Strangers in a Strange Land

MY FAMILY EMIGRATED from South Korea to Canada in 1975 when my sister and I were 6 and 5 years old, respectively. Before I left Korea, I had no idea where Canada was. With our mother, we boarded a plane that took us to Hawaii, then Alaska, and finally Toronto.

Korean was the only language I had ever spoken. I assumed that everyone spoke Korean. I had no idea what people were saying when I arrived in Toronto.

My uncle in Korea gave my sister and me each a cute little necklace to wear with our name, address, and phone number written on the back of it. It was a round red necklace with a picture of an adorable puppy. We wore it around our necks on the plane so that if we got lost, we could more easily ask for help to find our way home.

After 40 years of carrying the necklace with me as I moved from place to place, my children threw it into the garbage last year as they were doing spring cleaning. They thought it was a piece of junk. It may look like junk, but to me it provides a special reminder of my childhood, family, and the home from which I emigrated. Luckily, I liberated it from the garbage before trash day. Now I keep it safe as one of my prized possessions, one of the few things I have left from Korea and from my childhood.

My necklace reminds me from where I have come, what I have experienced, and what I have endured. As my necklace has survived all the moving and tossing around in my life, I too will survive.

As an immigrant family, we had few earthly possessions. We lived in a two-bedroom, cockroach-infested apartment. I had only one little hand-me-down toy doll that someone passed on to me rather than throwing into the trash. My library consisted of a few books that I read over and over. My parents had one car, and they worked different shifts, so they were rarely home at the same time. There was no car at home to drive us to the library to sign out books. After awhile I allowed my creativity to run wild and made up imaginary stories based on the pictures in the few books we had.

I did not complain too much for having so little, as I knew it was difficult for my parents to find jobs in Canada with their limited English and work experience. The jobs that they had were minimum-wage jobs. This meant that there was no extra money to splurge or take trips. So with a simple life and with lots of hand-me-down clothes, I did the best that I could at school. I excelled.

In the early grades, when I could not speak English, I still understood that my classmates were making fun of me. My clothes never fit right. They were either too big and loose or too small, and they were usually a decade old. They were definitely out of style. Children mocked me for the way I looked. And not just because of my clothes.

They mocked me because I was Korean. I have small eyes, a flat nose, and yellow skin, which made me look different from the white kids in school. I still remember the schoolyard chants of “ching chong, ching chong,” a racial slur directed at me or another of my Korean immigrant classmates. They never tired of asking me, “Where are you from?” I told them “Korea.” But they kept saying “Chinese, Japanese,” with their fingers pressing their eyes to slant up and down to mock my Asian eyes. They kept repeating “Chinese, Japanese” as if they could not hear me say I am Korean.

It was a painful time of trying to hide who I was and my Korean heritage. I did not speak Korean in public, and I tried to not look Korean, as if that were possible. But I tried, as did some of the other Korean immigrant children—girls put scotch tape over their eyes to make a double eyelid fold. Some dyed their black hair to a lighter brown or blond. Others tried to dissociate themselves from their Korean culture.

To the children in the schoolyard, I was a “foreigner.” I was not one of them. I was an alien to them.

TODAY, LIVING in the U.S., I am still viewed as a foreigner. I have advanced degrees. I am a professor. I am trilingual. But I am still often viewed as a foreigner who does not belong in North America.

I am often asked, “Are you comfortable speaking in English?” When visiting in the hospital, I am asked, “Do you speak English?”

I often speak to my children in Korean. I used to hate it when my parents did this to me when I was a child, but now I am grateful as this prevented me from losing my Korean. My children do not mind. They respond to me most of the time. However, if others hear me speaking in Korean in public, they automatically assume I am a foreigner and that I cannot speak English. This happens to me quite frequently as people assume that I cannot understand them and give me glaring stares.

I am often viewed with suspicion even as I do my own scholarship in theology. Some students and scholars think that only “white men” do “real theology” and what I am doing doesn’t count as “real theology.” I am often blamed for things that go wrong, as I am an easy scapegoat. Korean-American women are viewed as passive and obedient. This distorted imagery is often portrayed in our culture, such as in musicals like Miss Saigon that portray a docile, obedient woman as the love object of a white male GI. Therefore they become easy targets of discrimination and subordination.

Asian Americans are viewed as perpetual foreigners, no matter how many generations a family has lived in a U.S. community. Even fifth-generation Chinese and Japanese Americans are often viewed with suspicion and treated as foreigners and are not accepted as “Americans.” This perpetual-foreigner understanding allowed the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. The Italian Americans and the German Americans were never interned on the same scale, even though the U.S. was at war with both of those countries.

For white Europeans, it was easier to become assimilated and be viewed as an American, while it was difficult for the dominant society to truly accept Japanese Americans as Americans. They were viewed as foreigners during the internment, and they—along with other Asian Americans—are viewed as foreigners today.

THE BIBLE INCLUDES stories of foreigners and foreign women. In many instances foreign women were not welcomed and were told to leave the community. In Ezra 9, the foreign women were cast away. They were blamed for societal ills.

In her essay “Ethnicity, Exogamy, and Zipporah,” Karen Strand Winslow notes: “The Exodus account of Moses’ Midianite wife illustrates how this and similar traditions about ‘outsider’ wives were useful against those who claimed that only golah (exiled) Jews—male and female—and their offspring were truly people of Israel, the holy seed. The protagonists in the book of Ezra (Shecaniah and Ezra) contended that unions of male golah Jews with women originating inside the land produced mixed, polluted offspring who had to be expelled from the golah congregation. However, the stories of Zipporah—and other outsider wives or mothers such as Tamar, Asenath, the Cushite, and Ruth-—indicate otherwise. These narratives show that foreign wives were essential to the formation, preservation, and deliverance of the people of Israel.”

It is intriguing to notice that, in a patriarchal culture where lineage is important, the insider women were always barren until the Lord opened their wombs. As Strand Winslow writes, barrenness was never a problem for the outsiders such as Hagar, Tamar, Asenath, and Zipporah.

Childbirth was often a sign of a blessing from God. If this is so, then God blessed the outsider women and gave them many children. Many of Israel’s ancient leaders were born through outsider women. It is through these outsider women that even Jesus’ lineage came to be. God uses everybody, and all people are important and precious in God’s sight. Intolerance and valuing different people differently prevented people in Israel from welcoming the outsider women or their offspring such as Ishmael. The Bible draws contrast to reveal deeper meaning and understanding to us. The examples of the foreign women provoke us to redraw boundaries that divide foreign and native.

OUR HUMAN FEAR and ignorance often prevent us from welcoming and accepting those who are seen as the “Other.” In a society that too often judges people by their looks or culture, and treats people as inside people or outside people, Jesus calls us to accept everyone as equal and as members of the family of God.

When we look at the story of Jesus and the outsider Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), we see that Jesus does not ignore her. Rather, Jesus engages her and asks for a drink of water. He begins a lively conversation with the Samaritan woman that ends with her leaving her water jar and returning to the city. She says to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”(John 4:29).

There is a spiritual embrace between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. This spiritual action begs us to live our lives more lovingly and more spiritually. Jesus calls us to embrace those who are different from us. Jesus invites us to accept those who speak differently, look differently, and think differently. Jesus frees us to see people not as “foreigners,” but rather as our neighbors and fellow humans.

As a mother of three children, I worry about how their peers view them as foreigners and as the Other. They have had their own share of discrimination and racism, as they are among the few Asian-American children in their schools. We need to work so that our children and our children’s children are welcomed and embraced.

We are all God’s children. As God’s children we celebrate our differences, which enrich our lives and our society. We welcome the diversity created and gifted to us by a God of love, embrace, and Spirit.

“God took the first step to embrace us. We ought to follow that example by taking the first step to embrace the Other,” I wrote in Embracing the Other. “The Spirit of God that dances in our lives—connecting us, challenging us, and comforting us—asks us to treat those who are different as ourselves. The Spirit of God teaches us to join the divine dance of love.”