Unseen: When Your Cultural Identity is Devalued, episode 3
www.CrossCulturalVoices.org
John Yoder: Hi everybody! John Yoder here, your host for Cross-Cultural Voices. Welcome back to episode three of our series “Unseen: When Your Cultural Identity is Devalued”.
I want to share with you a little bit of the backstory of this episode, so that you'll understand what's going on. In episodes one and two, you heard the fictional story of Kenny Sok, a young Cambodian American who got a copy of Michelle's book, “A Longing to Belong”, and he asked her via email for a Zoom meeting where he could ask her some questions.
The Zoom interview that you are going to hear between this episode and next happened between me and Michelle earlier this year. In it, I roleplay Kenny Sok, a young Cambodian American, and I ask the kind of questions that many young people are asking today. Michelle plays herself talking to Kenny. In this interview, you will hear Michelle's actual voice. But instead of hearing me, you'll hear the voice of Joshua Fisher, a student at the University of Northwestern reading the role of Kenny in this interview.
I hope that you'll really enjoy the creative genre, which blends nonfiction and creative storytelling. And I hope also that you will learn a lot from what Michelle has to say about our cultural identities. As always, all of our podcasts, their transcripts, blog excerpts, and more is at our website www.CrossCulturalVoices.org. And now, let's rejoin Kenny in his story.
Narrator: Kenny Sok couldn’t be more excited. He loved what he’d read in Michelle Lee-Barnewall’s book A Longing to Belong. Now she was willing to meet with him over Zoom and discuss some of his questions. Kenny wrote out his questions in advance. He didn’t want to miss anything during their conversation.
Kenny didn’t know what to expect of Michelle as a person. Some of the professors he knew were a bit academic and aloof. He was delighted to find that Michelle was warm, personable, and very inviting.
After getting to know each other, Kenny got right to his list of questions.
Kenny: Michelle, I loved your book! I really appreciated all the stories of your growing up, being the only Asian kid in your high school class. It wasn’t easy for you being a Korean-American kid. How did you finally come to peace with having both Korean and American identities?
Michelle: Well, Kenny, I have to say that maybe one of the first things is a rather mundane occurrence. It wasn't necessarily this huge spiritual awakening. It was basically when I first moved out of Minnesota to go to the East Coast for college, and I basically discovered that there are a lot of people who are just like me.
I met other Koreans, I met other Asians, I met other ethnic groups, other races, and I realized that there were other people like me, so I no longer felt that “normal” was just being this one kind of person, which I didn't fit. I realized that I fit in with other Asians, but I also realized that there was just something that was wonderful about being with many different kinds of people.
It made me feel like I belonged and that it was okay to be me, to be someone who might be different than other people. But I'll just also say after that, as I began to explore scripture and what it meant to be a Christian, there were other things that became clear. You know, some of the fairly well known scripture verses like Psalm 139, which talks about being fearfully and wonderfully made, or Jeremiah 1:5, which talks about God knowing Jeremiah even before he was born. These things made me realize that God made us individually and therefore he made us unique and special.
Kenny: Yeah! I agree. God makes all of us unique. That’s still a struggle for me. One of my issues is that I’m so unique. I was the only Asian kid in our school in Rockland, Maine. But even when I was surrounded by Asian faces at Stanford, there weren’t very many of us Cambodian Americans around. At our pan-Asian church, it feels like we get swallowed up by the Chinese and the Koreans.
I wish everybody was like you, interested in other cultures. But most people aren’t. I know God made me special and that I matter to him, but I don’t seem to matter to a lot of people. Even Christians. How do I deal with that?
Michelle: Kenny, I think one of the things I've learned over the years is that sometimes it is okay to lament over something. There are a lot of times I wish people understood something about me and they're not interested. But I also realize it's just kind of part of where we are as humans.
So I tend to react in a couple of different ways. One is if I feel hurt, if I feel wounded, if I feel neglected, I need to ask myself, How does God want me to respond? How is this something that I can take to Jesus and ask him to fill in what is lacking from what I'm not getting from other people?
And I think that's one of the fundamental things we have to do. We have to realize that no one person can give us everything we need. And ultimately I know that I have to take that to the Lord when I feel like I've been rejected or I've been neglected. But I think also what happens when we do that, we find that we have our settledness in Christ. And I think it is a lifelong process.
But I think the other thing that happens is when we're able to find our grounding in Jesus, it enables us to be the kind of person who can listen to other people. It lets us be the kind of people who can give to others.
So if you feel like people don't pay attention to you or aren't interested in your Cambodian culture, I hope that Jesus can make me more of a person who can listen to you, who will be interested in you and your Cambodian culture. So in other words, even as I focus how Christ can help me, even if I'm wounded by someone, how can he also make me be someone who can help someone else? Maybe God can work through me to bring healing to them?
Because I think that is ultimately what the body of Christ is. It's supposed to do that. We are meant to be there for one another. And as humans, we're always going to be wounded by other people. How can I be someone who can help someone in their woundedness?
Kenny: You know, you’re right. It isn’t realistic to expect that everyone will be interested in my cultural heritage. So I guess I just need to find that circle of friends who will listen and care about my story, but accept that a lot of people won’t be really interested. Does that sound right?
Michelle: I think so. Because unfortunately, we do live in a fallen, in a limited world where people cannot do everything we want. But I think it helps to realize we have many different aspects to our identity. You know, race, ethnicity might be one part of our identity, gender might be another, profession, hobbies might be another. And I think one of the things we can do is, even if there's a part of me where at this point in time in my life, it's hard for me to find someone who relates to that, someone might be interested in another part of my identity.
My ethnicity is not the only part of who I am. And I have found in various times in life that I have people around me who understand different aspects of me. So for example, I may go through one season where I have, let's say, a bunch of close Asian friends around me who kind of understand me. I feel very comfortable. I might go to another season in life where my close friends who are close in proximity to me are the ones who maybe understand me more professionally. We go through different seasons of life, and part of it may be, knowing where has God placed you now?
You know, what kind of support groups do you belong to now? What is God doing in your life now? And so for example, I just wrote this book on race several years ago. I wrote a book on gender. So in different times of my life, I feel like God has focused me in different areas.
So right now, I'm focused a little bit more on talking about race and ethnic identity, but years ago, I was focused more on gender. We do go through different seasons. So I think there will be different seasons in which different aspects of my identity become, not more important, but let's say more prominent than others. And God might have me focused on that.
And so it may be at certain times God wants you to focus on being Cambodian, or it’s a season where he wants you to focus somewhere else. Yet there's also the sense of, Where does God have me now at this season of my life?
Kenny: That makes a lot of sense. I’m glad I’m Cambodian. But I also really like being an AI engineer. A lot of people find that interesting. And I always enjoy talking about Christianity with my friends at church.
Let me ask another question. I love the last three chapters of your book, where you talk about Revelation chapters 5 and 7, where people from every nation, tribe, tongue and people come together. What unites them isn't having a diversity forum or talking about justice. They’re simply in awe of the One who sits on the throne and the Lamb.
When I worship God, I get that. Whether I'm at our church, or just praying by myself at home, it makes perfect sense. Jesus is the glorious one. There’s nothing better than spending time in his presence worshipping him.
But that's not how most of us live. Lots of Christians focus more on justice than adoring Christ. How can we cultivate that sense of awe in our churches, and in our daily lives too?
Michelle: that's a great question because I will tell you that's something that I feel like I need to do more in my life too. And it's really difficult when you wake up in the morning and you have to go to work and you have to pay the bills or you have to clean the house.
And it just feels like there's not much room to take the time to do it. But first of all, I'll say thank you for noticing that, and I think that's one of the first steps to realize that this is something that we need, that we can get so caught up in the day to day that we forget to just put ourselves at the feet of Jesus, and realize that when we do that, it takes us outside of ourselves.
It keeps us from focusing on just ourselves and our problems and our grievances, and we see it from a larger perspective. This allows us to be focused on other people, too, and not just ourselves.
Sometimes I think it's good just to take time during the day or something, going outside, being in nature is something that, helps me. Am I willing to take the time to stop and just look up at the sky? One of the things I like to do is I just like to look up at the sky and watch the clouds go by.
For some reason in Tennessee, they seem to move pretty quickly. And so I can notice the clouds moving. So I love to just stop and look at the sky and watch the clouds go by. And that doesn't really even take too much time, but it just kind of reminds me that God is out there, that God is bigger than me and that the world is bigger than me. So even small things like that, you know, can be helpful.
I might also say that it is important for us to practice thanksgiving because when we practice thanksgiving, whether it's taking some time in the morning or just kind of throughout the day, it does make us appreciate God's blessings and to see what God is doing in our lives.
And then maybe another suggestion I might be is, I think this is particularly endemic to a lot of Asians and Asian churches, is there's a great focus on serving. Asian churches are often great at serving. But part of the problem is we're so busy serving, we don't take time to just stop and be with God.
I mean, it takes time to just to be in God's presence, not just on Sunday morning, to just take time to stop and enjoy being with God. You know, to talk with God, to look outside and see God in nature. But I think sometimes we feel this compulsion that we need to be doing something. We need to be serving God. We need to be doing this for our spiritual lives.
The result is that we don't value just taking the time to be with God. For many of us, we can feel guilty because it feels like we’re not doing anything. It’s like we need to be doing something. And we don't know how to just take the time to be with God, and to be in awe of God.
So I think some of it is realizing how we can have that balance. I'm not sure we can be in awe of God if we don't just take the time to do it. So it's difficult, I think, to do both serve and remain in awe of God without consciously making the time and space for it.
Kenny: Wow, you’re absolutely right! It’s so easy to focus on our jobs or serving others, that we pretty much forget God.
Narrator: Kenny really appreciated everything Michelle shared about coming to peace with his Asian American identity, and about standing in awe of God. His questions about race were coming up, and they were big questions.
John Yoder: I hope you were inspired by what you heard from this part of the interview, and I hope you'll come back next time, when we have questions for Michelle about oppression, privilege, microaggressions, and more. I'll see you then.
