Making Paper Cranes: Toward an Asian American Feminist Theology
by Mihee Kim-Kort
Chalice Press, Atlanta. 128 pages
Where are you from?”
“No. I mean … where are you really from? Like, originally?”
Amid our culture’s ongoing struggles with matters of race and ethnicity, questions such as these are often addressed to people of color. Sometimes they come from a place of suspicion, other times out of ignorance or friendly curiosity. How do we navigate the tricky issues that divide us, not glossing over our differences, but not singling people out either?
Mihee Kim-Kort has written a worthy conversation partner in a broader dialogue about race with her book, “Making Paper Cranes: Toward an Asian American Feminist Theology.” So often, we break the discussion into issues of black and white, and occasionally Latino; Kim-Kort reminds us eloquently but insistently that Asian-American experience (and Asian-American female experience) must be part of the conversation.
Kim-Kort writes movingly about her experience growing up as a child of Korean immigrants. Hers is a story of contradiction and paradox. On the one hand, many Asian-Americans are saddled with the so-called model minority myth: they are praised for being hardworking, trustworthy, etc. But they can also be seen as the perpetual foreigner, never fully integrated into the society. Kim-Kort’s story is one of simultaneous difference and sameness: She was all too aware of what set her apart from her Anglo classmates (a slight lilt in her voice, her skin color), yet she had the same celebrity crushes and obsessions as her white girlfriends.
It was Kim-Kort’s father, not her mother, who nurtured in her a sense that she could do and be anything (in her case, a Presbyterian teaching elder). It took time for Kim-Kort to come to appreciate her mother’s own strength, wrapped as it was in the clothing of domesticity. She writes warmly about the sights, smells and chatter of conversation during the all-important meal on Sundays after worship in the Korean church, and remembers her mother and friends foisting to-go boxes of leftovers onto members of the community who were in particular need. “Compassion and grace are forms of resistance, too, for when hospitality happens even in the midst of oppression and limitation, some barrier is overcome in that moment,” she writes.
Even as Kim-Kort lifts up the contrasts in her own life, the book itself is a blended approach: She weaves personal narrative with the voices of liberation theologians, Asian American theologians and feminist theologians. I loved the description of han and jeong, two theological concepts that involve “just indignation” and an identification with the suffering of another. Kim-Kort connects han and jeong to Jesus’ experience on the cross. I would like a whole book that explores these ideas more deeply. (Perhaps a sequel?)
The book declines to tie things up neatly. The task Kim-Kort points us towards is one of reconstruction and integration.
MARYANN MCKIBBEN DANA is the author of “Sabbath in the Suburbs: A Family’s Experiment with Holy Time” and pastor of Idylwood Presbyterian Church in Falls Church, Va.
