Unseen: When Your Cultural Identity is Devalued, episode 2
www.CrossCulturalVoices.org
John Yoder: Hi everybody! John Yoder here, your host for Cross-Cultural Voices. Welcome back to episode two of our series “Unseen: When Your Cultural Identity is Devalued”. Last time, Kenny Sok purchased a copy of Michelle Lee-Barnewall’s book, “A Longing to Belong”.
As Kenny began to read, he saw a lot of his own journey as a Cambodian American reflected in Michelle's story. And in today's episode, he'll read some more from her book, and learn more about himself in the process. And Kenny will be developing the questions that he wants to ask Michelle in the live interview that you are going to hear in episodes three and four.
If you like this series, you will probably also really enjoy the simultaneous series that we are running, called “Christian Compassion without Culture Wars”. In it, we have interviews with African American, Mexican, Chinese, and Indian Americans, discussing how we can build wonderful cross-cultural friendships, families and churches without endless bickering about DEI, CRT, intersectionality, microaggressions, and more.
You'll probably also really like the series that ran just before this one, called “Friendship in Black and White”. It's the story of two women who at the beginning of their relationship were at opposite ends of the social justice spectrum, but they stayed in the relationship, they worked through it, and they built a fascinating friendship.
All of our podcasts, transcripts, and blog summaries are on our website, www.CrossCulturalVoices.org. And now let's get back into Kenny's story.
Narrator: As Kenny Sok continued reading Michelle Lee-Barnewall’s book "A Longing to Belong", he saw much of himself reflected in her story. The mocking by classmates for her slanty eyes. The assumption she could speak Vietnamese to the new kid at school. The way kids taunted her father as an ape. The way there was an assumed “normal” in her community, and whatever it was, she wasn’t it.
Throughout the first two-thirds of the book, Kenny felt validation of his experiences as an Asian-American. But he was surprised to see the title of the final chapter was simply "In Awe".
That sounded strange. Was she talking about awe of Korean culture? Or American culture? Kenny wondered how awe could help anyone develop a healthy multiethnic identity. Reading on, he discovered Michelle saw awe of God as the source of unity for the diverse multitude of believers in heaven.
She quoted Revelation 7:9-10: "After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!'”
Here is how Michelle explained this passage: "This is the posture of the saints in Revelation 7. They are united in the presence of the awe-inspiring, all-humbling God, as we will be. Before the Almighty God, all sense of personal superiority will melt away. We will see God for who he is, and as a result we will see ourselves for who we are. Only the overwhelming nature of God will be able to overcome our insatiable human thirst for significance and power, a thirst that drives us to seek advantage over the other, too often at the expense of the other. Only complete submission to our Creator can cause us to truly come together, as natural human barriers fade into insignificance through our collective realization of utter dependence on the Creator. Differences will remain, but our compulsion to ignore, leverage, or abuse those for our own gain will not. We will see others as those whom we are with and for rather than against. All this happens when we stand in awe of God". (A Longing to Belong, pages 164-165)
Wow! That made Kenny stop and pause. This challenged his views on race. He heard so much anger in the discourse over race. Kenny had opinions like everyone else, but the vicious tone in which much of it is expressed troubled him. Even inside the church, it seemed like some believers were more focused on advancing their own ethnic group than loving God with all their hearts.
Kenny never saw it from heaven’s perspective before. The great congregation of Christians in heaven aren’t discussing diversity, or justice, or equality. They are so enthralled by their love for Jesus that their differences don’t matter anymore. And in heaven, nobody prioritizes the good of their own group. They look out equally for the good of everyone. This all made sense.
Michelle continued, "I see in myself a great potential to sin against my brothers and sisters no matter which “side” I am on. Seeking justice can be perverted into bitterness, a desire for retribution and revenge, the oppressed becoming oppressors and the sinned against turning into the sinners. But reflexively protecting doctrine can lead to pride in my insightfulness, a congratulatory self-righteousness for my astute observations, and a calloused heart that uses judgments against those I see as less doctrinally sound to justify doing nothing about a very real problem. In either scenario, my deceitful heart may cause me to pat myself on the back for my noble motives and incisive insights when in my heart I am doing the murdering Jesus warned against". (A Longing to Belong, pages 172-173)
That made a lot of sense to Kenny. Growing up in lily-white Maine, he didn’t directly encounter a lot of the tension between blacks and whites. But at Stanford he certainly did. Both in the student body and in some ministry organizations, people expressed perspectives about justice that left Kenny thoroughly confused.
Some held that Asian-Americans are victims of oppression and injustice, and should join other persons of color to dismantle white supremacy. Kenny knew this would never sit well with his parents. They told him so many stories of the Killing Fields under Pol Pot in the 70’s. His parents counted themselves lucky to be alive. They knew what real oppression was like. They rarely complained about the way they were treated in America, because it was so much better than people were treated in their own homeland.
Others held that because Asian-Americans have higher educational and income levels than white Americans, they are part of the systemic injustice that needs to be challenged. This struck Kenny as quite unfair. His parents had come to America with no more than the shirts on their backs, and one generation later their children were graduating from prestigious schools and earning good salaries. Kenny couldn’t see why he and Sarah needed to “dismantle their privilege” because others hadn’t been as successful.
Kenny was baffled by all the new vocabulary: yellow privilege, white adjacency, brown complicity, intersectionality, microaggressions, gaslighting, columbusing, and more. It felt like he’d need to take a special class just to keep up with the constantly changing terminology. And those who used this vocabulary didn’t seem to be particularly gracious. They seemed to be quite angry. Kenny didn’t want to be angry. He just wanted to belong.
That’s why he loved it when Michelle wrote, "Calls for justice dominate the social, religious, and political landscape today, but on a mundane day-to-day basis, I suspect a lot of people also just want to feel 'normal.'” (A Longing to Belong, page 38)
If there had been anyone else in his apartment, Kenny would have been embarrassed when he stood up and yelled. Finally, someone got it! What Kenny wanted was just to be normal!
Michelle further explained what it meant for the awe of God to create oneness among diverse believers:
"The first is awe of God on the throne. The second is awe of Jesus, who suffered and died for us. Both give a piercing reflection of our shortcomings and compel us to change by pulling us out of our small perspective to what matters much, much more. Both help us know our true place. Both transform us. When I am painfully aware of my smallness and pettiness, I have to ask myself, what grounds for superiority or personal demands do I have over someone else? If I were to really know my true place, how could I not love and care about my wounded neighbor, who is equally valued by God and created in his image"? (A Longing to Belong, pages 181-182)
Kenny thought of all the times in worship when he was barely aware of himself. Whether it was alone in prayer, or gathered with the people of Kindred Spirits Church, Kenny naturally flowed into passionate love for Jesus. When he did, he wasn’t thinking about his own Cambodian-ness or American-ness anymore. He was focusing on Jesus.
"True, our ethnic distinctions still remain. But they are secondary to our common identity as Christians. God does not dissolve differences, such as returning everyone to one language or creating a single nation. Rather, these differences of nations, tribes, peoples, and languages are transcended in worship of the one God, even while they remain". (A Longing to Belong, p. 175)
Kenny realized this meant that for all Christians, their primary identity is being children of God. Only secondarily are they Cambodians, Americans, or anything else. That realization alone would go a long way toward ending racial divisiveness.
Michelle’s book answered some of Kenny’s deepest questions. But it raised more. He wondered if he might be able to ask her about these things. He managed to find her email address, and asked her for a conversation. He didn’t have high expectations she would respond, since she was a busy professor and didn’t know him at all.
To his delight, she responded and offered to have a Zoom conversation with Kenny during her winter break. Kenny was delighted! As a diligent Asian student, he wrote out his questions for her in advance. He had a lot to ask!
John Yoder: Did you resonate with the things that Michelle shared in her book? If you could ask Michelle anything, what would you ask? Well, next time you're going to hear the questions that Kenny asked Michelle in their live interview. I'll see you then.
