If you’ve ever seen a picture of me with my team (or scrolled down on my blog and checked out all the faces on the left), you would have realized with just one glance that I’m different. Of course, it’s common knowledge that we’re all different inside and out, but if you play the “Which one of these doesn’t belong?”’ game just based on appearances, one of the first things anyone would notice is that the rest of my team is Caucasian while I am Asian. This might seem like a superficial comment, but race is anything but superficial. I don’t know why exactly the Race is consisted of a very small percentage of minorities. Maybe it’s because the World Race is based in Georgia, so it’s more well-known in the “Bible Belt” southern states where the population is mostly “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. Maybe other minorities (Latin, African, or Asian Americans) in the United States have cultural or social burdens and expectations (the immigrant American Dream, for one) placed upon them by their families so much so that spending a year traveling to eleven countries in eleven months to do missions comes at a heavier cost when it comes to respect, honor, and duty. But being Asian American on the race has been a lot harder than I imagined. And not just being Asian American, since that’s kind of general, but the “born and raised in California 2nd generation Chinese American” kind of Asian American.
My ethnicity has definitely affected my life experiences and shaped the community I have at home more than I had previously thought. It was difficult enough growing up understanding Chinese cultural and social customs along with American customs. Now when I get to a country, I have to tear both sets of cultural and social norms down to accept new ones. In African culture, when someone in the community passes away, the entire community is expected to send representatives to attend the funeral and mourn even if they’ve never known the deceased or the family of the deceased personally. It would be so completely rude not to send representatives from your family, that nobody would attend your funeral someday if you failed to show up for mourning. In American culture, people don’t accept a whole community of strangers to attend a funeral for someone they do not know, and then deem it rude when strangers don’t show up to mourn. In our minds, it would be more polite to allow families to grieve with those they knew and loved. In African culture, when a host invites you over for a meal or gives you a gift, the polite thing to do would be to immediately accept. In Chinese culture, the polite thing to do would be to decline at first, giving the host an opportunity to withdraw the offer (which could have been genuine or an exercise of formality), and then humbly accept after stating a few times that you wouldn’t want to be a burden.
My most recent experience with this in Malawi drove me crazy. My team showed up at a church where the pastor was unprepared to receive us since he did not know we were coming. His wife was also sick with malaria in a hospital, and he invited us over to his house for lunch. Given what I was raised to understand, it would have been incredibly rude to not decline the offer at first, since it was highly likely that the offer was a polite formality towards guests, and not genuine. In my mind, to immediately accept would have taken away his opportunity to postpone his invitation or withdraw it without losing face. I thought, “How could this man sincerely want us invading his home for lunch when it is not easy to feed seven Americans with a pastor’s salary on no prior notice while his wife is bedridden with malaria? Surely, he’s just being polite with an offer of hospitality.” But in reality, hospitality is so genuine, important, and valued in African culture that to reject it would have been disrespectful on our part despite the incredible inconvenience we would cause.
Obliterating both American and Chinese cultural standards has been far from easy, since no one else in my team community shares the experience of being raised in another culture. Strangely enough, I also miss being around people who look like me. Wherever I’ve gone with my team in Africa, my face doesn’t belong amongst the local people, but it also doesn’t belong with those on my team. While they call the rest of my team “mzungu” (which means, white person, usually a foreigner), I’m the only one that gets “China/Japan/Korean/whatever Asian they decide I look like”. I spent my childhood in a primarily Asian community, and spent the past four years at a university where the joke is that UCLA stands for “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians”. I haven’t been the “token Asian” (I hate this phrase, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it) in a group since my days in junior high when my family moved to the countryside, and I had forgotten how something as simple as seeing somebody who looked like you could be strangely comforting. So when I was in the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, and I saw a group of Chinese engineers, we immediately started enjoying conversation with one another. We talked about family, faith, government…pretty much anything you don’t normally breach in a conversation with a stranger, but I think we were all so glad to converse in a language we both understood, that we were willing to talk about anything. I had the opportunity to pray for their trip and give them quarters as souvenirs before they left. We exchanged e-mails, and one of the engineers even took the initiative to e-mail me a greeting. In Kitwe, Zambia, we also met a Korean American, Southern Baptist missionary couple from Cupertino, California. Just seeing familiar Asian faces from my hometown was pretty comforting.
Without opening our mouths, our physical appearances reveal racial and ethnic backgrounds that have the ability to draw us closer or further away from certain people upon first encounters. At different times in my life and on this Race, I’ve been ashamed and I’ve been proud of my face and the weight of people and history behind it that has come into my ownership without consent. Needless to say, being Asian American on the race has had its rewards and challenges thus far. But in the end, I am reassured by the hand of God forming me exactly as He desired to fill His specific purpose.
“You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, ‘He did not make me’; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, ‘He has no understanding?’” Isaiah 29:16
