Returning Home to America Through the Poet Langston Hughes

published in Dear America: Reflections on Race by Geeky Press

“Go back home Chink!”

Black ink sprayed all over the front door and wall of our house.

Graffiti is homo sapiens’ version of territory marking: a creative expression degraded to dog’s piss; a prophetic art blemished to a slur; a spray of hatred: “Get the fuck outta here!”

After six years of roach-infested, intermittent heating apartment, we moved into our first house, a step towards the American dream, a small plot of earth to our name, with a yard for us to tend, fenced not by white-pickets but steel mesh but a fence nevertheless. We turned the 70’s ranch house into our home. Grandmother taped up grainy b&w photos of her husband gone now for two years. Brothers and I put up Met’s 86 World Champions poster featuring Jesse Orosco’s lover’s jump into his catcher arms in our bedroom. Father decorated the living room in the poor man’s interior design, i.e. hand me down furniture that fit into our church van, arranged only physically, not aesthetically. Mother claimed the kitchen by making it reflect her culinary chaos — cooking for anyone ringing our bell with whatever found in the refrigerator and pantry. This was our home, until that night.

We unlocked the graffitied door and entered a house that felt cold, no longer feeling like our home. We were expelled. Not just from our home, but from the land. Although a year before, we swore an oath of allegiance with a photo framed President Reagan blessing us with a grandfatherly smile; although my father gathered nightly to pray for Reagan because he was God’s servant who magically made illegals into legals with a pen, signing the Immigration and Control Act of 1986– my father kept  the precarious life of deportation-fear to himself for six years; although we had our citizenship framed, and the original pad-locked; although, next to church, there was no other place we went with more regularity and religiosity than Kentucky Fried Chicken, the American shrine where a white Colonel Sanders invited us to dinner for his homemade “finger-licking” chicken; yet America was not home.

“Go back home chink.”

We were to deport ourselves back to China though we were not Chinese. I immigrated from Korea when I was seven. I had vague memories of it, even more vague emotional attachment. Korea was not my home because I gave up my Korean citizenship when I accepted American citizenship; because it had been 10 years since I’ve see Song Tan, the city where I grew up and I could not locate in a map until years later; because I could not tell you a single Korean poem but I liked reading T.S. Eliot though I could not exactly tell you why back then; because I fought my grandpa, tooth and nail and tongue, who scolded me for losing my Korean, my mother’s tongue, because, he said, “language is culture;” because I sang America’s National Anthem through its twenty octaves, but did not know the words of Korea’s anthem past the first line; because I have never been to China and I did not want to go back to Korea, except for a visit. But America was not my home, for China is for all yellows.

My father brought out buckets and sponges and we scrubbed vigorously; most of the ink dripped off, the outline persisted, a haunting ghost.

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

-Langston Hughes Let America be America Again

 

After a year in that house, we moved more east down Long Island that extended like a long tilde from the Q of Queens. We eventually went back to Queens where there were more immigrants like us. We were wandering. Americans in citizenship, but not in color.

When you are told you are not American enough times, you believe it. We are not reasoned to our beliefs, but shouted into them. The slurs become an inner voice, a consciousness. This is double consciousness. W.E. Dubois coined that term in his autoethnographic work as he tried to explicate The Souls of Black Folk, the deep rift within him. Double Consciousness is “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Double Consciousness is the ghost of the graffiti taking your body, becoming your own voice so you are saying to yourself, “Go back home, chink!” Intellectually, you know it’s not your voice, but because it’s in you, it’s hard for you to believe it’s not yours. Double consciousness is hating shopping at Macy’s on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, because your Chink-mom will haggle on a dress price, and you hide behind the white, slender mannequin.

Double consciousness is societal-rejection coded into self-rejection. A code that is recoded thousand times a day, in the white faces of actors, politicians and writers, and anyone with power and speaks with authority.

When preaching to a new congregation, I am not introduced as a preacher, but as a Korean-American preacher. A true American needs no adjective. A true American is a noun. I am always a qualifying adjective. Double consciousness is the insubstantial adjective.

This double consciousness, this rejection of oneself, is not sustainable. You cannot negate yourself so consistently and deeply. You find a way to deal with it. There are options.

You compensate for your double consciousness by doubling your effort to be American, prove that damn inner voice wrong; be more American than any white guy. Change your name from “Kwang Sung” to “Samuel.” Hide that character-based Korean name in the ignorable middle name. Change your last name. Marry a “Smith” or a “Johnson.” Work on your pronunciation, roll the “R,” so it does not sound like that sing-song “L.” Lose your need to create an ending vowel as most Korean words, and get used to ending in a clean, hard consonant. Become William Carlos Williams, his Carlos’s immigrant history safely tucked away between the safe and proper English name of “Williams.”

Such bleaching is abrasive, and an erasure. Your Korean name pushed aside, and with it the Korean language, culture, and anything that comes from your Korean parents, and parents too. You lose your heritage; you lose your ancestors.

My grandfather came to America when he got into a motor cycle accident in Song Tan, driving 60 in a highway when he was 65. He moved in with us when we had moved back to Queens. He often got up from the dining table, tapping his walking cane, and chewed out my brother and I, accusing us of disrespecting an elder by not speaking Korean during meal time. “You could be cursing me out?” my grandfather suspected. My parents agreed and sent us to Korean school on Saturday mornings. They certainly wanted us to assimilate — bought us Met’s baseball caps, mitts and bats to play pick up baseball game — but Saturday baseball can wait for Korean school. “At least read your Korean name in Korean!” my grandfather railed.

My grandfather was not a sour person. “When he entered a room,” my grandmother told me after his funeral, “in a few minutes everyone would be laughing.” He was humorous and adventurous. He once bought a pair of hamsters from the street – the pair was a couple and when they had babies we saw them cannibalize their young. Scarred for life we wanted to throw them out. He kept them. He was also compassionate. But when it came to Korean language, he was deadly serious.

His last words to me were in Korean. He said, “nae-il da kkeun-nat-da” My elementary Korean interpreted it as, “tomorrow is the end.” I thought I had a day to make amends.

That day, I shared those words to a friend who had just come from Korea. He offered another interpretation: “My work is done.”

My grandfather believed God didn’t play dice with human lives. His life was evidence of God the director for he was an adamant atheist until he got struck dumb. He called for the village pastor to sing a hymn, and when he joined the pastor for the third verse, he found his voice again. He breathed because he was tasked. Now, his mission was done. He was putting his house in order; and I thought I had one more day. I never had that extra day. When I begged him for forgiveness, his eyes were locked to the ceiling; he had lost his voice, only seeking another breath.

How could I deny my grandfather? Especially after he left me.

Another option is to leave the country. Deny America. Why stay when you are not wanted? James Baldwin did that for a while, sought a new way to identify himself and went to Paris, where he discovered he was more American than African, that he knew a Tennessee white farmer’s songs and soul better than Africans who shared his dark skin.

America gets into you. Though America may reject you, America is alluring, conniving.

It is partly the indelibility of your childhood years. You don’t choose your childhood, but your childhood chooses many things for you, what you like to eat, what scares you, who you fall in love with. You do not have to love your childhood – though for your own sanity it is best to accept it —  but you cannot hate it. You cannot strip yourself of your childhood as much as you cannot strip off your body. Your yellow skin is your body and is you, but so is your American childhood, growing up watching Gilligan’s Island and Happy Days, and reading Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, and writing to be like them.

I grew up in Flushing, a corner of Queens, a terminus stop of 7 train, and just a station away from Shea stadium years before it was replaced by Citifield. When I drive through it on my way to visit my parents in Westbury, I wonder how I ever survived those streets. I don’t want my children to grow up there. Yet, nostalgia surges over me when I read the restaurant signs, Geum-gang-san, Sam-won-gak, from my childhood days. Macy’s is no longer there. I feel the pleasant nausea of homesickness when I drive by P.S. 20, where I played baseball on concrete and chalk-drawn bases.

You can’t leave America because America won’t leave you.

I went back to Korea right after graduating from seminary. I took a year off before starting church work, to learn Korean, do what my grandfather wanted me to do, my penance. Every time I hailed a taxi and gave the name of the stops, “Jong-no-sam-gak, Gyeong-bok-gung” the driver would pin me, “Gyo-po,” which means an ex-pat, or a Korean gone abroad. It is slightly derogatory. English flaunts itself in every Korean word I say.

Remove double consciousness by silencing one of the two voices.

“You are a chink.” Then don’t be one. But you can’t negate yourself. It’s suicide.

“Go home.” I will. Leave America, but America is not geography but a way of seeing, doing and speaking, and you can’t leave such things behind.

There is another option. Deny double-consciousness itself. Maybe the double-consciousness is not in you, but in America itself. And it took a poet to teach me this.

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

-Langston Hughes. Let America be America Again

 

There is a solace when you find people who suffer your oppression. So, I excelled in the Korean church youth group: president of youth group, then college-advisor of youth group, then youth pastor. They were “my people.” I huddled with them often. It’s a solace of silence; a solace but still a silence.

Your spine straightens when you hear your voice in a poem. Langston Hughe’s poem, Let America be America Again, gave body, nouns and verbs, larynx and teeth, to my voice.

Hughes spoke out loud what I was whispering to myself, and the inner voices became speech. Inner voices feel like inviolable conscience. Inner voices speak in absolutes and you feel your only option is obedience. Speech, however, is presentation of an idea. And an idea, you can explore, understand, disagree with. You can argue and refute speech. When you inner voice becomes speech, you can refute it.

Langston Hughes’ poem, Let America be America Again, incarnated my inner voice into a speech I can wrestle with.

 

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

-Langston Hughes, Let America be America Again

A poem is not read, but spoken. And speaking is resurrection; the voice of the poet and the voice of the reader resurrect each other. When I read Hughes out loud, I imagine Hughes of my imagination, calm and more baritone than his recording, reciting his poem without paper, as if he was birthing it for the first time in the speaking of it, a creation ex-nihilo. After all, he is the “I am” of the poem. At the same time, it is my voice I hear, with its deeper timber and tone and the Korean&Queens mutt accent. The words are vibrating on my lips. In my inner ear, I hear the cadence of Hughes, but my physical ear hears my inflections. Huges is the “I am” of the poem, but so am I. I am also the repeating “I am” of the poem.  Hughes channels his voice through me; I channel my voice through Hughes.

And as I speak the poem, I begin to understand because one doesn’t understand one’s voice until it steps out of the shadow of whisper and into the light of sound.

I know. I am not black. Hughes is black.

The black slavery experience and the yellow immigrant experience are different. The difference is not simple. It is not the difference of individuality, but of history. He has Transatlantic slave trade, arms and legs spread out like a meat in butcher’s market for better valuation, and selling away of his children like a bitch’s pups. And there is the difference of skin colors and where they fall in the racial hierarchy. Yellow is not as dark as black. Yellow is whitish and has been held up as the ideal minority, a faux social category created to guilt the black for their ghettos. But we share in the experience of double consciousness, that no matter the length of our stay in this land, we were never seen, and still are not seen as true Americans.

Yes, double consciousness has struck the yellows with the brutal club of racist laws too. We have our blues too. Miscegenation laws, yellow cannot marry white because it’s unnatural, because yellow is unnatural. Executive Order 9066 where “Japs,” though citizens and residents, were herded into concentration camps. Vincent Chin, whose skull was cracked open with a baseball bat and justice put a sticker price on a yellow life: three years of probation. That’s the spit-worth of a yellow life.  And the rational for releasing the murderers back into the society? They were Americans. Americans were losing jobs to foreigners. Vincent is a foreigner by the color of his skin, so who cannot understand Americans fighting for Americans and American ideals, with guns in Vietnam and baseball bats in Detroit. Patriotism is always in danger of cannibalism, of killing its own citizens and its own ideals. It is America who is the contradiction.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

 

This stanza is in response to inquiry of who are the silent ones, who are rejected and marginalized into silence.

But here is a surprising paradox I got only as I spoke this poem. In affirming one’s marginalization one’s margin becomes a central place, a place worthy of speech, of history, of poetry. In saying “I have been silent,” one has already broken the silence.

The “I” is reinstated when it recognizes the dissolution, the enslavement, the oppression, the expulsion of the “I.”

I grew up thinking I can get away from the haunt of the slur if I deny that I am the “chink.” But the poet Hughes, or as I now call him, prophet Hughes, tells me to own up. I am the chink. When I give witness to my rejection, I find that “I” doesn’t die. Silence kills, not the rejection. Speech resurrects. Speech overcomes rejection. And the “I” that goes through the rejection is an expansive I. When I affirm my experience, being “poor,” and/or “driven,” and/or “clutching” and/or “bearing slavery’s scars,” the “I” becomes encompassing, broad, universal.

When I affirm that I am Korean and that I am American, and that in this body, I am both, then that very confession becomes a declaration, that this body has no contradiction, that double consciousness is not inherent to my body. When I reject the self-rejecting inner voice, then I become the inner voice of America, the conscience that says to America that you have not been faithful to yourself, that you are far from your dream. That the tearing of the soul is within America itself.

The poet Frank Bidart writes, “Every serious work of art about America has the same/Theme: America/is a great Idea: the reality leaves something to be desired.”  Not just art, but history. The history of American is the story of the struggle between the Dream of equality for everyone and its racial injustice, the nightmare of its power-mongering, fear-driven racial politics. “All men are created equal” but not poor men, or red men, or black men, or yellow men, or women. Send me the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore/ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,” but not if they are Irish, French, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, or Muslims.

Every immigrant, everyone rejected by America is proof of America’s double-mindedness, the shame of America’ unfaithfulness to itself. The poor white, the black slave, the yellow immigrant judges America’s hypocrisy.

But the judging voice is not condemnation. It is not damnation but a call to repentance. And repentance is the energy hope gives, for repentance is the belief that we are not doomed in our sinful ways, that we can choose new possibilities. The immigrant as the inner voice does not conspire against America, but inspires America to unfailingly strive to be faithful to its own dreams. Immigrants are the prophets of America. Prophets seek to awake their nation from the stupor of their daydreams, so the nation they love can pursue a real dream. Prophets are not doomsayers but dreamers and those who know the American nightmares are the greatest dreamers.

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—

Who made America,

 

It is America who needs to come to terms with me, because this is my land; this is my country; and I am home.

 


If this essay speaks to you, I hope you share it, tell others and check out the book which is a collection of works that deepens the conversation on race through sharing of stories.

You can purchase this collection by Geeky Press from:

Paperback – Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, or Lulu.
Ebook – Lulu

Today’s Reformation: Ending Church Segregation

When the sun dawned on Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther prepared to share his 95 theses with the German church — not knowing  the day would eventually be pegged as the birth of the Protestant Reformation, and a day that fundamentally changed the landscape of Europe.

The parchment at hand had a laundry list of grievances against indulgence, a way to reduce the amount of punishment required to suffer for sin, as taught by the Catholic Church. In 1500s Europe, indulgences had become a practice that monetized salvation — for a monetary offering, the church would promise remission of punishment in purgatory. The gift of eternal life was turned into a late night infomercial: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Luther could no longer stomach a practice that fleeced peasants to fatten the pockets of clergies and finance St. Peter’s Basilica. He even directly called out the pope: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?”

The common narrative of Reformation emphasizes Luther’s recovery of biblical authority on which he established the doctrines of salvation by grace, and not by works. This is unfortunate, because it caricatures Luther’s social reform solely into a doctrinal dispute. But Luther’s main target was the church’s unjust practice of indulgence. He had to undo convoluted doctrines, haphazardly slapped together through centuries, that were needed to support this inhumane practice. So against the labyrinthine doctrines that were buttressing indulgence — including purgatory, authority of tradition, and infallibility of papacy because lies need more words than truth — Luther marshalled what we now know as the rallying calls of the Reformation: “Grace alone, Scripture alone, Christ alone.”

These were the times…

(to continue to read at Sojourner)

Chi

(first published in American Journal of Poetry)

my mother told me to get acupuncture for my ankle sprain,
I laughed and corrected her, acupuncture is Eastern superstition,
works by the transference of our attention, from one pain to another,
i.e. from your torn fibula to the invasion of dermis by a needle,
and not some mysterious Chi energy never observed by a microscope.

but today,
there are Western acupuncturists
with degrees from universities that actually have
campuses and credentials; and there are books,
I mean hard cover — drop on your foot, shatter you cuneiforms,
centuries of pages of resume-heavy papers — text
books from publications not run from a basement
but companies with market-researched logos
stamped on buildings who send out agents like baseball teams.

from all this, I can conclude,
my mother has somehow convinced the whole western world
to believe that acupuncture can relieve migraines,
seaweed soup helps you lactate ,
and bleeding out the black blood pooled in your thumb,
will soothe your upset stomach, in short,
that mothers know best,
old wive’s tales are old but are not tales,
and east knows things the west can’t know
with all his steeled instruments.

Or else
the whole scientific, medical, educational
industrial complex of knowledge,
is a sham, and that what is real
is the old Chinese acupuncturist,
off Brown & Main Street, his shaved head,
and his almond-blossom eyebrows
that bend like an ancient
tree with his smile, and the wall pinned,
penned diagram of the human body,
splayed, and all the energy points dotting that universe
like constellations, inscribed in them
a person’s health and fate, and his searching index finger,
snubbed like a nose, sniffing for my energy point,
and once he finds it, thrusts a needle
that sinks in without a single red tear drop,
and my mother,
clasping my hand,
believing it still in need of holding,
like I’m still her
five year old
Chi.

Opening Walmart

(first published in American Journal of Poetry)

The shoe boxes are stacked, ordered in ascending size,
separated into sexes, what a customer chooses to wear, cross-
shoeing — her own compound word — is not her judgment,
just that the men’s sneakers don’t sneak in between
Dora sandals, ankle-strap heels and stilettos.

Then off to the vegetables which are biologically,
thus categorically, distinct from the fruits which are ovaries,
–which is probably why people want to stay in the dark
about this simple distinction about the foods they eat,
this expose on the violence necessary for life —
she makes sure vegetables and fruits keep to their sections
with one exception, tomatoes, which are fruits,
but they swear they are vegetables, and she
won’t fight them, besides, what harm is there
if a tomato lies next to a bok choy, as long
as a tomato believes itself to be a vegetable
and a bok choy doesn’t mind.

Finally, she checks, the polish of the floor,
which, if done with diligent love,
you can see the whirling of the ceiling fans,
swirling like Van Gogh’s broad stroke paintings.

She is not the manager, but she feels responsible,
because this rectangular universe is small enough
for her to feel responsible, a feeling she enjoys.

The cash register’s numbers are lit neon green, to traffic people,
and the express lane’s maximum of 20 is also lit,
perhaps today, no one will break it, though there hasn’t been a day
that rule wasn’t broken in the 29 years she has opened the market,
the only days missed were when her father died, then her mother the year after.

Although, sometimes, she misses the wilderness of her childhood years,
wandering under and around Hallasan, especially when she sees the
first customers come in holding hot coffee with steam rising
like mists on a sea when the sun wakes the wild.

(Hallasan is the tallest mountain in South Korea located in Jeju island)

Was C.S. Lewis an Evangelical?

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
-Vaclav Havel

“Welcome to Mario E. Wad Center of Wheaton College, the Harvard of Evangelical Christian College,” says the host, Dr. T, a theology professor with a hip trimmed grey goatee wearing a discolored hip Levis, accenting both “Harvard” and “Evangelical;” hard to judge what he emphasizes more.

“We’re here to talk about C.S. Lewis, an Evangelical Christian,” this time, he emphasizes the all important E-word, “Lewis didn’t know he was an Evangelical, but, that is how we should all live our Christian lives, not self-righteous, but subconsciously-righteous.”

Claps. A young man in the back growls, “Yeah!”

“For his series Chronicles of Narnia is the gospel in children’s story. When Hollywood produced The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they were doing evangelism for us. The Lion of Narnia is the Lion of Judah.”

Dr. T pauses. When that last line about the lion came to him, he was greatly pleased, and thought it should have the chance to please his audience too. They don’t applaud and he takes it as the silence that usually follows profundity.

“Well, there’s been a little controversy brewing about C.S. Lewis’ faith, whether he was quote unquote  a true Evangelical,” the host laughs and the audience follows right on cue. “Some say his Narnia stories, even with the great Christ figure Aslan roaming through every story whether he is in the scene or not, is too pagan, with witches and talking animals as if animals could reason like human beings implying animals share in the Imago Dei.”

There is a boo and someone shouts, “We ain’t monkeys!” and the crowd erupts chanting. “Creation! Creation! Creation!” Dr. T loves the football game like testosterone in the room but he pretends to want to calm them with the wave of his hand. “So I have invited a C.S. Lewis expert to debate Lewis’ evangelicalism with capital E. Please welcome Dr….”

Dr. T can’t finish his introduction because he is open mouthed in shock for onto the stage enters not a Lewis expert but Lewis himself, oval face, a bald pate, kindly avuncular except for the piercing gaze of his intelligent eyes. Lewis sinks into the sofa and sips the cup of water waiting for him, a stage made to look like a living room which is how all TV talk shows do it nowadays.

“You are…” Dr. T stammers.

“Clive Staples Lewis,” Lewis rescues Dr. T from his momentary loss of coolness, “and since you are talking about my faith I decided to talk for myself since I don’t trust anyone with my faith, especially experts, because they can never change their minds once they make a statement since if they do, they can no longer be considered an expert. Quite a catch 22 isn’t it? An expert can never correct his mistake, his authority is based on unrepentance.”

This insight is lost on Dr. T for he is self-absorbed, that is, he has recovered his cool persona….

(you can continue reading at Cultural Weekly)

Art, Music, Poetry in Raleigh and its Protest Against White Supremacy

Tuesday night, 8/15, downtown Raleigh, and though South Mcdowell street is a main artery running north and south through the city, the traffic flows, which I’m not accustomed to coming from Manhattan where traffic jitters, honkings and crazy taxis weaving an inch from you is every night fare and a sign of the city’s vitality. Next to the frenetic bustling of New York, Raleigh’s sauntering feels like slow death. I look for parking and find it within two blocks, and it’s free. I appreciate this convenience though. In New York, parking would’ve been half of my paycheck.

I take half a flight of stairs down to IMURJ, a coffee shop, slash, bar, slash, gallery, slash, music venue tucked in a half basement of a warehouse. On the street level, a three feet orange banner and a chalked A stand sign on the sidewalk announcing the evening’s Open Jam session hints at activity below the relatively deserted streets. My wife, Suyun, and I, open the door and greet Kenneth, the art manager. He has the look of an artist too busy to care for fashion, light blond hair pony tailed for convenience, which itself is fashionable. We got to know him only a month ago, and we asked him if we, before our imminent relocation out of Raleigh we’ve come to love, can do a last minute exhibition at IMURJ with Suyun’s artworks at Castalia that was finishing its run, hoping for sales, less canvas to transport and little cash for the road. To our surprise, Kenneth said “yes” then planned a whole evening party for her. This is Kenneth, this is IMURJ, this is Raleigh, immediately family welcome for fellow artists, southern hospitality in a bohemian look..

(continue reading at Cultural Weekly)

A New Understanding of Worship

On July 30, Susan McSwain brought her friends from Reality Ministries to lead us in worship. Reality Ministries is a community of people with and without disabilities serving each other and serving the city of Durham, North Carolina, together. As they lead worship that Sunday, I experienced a joy so pure I almost questioned all previous experiences of joy in worship. In trying to say thank you, I found myself reflecting theologically on that iris-widening encounter. Theology, if I am reading Paul correctly, is a thank-you note to a life-impacting gift. So, here is my letter to give thanks for the gift I received in worship.

Dear Susan McSwain and the Reality Ministries Team,

Thank you for leading worship for us. For you weren’t just a guest preacher and worship team breaking up our routine. No. You changed the worship of New Life permanently. For the following Sunday’s worship wasn’t ordinary either. Your team wasn’t there, but your joyous spirit was flaming through us, like menorah candles that stay lit beyond its oil supply. Now, we weren’t dancing as we did when your friends led, but feet were tapping and I swear, given time, those feet would have hopped and spun. People were singing so loudly it was difficult to hear the worship leader at the microphone. He was happy to step away from the microphone and let the congregation lead. Just as it was when your friends led, it was confusing as to who was leading who.

What did you do to us?

You loosened the chains of performance in our worship. And we didn’t even know….

(please continue reading at Presbyterian Outlook)

Spiderman’s Home Coming and My Home Coming to Queens and my Mother

I caught Spider-Man: Homecoming on its opening week in Queens New York, where I grew up, left when I graduated high school, and returned that July 4th weekend to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday. So as Peter Parker (Tom Holland) navigated through the neighborhoods I grew up in, all sorts of harmonics of emotions resonated, among them empathy, anger and homesickness. I was rooting for Peter, and even for Vulture (Michael Keaton), because I was rooting for every scrabbling Queens citizen; because I was rooting for the blue collar worker who’s just trying to keep his job before the ruthlessly outsourcing corporate world that doesn’t care for the neighbors they vacate in their pursuit of profit and security (Avengers headquarters moving to an indistinct upstate location); because I was rooting for my mother who will have to move into a smaller one bedroom apartment after her birthday bash; because I was rooting for myself who never looked back to Queens after he left, yet driving down Roosevelt Avenue with the 7 Train rattling above him feels like a homecoming.

In this newest rendition of Spider-Man, Queens is not just the city he saves, he is the city’s pluck incarnated. Queens is part of Spidey’s power. In one laugh-out scene, Spider-Man has to dash through the Long Island suburbs to get to the place of crime because there are no tall buildings to catch his web with which to sling himself. Spider-Man is out of place, his powers useless. He’s no longer your friendly vigilante but a masked thief, which he was to the two screaming little girls camping out on their backyard. This slapstick romp through swimmers and grillers nails the heart of Spider-Man. His motto, “Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” doesn’t mean he is neighborly, but that he is through and through a Queens native.

A hero of a city might seem a common trope. Batman belongs to Gotham and Superman belongs to Metropolis. But both cities are make believe cities, a typology of New York (Metropolis is New York in daytime and Gotham is New York in nighttime when 42nd street was seedy). They are not real cities so the director can design the building sets. Spider-Man’s neighborhood is real and not negotiable. The trains rattling on rusty red steel elevated tracks has been shuttling many Queens citizens back and forth for their work, schools, and trysts. Spider-Man hitches a ride on the same train, and the route is set. This is my Queens in which Spider-Man is trying to do some good.

When Spider-Man attempts to thwart a bank robbery by thieves masked as Avengers, he fails because he promptly forgets the thieves when he sees the corner deli blasted. He swings to save Mr. Delmar (Hemky Madera). Avengers care for innocent people, but the people they rescue remain generic and their death isn’t guilt but an issue of principal and politics (the conflict that divides the Avengers in Civil War). Spider-Man isn’t trying to reduce collateral damage when he swings into the fiery deli, but saving Mr. Delmar. The people he saves are his neighbors. The conflict in this hero story is not whether the hero can change the city, but whether the hero can accept the city. In the last scene

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Reflections on Home, Belonging and Church on My Mother’s 70th Birthday

Eric Barreto, an associate professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, started his Bible study on “differences and diversity in the Book of Acts” at Big Tent by asking the 600 gathered in St. Louis to turn to the person next to them and tell the story of when they first experienced their race or experienced people of another race. Of course, he says, no one needs to share. But who is he kidding? We are Presbyterians. We love to talk. Soon the chapel’s vaulted ceiling was swirling with noise like the “thunderous cascades” described in Revelation as strangers shared intimate stories.

She tells her story of growing up with a black nanny, a privilege she didn’t recognize until college because she had been born into it. As the proverbial saying goes, fishes don’t know they are in water.The stranger to my right is the clerk of a presbytery. She is an elegant senior with short red curls, a thin long face and glasses on her sharp nose through which she looks at me with compassionate eyes. She doesn’t look anything like my mother, but she still reminds me of her.

I tell her I knew my race the moment I landed at John F. Kennedy airport in New York. I was seven with only two English phrases: “Thank you” and “Where is the bathroom?” I entered first grade and was promptly ridiculed for my slanted eyes. But this was, to an extent, the usual playground chaffing. Children are cruel in their name-calling; I speak of children as if they are another species, but we were all once children. We would take the slightest difference in physical feature and turn it into a slur. “Big eyes,” “pig nose” and “flat face” – these slurs might stir painful memories for some readers either as the recipient or perpetrator. Ribbing happened in Korea just as it happened at P.S. 20, my elementary school. The slurs hurt, but cruelty inflicting the hurt was imitative cruelty. The kids in my grade saw older students use these words, so they acted likewise for the cool factor. Most of the time, kids riff on each other and then would forget about it as teammates were needed for a game. I played shortstop, and suddenly I wasn’t “slanty eyes” but Ozzie Smith. And alliances change quickly, which meant I wasn’t out forever. I knew that I was Korean, I didn’t speak English well and I wasn’t white, but I had friends. I belonged.

But an incident in middle school shattered that illusion. I learned that whiteness and American were synonyms in the internal dictionary for many Americans. We had bought a house in Long Island, leaving the roach-infested apartment in Queens. It was a ranch home with a fenced yard and we decorated the walls with our family photos; I covered my room with posters of the 1986 World Series Champion N.Y. Mets. We also hung framed copies of our citizenship documents, thanks to what my father called a divine act: the Immigration and Reform Act of 1986. It was a good year for us. We were home.

Then returning from worship one Wednesday evening, we turned into our driveway and saw black graffiti across our front door. It hissed, “Go back home chink!”

We moved out about a year later.

I told this story in different forms to difference audiences. I told it in a poem, in a personal essay on America’s hypocrisy and in a column on the American dream. I’ve told it to my Asian friends, and they all chime in with similar stories. I’ve told it in a Duke religion class and heard many gasp.

Whenever I tell this story, I usually feel the lingering tremors of anger for the invasion of my home. But when I told this story to my stranger-confessor at Big Tent, I felt sadness surging in me and threatening to break out into tears.

Barreto, who knows how to artfully work an audience, claps twice and turns the audience’s attention back to him and silence falls quickly. As he goes deeper into the Bible study, my thoughts continued to flit in and out as I tried to figure out why my heart swelled with sadness. It was a new emotion for the memory.

***

I flew into St. Louis for Big Tent from New York. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, but I had been in New York to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday with family. My brother from Seattle flew in with his family of four. My mother’s sisters from Canada and Korea flew in, too.

My family of five drove to New York. When we arrived at my mother’s home, she came down the stairs a little slower than I remembered her moving in the past. I hugged and kissed her, her body smaller than I remembered. And her hair didn’t look quite right. She used to wear a majestic pompadour, now, I find out, she is wearing a wig.

“When did you start wearing them?” I ask her as we are setting up for dinner.

“A year ago.” Her hair loss had been sudden.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She laughs as she tastes her kimchi stew.

I ask: “How much was it?”

“Not much.”

My brother finds out that it was a $30, an artificial wig. Wigs made of natural hair can cost $1,000. “I’m going to buy her a mix, $300 range. That will be my gift to her,” he says.

In a week, she will be moving out of the house and into a single bedroom apartment. My parents can no longer afford anything more. My father is retired. The church (not Presbyterian) didn’t pay for pension, which is the norm for immigrant churches. Mother started working for a company providing home assistance service for elderly. She goes to senior invalids and helps out in the house: cleaning toilets, emptying trash, chit chatting and nodding to re-run stories, changing the bedding of their hospital beds.

All this time I thought she was working as a counselor for seniors. That is how she described her work to me

“It’s ministry, my son. I go to lonely elders. I sit with them, talk to them. It’s simple really,” she told me over the phone when she first started working again.

My brother tells me, “She is not a counselor. She is a house maid.”

“How many hours do you work?” I ask her after all of the grandkids are in deep sleep after a full day of swimming – they are sprawled out on the living room, now reimagined into a camp.We hear what we want to hear. I’m sure she is framing her work as ministry, and should do so. It’s a good theology of work. And I’m sure she works with the same sense of calling and passion as she did with my father before he retired. She loved being a pastor’s wife. She enjoyed feeding the whole youth group and visiting at hospitals. She was a pastor, too. No. She a pastor. She is not just a maid. But she is also a maid. Her bones ache. She takes a painkiller almost every evening.

“20 hours, 40 hours.”

I tell her my brother told me that she works 60 hours each week.

“Sometimes, if there is need.” She implies the need of the seniors. But I know it’s her own need to pay rent.

“How much do you make?” I ask.

“$10 an hour.”

“Is that after tax?”

She smiles.

Why did I ask when I already knew the answer? And does it even really matter?

***

My father is driving me to the airport to catch my plane to St. Louis. The sun isn’t up yet. The streets are lit only by street lamps. The Long Island expressway will be bumper-to-bumper in an hour. It’s dark so we miss the sign to the airport. The GPS gets us back on track. Both of us are squinting; now that I’m 43 my sight is also weakening.

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America, My America

America, My America

Though you say I am not yours,

though you pissed all over my front door

with your black graffiti hissing

“Go back home chink!”

you are still my America.

     

Because I believe in you,

not in your greatness

but in your capacity to repent.

Though you think you are great — drunk with blood,

and puke your vulgarity, you are still my America.

For when you are sober, you are an inspired poet.

Your song of independence is painfully beautiful.

Though you don’t believe in your own rhetoric, I

believe in the words that constitute you, my doubting poet,

that we are all endowed by the creator with inalienable

rights no nation can deny, not even you, America.

for they are not your words which you can

undo or redo for words are greater than the poets that borrow them.

And one day, those words will cut your heart into repentance.

 

America, you are my America because you are a dreamer.

Did  you not raise your small hands against the Behemoth Britain

because you dreamed of a land where lady Liberty called

the poor and refuse of this world into her shores,

shining an inviting light through the open seas?

 

We call it the American Dream, but it is older than you America.

Older than all your contradictions and nightmares,

older than your Jim Crow laws and burning crosses,

older than the Trans Atlantic slave trade, older than the

Red Man’s decimation, older than the rise of people who call themselves white,

older than nations fattening into self-importance and rapaciousness.

 

Prophet King did not awaken the dream.

King was awakened by the dream.

It was in Hughes for it is older

than the rivers in his body;

Old as the Tigris and Euphrates.

It gave visions to Crazy Horse,

of all races gathered around the tree of life,

singing the same song in different tongues.

It inspired Whitman to see in the grass,

the soul of the black and white in the same soil,

his life continuing to life on the boot soles,

the journey-work of the stars.

It stirred in Sojourner Truth

her song to go home as a meteorite.

 

It was the dream of a young Palestinian

dying splayed open on a wood

to welcome all nations

to dine around his table

 

It was the dream of Abraham, that both his sons

would put down their swords and put him to the ground as brothers.

 

The dream is as old as Adam and Eve

who dreamed of Cain and Abel returning home for dinner.

 

One day, you will see me and see the error of your ways.

You will repent, that ancient practice of grasping Dream’s wings,

and I will welcome you home.

(was also generously published at Tuck Magazine)