppressive situation must be addressed before a person can effectively resist the oppressive situation in society. Here I would like the reader to indulge some more of my personal introspection.
First, I find myself having to resist an excessive yearning for my homeland in Korea. I spent my childhood and some of my early teen years steeped in nature, as I lived in a small farming town surrounded by creeks and high mountains. After over fifty years in America, I still look for the spring flowers of my hometown, and the sounds of various kinds of cicadas in late summer and fall, and the fall flowers that line the roads. It’s probably okay to miss these things. But when I find Korean pine trees far more aesthetically appealing than American pines, then I wonder if I am not clinging too much to the past.
I also wonder at times if I have done the right thing in leaving all the history of my family and ancestors in Korea and transplanting myself in an entirely different culture with a different history and starting a family here away from my roots. Korea will always be my and my descendants’ ancestral home. But as generations come and go, this ancestral home will be increasingly no more than a reference point without all the colors, sounds, meanings, and feelings I once knew. Here again, I must resist an overattachment to those roots, and be able to leave home, like Abraham, although I always wonder how Abraham did it.
I must also confess that I probably engage in what can only be called my appeasement of white supremacy. After fifty years of surviving in this country, owing so much to many generous and kind white people, I have attained a habit of mind to try to be overly kind to white people. Partly, my overkindness is a strategy to forestall any rude or mean demeanor from the white American. So whenever I am facing a white American official, serviceperson, business agent, or even salesperson, I tend to become overly obliging and usually address them “Sir,” “Ma’am,” or “Miss,” more than common courtesy requires. (One supermarket meat clerk said to me that I was the first person who called him “Sir” in his entire life.)
Every time I needlessly call somebody “Sir,” I say to myself that I must stop doing this. At my age, after half a century in America, I should consider myself equal to anyone as a human being and expect to be treated that way. This internal resistance against my appeasement of white supremacy continues. I have strong survival instincts.
I am also aware of a kind of racist habit I have in relation to the scholars I choose to read. When I look through a list of scholarly writings on the thought of a Western thinker, I tend to think that those articles or books by authors with non-Western names cannot be very good. I probably acquired this habit over the years of living in a Western world that generally is prejudiced in favor of Western scholars over against the non-Western, especially when the subject matter is Western in content. For some years now I deliberately try to resist this prejudice when I look over a bibliography on a Western thinker.
The Christian spirituality of resistance cannot be limited to the resistance against racism and racial and ethnic prejudice. A recent book entitled Resistance: The New Role of Progressive Christians, edited by John B. Cobb Jr., lists five “dominant forces” in America today that Christians are called to resist: consumerism, poisonous inequality, American imperialism, scientism, and global warming.8 The small steps that individual Christians can take in promoting countercultural values are where we must begin.
The spirituality of the new liminality and communitas cannot be limited to prophetic resistance. It also celebrates the reign of God that is already here and now. Asian American spirituality includes happiness and joy. Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo points out that “the prophetic without the festive turns into cynicism and bitterness, or simply fades away.”9 But happiness and joy for Asian American spirituality are happiness and joy “that forget nothing”—that is, are fully aware of the difficulties and problems facing Asian Americans (more on this below).
The words happiness and joy need a brief comment. The Greek word that is translated as “blessed” in the Beatitudes in the Gospels is makarios, which means “fortunate,” “happy,” “in a privileged situation,” “well-off.”10 The meaning of the English term happiness is wide ranging: gladness, feeling fortunate, contentment, tranquility, blessedness, in union with God, and so on.11 Jonathan Edwards considered happiness as a state that combines both the knowledge of true beauty and the delight in and love of true beauty.12 Joy is too ecstatic. Happiness seems to be a broader term than “joy,” referring to a basic affection of the entire person who is in harmony with his life and with the ultimate reality.
The basic affection of happiness in Asian American spirituality is rooted in our knowledge that God has won the decisive victory over evil and that we live with the expectation of the complete actualization of that victory in all areas of God’s creation. Asian Americans’ life in America, in spite of all the difficulties, is not without the benefit of God’s gracious blessings, for which we should be grateful and happy. I came to this country with $150 in my pocket over fifty years ago, and for all that time, I have not gone hungry even for one day. America to many people is a land of opportunity, and its people are generous. I am not forgetting that this “generosity” is often condescending and patronizing. But I am simply admitting that without such generosity, I might not have survived. There also have been individuals whose support, friendship, and generosity have been a pure embodiment of God’s grace. Happiness to a significant extent is gratitude.
Once I was flying back from Seoul, South Korea, after one of my many trips to my homeland. As the plane was approaching John F. Kennedy Airport, I was again troubled by the contradictory character of my feelings. I felt good that I was coming home, to my family and to my house. At the same time, I was asking myself, “Why am I coming to a foreign country again?” To have both of these feelings was somewhat troubling. I was coming to my home in America, but America still was not my home.
Soon I was lined up with my baggage for customs inspection. One white American customs officer was sitting on a stool quickly glancing at everyone’s customs report form. He let some go on out to the arriving area and asked others to remain for some further inspection. My turn came, and he looked at my passport and said I could go. But as he let me go, he looked at me and said, “Mr. Lee, welcome home!” What he said literally overwhelmed me. As I was walking to the door to the arrival area, I noticed that my eyes were tearing up a little and I still think, years later, that I should have gone back and thanked him for saying what he said.
Now I need to say a word about the phrase I mentioned earlier, “the happiness that forgot nothing,” which comes from Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. For Camus, being aware of the reality of human life, however ambiguous or often painful it may be, is a fundamental requirement for an authentic existence. So even “happiness,” which Camus once defined as “the simple harmony between a man [sic] and the life he leads,” has to be “the happiness that forgot nothing, not even murder.”13
Miroslav Volf, in his brilliant and profound book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, presents a very different view of remembering and forgetting. According to Volf, exclusion suffered in the past is still an exclusion if it is not forgotten. If we remember suffering and injustice of the past, we will never “be whole.” If we remember the pain of the past, suffering will never stop, and we will only end up with “an unredeemed sadness.” Volf argues that since redemption includes the redemption of the past, and since the pain and injustices of the past cannot be dissolved through theodicies, only forgetting or nonremembering can help. “Put starkly,” says Volf, “the alternative is: either heaven or the memory of horror.… Redemption will be complete only when the creation of ‘all things new’ is coupled with the passage of ‘all things old’ into the double nihil of non-existence and non-remembrance.”14
My main objection to Volf’s point of view is that if pain and injustices are forgotten, then their seriousness is not duly recognized and respected. Just to forget is too easy an answer on matters as grave as exclusion and dehumanization. It is a too easy way out, it seems. My conception of heaven is not where all bad things are forgotten, but where all tragic and painful things are fully remembered yet they do not shatter us the way they used to. Heaven is where all the injustices are remembered and also rectified. What do we do, on this side of heaven, with the wounds and pain that we remember? After a while, are we not often granted the power to live with our wounds and pain rather than being overwhelmed by them? Are we not granted the power to carry our crosses on our shoulders rather than be carried by them?
Memories of wounds and pain can also lead to healing. Jesus’ resurrected body bore the wounds of the cross, and those wounds helped Jesus himself and doubting Thomas remember the crucifixion and restored Thomas’s relationship with his Lord. Pilgrimages to the sites of the Japanese American internment during World War II help the victims and others to remember the suffering and thereby help them begin the process of coming to terms with it and of being healed.15 I would side with Camus and insist that true happiness forgets nothing.
As a prototype of the celebrative happiness of Asian American discipleship, I think of the breakfast that the resurrected Jesus prepared for his disciples by the Sea of Galilee (John 21:1–14). Jesus surprised the disciples by appearing on the beach early in the morning. He helped them catch a large amount of fish. Jesus then prepared a charcoal fire to cook some of the fish they caught. The disciples were still not completely sure who this visitor was. Jesus then invited them, “Come and have breakfast.” Though marginalized and liminal as a region, Galilee still has beautiful beaches where friends can have breakfast by the sea. We must imagine Jesus happy and not forgetting anything in front of the charcoal fire.