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The Best of Both Worlds published in Regeneration Quarterly, Fall 2000 (now archived as part of Christianity Today magazine at http://ctlibrary.com/rq/2000/fall/6326.html)
Last week my wife and I were sitting on our living room futon, feeling our son kick in Ming’s tummy, when I started to cry. As Ming tried to understand my sudden flow of tears, I described being overwhelmed with love and fear. “How will I be able to express how much I love my son?” I suppose I’m not the first father to feel that way. But for Ming and me, this question—along with the other questions that beset every couple expecting their first child—is complicated by our bicultural identities. I’m a second-and-a-half-generation Japanese-American; my wife Ming is second-generation Chinese-American, and in April we relocated into an inner-city neighborhood that is primarily African-American, Caribbean, and Latino. Growing up with parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States from Asia, both of us learned to move between the culture of our families and the mainstream Caucasian-American culture that shaped many other parts of our lives. Now we are learning to navigate through urban culture as well. Against this backdrop, we are asking, “What do the different cultures we live in have to say to one another? How does the gospel speak into each? What do we hope our children will receive from each? And what do we hope to protect them from?” When I was nine years old, a boy a few years older than me lived two houses down. He was Korean, and being Japanese, I felt an Asian camaraderie with him. We had other things in common, too, like dirt bike riding and drawing. Unfortunately, he also introduced me to some new activities. He had stumbled onto his father’s stash of Playboy magazines, and he would invite me over to his house to look through them while both his parents were at work. Even though I was young, I had a vague sense of unease about the whole thing. Then we got caught. My friend, who had taken to drawing sexual acts on paper, left one of his drawings in my desk drawer, where my parents found it. Needless to say, they were upset. They held the paper and looked down at me with a piercing stare. I remember feeling a sense of shame, dread, and confusion. I knew they were right, and I felt dirty. All of a sudden, there seemed to be a huge distance, a breach, a Grand Canyon–like break, between me and my parents. Fortunately, I couldn’t draw that well, so my parents knew that I didn’t do it! When they questioned me, I confessed that it was my friend, and I also told them about the magazines. They took the drawing from me, forbade me from playing with that boy, and told his parents about the discovery. We never spoke of it again. My parents did not say, “We’re glad you told us about this.” They did not explain why it was wrong, or why they reacted so strongly. They didn’t tell me about sex. I felt confused and ashamed, but I didn’t really know why. What could fix that distance between me and my parents? I knew I had done something wrong, but what was worse, I felt like there was something wrong with me. Much later in my life, when I discussed this incident with friends who’d had similar experiences, I learned to call what I experienced shame. My parents taught me shame mostly through the body language of strong disapproval—folded arms and stern glares—and the language of rejection—strong, lecturing tones and statements like, “Don’t you know how you make our family look?” Shame is very different from the guilt most white American parents try to induce in their children when they are disciplining them. Guilt is primarily action-based; it is incurred when someone fails to live up to a standard. My white friends’ parents would respond to confessions with calm fairness, a simple explanation for why the act was wrong, and eventually, forgiveness. That wasn’t how my family operated. Shame is identity-based, rooted in your ability to live up to the expectations of those around you. My parents’ responses to me were not as extreme as those of the parents of some of our Asian friends, whose parents would tell them, “You’re a disgrace,” but I still felt a significant break in relationship. The effect on my sense of identity was profound, because instead of feeling that I had done something wrong, I felt like I was something wrong. This feeling of shame and of being a mistake was reinforced by our parents criticizing us more than praising us; they withheld praise and affection out of fear of creating pride and complacency in us. When I brought home a report card with good grades, my parents, especially my dad, would ask, “Why didn’t you get a one hundred percent?” I swam competitively on the same club team as Olympic gold-medalist Janet Evans, and when I did well at one competition, my parents asked, “Why didn’t you do as well as her?” They were joking—mostly. But shame, like guilt, can also mold a conscience in healthy ways. I learned very early to anticipate other people’s needs. When, as an adult, I had a roommate in a crowded house and left early for work, each night I put my clothes outside the door so that I wouldn’t wake him up in the morning. He once told me that he really appreciated that, especially since I did it without being asked. My cultural heritage had molded me, without even realizing it, into someone who could put others’ needs first. Similarly, during my teenage years, when I wanted to buy something, my mom would sometimes ask me, “How would that make your sister feel?” I’m thankful for those reminders. I learned that our finances weren’t inexhaustible, and I grew up aware that purchases had an effect on my younger sister. For me, this translated easily to a Christian resistance against materialism for the sake of the poor. My parents also taught me about silence and longsuffering. My mom often taught me about the Japanese word enryo, which means the ability to suffer without complaining. Ming’s mom stressed the equivalent Chinese term, chi ku, which means “eating bitterness.” Implied in these words is the ability to suffer without speaking and still care for others dependably. In Asian culture, this is a sign of strength—a view that conflicts directly with the American sense of entitlement. Our parents went through many hardships—immigrating to the U.S., facing discrimination, the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, dealing with the problems in their families—without complaining and while always trying to put the family first. My father worked for almost thirty years at a defense contractor where he bumped up early against a glass ceiling, yet he never complained or gave me any indication that I should trim my expectations. My American friends acted very differently; I sometimes felt like they complained a lot. It seemed like in America, it was fashionable and entertaining to complain. When I was swimming competitively, many of my non-Asian friends would complain loudly in the pool and get kicked out of workout. It’s not that I didn’t feel the same way, but I had a barrier to verbalizing those feelings and acting on them. I’m thankful that my parents gave me this internal sense of discipline and a strong desire to put my commitments ahead of myself. At the same time, silence had its downside. Ming’s family never talked about the fact that her grandmother committed suicide. When she was sixteen, Ming had a severe eating disorder and went to see a counselor who tried to talk to her about family dynamics. But Ming’s mother felt that Ming and the counselor were trying to blame the family for her problems. Her parents were angry and fearful, and so she stopped seeing the counselor after a few sessions. It was as if talking about hard things was ultimately selfish. My parents, too, often reminded me of the sacrifices they made for me. My mom would tell me how hard she and my dad had worked for my benefit. Looking back, I appreciate that I was told about this, but at times it seemed heavy-handed. For instance, once when I was already feeling miserable for having done poorly at a swim competition, my mom made the untimely remark, “Mako, do you know how much we’re paying to keep you swimming?” As a result of comments like this, I wrestled with feeling heavily indebted to my parents. The language of sacrifice and obligation can create lifelong burdens for a child, who is then unable to imagine being motivated by joy rather than duty. It took a long time for both Ming and me before we honestly felt motivated by joy rather than duty in our relationships with God. Our Asian upbringings prepared us to receive and live the gospel in many ways. Asian culture fosters an understanding that morality is more than just adhering to abstract standards—that it includes cultivating empathy and anticipating another’s emotional responses. The high value Asian culture places on hearing the unspoken is modeled by Jesus himself, who is a master of listening and addressing the underlying need or question of those who come to him. We want to teach our children to do the same, to listen well, even to non-verbal cues, and to serve others without being asked. More than that, we want to teach our children that God does this for them, that our Father sees and cares about the hidden needs of their hearts before they even tell them to him. Asian culture fosters a sensitivity in our relationships, emphasizing the effects our actions have on others. Sometimes it seems like American culture conceives of relationships in terms of contracts. For instance, one book on parenting written by white American Christian psychologists suggests that if we tell our children to clean their rooms before we take them shopping, and they fail to live up to their end of the bargain, that we should stay calm and simply spell out the consequences: “Too bad, you’ll just have to stay home while the rest of us go.” Staying calm is a good idea, but, something strikes me as odd in this general approach. Are commitments to be taken so lightly? Shouldn’t our child care about how their actions make us feel? A child willing to accept consequences for bad choices is not necessarily a child who chooses well. We want our children to keep their commitments even when it costs them. While we may not use the same methods our parents did in emphasizing the ties between self and others, we want our children to live their lives not just as individuals making contracts but as people committed to something larger and greater than themselves. We want our children to see their resources, energies, and time as gifts that are not just “their own” property, but exist for a larger purpose and a larger community of believers. We want them to understand that we are to be made an important but subordinate part of God’s larger community and purpose, since we owe God a debt (Rom 1:16). We very much want to sacrifice for our children—as our own parents sacrificed for us—as a model of a God who sacrifices for them. But we want to refrain from using the language of sacrifice to create a sense of obligation to repay us. Instead, we want to use a language of sacrifice as freedom for our children to love others, in the same way that Jesus, after washing the disciples feet, told them, “As I have loved you, love one another.” We want to give our children the best of both cultures. The Western sense of being an individual who has worth independent of the approval of any human community is something we also want to instill in them. We value the ability to separate who we are as God’s children and what we do as fallen human beings. We appreciate how Western culture encourages the ability to articulate convictions, values, and choices in a way that is not only tied to a community but is internalized in one’s own self. Eventually, we part ways from both cultures. American and Asian parenting styles both focus on behavior-management, whether it be through bribery, flattery, criticism, guilt, or shame. Asian parents tend to create emotional distance to get the child to conform to the parents’ wishes. But Puritanical America tends to produce children merely satisfied with doing right behaviors. Rather than be satisfied when our children obey us, we want them to know where their behaviors and attitudes (right or wrong) come from: the heart. When God meets Adam and Eve after their disobedience, he responds not with silence nor with immediate consequences, but with searching questions—questions that invite his children to step back into relationship with him by answering for what they did and why. We want to do the same, creating opportunities for our children to name the problems they see in their own hearts. We plan to ask many questions about how different events or situations make them feel and what causes their feelings. We want to educate them on why pride, judgmentalism, anger, and lust endanger their hearts, and why their longings for connection and approval can only truly be met by inviting the Spirit of Christ to come in. We also want to emphasize the restoration of relationship after sin. Some of our more experienced friends who are parents make a regular habit of asking their children for forgiveness even for minor things—“Mommy shouldn’t have gotten impatient with you like that; will you forgive me?”—knowing that as hard as we try as parents, our children will have many things to forgive us for. We hope this will impress upon our children that no one is perfect, that forgiveness is not just pardon but an act of restoring connectedness, and that we all need to be forgiven by and connected with God. We hope this will make it easier and more natural for them than it is for us to go to God and others when they need to ask for forgiveness. The need for God we want our children to feel is akin to what we’re feeling now. As we sat in our living room last week, feeling the joy of becoming new parents but also knowing that we will not be able to love our children as perfectly as we hope to, we felt our hearts’ very deep need for God. That awareness, above all else, is what we want to pass on to them. |
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check out the Lazarus at the Gate economic discipleship curriculum |
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