The Fire Next Time

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African American, Asian American, Chinese church, James Baldwin, model minority, Noah's Ark, race, The Fire Next Time

When I was sixteen, I read a book titled The Fire Next Time. I figured that since it’s James Baldwin’s birthday today, I should put something up on the Thing in commemoration of this event. In fact, since I promised in a previous post on the George Zimmerman verdict that I would write about the immense impact that Baldwin’s work has had on my thinking, consider this a promise fulfilled.

When I was in high school, I did not know that the ‘model minority’ stereotype was the archetypal concept against which Asian American studies was positioned. The ‘model minority,’ for those who aren’t in the know, was a concept developed in the 1960s by white sociologists and journalists who observed that–in their view–Asian people responded to racism differently from black people. While black people were hitting the streets in civil rights protests and arming themselves with the Black Panthers, this stereotype considered Asian Americans to be a ‘model’ minority who focused on the integrity of their private spheres–their strict family life, their hard work in the private sector (usually mom-and-pop shops), their emphasis on education–to overcome racial barriers in America. While Asian American studies was formed through Asian Americans joining in solidarity with African American strikers on university campuses soon after ‘model minority’ articles hit issues in U.S. and World Report and Newsweek, the model minority stereotype was also embraced by a good many other Asian Americans, not least S.I. Hayakawa, the Japanese American university president against whom the black and Asian students were striking on the San Francisco State College campus. By the 1980s, Asian American scholars noted that an increasing number of their students were using the ‘model minority’ to construct their own identities, and many complained about the internal psychological contradictions, the apathy for poor Asian Americans, and the disdain for Chicana/o and African American populations that were the concrete consequences of buying into this stereotype. Indeed, one could say that the use of the ‘model minority’ ideological stereotype in the 1960s had succeeded in positioning Asian Americans as a wedge between white America and peoples of colour who were not Asian, often with devastating consequences for Asian Americans in late 1980s and 1990s urban race riots.

Not knowing any better at the time, though, I considered myself part of the model minority. I lived in California at the time, and if you know anything about the University of California system, what you know is that there are things called ‘UC credits’ that the university uses to evaluate whether certain high school courses can be said to prepare one for admission to the UC system. Intent as I was on getting into a UC school–for the record, I was admitted into four of them, but chose to move out of state, and indeed, out of country, for my university education–I decided to drop home economics. ‘Home ec,’ you see, was not a UC-credited course. But Twentieth-Century Literature was. So I replaced ‘home ec’ with ’20th-century lit,’ and ended up taking two English courses during that term, one an honours English course in which we studied American literature, the other this 20th-century lit course. Needless to say, I was very sleep-deprived during that semester.

I did not know that I would actually get much of what I mull over now out of 20th Century Lit. After all, if it weren’t for that course, I would never have read Thomas Mann, Nadine Gordimer, Dorothy Parker, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Salman Rushdie, or Flannery O’Connor. As we explored the 1920s, the teacher handed out photocopies of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, and we spent a month combing through the work produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes became a household name. (I didn’t realize this until now, but during that same time, I was taking another course called ‘the Bible as literature,’ and we read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple there.)

It’s in that context that the teacher put a book on our desks quite late into the semester. It was James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

I remember reading it and having no idea what Baldwin was talking about. In the first part of the book, Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew, telling him that generations of black self-hatred should not be blamed on African Americans but on a system of segregation in America in which white America systemically induced a sort of African American subservience that, if undermined, would cause a radical shift in the nation’s constitution itself. As a ‘model minority’ Chinese American, I connected with none of that. After all, we Asian Americans weren’t victims of racism, I thought. We were doing quite well economically. And if we could do it, couldn’t everyone else?

It was to my dismay that the teacher announced soon after this book was assigned that we had to write a poem in response to this book. How was I supposed to write a book about a poem with which I had no connection? I mean, by this point, my father had already been ordained by the African American Progressive Baptist denomination. Unlike other Asian American families, ours was in contact with African Americans working for racial justice in Oakland. I had African American friends in high school who spoke out incessantly against racism in all of its visceral forms, and I actually listened to black gospel music. But I was not black. I was an Asian American, and a damn good model minority one too (I had a 4.39 GPA in high school, if you can wrap your head around that). My African American friends should be the ones writing the poem, I thought, not me.

It was then that I re-read the second part of the book. I must have really fallen asleep on my first time through; either that, or I was just really confused. Baldwin writes his autobiography in the second part, tracing his time as a teenage preacher in an African American Pentecostal church and then his being introduced to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam. The first time through, I must have been bewildered–given my encounters with black Christianity–that African Americans could be Muslim. I was probably so weirded out that I completely missed what Baldwin was saying.

The poetry assignment forced me to re-read part 2. Of course, I re-read part 1 too, but that was short–like 10ish pages. Part 2 is this monster of like 100 pages.

And then, just as Baldwin titles the first part, ‘my dungeon shook.’

Re-reading part 2, I began to see parallels to the Chinese churches in which I had grown up in both Baldwin’s account of his Pentecostal preaching and in his ambivalent relationship with the Nation of Islam. Writing of his preaching, Baldwin pretty much says that he was giving his congregation a Marxian ‘opiate of the masses,’ encouraging them as black people to embrace their subservient conditions while looking forward to life in the world to come, to not care about their material conditions and focus on the ephemerally spiritual. In the second part of the book, though, Baldwin issues a different warning about Elijah Muhammad. Baldwin writes of how he admires that the Nation of Islam wants to construct a sort of black nationalism that views ‘black as beautiful.’ However, this comes at one expense: Elijah Muhammad just keeps on throwing out epithets about ‘white devils,’ demonizing white people as the other just as they demonized black people. Baldwin says that that kind of thing insidiously reinforces segregation–keeping the white and black parts of America hating each other and thus dwelling in separate communities–and he says that if those forces of mutual hatred are not dealt with, there will be a racial apocalypse, a judgment on America in which the races will try to kill each other. That judgment, as he quotes the spiritual, evokes a visceral biblical image: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, the fire next time.’

In many ways, this paralleled my experience of Chinese churches. In private circles not too unlike Baldwin’s dinner meeting with Elijah Muhammad, anyone who was not Chinese was called a ‘ghost’ and a ‘barbarian,’ be they white, Chicana/o, or black. In fact, I heard some even speak of non-Chinese Asians as somehow inferior to the Chinese, be it the Japanese (for the events of the Second World War) or the Filipina/os (for their otherness to Chinese, probably starting with skin colour and then descending into all manners of stereotypes that I cannot bear to repeat on this blog). Hell, even the Chinese from the People’s Republic of China were demonized for being Communists. And yet, unlike the Nation of Islam’s focus on material conditions, our Chinese churches focused on becoming ‘truly spiritual,’ casting off worldliness for the life of the spirit. This had an ironic effect, of course, for our affluent congregations. In church, the focus was on being spiritual, but in the world, we had to get ahead: we had to have 4.5 GPA (mine was considered low, compared to some of my peers), we had to get a 1600 on the SAT I (in those days, there were only verbal and math scores), and we had to aim for economic success in practical careers. I found out later that there was theological justification for this sacred-secular divide: the longtime pastor at our Chinese church regularly declared from the pulpit, ‘Where Christianity is, there is prosperity!’ Focus on God and being spiritual, the ideology went, and you would become economically prosperous with God’s blessing. Opiate of the masses?

As I saw these parallels, I wrote a poem called ‘A Chinese Church’ that eventually became the first thing I ever published (I put it in the literary magazine I founded at the high school; yes, I founded it). I imagined that in the midst of all of this, I might be dating a white girl, and I called her ‘Abbey.’ I even posited that she was a missionary’s kid who spoke Chinese; I never imagined that I’d actually meet white women who could speak Chinese better than I (e.g. Not a Dinner Party), and for the record, I am happily married now to a Chinese woman who is a free-church evangelical. But anyway, for the sake of responding to The Fire Next Time, I imagined bringing Abbey to a Chinese church. She would get all kinds of strange glances as a ‘ghost,’ weird stares as a ‘barbarian,’ and a stream of people telling her, ‘This is a Chinese church; how can I help you?’ I ended the poem with a zinger: having left the church, gotten married, and gotten Abbey pregnant with a half-white, half-Chinese child, the speaker (well, that is, me) declared, ‘They were a Chinese church; could they help us?’

The poem was a hit. As I said, I got it published in the literary magazine (well, I was the founding editor, so it had to go in there, but it got some good responses). It was also awarded 100% as its grade, which helped my 20th Century Lit overall score and my 4.39 GPA.

But I never imagined that ten years later working on a PhD on Chinese Christians, I’d still be mulling over The Fire Next Time or that my poem, which was written with fairly instrumentalist motivations, would still be lingering in the back of my head. Of course, a lot has happened since then, my thinking on the Chinese church has (hopefully) matured, and I (thankfully) did not end up marrying a white missionary girl named Abbey.

But on this commemoration of James Baldwin’s birthday, I want to thank James Baldwin for shaking my ‘model minority’ dungeon.

Indeed, shortly after writing this poem, we were assigned in AP US History to do a project on a topic of interest to us. Having done some research and discovered a film by Justin Lin called Better Luck Tomorrow, I decided to research the ‘model minority,’ and that was the first time that Asian American academic names like Ronald Takaki, Sucheng Chan, and Roger Daniels came onto my radar screen. But I don’t think I actually got it until my doctoral work when I embarked into a sustained reflection on Asian American studies and its protest of orientalizing racialization throughout American history.

It was then that I discovered that the way that most people who criticize Chinese churches often misses the mark. Critiqued as bulwarks against racial integration and strongholds of conservative patriarchal ideologies, it has simply never occurred to most people that Baldwin’s analysis of both the black church and the Nation of Islam might have any application to Chinese Christianity. It does.

And here’s the application.

It is that ‘Asianness’–and ‘Chineseness’ in particular–has to be continually constructed within Chinese churches to preserve their place as the model minority within a black-white racial hierarchy. ‘Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness’ don’t imprison Chinese churches; Chinese Christians themselves actively construct a unitary ideology of what these things are in order to hang on to their wedge position as the ‘model minority.’ This is not just confined to America. A recent example of this is the attempt in Hong Kong by some Chinese Christians uninterested in making these constructs to hold others who are interested in these power dynamics accountable for their claims about trying to find Noah’s Ark in Turkey. For those who aren’t in the know, an organization in Hong Kong has solicited funds from Chinese churches over a decade in an effort to find Noah’s Ark as a silver bullet for convincing the world of the inerrancy of Scripture, which they claim will result in a major proselytizing harvest. In the process, dubious actions have been committed, especially the exaggeration of results from their Turkey expeditions (on which no credible archaeologists went). While my friends like Sam Tsang have been pressing for truth in this matter, the response tends to be that the dissenters calling for accountability will shatter the construct of a universal Chinese Christianity that needs to speak with one voice for evangelistic effectiveness. In other words, there’s too much riding on some Chinese Christians wielding the power to construct ‘Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness,’ so much that dissent is suppressed. Allow the dissent, and shatter the community.

Baldwin warns us precisely of this kind of thing. He reminds those of us Asian Americans who buy into the ‘model minority’ stereotype that, by corollary, this construct that from its very inception was meant to situate Asian Americans as a wedge between black and white America is designed to feed segregation and hatred, whether those of us who used it for our identity construction know it or not. In other words, buying into ‘model minority’ constructs may not be accompanied by known malicious intentions, but the structural social consequences of buying into it result in hateful polarization. The horror is not simple theological and organizational breakdown within Chinese churches and among Chinese Christian networks. It’s that they will feed the racializing processes that keep the races segregated from each other in mutual fear and hatred, a problem that, as we saw in the Trayvon Martin case, is just as insidious today as it was when Baldwin was writing. It’s those constructs that must be the target of any prophetic critique. Those of us making this critique love the Chinese church. We grew up in it. We were spiritual formed by it. Our closest friends and family are part of it. But we criticize not because we either hate the church and not because we are simply trying to save a structure that we, and no one else, care about. We speak because we pray that Chinese Christians would be shaken from our complicity with racial segregation and realize that the ‘Christian’ thing calls us to contribute our very selves to the church catholic’s ministry of reconciliation.

Indeed, as Baldwin concludes The Fire Next Time, reconciliation can only happen when the demonization stops and the power of love conquers the consolidation of segregated communities. To posit a heterodox reading of The Fire Next Time via a radically orthodox Christian lens, the fire next time can only be avoided by the Cursillo prayer: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.’ James Baldwin has spoken to us, and his words are prophetic. We are called to repentance; we are summoned to examine our contribution to the impending racial apocalypse; we are beckoned to follow the way of love over against structures that feed hatred and division. Though James Baldwin left the pulpit early on in his ministry and thought that he left the Body of Christ, Baldwin calls us to follow the way of Christ, a way that shattered my dungeon and has moved me in a vocational direction that I never imagined I would take when I was sixteen. All I can say is that I am grateful to Baldwin for writing his book, and I hope that my work does his legacy justice.

Wong Fu For Life

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Asian American, Chinese American, Chinese church, Chinglican, Chris Dinh, Christine Chen, English ministry, ethnic, everyday, Kaba Modern, Korean American, life, love, nice girl, Nice Girls Crew, nice guy, Philip Wang, race, relationships, rigidity, romance, second generation, silent exodus, stereotype, Ted Fu, timelines, Wesley Chan, Wong Fu Productions, yellow fever, Yuri Tag

In a move that will likely annoy Churl to no end, I would like to take a short break from the Chinglican posts on Anglicanism (Part 3 is almost done, actually) and write something a bit more fun. When I first began blogging on A Christian Thing, I saw myself as a sort of Asian American voice on the blog, and it was my original intention to highlight how portions of contemporary Asian American and Asian Canadian arts and culture reflected the theological constitution of the world without the Asian American and Asian Canadian artists even knowing it. It was to that end that my first two posts on the blog were about Lynn Chen and Lisa Lee’s Tumblr blog, Thick Dumpling Skin, as well as on the Linsanity phenomenon in early 2012. At that time, Chinglican wasn’t going to write much about the practice of Anglicanism and about how certain major evangelical players were more ‘catholic’ than they made out to be. If you look carefully at how those posts originated, they were often provoked by some of Churl’s musings, say, about how Churl wished that Mark Driscoll were indeed Roman Catholic (to which I replied that Driscoll was more Irish Catholic than anyone has ever discussed him) while the more recent Anglican series is a reply of sorts to Churl’s desire to jump ship to Rome. I never intended to provide my analysis of the Anglican Communion, never wanted to address the neo-Reformed crew, and never thought that I would be speaking in my own Asian American voice to contest orientalizing voices within American evangelicalism at present. Indeed, I never thought that as Parts 3, 4, and 5 come out of the Anglicanism series, that I’d actually be doing Anglican (or better, ‘Chinglican’) theology on this blog. I suppose I had my own thoughts on these matters that I had personally worked out, but I never thought I’d be writing about them so publicly.

Three nice girls who have nothing to do with Wong Fu, at least not apparently. But they are (from left to right) Michelle Krusiec, Lynn Chen, and Sheetal Sheth. You should watch their stuff too.

Instead, I was supposed to be the happy voice on this Thing, still ridiculous to be sure, but happily ridiculous, blissfully looking at the most secular of Asian American arts and culture and finding good theological things to celebrate there. It was to that end that I wrote about how Thick Dumpling Skin’s address of body issues might appear overly individualistic, but Lisa Lee’s presumably Christian background (she says that her eating disorders hearken back to church potlucks) and Lynn Chen’s Catholic upbringing make them way too theologically thoughtful to end on an individualist note, even if they claim to be secular right now. On the same token, I also complained that while Jeremy Lin has been celebrated as the person to finally shine the spotlight on Asian American evangelicalism in the public eye, his theological assumptions have not been adequately interrogated, and we would be well-served as the church catholic if Lin were to tell us the painful story of how he was marginalized as an Asian American basketball professional as a theological reflection. For both, I wanted to celebrate the fact that we English-speaking younger generation Asian North American Christians (or at least, those with Christian backgrounds) aren’t simply making an alternative arts scene. We are actually doing theology, and doing an fantastically creative job at it.

It’s in that light that I’d like to celebrate Wong Fu Productions today. Wong Fu Productions is a small start-up film company started by three college friends who attended UC San Diego together, Philip Wang, Wesley Chan, and Ted Fu (they have also since added Chris Dinh). Currently based in Los Angeles, they have over one million subscribers on their YouTube channel and a successful business that sells T-shirts and plush toys, while they make film shorts (and aspire to make feature-length films) on YouTube. Over the last weekend, two of the co-founders of Wong Fu, Phil and Wes, visited Vancouver, along with Kaba Modern dance alumna Yuri Tag. Last week (June 8) was also the tenth anniversary of Wong Fu Productions. Because they’ve arrived on my home turf and because it’s time for me to appreciate them anyway, it’s time for an appreciation. (If you want to know what Wong Fu has to do with Yuri Tag, watch the entire series, ‘When It Counts.’ I’ve put the first episode down below.)

The appreciation that took place here in Vancouver treated Phil, Wes, and Yuri a bit like celebrities. Kept at a distance from the fans, the local Asian Canadian YouTube artists who hosted the festivities resorted to tactics that made the event seem quite needlessly formal, complete with raffle ticket draws, very formal and stiff interviews, and games through which the audience would purportedly get to know the Southern Californians. It wasn’t until near the end of the show that Phil broke the ice and reached out to fans, upon which he realized what the crowd control strategies were for, as someone shouted, ‘Will you father my children?’

It wasn’t always like this, though, and this is definitely not how I remember Wong Fu in the past, nor how I feel about them in the present. The Wong Fu guys are a bit older than me, probably by some two or three years. I know that that’s not much now that we’re all adults (but none the more mature, probably!), but in pre-university terms, that’s quite a bit. Not only would they have been seniors when I was a freshman in high school (thinking like that makes them feel old indeed), but in the Chinese church, we would have had to call them gege 哥哥 (older brother) and jiejie 姐姐 (older sister) simply because they were older. I mean, I’m sure that Phil 哥哥, Wes 哥哥, and Ted 哥哥 would chafe under their titles, but in a way, the fact that they have been able to carve out a path in Asian American arts and culture to the point that they’re taken seriously makes the attribution of older sibling ironically appropriate.

Like many, the first short I ever saw of theirs was called ‘Yellow Fever.’ Do yourself a favour and watch it below if you haven’t. The central premise of the short is that while white guys can get Asian girls, Asian guys can’t get white girls. Created prior to YouTube, the short became a hit, downloaded by many of my friends and shown to me at many a party at someone else’s house. We got the sense that these guys were big; they had struck a nerve with all of us relationally challenged, younger, single Asian Americans because they were able to articulate our relational frustrations without actually naming the cause. Instead, they made it funny without explaining anything.

But what really caught my attention was ‘Just A Nice Guy.’ (I’ve put it down below for you.) Again, Wong Fu pinned the relationship challenges of Asian Americans to a particularly corny answer that many Asian American (and arguably non-Asian American) guys give for the reason for the one that got away: ‘I’m just a nice guy.’ (This is why you have to watch ‘When It Counts’ above: Yuri Tag is a ‘nice girl.’ What a spin.) Again, the explanation is just ludicrous to be unbelievable as a non-explanation. Phil plays a ‘nice guy’ seeking the affections of a girl in his study group, but because he is a nice guy, he always gets ‘friend zoned’ by the women to whom he is attracted. It never occurs to him till the end to actually say something about his attractions and affections, which only goes to show that the ‘nice guy’ category is something in which he put himself in the first place. It’s not because he’s Asian that he’s a ‘nice guy.’ It’s not because he’s shy that he’s a nice guy. He’s a nice guy because he said so himself, and that’s what’s keeping him from pursuing relationships.

Since ‘Nice Guy,’ Wong Fu has been making fun of the categories we conservative Asian Americans from the suburbs have set up for ourselves. I say ‘conservative’ and ‘suburban’ as qualifiers because obviously, Asian Americans range the political and geographical spectrum. If you look at the shorts, though, there are a disproportionate amount of suburban scenes (for a new hilarious one, watch ‘Meet the Kayak‘), and the rigidity of stereotypes suggests that while Wong Fu itself is no conservative organization, they may have had fairly socially conservative backgrounds (and they are seeking to transcend it, which means that it’s nice that they got to meet with Barack Obama at the White House). What this means is that Wong Fu doesn’t speak for Asian Americans; how could they? (They certainly don’t represent any of the Asian Americans in poverty or who aren’t privileged enough to get higher education because of fears that they might be deported.) But for those of us suburban Asian Americans who grew up socially conservative (for a great complaint about us, see Glenn Omatsu’s ‘The Four Prisons’ paper), many of us grew up imbibing stereotypes of who we should be as a model minority focused on our own education and careers, and we proceeded to execute that prescription for our lives with rigid timelines and entrenched categories for how our lives should be. As we executed our lives with the instrumental rationality that we lived ever since we learned that we should be a model minority, we applied those same tactics to our personal relationships, leaving emotional carnage in our wake.

Wong Fu is a look in the mirror. One particularly poignant short is ‘Strangers, again’ (see below). If ‘Nice Guy’ is about the hard-and-fast categories in which we place ourselves as conservative suburban Asian Americans, then ‘Strangers, again’ is about the rigid timelines we set for ourselves. On a cursory view of the video–which, unfortunately, is how most viewers saw it–the film seems to be almost hyper-Calvinist in its stripping away of agency from people in a relationship. It’s almost predestined that every relationship will start with some form of excitement, degenerate into apathy, and then disintegrate into a fighting match that ends in two people, once in love, becoming strangers again. But this is not the way that even Wong Fu sees it. Spoiler alert: the final scene has the guy in the relationship (Phil) thinking about if he were to do it again, he’d apologize to his girlfriend (played by the fantastic Cathy Nguyen) halfway into the relationship, cutting off the ‘stages’ right in the middle. Relationships are not predetermined, the film is saying. You can do something about them. (If you want a view of relationships where these stages are but a dream, check out Wes’s Cannes selection, ‘At Musing’s End.’)

Wong Fu also has a variety of comedy sketches that take apart these stereotypes. The ‘Technology Ruins Romance‘ series takes apart the ‘nineteenth century’ notion of long lost love, showing how predetermined conclusions about hopeless romance are simply unrealistic in contemporary everyday lives. There’s also ‘Rick’s Man Tutorials,‘ a parody of Asian American men who attempt to show off their jock sides and look insensitive while falling apart emotionally on the inside. ‘Funemployed‘ delivers a blow to the idea that unemployment is simply failure, while also delivering to us in the midst of the unemployment story a classically creative Wong Fu music hit, the purposefully inane and vapid ‘Dance to This Song‘ that is a parody of every other club song to which to dance.

Put succinctly, Wong Fu Productions demonstrates time and again that the hand-wringing over what constitutes Asian American identity is so painfully silly that it should be laughed at. Instead, life should be lived. This is why they have also produced a variety of music videos for fellow Asian American YouTubers, a task that has culminated in them filming a music video for multiplatinum Taiwanese American artist, Leehom Wang. The music is where you can’t make the stuff up about life and love, where it’s impossible to put everything into a categorical grid or a rigid timeline, where artists must deal with mystery. That’s why Wong Fu now sponsors the International Secret Agents concert series that brings Asian American artists (many of whom are practicing Christians) to the stage to sing not about Asian American love, but their personal experience of love.

In other words, the notion of Asian American identity seems only to be a secondary concern for Wong Fu. If there’s anything to be said about Asian American identity, it’s that if we tell the truth about life and love, we find ourselves constituted not by some category we’ve imposed on ourselves. Instead, we are constituted by the ‘other,’ in that special word in younger Asian American circles called ‘relationships.’ Many of Wong Fu’s videos explore dating relationships in particular, but what’s increasingly striking is the way that their relationships are not merely sexual in nature (some, say, ‘The Last‘ and ‘To Those Nights‘ have slight hints that something subtly sexual might be going on). The overarching framework is not sex, though. It’s friendship.

The sort of friendship that Wong Fu portrays is a desire for deeper knowledge of the other for the other’s sake, to the point of critiquing one’s obsession with one’s own identity. When this is fulfilled–when that longing to know and to be known, to love and to be loved is fulfilled–then that’s what Wong Fu calls ‘home.’ Home is not only a place: it is a place if it’s filled with memories of relationships and times gone by, but it’s not just some physical space devoid of meaning. Home is not only one’s family by blood: it’s not the old stereotypical Asian American argument for traditional family values where the only people you should trust are those with whom you’re related by blood. Home is not even a place where everyone is of the same race; it’s not that Wong Fu is colour-blind (far from it), but race is not a relationship, and there’s no obsession with Asian American identity to make race a deciding factor for social relations. No, home is where your friends are, where the imposed categories and rigid timelines are stripped away and you can simply be with your friends. It’s in this context that we finally find what the Wong Fu holy grail of a dating and marriage relationship is: it’s one where one is loved because one is known and one knows the other. (For Wong Fu’s radical experiment with how far this idea can go, see their short-lived attempt at a television series, Home Is Where the Hans Are.)

Somehow, somewhere, there has to be something theological here.

It’s here that it’s easy to be stumped. After all, what’s so theological about all this? To be honest, there’s nothing really at the surface, although there’s plenty underneath. I mean, I could pin it to my sighting of a cross in an engagement video that Wong Fu did for a couple whose relationship spanned Los Angeles and Taipei, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have mutual friends with Wong Fu who are card-carrying Asian American evangelicals, some of whom were in their very early videos when they were students at UC San Diego. I also happen to remember that on an early version of Phil’s biography on the Wong Fu site, he said that his mom was a deacon in his church in Walnut Creek.

But I won’t go there because the films don’t go there.

You could say that there’s hardly anything worth our theological notice in Wong Fu aside from the occasional YouTuber that Wong Fu works with mentioning ‘God’ (say, Yuri Tag). Other than that, the Wong Fu shorts have really nothing to say about God.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

You see, if we can move this whole discussion to Asian American churches struggling with the ‘silent exodus‘ of their second generation to greener pastures, these shorts are an amazing resource for Asian American English ministries struggling to put their finger on what it is that their people struggle with in their everyday lives. I’m sure this could be said about a variety of non-profits and sundry dedicated to Asian American services. But English-speaking ministries in Asian American churches are notorious for trying to name what it is about Asian Americans in an effort to define their people and then move in to solve their problems in the name of Jesus. You have parents who tell you to be over-achievers. You are over-achievers. You are too much of a good Asian. You need Jesus. Note well: those are already the good ones. Some, of course, are worse, and may be downright racist: We are Asians, and we are superior to white people because we work harder and have stronger family values. So we are better Christians too.

It’s these stereotypes that are currently the plague of Asian American evangelical theology, and Wong Fu shows us another way. Perhaps ‘naming’ something that’s already there is not a defining action.

Maybe it’s a comic action.

It’s comic because once you bring up the categories with which Asian Americans have been defined and have set out to define themselves, they are funny because they sound so ideological that they’re just ludicrous. Why is it really that Asian guys can’t get white girls while white guys get Asian girls? Is there anything more to a ‘nice guy’ and a ‘nice girl’ that makes them so relationally hapless? Does anyone actually go into a relationship looking to become ‘strangers again’? Well, no, and the people who do should be given a sympathetic look in the mirror. This is what you’re doing to yourself, the Wong Fu shorts say. Get over yourself, and live for a change. There is so much more to life than your tidy categories, pressing timelines, and lame excuses for why you’re relationally challenged. Get out there. Live. (And if there are racist people in the way, tell them to get with the program and do something good for a change, like get to know someone personally.)

That’s a remarkable theological service done for Asian American English ministries. In answer to what exactly defines an Asian American that they can be targeted for ministry, Wong Fu wants us to know that we are not merely Asian American. Let’s get our theology right. God is not out to define us because we are not categories. We are not simply made of timelines. We do not exist to be defined for your next pet ministry project, and those of us who fit all of the stereotypes in the shorts are very funny people indeed. We are people, and we have everyday lives, and those lives are worth making fun of and turning into dramas. In fact, even if we defy the notion that our lives are stories lived comically before God, even if we insist that the categories define us and the timelines rule us, even if we purport to be a model minority because we have something about being Asian American to prove (of course, to the chagrin of progressive Asian Americanists), people like Wong Fu can still tell our stories as comedies, sometimes even at our expense. After all, the entire tradition in which we find ourselves is in fact a story, and it is a comic one, one that ends with us coming home to a place we did not expect with friends who have forgiven us for our instrumental rationality, even as we have forgiven them and have been forgiven by God himself.

And so, I’m just going to say it: Wong Fu for Life. Thank you, Phil, Wes, Ted, Chris, and Christine, and everyone else who works at Wong Fu. Your videos really do make my day better. Thanks.

Anglophilic about Athanasius: a silent exodus reflection

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Today is the Memorial of St. Athanasius of Alexandria. Accordingly, I decided to give his De Incarnatione Verbi Dei a re-read.

I read it first seven years ago. That time, I was sitting in a parking lot for a public park in my Vancouver suburb.  An auntie I knew from the Chinese evangelical church I was going to–all women my mom’s age are called “auntie”–drove over and asked what I was reading. I said that I was reading Athanasius. Just the name weirded her out. “You are always reading such complicated stuff,” she said.

I would have explained to her that because she was a fan of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity–a book she recommended to everybody (though I doubt she’s actually read it all the way through herself)–she should read Athanasius. In fact, I was reading Athanasius because I had read C.S. Lewis’s foreword to On the Incarnation in one of the versions of Mere Christianity that I had flipped through. He talks about why it’s important to read old books: because each “age” has its particular ways of thinking and doing things, reading an old book helps you see all the blind spots of your own particular “age.”  In this preface, Lewis talks particularly about the impact that Athanasius had on his own theological thinking:

When I first opened his De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as “arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature.” They are here shown to be rather the re-telling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to “borrow death from others.” The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life—a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance which Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that it is not Athanasius.

Of course, this sounds all so much like what Molly Worthen has recently written about the Anglophilia of American evangelicals trying to find intellectual moorings for an otherwise anti-intellectual American evangelicalism, and I won’t deny that at the time, I was soaking up the neo-Reformed goodies put out by Mark Driscoll and John Piper. In fact, to come completely clean, I was reading Lewis’s Mere Christianity for a course on Christian Living at Calvary Chapel Bible College, and yes, this was the Calvary Chapel where Pastor Chuck Smith baptized over 10,000 hippies in the 1960s and became the flagship church of what has come to be known as the Jesus Movement. (I learned about Lonnie Frisbee much, much later.)

I’m just trying to say that C.S. Lewis sounded really smart because he was British.

So, OK, fine, I’ll admit that I was reading Athanasius to show off that I could read “complicated stuff” by authors with complicated names with a hint of Anglophilia thrown in.  In fact, I have to say that I was being outright Anglophilic because I was reading a horrible nineteenth-century translation that made Athanasius sound like some highfalutin Oxford don. Like Lewis, Athanasius sounded so smart because he was–well, at least in my translation–so British.

Fast-forward six or seven years. I’m completely done with Calvary Chapel’s dispensationalism–I threw in the towel when we were dissecting Romans for verses related to the Rapture–and I’ve jumped ship to Regent College. A paper topic for the Christian Thought and Culture course on pre-Reformation Christianity asked us to take a position on one of the old heresies in the early church. I chose Arianism, partly because a few faculty members had duked it out during their joint lectures over whether Athanasius’s polemics toward Arianism actually made any theological or biblical exegetical sense.

That’s when I read Rowan Williams’s Arius. One of the funny things about Anglophilia is that it’s so selective: American evangelicals love their Lewis, Tolkien, Stott, and all the rest that they re-baptize into their evangelical fold, but they most certainly are not going to take in Rowan Williams. Most of what I’d read and heard about Williams at that point, especially from Anglicans who had broken away from their dioceses over the blessing of same-sex unions, was that he was a “spineless moron” who didn’t have the guts to enforce the moratoria on gay bishops and same-sex partnerships called for in the Windsor Report. I expected him to be equally spineless on fourth-century orthodoxy.

Williams pulled a fast one on me. His analysis of Arius was that Arius was an ultra-conservative pastor in Alexandria whose view of God the Father was too high. He wanted to protect the Father from the suffering of the Son, and that’s why he insisted that the Son had to be sub-divine. Moreover, he was a worship song writer, so he wrote songs like the Thalia so that, as Williams astutely points out, when Arius’s teaching was condemned at Nicaea, Arius still had plenty of fans to keep him company and bury him when he died.

For Williams, orthodoxy did not mean the same thing as conservatism. If anything, it was just the opposite. It was the polemicists like Athanasius who had to keep on their toes, the ones who had to stay creative:

Athanasius and the consistent Nicenes actually accept Arius’ challenge, and agree with the need for conceptual innovation: for them the issue is whether new formulations can be found which do justice not only to the requirements of intellectual clarity but to the wholeness of the worshipping and reflecting experience of the Church. (235)

Little surprise that the conservatives in the Anglican Communion don’t exactly like Williams: after all, who would want to admit that “historic Anglican orthodoxy” with all of its “traditional” teaching on marriage and family is a modern creative formulation that needs more serious theological probing? I’m not even sure that Athanasius would have liked Williams’s assessment of his historical situation, as Williams does go out of his way to say that Athanasius’s polemics might have distorted and exaggerated Arius’s teaching quite a bit.

It’s with this new ambivalence toward Athanasius that I found myself reading De Incarnatione Verbi Dei this morning.

Lewis says that Athanasius’s writing throws the modern world in sharp contrast. On the one hand, Athanasius’s take on miracles is a robust reply to those who say that these things violate “the law of nature”: if the creative Word became flesh, after all, he can create whatever he wants, and that’s OK in a pre-modern enchanted context. On the other, Athanasius’s assumption that all Christians live virtuous lives cannot be said of Lewis’s mid-twentieth-century British experience. For Lewis, Athanasius’s world is fundamentally different from the modern world, and that’s why we have a lot to learn from him. (One could point out the superficial similarities between Lewis’s view and the heterotopias in Foucault’s Of Other Spaces.)

Forgive me, then, for sounding like a heretic to American evangelical Anglophilia and say that I found Athanasius’s On the Incarnation surprisingly similar to what an old-school Chinese Christian pastor in the late twentieth century would be hammering from the pulpit. In fact, as a second-generation Chinese Christian who has less-than-proudly joined the “silent exodus” by attending a non-Chinese church regularly (see also Doreen Carjaval’s original article in the Los Angeles Times and Esther Yuen’s Vancouver adaptation), I might say that it even revived so old-time resentments toward some of my first-generation patriarchs.

On the face of it, De Incarnatione is a very sophisticated theological argument. Athanasius’s main thrust through the work is that the Word became flesh because while the Word had created the world out of nothing, the Fall was corrupting all of creation back into nothing. You can see this corruption, Athanasius begins, in violence from personal adulteries and murders to outright warfare between city-states. The Word thus takes on a body so that he can resurrect to conquer death. A new existence follows in which adulterers are made chaste, murderers are made peaceful, and wars stop.

So far, so good. In fact, I like the pacifist implications of all of this.

That’s when it gets violent. As Athanasius gets polemical about Jewish and Greek interlocutors about Christianity in the second half of the work, I was like, “Wow, an old-school Chinese church pastor could have said this.” And that ticked me off a little bit.

First off, Athanasius would be as helpful to interreligious dialogue as a Chinese Christian fundamentalist. Maybe it’s my stupid nineteenth-century translation that makes the Orientalism come out so pointedly, but here’s a quick snapshot:

And whereas formerly every place was full of the deceit of the oracles, and the oracles at Delphi and Dodona, and in Boeotia and Lycia and Libya and Egypt and those of the Cabiri, and the Pythoness, were held in repute by men’s imagination, now, since Christ has begun to be preached everywhere, their madness also has ceased and there is none among them to divine any more. And whereas formerly demons used to deceive men’s fancy, occupying springs or rivers, trees or stones, and thus imposed upon the simple by their juggleries; now, after the divine visitation of the Word, their deception has ceased. For by the sign of the cross, though a man but use it, he drives out their deceit. And while formerly men held to be gods Zeus and Cronos and Apollo and the heroes mentioned in the poets, and went astray in honoring them, now that the Saviour has appeared among men, those others have been exposed as mortal men, and Christ alone has been recognized among men as the true God, the Word of God. And what is one to say of the magic esteemed among them? that before the Word sojourned among us this was strong and active among Egyptians, and Chaldeans, and Indians, and inspired awe in those who saw it; but that by the presence of the truth, and the appearing of the Word, it also has been thoroughly confuted, and brought wholly to nought. (De Incarnatione 47).

This brings back memories of old-school Chinese church pastors fuming at the pulpit about smashing Buddhas and burning them in tin trash cans in new converts’ backyards or imagining demons flying out of Buddhist temples to corrupt the suburb his people are living in. (Chinese women pastors are a recent phenomenon.) I certainly couldn’t imagine this turning into A Common Word or Nostra Aetate. In this view, there’s something inherently bad about religions other than Christianity. Other religions, it would be said, deal with demons and the devil. Christianity is the light that drives out the darkness, the good that drives out the bad.

Ditto Athanasius on Jewishness:

What is left unfulfilled, that the Jews should now disbelieve with impunity? For if, I say–which is just what we actually see–there is no longer king, nor prophet, nor Jerusalem, nor sacrifice, nor vision, among them, but even the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of God, and Gentiles, leaving their godlessness, are now taking refuge with the God of Abraham, through the Word, even our Lord Jesus Christ, then it must be plain, even to those who are exceedingly obstinate, that the Christ is come, and that he has illumined absolutely all with his light, and given them the true and divine teaching concerning his Father. (De Incarnatione 40).

It’s not Dabru Emet, that’s for sure. I’ve certainly heard my share within Chinese churches about the ignorance of Jews refusing to believe in the Messiah and how we’re so much smarter because it’s so obvious that Jesus is the one they’ve been looking for. As one Hong Kong Chinese pastor in Vancouver who did his Doctor of Ministry thesis on Jewish-Christian relations pointed out to me, that’s why there’s zero dialogue between Chinese Christians and their Jewish neighbours.

Athanasius then assumes that where Christianity is, it just triumphalistically pastes over an existing religious landscape with its own enlightened geography:

This, then, after what we have so far said, it is right for you to realize, and to take as the sum of what we have already started, and to marvel at exceedingly; namely, that since the Saviour has come among us, idolatry not only has no longer increased, but what there was is diminishing and gradually coming to an end; and not only does the wisdom of the Greeks no longer advance, but what there is is now fading away; and demons, so far from cheating any more by illusions and prophecies and magic arts, if they so much as dare to make the attempt, are put to shame by the sign of the cross. And, to sum the matter up, behold how the Saviour’s doctrine is everywhere increasing, while all idolatry and everything opposed to the faith of Christ is daily dwindling, and losing power, and falling. (De Incarnatione 55).

Rowan Williams casts a fair bit of doubt on this assessment with the view that there were lots of different kinds of Arians and lots of different factions within Nicene orthodox groups and that these guys duked it out for well over a century and a half. And yet, Athanasius’s polemic against all things non-Christian reminds me of the Chinese senior pastor in my childhood church who used to declare from the pulpit, “Where Christianity is, there is prosperity!” (How Weberian.) As geographer Judy Han writes about Korean Christians, there is often a lack of clarity about what’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the gospel of prosperity in all of this.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that–contrary to Lewis’s view of ages as so different from each other–I now find Athanasius’s On the Incarnation to be familiar childhood territory, not the “complicated stuff” with a hard-to-pronounce name laced with Anglophilic otherness. Perhaps, as Charles Taylor points out, the “disenchantment” of the enchanted pre-modern world was never fully completed. Instead, Taylor suggests that we live in a “cross-pressured,” if not “schizophrenic,” world where we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t believe in anything supernatural and are subsequently fascinated by anything remotely magical. (Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann has a fascinating take on how this all gets reconciled psychologically.) Athanasius isn’t so different from the rest of us, especially me as a Chinese Christian.

And yet, if Athanasius isn’t so different, I’d like to follow Williams and hold him accountable for some of his statements. Woe be to me to take a canonized church father in both Catholic and Orthodox communions to task, but I’m totally on with Williams in thinking that Athanasius may really have exaggerated some of his polemics. This is admittedly a frightful task, as nerve-wracking as trying to have a theological dispute with a first-generation Chinese Christian senior pastor revered by an adoring immigrant congregation. After all, I run the risk of being called disrepectful to my elders, the zhangzhe (長者) revered in popular Confucian ideology.

A helpful–but still admittedly problematic–way to push St. Athanasius a bit might be to follow the comparisons between him and twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth. Athanasius’s take on religion itself sounds very Barthian (or Barth sounds very Athanasian, which is probably more the case):

But men once more in their perversity having set at nought, in spite of all this, the grace given them, so wholly rejected God, and so darkened their soul, as not merely to forget their idea of God, but also to fashion for themselves one invention after another. (De Incarnatione 11).

This sounds an awful lot like Barth railing about religion as the “frontier” of human possibilities, that the whole point of the resurrection of Jesus is to show how far off the gods that we project from our own desires are from the beaten track.

The two of them came to similar ethical conclusions. For Athanasius, this sort of projected religion led to increased human conflict:

For formerly, while in idolatry, Greeks and Barbarians used to war against each other, and were actually cruel to their own kin. For it was impossible for anyone to cross sea or land at all without arming the hand with swords, because of their implacable fighting among themselves. For the whole course of their life was carried on by arms, and the sword with them took the place of a staff, and was their support in every emergency; and still, as I said before, they were serving idols, and offering sacrifices to demons, while for all their idolatrous superstition they could not be reclaimed from this spirit. (De Incarnatione 51).

For Barth, when the German nation-state made up versions of God for the church to subscribe to, it was well on the way to Nazi totalitarianism and the geopolitical madness of World War II.

If this is the case, this is a profound challenge to the old-school Chinese Christian pastors I think sound so similar to Athanasius. It would challenge them to say concretely what the links between idolatry and ethics are. Don’t just say that “other religions” or “folk religions” are inherently, essentially bad and evil systems associated with the devil. Are they actually violent in practice? How so? Be concrete. We believers in the incarnation are, after all, a concrete people.

And what about Henri de Lubac’s argument in Catholicism that the catholic impulse is all about re-focusing spiritualities on Jesus Christ? or Tolkien’s point that all true narratives find their fulfillment in the eucatastrophic redemption in the death and resurrection of Jesus? (I realize that the latter example brings us back to Anglophilia, which just goes to show that, as James Cone says about his training in white neo-orthodoxy, it’s pretty hard to shake.)

Or what if, as Stanley Hauerwas has it in his own reflection on interreligious interaction and the work of Fr. David Burrell, CSC, the whole point is that faith is all about embodied, performative practice, not propositional systems? Maybe St. Athanasius is making a René Girard argument, that all of this violence is caused by the projection of mimetic desire into religious ritual.

Sure, OK, maybe we shouldn’t tell St. Athanasius to read our twentieth-century theologians, but what I’m saying is that it’s not that St. Athanasius is wrong about religion. It’s that he’s got thoughts to develop. And our job, far from uncritically revering him, is to push that development along.

The point is, if we really do believe in the communion of saints, let’s not put the artificial distances of modernity, Anglophilia, or canonized sainthood between us and the church doctor. After all, Athanasius’s central point in De Incarnatione is that the Word became flesh to free us from the state of corruption so that we can share in the divine resurrection life. If this is so, St. Athanasius is still alive, and he is our brother.

Catholic popular theology would have us say then, “St. Athanasius, pray for us.” What Rowan Williams has shown us that we can also say is, “St. Athanasius, I’m going to push you on this one.” Growing up Chinese Christian, I’d say the latter is absolutely necessary for a more solid understanding of how the church ought to relate to the world.

But it’s a hard thing to say. After all, we don’t want to be disrespectful to our elders.