Abstract
This chapter presents three letters by three Asian women scholars—Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Korean—written to the intellectual and spiritual “sisters-mothers-aunties” who have influenced, empowered, motivated, and challenged how they live, move, and have being as academics, educators, ministers, and “artivists” in Asian transpacific America. Juxtaposed against the decisive print typically found in academic prose, each metaphoric cursive in these correspondences reveal the vitalities and vulnerabilities of identity and vocation, of belonging and estrangement, of timid wonderment and brazen path-blazing, of grateful remembrances and outrageous future-projections, as each letter-writer picks up her pen, closes her eyes, and dreams of peaceable worlds in which they can flourish.
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Notes
- 1.
The title of this chapter comes from the title of a posthumously published diary of a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Dang Thuy Tram, who served as a medical doctor with the Vietcong forces against the Americans in the Vietnam War between 1968 and 1970. The subtitle refers to reflections by Vietnamese cultural and postcolonial critic Trinh T. Minh-ha on the cultural tactics of Lhakar vigils in Tibetan resistance against human rights abuse: “Each branch of coral holds up the moon.” Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016), 220.
- 2.
The solidus (/) is used here for “Asian/American” to signify the unstable and indeterminate differentiation between “Asian” and “American,” and the simultaneous mutually inclusive and inextricable “both/and” nature of the two. See a compelling discussion of its usage in David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). In this chapter, “Asian/American” is used to stress conceptual complexities between “Asian” and “American.” For general population or demographic reference, “Asian American” is used in keeping with the requested guidelines of this anthology.
- 3.
In the lexicon of the “theater of the oppressed,” dramaturgical performances for social conscientization invites audience members to not be passive “spectators” who assume that social realities are part and parcel of “finished theater,” but rather “spect-actor” who are “subjects” and “transformers of the dramatic action” that can alter oppressive situations. See Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 122, 42.
- 4.
Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019).
- 5.
Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 127.
- 6.
See Amy Uyematsu’s powerful and semi-autobiographic retrospective essay about new waves of solidarity and coalition-building in “Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), 21–35.
- 7.
For an introduction to the notion of multiple tongues in feminist/mujerista/womanist writings, see Aída Hurtado, “Strategic Suspensions: Feminists of Color Theorize the Production of Knowledge,” in Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing, ed. Nancy Rule Goldberger et al. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996). For her field-shaping work on transnational “flexible citizenship,” see Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
- 8.
The inspiration for this letter-writing approach comes from a conversation with colleagues at the Forum for Theological Exploration, specifically Patrick Reyes and Dori Baker, whom I consider to be “creativity savants” in their own scholarship. For effective experiments with genres in the two anthologies compiled by the network of Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM): Rita Nakashima Brock et al., eds., Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007); Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim, Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017).
- 9.
Gereja Kristen Indonesia is the Indonesian Christian Church of the reformed tradition in Java.
- 10.
Cheng, Ornamentalism, 17.
- 11.
Ci is a contraction from cici or cece. It is a Chinese expression for older sister. Rev. Diana and I are ethnic Chinese. I call her cici to honor her and to show the closeness of our relationship. Ordinarily, a woman pastor would be addressed as ibu (“mother”) to indicate her esteemed ordained status.
- 12.
Mujiburrahman, “Islam, Perempuan dan Pendidikan (Islam, Woman, and Education),” Marwah: Jurnal Perempuan, Agama dan Jender 13, no. 1 (2014): 21–31. Mujiburrahman acknowledges that the discrimination toward women is prevailing because (1) the cultural and social context of Indonesia, as is around the world, perpetuates discrimination against women; and (2) within religion settings, religious leaders lack the training to interpret sacred texts, such as the Quran. The lack of education stifles to the emergence of alternative interpretations about the role of women found in the texts.
- 13.
Nursalim, “Diskriminasi Gender Di Media Televisi,” Marwah: Jurnal Perempuan, Agama dan Jender 10, no. 2 (2011), http://ejournal.uin-suska.ac.id/index.php/marwah/article/view/495/475.
- 14.
Marianne Katopo, Compassion and Free: An Asian Woman’s Theology (Marykroll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), 11.
- 15.
HyeRan Kim-Cragg, Interdependence: A Postcolonial Feminist Practical Theology (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2018), Kindle Location 317.
- 16.
Kim-Cragg, Interdependence, Kindle Locations 2291–94.
- 17.
Kim-Cragg, Interdependence, Kindle Locations 1794–95.
- 18.
Kim-Cragg, Interdependence, Kindle Locations 3722–34.
- 19.
“Kính mến” is a compound greeting in Vietnamese which one may choose to express a combination of reverence, esteem, respect (kính) and lateral, fraternal, comradely affection (mến) for the intended recipient.
- 20.
Mai-Anh Le Tran, “Wenh-in Ng,” Biola University, Talbot School of Theology, https://www.biola.edu/talbot/ce20/database/wenh-in-ng.
- 21.
See Asian Women United of California, ed. Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1989); Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997).
- 22.
See Barbara Anne Keely, Faith of Our Foremothers: Women Changing Religious Education (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997); Marlene Mayr, Modern Masters of Religious Education (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1983).
- 23.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (London: Routledge, 2011).
- 24.
Tran, “Wenh-In Ng.”
- 25.
See Jin Young Choi, “Phronēsis, the Other Wisdom Sister,” in Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders, ed. Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 105–14.
- 26.
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials has described this phenomenon as “planned obsolescence.” See Flashpoints for Asian American Studies (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), 66–81.
- 27.
Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 7.
- 28.
Among a variety of racially charged epithets, “hollow bamboo” refers to American-born Asians who appear Asian on the outside but are “empty”—or white—on the inside. Add “bananas” and “coconuts” to the mix, and we have a tropical array of insults to mangle Asian/American ego-integrity. See Zia, Asian American Dreams, 15.
- 29.
These issues were topics of conversation among six Asian theological educators at a recent colloquy hosted by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning.
- 30.
Cited in Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 25.
- 31.
Cheng, Ornamentalism, 25.
- 32.
Flashpoints in Asian American Studies serves as guide and inspiration for this.
- 33.
Tran, “Wenh-In Ng.”
- 34.
It is worth noting that you were among the early faculty leaders of PANAAWTM who coauthored the important resource titled “Developing Teaching Materials and Instructional Strategies for Teaching Asian and Asian American/Canadian Women’s Theologies in North America” in 1999, http://www.panaawtm.org/presentations-papers-research/.
Bibliography
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Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. London: Routledge, 2011.
———. Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016.
Uyematsu, Amy. “Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet.” In Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, 21–35. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Zia, Helen. Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
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Tran, MA.L., Gunawan, L., Hwang, H. (2020). “Last Night I Dreamed of Peace”: Letters to Women Who Hold Up the Moon. In: Kwok, Pl. (eds) Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_16
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