Compassionate Christians

Asian-Americans find liberalism through Christianity.

by Lily Huang

At some point after the jumbling together of all of the world's races and religions, after the Big Three subdivided and scattered, after one country in particular became a country of immigrants, somewhere between high school and college, maybe, religion took another turn: this time, straight back to its ethnic divides. That is to say, religion became ethnicity-specific, in the way that black Christians and white Christians make up separate congregations down South, or the way that Asian Christians feel the need to form their own fellowship on a college campus. Not that anyone minds anyone else; it's just different. And understandably so--among the Asian Christians I talked to, almost all had something to say about immigrant parents and the way Christianity has taught the kids to see things a little differently. My question for them, though, is how they came to be Christian at all, given the often staunchly secular tradition of their native cultures. I talked to a few of them to find out--those who responded with interest to my inquiry on the mailing lists of the Harvard Asian American Christian Fellowship (HAACF) and the Asian Baptist Student Koinonia (ABSK)--and discovered a little about why ethnic specificity in religion has had a tendency to reappear. I also discovered that the people I talked to shared something besides ethnicity: a religious coming-of-age that complemented the development of free-thinking, the most fundamental basis of the word "liberal."

I have to confess that, at the outset, my idea for this story was to some extent self-serving. I was looking for people who had grown up like me, in secular Asian-American households, people who had had to ask certain persistent, existential questions on their own--and who had found different answers. It turned out, though, that our answers didn't stray too far from one another's. Only the appearance of our beliefs is different, which speaks to the claims of both religious and secular (not to mention liberal) ideals to universal truth. The Asian-American context did lend some fundamental distinctions to their context of Christianity--the tinge of Confucian ideals in parenting, the more ascetic nature of familial love, the legacy of the immigrant experience--but my most profound realization didn't concern the relationship between religion and culture. It was that the liberal myth about religionists can only be held up for so long; at some point, it's no longer a question of religion but one of spirituality, which all free-thinkers, Christian and non-Christian, liberal and non-liberal, have ventured to answer for themselves.

Converting

Terry Shih '04 began going to church in his sophomore year of high school, when his friends enthusiastically recruited him to their Asian-American fellowship. Coming from an irreligious family, not to mention having to let go of a certain dismissive attitude toward Christianity, made actual conversion for him "a gradual process. My family background is almost devoid of spirituality," he says. The Shihs, immigrants from Taiwan, observe a tradition of ancestor worship, but not "an everyday religion that they strictly adhere to."

"So I never really thought about [religion] much," says Shih. "When I started going to church I realized there was this whole other aspect of life." He remembers being initially struck not by the theology but by the community. "The way [people] interacted with each other was just different than what I was used to. The way they just cared for each other was completely different." Outside of church, this kind of camaraderie was "harder to find." Camaraderie is still a major focus of Shih's religious involvement at Harvard; he has a close group of friends from HAACF with whom he can be open about religious and non-religious matters, and he sings for the Christian a capella group Under Construction. Last year he led Bible study for a small group of freshmen.

Shih's parents, however, still haven't shed all of their initial doubt. At first "they thought Christianity was just some phase I was going through." Five years later, the debate is approached from another angle. "I still get into arguments with them because I spend a lot of time here at school doing AACF stuff and singing with Under Construction."

Both Tim Wong '05 and Jenny Davis '05 bring up the sense of community as a significant first appeal of Christianity. Though Wong jokes about it ("I'm not sure why [I went to ABSK]; they did this thing where they offered food and stuff"), he doesn't hesitate to speak frankly of a nagging problem on campus. "Harvard's weird. I remember looking around campus and seeing all my fellow students disoriented and really lonely because people couldn't really form connections. [They were] suffering and making up for it in different ways, whether it's through achievement (which I guess they've been doing for a while), or through hedonistic things, or through relationships, just covering up this underlying dissatisfaction." People didn't stop long enough to ask themselves: "Are the things I do spiritually fulfilling?" Far more often than not, we shy away from that question, because one possible answer, the frightening one, the one that forces everything--parties or not, friendships or not, social service or not, Harvard or not--to stop dead in its tracks, is no.

Wong practiced Christianity in his early teens, but remembers himself as simply going through the motions. "My understanding of Christianity then wasn't the same as it is now." He later began to call his entire belief system into question, and it wasn't until his freshman year at Harvard that he began to explore religious involvement again--through ABSK--and not until just over a month ago that he considered himself fully converted. "I wanted to be more independent and decide things for myself. But it eventually got to the point where I was completely nihilistic and didn't even believe in things like morality. You can't really exist in that state for very long without there being a crisis." Reflecting on this state, he grows somber. "There's a character in every Dostoyevsky story that's like that. He always ends up killing himself at the end of the story." In other words, everyone must believe in something; everyone must reach their own spiritual conclusion. There is meaning to be found, but it's not what you were merely told.

For Wong, meaning lies in helping other people. "I guess the most basic thing I believe is that, if one's relationship to God is right, then morality towards self and others will come naturally. When I see myself treating others badly or see myself not doing or being enough for another, I can always trace that back to ignoring God and his spiritual reality. Even passive vices like fear, shyness, and insecurity are a result of not knowing God's higher fulfillment.

"All these different things that I'd been looking for to fall on, to somehow save me, or deliver me--it could be yourself, or it could be other people, or a relationship, or it could be partying and doing drugs--I tried all those things. It inevitably disappoints."

At Harvard, especially, it's easy to get caught up--in work, maybe, or in perpetuating an image. "Even the sweetest, most affectionate people say to me, `I can't tell whether life has meaning or not. I can't see how people go on living.' Or people who are really on the ball, really confident, really dedicated, disciplined, into social justice and all these things. When I tell them that I used to feel like everything was hopeless, they say, `Well, not to make light of it, but I feel that way all the time.'"

Davis, too, now a group leader in HAACF (she is half-Asian), approached Christianity as a skeptic. "All throughout high school I'd gone pretty far from religion. I had a hard time with a lot of the hypocrisy, a lot of things done in the name of Christianity that are terrible." At HAACF, though, she "found something different in the people that you don't usually see at Harvard. Like a warmth--an acceptance."

She describes her family as only "Christian in name." Her grandparents were devout, but "[her] mother never liked going to church, [her] brother hated church. [Religion] just became not a big thing. And we never talked about it." She came to realize, though, that she had always, unwittingly, been spiritual. "I've always held to the idea that things always work out for the best. And if you think about it, that's pretty much saying that you believe that there's something out there ordering things."

The Asian Experience

One of the first aspects of Asian culture that Shih has had to reconcile with Christianity was the dynamics within his own family. "An Asian person's concept of family is different from a white person's concept," he says. "The way we think of our fathers is different." Sophia Lai '04, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan, specifically recognizes "parent-child interaction" as a product of the Confucian influence. "It can be common in Asian households that parents are more distant, and they don't show their love for their kids in the same affectionate manner you would see in a traditional, Western family." She pauses. "So when you understand God as a father, how does that change?"

Lai has been active in HAACF since her freshman year. While she first went to church as early as the second grade, she didn't begin to come into her current understanding of Christianity until ninth grade, when she joined a Chinese fellowship. To Lai, the Christian concept of grace is equally alien to the Asian frame of mind, to a "society that's more Confucian and more demanding." Trying to reconcile grace with her own upbringing is where she feels the first ripples of the immigrant experience. "With immigrant parents, there's a lot of 'what if I fail? What if I mess up?' The point of Christianity is that you don't have to be perfect. It's good that you try to be good, but if you mess up, you shouldn't just be sitting around wallowing in self-pity. There really shouldn't be the word `should.'"

Nowhere is the immigrant identity more keenly felt than in the all-too-familiar push for conventional success. "My parents are very big on financial success," says Shih. "I can understand that--they came from Taiwan and were very poor immigrants." His parents did succeed, and were happy and proud to win their struggle, but they began to "see financial success as happiness--they equate the two. I would say that, although it's important to be able to provide for yourself, it's not the biggest thing in the world."

Christian and Liberal

Sometimes the easiest way to see through conventional success is, ironically, to attain it. he second half of Lai's senior year of high school was a fairly typical pre-Harvard experience: she had friends, a supportive family, romance, and of course, an acceptance letter. "It seemed like everything was going really perfectly and everyone saw me as the girl who was going to Harvard, who's got it all together. It was at that point that I was really like, `You know, this doesn't really mean that much.' I just felt this deep frustration about everything, because it was supposed to bring me happiness, but it wasn't."

"When you have a goal of getting into Harvard, [the fulfillment of that goal] is going to happen at a set point in your life. I realized that, all of a sudden, everything was open. There's not as much certainty." Something had run its course, and she had two options: to pick another predetermined course, set her sights on the next marker of success and fulfill the necessary requirements, or to step off the track for a moment and conduct a serious reassessment. She could aim for "the best law school, the best law firm, the most power, prestige, money, whatever. I could keep doing those things, but then I realized that that wasn't worth it."

Christianity pointed her to other ideals, based on an "understanding of life that's beyond the traditional Chinese, Taiwanese, Asian, or even American sense of success. I started seeing more about equality in society." The Bible itself, more than it expounds conservative values, emphasizes "loosening the chains of oppression, `feeding the hungry, clothing the naked.'" She realized that "central to Christianity is serving people who have less than you have.

"[You ask] what's wrong with perpetuating inequality. What did we do? We're just going into where we are. And I think it's Christianity that said, no, just because you were born into this position of opportunity and advantage, it doesn't mean you can be like, `I was born with it so I'm just going to take this and fly with it.' You have to look at the other people around you. No one deserves where they were born.

"Becoming more liberal in some ways has been a lot of my trying to reconstruct what Christianity means, and that's definitely not unique to me. There are a lot of young, educated Christians who are more liberal because they understand Christianity as being very socially-oriented."

Lai, once a board member of the Republican Club, is what one might call a born-again Democrat. She's even become wary of the familiar rhetoric. "I don't like the term social justice be cause it's very much a catch-phrase. But I started seeing ways in which justice in general is very, very central in Christianity. And I don't mean justice as punishing the adulterer."

Jenny Davis had a similar experience. Instead of traveling or interning somewhere last summer, she spent her days working at a small homeless shelter in her hometown, doing office work, cooking meals, and talking with residents. "That's something I very definitely would not have done before [I became Christian]. I always knew community service was a good thing, but I still always dragged my feet to do it. But after I converted...I suddenly was really enthusiastic."

For Tim Wong, Christianity has its very roots in free-thinking: "If you look at Jesus, he's the most free," he says. "All the shit in the world didn't affect him at all. He cared about what was spiritual; he didn't care about status. I [used to want] to be more independent, more free, and somehow I equated that with freedom from God."

The Asian-American share of society's general social indifference is yet another repercussion of the immigrant experience. It stems, in large part, from being raised by parents who often don't consider this country their own and naturally distance themselves from pressing social issues. "There's this tendency for Asian Americans to not be involved in certain issues because they don't see them as relating to them," says Lai. Not that Asian Americans are a target group for social indifference, but indifference, when it arises among Asian Americans, may have a distinct cause. "There are a lot of systemic things," Lai explains. "A lot of [Asian] parents who are here came over on PhDs. And you don't get PhDs in humanities here if you're coming from Taiwan or Korea. So they're really science-oriented, and there's this big push for [their children] to be doing medicine, or engineering, which are the 'secure' fields."

And if one were to pit oneself against the forces of social injustice? Is Christianity any help in the struggle? Lai thinks so: "[Many people] get frustrated because they see how hard it is. It's definitely Christianity that's made me see that, okay, it is hard, and in some ways impossible, but it's Christianity that gives the final hope...that there is a standard for justice, which is God."

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu