Becoming Whole

As a biracial Chinese American woman, I feel less like a fraud when I’m close to family. They know the traditions, the dialect, and the mouth-watering recipes by heart. And they look the part. I, on the other hand, can fade into a crowd of white faces like a snowflake on the side of a ski slope. I know the traditions and words, not from experience, but from stories of the older generations. Family is my anchor, my memory, the puzzle where my pieces fit. 

All of this was tethered to my Gung Gung, my grandfather who wouldn’t let me leave his house without eating something, who taught me how to count change at our family grocery store, who always dressed like the Chinese Mafia, and who passed away just one month after I gave birth to my first child. Soon after, my Asian American roots began to feel like my Gung Gung -- a memory drifting further away with the passing of time. With the passing of time also came the isolation from family.

The tricky thing about shame is that it festers in silence, becoming more powerful with every decision we make to isolate ourselves. No one knew that better than the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. Her shame grew by the day, overtaking her joy and freedom. John 4:6 says she visited the well around noon, a strategic decision since everyone else would’ve made their trip in the early morning to avoid the heat of the sun. This woman may have been like the others in appearance, but not in essence, so she worked to suppress the parts of her story that would garner attention. 

Then Jesus entered the scene. He saw her, and not only for the person she pretended to be. Jesus, a Jewish man who was an assumed enemy of the Samaritan people, made this Samaritan woman whole again. He saw all of her story, breaking down gender and racial barriers to recover her joy. In one radical move, Jesus proved that you don’t have to be the same to remove someone’s shame. 

I experienced this same life-changing truth several months after Gung Gung died. I laid quietly in bed, stretching out my limbs and listening intently to the monitor as my husband went to fetch our daughter. My groggy spirit was quickly jolted awake by the sound of two distantly familiar words over the speaker: Jo Sun, which means “good morning” in Cantonese. Nostalgia caught in my throat and joy pumped through my veins as I realized the truth: wholeness doesn’t require sameness. In fact, the power of God’s Kingdom is that He unites such different people under a banner of love and mercy. Unity, not uniformity, is what makes the people of God so astounding. Unity, not uniformity, is what makes us powerful.

There is beauty in the diversity of the story I’m building -- just like my white husband who speaks Cantonese to our children, just like our family meals that are a hodge-podge of ethnic cuisine, and just like our Savior who has declared a purpose for every page in our story. No part of my identity is lost or diminished by the addition of difference, even the different parts of my own background, because Jesus takes the diversity of my earthly heritage and combines it with the beauty of His eternal inheritance. The joy of finding freedom is that I won’t ever stop reading the story God has written for me. The joy of knowing Jesus is that He makes space for my differences. The joy of becoming whole is that the Father is now my anchor, my memory, the puzzle where my pieces fit.