Unseen: When Your Cultural Identity is Devalued, episode 1
www.CrossCulturalVoices.org
John Yoder: Hi everybody! My name's John Yoder, and I'm your host for the podcast Cross-Cultural Voices. I'm very excited today to welcome you to the first episode of our series “Unseen: When Your Cultural Identity is Devalued”.
In this series, you'll be hearing from Dr. Michelle Lee-Barnwell. She's a second-generation Korean American and a professor at Talbot School of Theology. In episodes one and two, you'll hear a few quotes from her book, and in episodes three and four, you will hear her in a live interview.
Can I tell you the story of how Michelle and I met, and how we agreed to work together on this project? It's really a unique story. We were introduced by a mutual friend through email. but before I spoke with Michelle, I got a copy of her book “A Longing to Belong” from Amazon. I read it and I loved it. I knew it fit our audience, and I really wanted you to hear from her.
The book isn't laid out like a typical autobiography that tells her story from beginning to end. It tells sniglets of her story, interspersed with Bible principles. As I read the book, it answered some questions, but it raised others from the perspective of so many multicultural young adults that I deal with.
As Michelle and I were getting to know each other, I tossed a novel idea at her. I said, “Michelle, how about you and I Zoom? But I will not be me. I will role play a young 20-something Cambodian American named Kenny, who has the kind of questions that young second gen have. Michelle, you be yourself”. And she agreed.
I sent her questions in advance. So when we did that Zoom conversation, I was Kenny and she was Michelle. I asked her some very relevant questions and we had a lot of fun in that process.
You will hear that Zoom conversation as episodes three and four of this series. But first, in episodes one and two, you will get to meet Kenny. Kenny's part is narrated by Joshua Fisher, a student at the University of Northwestern. Kenny has a lot of questions about his ethnic identity. He gets a copy of Michelle's book. You will hear a number of quotes from that book in episodes one and two, and that will set the story for the questions you hear in the interview in episodes three and four.
You can find all of our podcasts, their transcripts and blog summaries at our website www.CrossCulturalVoices.org. And now, let's meet Kenny.
Narrator: Kenny Sok smiled outwardly, but he grimaced on the inside. The situation was innocent enough, but it was one Kenny faced again and again. His Christian coworker, Brad Peterson, saw him in the hallway and asked, “How was worship at the Chinese church yesterday?”
“It was great,” Kenny responded. “Two new people joined our worship band. It was the first time our team had someone to play the sax. And we had a potluck afterward, where we could connect more deeply with new attenders.”
Kenny’s answer satisfied Brad. And everything he said was true. But he left out details that mattered to him, but obviously not to everyone else. Kindred Spirits Church is a pan-Asian congregation, not Chinese. And Kenny is a second-generation Cambodian-American. He’d told Brad and other coworkers before, but many times it didn’t stick. Everyone at work liked Kenny well enough, but often referred to him as their Chinese or Vietnamese colleague.
By now, Kenny was used to it. When people asked where he was from, “Maine” wasn’t a satisfying answer. When he said he was from Maine, they would frequently respond, “No, where are you really from?” The answer that satisfied them was “My parents came from Cambodia in the 70’s, but my sister and I were born in Maine.” That answer usually made them happy. But often important details, like Kenny being Cambodian, didn’t stick.
Being Cambodian was central to his parents’ identity. They were part of the massive wave of boat people who fled the massacre of the Pol Pot regime that decimated Cambodia’s people in the 70s. They were grateful to escape with their lives, and to be granted refugee status in the United States. As rural peasants, they weren’t highly literate in their mother tongue, let alone English. They struggled to communicate with others in their community. Being a fisherman by trade, his father quickly gained employment among Rockland’s lobstermen. That’s where Kenny and his older sister Sarah were born.
Kenny was a smart kid and excelled in school. But he was constantly picked on by his classmates because he was short, quiet, and had a “funny” last name. His classmates would taunt him, “Hey Sok, where’s your brother Shoe? And your cousin Laces? Are you one of the Red Sox or the White Sox?”
Being the only Asian kid in a class of 130 was tough. When he was with his best friends, he would explain a bit about Cambodian culture. But when most of his teachers and classmates called him Chinese, he just remained expressionless and let them keep their misperceptions.
Kenny’s parents were ecstatic when his sister Sarah won a scholarship to Cornell’s College of Business. By now she was an MBA, and doing well at a firm outside Boston. Her parents missed her, and worried about her still being single at 29. But they were deeply grateful for all she had achieved. They had come from Cambodia with nothing. Seeing their only daughter succeed in the American marketplace brought them a deep sense of satisfaction.
They were equally pleased when Kenny was admitted to the AI program at Stanford. For Asian parents, having any child enroll in a STEM course at a prestigious university brought honor to the entire family. Even better, their son was a pioneer in a new field called AI. They weren’t exactly sure what AI was. But whatever it was, it was the new big thing, and that made them very proud of their son.
Living on campus at Stanford was the first time for Kenny to live among a large Asian population. He met many students who looked like him—Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Burmese and more. And then there were the Indians, Africans, Latinos, and others. What a contrast to the mostly-white population of Maine!
Kenny found a solid spiritual home at Kindred Spirits Church. Its pan-East Asian congregation brought together international students from across Asia, as well as second-generation Asian-Americans like himself. He loved worshipping alongside a larger congregation of others who looked like him.
It bothered him, however, that the larger Asian groups seemed to dominate the church’s culture. Chinese and Koreans made up the majority of the congregation. It wasn’t that they acted in a domineering manner. They were simply doing ministry the way they had learned it, and assumed it would bless everyone. Kenny had conversations with Thai, Filipino, Malaysian, and Burmese members who felt somewhat marginalized in the church. Nobody was mean to them, and the church leadership listened to their suggestions. But the church still felt strongly Chinese and Korean. Kenny enjoyed the potlucks well enough, but discovered that bulgogi and kimchee weren’t “his thing”.
Kenny began to wonder if he would always be a perpetual outsider. There was no doubt he wasn’t an insider in the majority white communities of Maine. But having lived in Northern California for eight years now, he knew that being Cambodian didn’t even make him an insider within many East Asian communities.
Kenny asked himself several questions. Who were “his people”? Was he really Asian? American? Cambodian? Should he marry a white girl and have kids who might shake off their Asian identity?
Kenny deeply loved his parents and sister. He valued the warmth of the close-knit Cambodian community. He also valued the American culture that had made his educational and financial success possible. Kenny wasn’t quite sure how to answer the question “Who am I?”
One Sunday morning, Kenny’s pastor announced there were several copies of the book A Longing to Belong at the information table. The title alone was enough to pique Kenny’s curiosity. Once he looked at the book, he was impressed by the author’s credentials. Michelle Lee-Barnewall was a second-generation Korean-American with a Ph.D. from Notre Dame, who was a professor at Talbot Seminary. Kenny was a quick reader and found the title compelling, so he purchased a copy and began to read it that afternoon.
He didn’t have to read far beyond the introduction to realize he could strongly identify with Michelle. She wrote about the experience of getting her first pair of glasses:
"The reason I was so happy was because in my eight-year-old mind I thought, Now I will be able to hide my eyes! People won’t be able to see that I have these small, slanty eyes, and they will stop making fun of me. Needless to say, I was proven wrong. I was stuck with both my eyes and my glasses. But I’ve always wondered about that event. I can’t remember most of the incidents that prompted my misplaced victory dance, but I do recall thinking that my day of salvation had arrived because now I would be able to be like everyone else. My hopes were soon dashed, but as I grew up, I never stopped wishing that things would change, and I never stopped trying to fit in". (A Longing to Belong, pages 3-4)
“Okay, she gets me,” Kenny thought to himself. He recalled similar incidents when classmates made fun of his name, eyes, height, and more.
What he read reminded him not only of his own journey, but also of his parents’ journey. While Michelle’s father usually remained silent about mistreatment he suffered in America, on a few occasions he let her see a glimpse of the rejection he experienced.
"I remember he once spoke quietly but bitterly about children at the hospital who pointed at him and shouted, “You look like an ape!” while their parents stood by and did nothing. I was shocked because it was so unlike him to say anything negative about life in the United States. But that was all he said, and then the moment disappeared, like a pebble that falls into a smooth lake and vanishes with barely a ripple". (A Longing to Belong, page 67)
This was so true of Kenny’s parents! They knew America wasn’t perfect, but compared to the slaughter of their family members in Cambodia it was the Promised Land. They were proud of their American citizenship, and displayed the American flag prominently on their porch. They wanted everyone to know they loved their new homeland.
Their devotion to America was so strong that they perceived of being American as almost identical to being normal.
"The standard definition of what was normal and not normal was constantly communicated to me, along with the message that I didn’t fit the standard. I concluded that the problem must be me. The rest of the world is normal and I alone am not. Even though my friends might accept me, I could not move beyond what I had learned from the larger world. So it was incredibly profound when I later learned that being who I was—being Korean—could also be part of my identity and could be something good". (A Longing to Belong, page 36)
That totally resonated with Kenny. There wasn’t much to celebrate about being a Cambodian in Maine—or so he thought. He wanted to know how Michelle, the only Asian kid in her class of 300 in Hibbing, Minnesota—came to peace with her ethnic identity.
Kenny was so engrossed in Michelle’s book that he finished it that afternoon. As he did, he was surprised to discover something unexpected yet obvious that could bring oneness to a highly diverse community—a shared awe of Christ.
John Yoder: I hope you enjoyed what you've learned here in episode one. In episode two, Kenny learns more from Michelle's book, specifically how centering on Christ can help him build relationships with others. And Kenny will be thinking through the questions he will ask Michelle in the interview that you will hear in episodes three and four. I'll see you then.
