What Now? What AAPI and Friends Can Do Post-Lament

By Sylvia Lee

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here’s a reason the majority of the Psalms are poems of lament, elegiac in their grief and despair. As we have seen, there is much to lament. But often, in these psalms, the grief gives way to some action: dancing, being joyful, meditating, remembering, finding peace. And so for us, after sitting shiva, grieving the systemic racism and misogyny ingrained in our institutions and our society, what ought we to do post-lament? Or perhaps more accurately, what can we do concurrently with the cycles of lament we find ourselves in? I’d like to offer three moves AAPI and allies can make in order for us to come closer to the vision of shalom so many of us hope for.

The first action is the hardest—it is to do a sober inventory of our values, and to interrogate our beliefs. In particular, how much of our belief systems have been informed by white male culture with values steeped in white supremacy? I don’t mean the obvious connotations you may associate with the term. I mean the benevolent type of white supremacy that would paint Jesus as a blond-haired, blue-eyed savior rather than the brown-skinned, Middle Eastern man he was. White supremacy is so subtly ingrained in our culture that even ethnic churches carry the competing aromas of Christ, with Christ the white savior.

Erna Kim Hackett, an Asian American woman pastor and founder of Liberated Together, writes that:

“Christianity is [also] preoccupied with the stories of white men. White pastors and their church plants. White male pastors and their books.  White male pastors and their conferences. White worship leaders and their songs. White theologians and their esoteric explorations. 

Every week the pulpit is the story that men want to tell about the world...When men are the ones doing all the Biblical interpretation, it’s all slanted one way.”

As Hackett suggests, added to the layers of whiteness permeating Christian culture is the deep sexism that is also ever-present in churches regardless of race/ethnicity. Much has been said about the Atlanta shooter being “radicalized” in the white evangelical church. But what if he was merely listening to these overwhelmingly male narratives that would separate women from their humanity and dignity and cast them as “sources of temptation?” Add to this the prevailing cultural narratives that cast Asian women as sexual objects, and how can anyone be surprised at the outcome? Asian women were not surprised; our whole lives we have remained silent because the dominant message has been to avoid shame and pursue “purity”. We’ve been told to “behave and dress modestly,” to “not be a snare”  or “distraction” for men, to be a paragon of virtue in order to cater to the caprice of male desire lest we find ourselves subject to male rage. 

If we were to re-center the stories told in church from the perspective of men (not just white men) to include more diverse perspectives, I wager we would see, emerging out of the woodwork, stories so nuanced, so specific, that we would gain a more complex understanding of the sly, inner workings of sin itself: how it feeds off of reductive attitudes, a hunger for control and power, and how it thrives on allegiance not to gospel, but to hierarchical power structures that clutch racist ideas in one hand and sexist ideas in the other to retain the status quo.

So how and where do we begin this work of re-centering ourselves to make room for marginalized voices? To re-center ourselves, we must clear the stations on our presets. We must actively seek out stories that do not come from the same voices we are used to hearing in white culture.

Ellicott City resident and award-winning author Chimamanda Adichie went viral for a Ted Talk she gave on “The Danger of a Single Story.” She talks about the limits of a single narrative in capturing the experiences of a varied African diaspora, and the same is true of Asians. As prevalent and damaging as Asian fetishization has been, it is not the ONLY story Asian women have. Cultural representations would have you believe otherwise, but this “single” story is a false narrative. In truth, the stories are diverse and emerging. If you attune yourself to look intentionally and to listen, you will see them. 

In literature, you will see poets like Fatimah Asghar writing about the generational trauma and duality of partition in India/Pakistan, how it divides the soul while reinforcing the unity of bloodline strangers. You will see writers like Jenny Zhang cutting open the Chinese American immigrant narrative by dropping us off at the intersection of race and class. You will see writers like Steph Cha, laying bare the real harm the Korean community has done to the Black community, through the eyes of women, and how the younger generation is reconciling these truths in their own stories by defying the lies of white supremacy. But you have to look, and you have to pay attention.

And after you have listened to these stories, take what you’ve witnessed and become a storyteller yourself. Start with your family. 

So many Asian Christians I speak with see it as a necessity to openly talk with their children about sex, pornography, and other traditionally “taboo” issues our parents never discussed, because of the way these issues lead to sin and harm. But rarely have I heard “racism” or “sexism” as one of the imperative topics that must be discussed because of their sinful nature. Too often, this is not an intentional conversation Asian parents (any parents) have with their own children, except to point out instances of attacks against them, and usually done by other POC. But what if we changed that for our own children? What if we showed them how to be proud of their Asian heritage while at the same time aware of the history that would pit us—a so-called “model minority”—against our oppressed friends? 

Similarly, if you are a second or third-generation Asian American, there is an imperative to challenge racist stereotypes in our own community. The writer Cathy Park Hong mentions in a recent interview in The Atlantic that older Asian immigrants may use the hate crimes perpetrated by Black people to reaffirm ideas of anti-Blackness. It is easier in some ways to talk about Asian hate crimes when the perpetrators are White. But when the perpetrators are other minorities, suddenly, communities of color are pitted against each other. But who is crafting the narrative here? When we attack each other, blame each other for the problems that white supremacist thinking has told us are a result of other minorities, then try to advocate for our own justice, we are, in the words of the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde, trying to “use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house,” and this only serves to weaken our power.

No. We must start telling another story. It is a story that moves beyond lament. A story that refuses to blame other oppressed communities for our pain, and starts seeing the deeply entangled root causes that give the sins of racism and sexism a stranglehold on our institutions, including our churches. For every story that would fetishize and therefore dehumanize Asian women, we must counter this with a story that bears witness to who we are: image bearers of the Almighty God, imbued with his power. So what story will we tell—to our friends, our family, our neighbors? And how will we know what to say if we do not interrogate our beliefs and seek out narratives that speak truth into our very existence? 

Importantly, as we take these next steps, and the headlines change to the Next Big Thing, remember that, in the words of the poet CP Cavafy, “the road is a long one... but don’t hurry the journey at all.” Each of these moves will take time. But it is in this deliberate process of carving out a new narrative that we finally move out of lament and into a true and lasting shalom in our communities and our areas of influence. Thank you.

This article was originally written for the Stand For AAPI Lives in Howard County, Maryland, March 28, 2021. Posted with permission from the author.

Photo by Kelly Lacy from Pexels

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Sylvia Lee serves as co-Chair and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College. She has been published in The Korea Herald, Poets and Writers Magazine, and Lostwriters, among others, and currently co-hosts the recently launched podcast Bookish: A Casual Book Club through Dragon Digital Radio. She has served on the editorial boards for several literary magazines, including HCC’s community publication The Muse. She received her M.F.A. in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland at College Park.