Not a Dinner Party Is a Chinglican

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Anglican, Asian American, Catholic, Celia Allen, China, Chinatown, Chinglican, complementarian, Donaldina Cameron, egalitarian, feminist, feminist theology, liberation, Mao Zedong, missionary, neo-Reformed, Not a Dinner Party, orientalism, Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, white missionary women

Some time ago, I raised the issue on this Thing that we need a feminist theologian. You could say that we now have one, although I’m sure that Not a Dinner Party’s views are not quite as radical as Mary Daly’s, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s, or Rita Nakashima Brock’s. (Or perhaps they are, which would be very interesting indeed). Instead, Not a Dinner Party’s rant ostensibly places her in the same camp as those who have been labeled ‘evangelical feminists.’ What is striking about this is that even as Not a Dinner Party admits that she too has moved from a sort of Reformed evangelical confession to high-church Anglo-Catholic practice, so have some evangelical feminist bloggers like Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, to some extent for each, at least in their personal contemplative practices. If there are two sides of the same reactionary coin with regard to complementarian and patriarchal models of gender roles, there may be two sides of the same feminist coin as well.

Since Not a Dinner Party raised the possibility of the patriarchal reactionary coin, I will leave her to address this hypothesis of the feminist coin in her further reflections on this Thing.

My aim in this post is instead to celebrate the arrival of our second Chinglican on this blog. I regret to have not been able to proceed further with the ‘What’s So Good About Being Anglican?‘ series before writing this post, for I do plan to write an exposition of the Anglican charism in part 4 and of Chinglicanism in part 5. But if my post on Justin Cantuar and the Cursillo Movement was a preview of sorts into the nature of part 4, consider this appreciation of what Not a Dinner Party stands for as a preview of sorts into part 5’s more drawn out discussion of what it means to be a Chinglican.

I want to write about Not a Dinner Party’s admission that she is interested in all things China. To make such an admission may put her into the ranks of white missionary women who were very interested in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these women did not make it all the way to China; instead, some like Donaldina Cameron (Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, San Francisco) and Celia ‘Debbie’ Allen (First Chinese Baptist Church, San Francisco) mentored youth, alleviated poverty, and combated domestic violence in American Chinatowns.

Donaldina Cameron as a saint

Indeed, there is a fairly clear trajectory that runs from the work of these white missionary women in Chinatowns and the liberation movements of Chinese American youth combating racism and Chinese segregation since the 1930s Tahoe Conferences, efforts that eventually culminated in calls for social justice from the National Council of Churches’s National Conference of Chinese American Churches (CONFAB) and the joining of mainline Chinese churches with the War on Poverty and the ethnic studies strikes in the 1960s and 1970s, through which seminal organizations like Self-Help for the Elderly, the Chinese Hospital, and the Mei Lun Yuen Housing Project were started.  While some Asian American scholars are somewhat ambivalent about the sort of imposition of whiteness onto Chinese spaces by these missionary women, many Asian Americanists themselves often laud these white missionary women as prototypical anti-racist feminists in Chinatown (see, for example, Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue, Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet, and Derek Chang’s Citizens of a Christian Nation; for a critique, see Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals). That I know Not a Dinner Party to have worked in Chinese immigrant services and anti-poverty work on both the West and East Coasts may well indicate that she is following in this long legacy.

Yet even that is not the subject of this particular post, though we may well come back to these themes in the future.

What I want to discuss here is the influence that white Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have had on my thinking on Anglicanism. This is thus not an introduction to Not a Dinner Party, as if she needed one and had to work off a complementarian model where she speaks only under authority on this Thing. I am not introducing her. I am appreciating her.

As you will see from her more formal introduction on her Tumblr, Not a Dinner Party takes her name from Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s quip that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party.’ For some, this explicit invocation of Maoist ideology may be alarming, as it may suggest that there are some of us whose radical critiques may stem from secular socialist sources.

Yet if there is anything that Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have taught me, it is that we must categorically refuse to see China as the ‘other’ to the West. Timothy Cheek is one of these Anglicans. A scholar of Chinese intellectual history both in the Republican and Communist periods, Cheek writes in his introduction to relations between China and the West, China since 1989: Living With Reform, that especially those who do America-China relations often fixate on China as the ‘other’ without realizing that this binary geopolitical framework feeds deeply into how an American national consciousness is conceptualized. If this is the case, Cheek argues, then we need to understand China rightly. Throughout his work, then, Cheek makes the case that we need to understand that saying that ‘Mao is a bad man’ is not enough; we actually have to unpack who Mao was, who the intellectuals both for and against Mao were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the Republican era were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the post-Mao Reform era were, etc. Moreover, Cheek emphasizes that there is a ‘historical Mao’ who actually did things that were good and bad, as well as an ahistorical ‘living Maoism’ that endures today that places Mao as a mythologically good and evil figure in modern China. Seen in this way, China isn’t this big totalitarian land mass over there. Instead, borrowing from the Yale historian of China, Jonathan Spence, it’s a concerted ‘search for modern China,’ examining what we know as ‘China’ as a complex, modern political and economic set of systems whose activities are integral to international politics.

Cheek is not the only one doing such things, especially at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver’s Institute of Asian Research, where much of this complex political economic analysis of Asia-Pacific nation-states takes place in its various centres under leading scholars (both emeriti and contemporary) like Terry McGee, David Edgington, Abidin Kusno, Michael Leaf, Alison Bailey, and Tsering Shakya. To be sure, not everyone here is an Anglican. But the China scholars, like Tim Cheek, disproportionately are, for other scholars, such as Pitman Potter (a China law professor who has recently been ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada) and Diana Lary (an emerita professor of modern Chinese history, with interests particularly in Hong Kong, and who is a latitudinarian Anglican laywoman) certain are Anglican as well as leading China scholars. These scholars also take a similar view of China, refusing to frame it as a backward geopolitical ‘other’ but as a complex, modern apparatus with thriving public and private spheres and vibrant intellectual activity both for and against the state.

It’s here that Not a Dinner Party fits, and the fact that both her partner and I were both students supervised by Tim Cheek for our undergraduate history theses makes this point all the more poignant. (Parallels aside, however, her partner is much more mature in a Christian sense than I am–evidenced by his conversations with me when we were in history together–and whose emphasis on actually doing poverty work and working for social justice puts me to shame.) As a white woman interested in all things China, Not a Dinner Party’s command of Mandarin Chinese, both spoken and written, routinely makes me defer to her for translation, and her knowledge of the Chinese state apparatus and civil society usually means that it’s usually I who consult her for my knowledge of China.

But these people’s deep knowledge of modern China is not the point of this post. It is that this approach to China–one that emphasizes complex alterity in contrast to Cold War ideologies–seeps into their practice of Anglicanism and has deeply influenced the way that I understand Chinglicanism.

If anything, these sorts of approaches to China are far from anything orientalist. While Churl complains in a previous post that Catholicism may be Anglicanism’s ‘Orient,’ I’d like to propose that the alternative to that lies somewhere in Not a Dinner Party’s approach to China. Indeed, Edward Said made it clear in Orientalism that what he was critiquing was not that the ‘orient’ was being studied by ‘occidentalist’ scholars, but instead that ‘occidentalist’ scholars’ methodologies tended to frame the ‘orient’ as a monolithic whole without bothering to actually engage the region of the world called the ‘Orient’ in all of its complexity. The answer to Said is not to stop studying ‘Asia’ or ‘China’; it is to represent it as complex. And this is what these Anglican scholars of China do: instead of seeing the ‘other’ as a fascinating, exotic, but backward monolithic wholes, they examine China as very much a part of who we are and as a complex state apparatus straddling a very complicated economy with multiple publics and counterpublics vying for their voice to be heard. This is China; this is also Catholicism, with its very complicated hierarchy, its fascinating financial exchanges, and its various factions duking it out. What the Anglicans who study China have taught me is that while it may be geopolitically convenient to posit the ‘other’ as ‘wholly other,’ such an approach is neither a fair representation of the other’s complexity, nor an accurate view of how the ‘other’ constitutes our very selves, nor a good way to advance conversation that will lead to the ever increasing collegiality, communion, brotherhood, and sisterhood to which all Christians led by the Spirit are called.

This is what makes Not a Dinner Party’s initial rant on this Thing so on point. What she is pointing out to us is that Catholicism is not one thing. However, the reduction of the neo-Reformed converts running to Catholicism belies what she facetiously calls ‘orientalist’ bells and smells: they reduce Catholicism to one thing. She might declare to us that she herself is a ‘single issue voter’ on the subject of women’s ordination, but she goes on to say that ‘I think the trend is particularly troubling, beyond the gender questions, because the gender questions bring up something larger, i.e. things that become problematic when you go in this direction.’ One may read her as repeating the same ‘slippery slope’ arguments presented by John Piper in the Gospel Coalition video on complementarianism that she posted, only running in the opposite direction.

The only trouble is, a ‘slippery slope’ is not what Not a Dinner Party is talking about.

Not a Dinner Party is saying that it is troubling that when neo-Reformed converts go over to Catholicism, they reduce Catholicism via their narrow view of gender complementarity that only represents one wing (albeit the dominant wing, including in the magisterium) of the Catholic conversation. One wonders, for example, whether their Catholicism is big enough to include the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) or other conferences of women religious, to whom, by the way, Pope Francis went out of his way to say that they should keep doing what they are doing even if they are investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the same CDF formerly headed by a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who declared while still in office that whatever disagreements he had with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and her ‘radical feminist’ friends (which he unfortunately declared ‘another religion’), he considered her an important and thoughtful exegete. One wonders whether their Catholicism is big enough to recognize that liberation theology movements are now being vindicated by Pope Francis as part of the magisterium and that the Church has always had an ‘option for the poor,’ in which framework the free market advocates such as George Weigel, Michael Novak, Robert George, Richard John Neuhaus, and Paul Ryan with their subsidiarity arguments sound more neoliberal than Catholic. One wonders whether these people, instead of reading First Things, have been tempted by the free student subscription to Commonweal. If indeed there are single issue voters, Not a Dinner Party seems to be suggesting that it is these neo-Reformed converts.

And all of this can probably be traced back to Not a Dinner Party’s commitment to an Anglicanism that does not frame China as the monolithic other. In fact, one can only see that the neo-Reformed and conservative Catholic converts are two sides of the same reactionary coin from the vantage point of commitment to analyses that unpack modern complexity, for it is only from that perspective that one can point out reductionism in all of its insidious forms. Just as China should not be reduced to living Maoism (though that is certainly there), Catholicism should not be reduced to the magisterium (though it certainly has a place).

What do we call that vantage point in the Christian church? Well, Not a Dinner Party and I would call it ‘Anglicanism.’ Or better put, it’s called ‘Chinglicanism,’ because we realize that it’s a particular kind of Anglicanism that we are talking about here, one that is not interested in propping up the old colonial structures of the British Empire as it sets up racial hierarchies and segregated urban developments all over the world, but rather, one that realizes that the parish charism does not even allow for a strict spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world.’ It should, after all, be little surprise that the progenitors of ‘radical orthodoxy’ like John Milbank and some of their critical post-liberal allies like Rowan Williams and Stanley Hauerwas are also Anglicans who argue that that very spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world’ is itself a secular construct. As Milbank points out from the get-go in Theology and Social Theory, the saeculum as it has been traditionally conceptualized in Christian theology is not a place; it’s a time, a reference to the ordinary time between Christ’s first and second parousia. In this way, the spatial boundaries of the church are artificial, for the church is a display of an alternate but radically true ontology of radical communion, hospitality, and forgiveness in the midst of a violent world that erects and polices borders all over the place. It’s only in this context that Hauerwas’s mandate to make the church ‘the church’ and the world ‘the world’ makes sense: he is not talking about a physical spatial differentiation, but a radically ontological one in which the church and the world co-exist and where the church’s practices in the midst of the world threatens the world’s legitimacy as an ontological construct. That’s a deep articulation of the parish charism, that is to say, that the Anglican parish exists in the midst of a world that seeks to co-opt it because it doesn’t place those boundaries around itself, but where it ideally–and never completely successfully–displays an alternate mode of charitable social relations in the midst of a violent world.

Chinglicanism extends that parish charism and says that even imperial Anglicanism’s ultimate ‘other’–the ‘Orient,’ ‘Asia,’ or more precisely, ‘China,’ as well as ‘Catholicism’–must not be understood in the terms of colonial segregation or uncritical geopolitical posturing because that is a betrayal of the parish charism itself. It recognizes instead that a parish charism shows us what it means to be constituted by the ‘other,’ that our communion is deeper than we ever imagined, and that this communion is not easy and is in fact all too easily shattered by elitist political posturing. It requires us all to recognize that the ‘poor,’ the ‘Chinese,’ and the ‘Catholic’ are not others to be labeled and pushed away, but rather that we are all part of this parish together.

Not a Dinner Party is thus a Chinglican, for we both refuse to understand the ‘other,’ be it China or Catholicism, in static terms or even as apart from the constitution of our own existence, for doing so would be a violation of Anglican Christian practice altogether. Indeed, to the extent that I have committed these errors, Not a Dinner Party has often corrected me. In this way, she reminds me always that I must be a better Chinglican, for in practicing my Chinglican charism, I am contributing my share to the church catholic that we may all be irreducibly one.

We Remember

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Arab Spring, biopolitics, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, Centessimus annus, China, Chinese, dissent, geopolitics, human dignity, ideology, indigenous, John Paul II, Liu Xiaobo, orientalism, orientalization, redress, state, Tiananmen

June 4 is a day for remembering. This year is no different, for it is now the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident, the event in which students who had occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for over a month were brutally suppressed–the official term of protest from its observers is massacred–as they demonstrated for a new democratic regime in China.

It is thus a day to remember.

We remember that the fight for redress is not yet over. When a state uses military force against its own citizens and then attempts to paste over these events by denying their historical validity and diverting focus from them onto market reform, it is incumbent on all of us to remember that justice has not yet been served, that the state’s murder of people within its own borders is never just wherever it happens, whether in China in 1989, in the present in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Syria, or Turkey, or even in the history of the Americas in American and Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples. We remember because we are calling for the state to acknowledge its own crimes and to bring to justice those who maneuvered the state to commit these crimes.

But we remember also that our memory can be corrupted.  We also remember that the remembrance that these atrocities happened have also been used in the service of othering exclusion. We must remember then that when memory becomes corrupted, it can be used for the service of greater evil.

And thus we must also remember that China is not a geographical foil for the politics of life. We have heard over and over of the issues of life in various sites in China–a little girl run over by a truck, the countless road accidents, the melamine lacing of baby powder, the unethical production of under-regulated automobile parts, the human rights abuses against ethnic minorities. Recently, we heard of a baby boy flushed down a toilet by a desperate mother, and we heard of school principals sexually preying on their own students in collusion with government officials. As we hear of these issues, we are tempted to frame China as the space of the other, a space where life is devalued, a space inhabited by barbarians and country bumpkins and industrial crooks and political Fu Manchu masterminds, a space where everything should point to the events of Tiananmen being just business as usual.

Even as we remember for the sake of Tiananmen redress, we also remember that we must not give in to the temptation to see China as a unified geopolitical bloc. We remember instead that China is vast, that its political system is complex, and that its vastness and complexity belies many avenues of dissent. We remember that dissent is not always on the side of justice simply because it is dissent, that people we hold up as democracy heroes like Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo supported the Bush Administration’s Iraq War with the anti-democratic, neoconservative rationale of pre-emptive warfare in the hope of forcibly enacting democracy in the Middle East for American imperialist interests. We remember that China is not the unitary other, that people and politics as complex as our own go on there as well, and that our pleas for redress are coupled with the complexities of human sociality.

We thus do not remember in order to frame China as the geopolitical other. We remember instead that history is littered with spectacles of violence as various individuals, parties, regimes, and imperial rulers have attempted to exert their sovereign power to make the meaning of ‘Chineseness’ uniform. We remember that these efforts at racial, ethnic, and national subjectification are themselves born of unjust impulses. For what, after all, was the point of the crackdown at Tiananmen, if not to exert the sovereign power of the state to make an international example of those who dared to dissent against an ideology of Chineseness?

So yes, we protest as we remember. But how we protest can never be done with the methods of exclusion. As John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus annus, our protest is not waged by deploying alternate ideologies as foils to injustice. Instead, a constant focus on the dignity of the human person is a protest against ideology itself, grounding our critique in the reality that we are not primarily cogs in a state or market regime, but embodied persons who live and eat and sleep and feel and play and work and laugh and weep and love. Yes, we remember, but our memory grapples with the will to power inherent in something as banal as saying that all ‘Chinese’ people should be a certain way. Those of us who are Christians who join in this protest are thus uninterested in developing a new ideology of what it means to be Chinese. We are looking forward instead to the day when our human community will be constituted by the recognition that we are all made in the image of God.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

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Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”