Asian and Asian-American Student Experiences

Darrell Bock:
Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic today is dealing with difference. And by that I mean a particular set of relationships, and that is relationships to Asian-Americans, which has certainly become a sensitive topic here recently. So we're just going to walk through this with... I have four guests, and I'm just going to go in order here. I guess it's the order I have. Mikel Del Rosario is probably familiar to you. He normally sits where I'm sitting as a host for The Table, and he works at the Center. Welcome, Mikel. Thank you for being a part of our podcast today.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Thanks so much for having me.

Darrell Bock:
And then Andrew Feng, who works in the center for a year. He worked a couple of years as an intern, and now just he so loves us, he's just hung around with us. Andrew, great to have you with us.

Andrew Feng:
Glad to be here.

Darrell Bock:
And Andrew, where are you in your seminary program?

Andrew Feng:
I just graduated in May.

Darrell Bock:
Okay. And congratulations. So we'll give you a high five, a virtual high five. Well done. Mikel, by the way, has been working at the center for so many years, I don't know how many it is, Mikel.

Mikel Del Rosario:
I think it's eight.

Darrell Bock:
Eight years total. Okay, because he helps us, of course, with The Table. And then Ruth Singsit. Did I pronounce that last name correctly?

Ruth Singsit:
Right, Dr. Bock.

Darrell Bock:
Okay, very good. And where are you at the seminary in terms of program?

Ruth Singsit:
Well, I hope to graduate next year, summer, but I plan to walk in May, so...

Darrell Bock:
Okay. There you go. So you're a child of eschatological hope?

Ruth Singsit:
Yes.

Darrell Bock:
Okay, very good. And then Kasey Olander. Kasey, thank you for being a part of our podcast today.

Kasey Olander:
I appreciate you having me.

Darrell Bock:
Glad to do it. Kasey also works with us at the Center. She keeps all of us organized and is also going to be responsible for managing our subscription service that is coming to a theater near you sometime soon. How's that for being specific, right, Kasey?

Kasey Olander:
Exactly. Looking forward to it.

Darrell Bock:
Yeah, we are. So let me dive in. This is a tricky topic in some ways for people, because obviously we live in a time in which tensions around racial difference are much discussed in our context and culture. But normally, at least in our context, it tends to be a black/white conversation, but in this particular case, more recently it's become clear that this isn't just a black-and-white conversation.

Darrell Bock:
In fact, Mikel, I'm going to start off with you, and then I'll do the go-around. I'll just make this observation. When we were talking about race several years ago as a staff, almost all our conversation was about the black/white relationship. And Mikel chimed in at one point and said, "I'm a ghost in this room." And what he meant was that you're talking about me, but you're not talking about me. We're talking about race relations and the differences between the races, and all our discussion was black and white. And here he was as an Asian of Filipino background, and he wasn't being addressed at all. And I think the point was a very, very good one. In fact, it very much redirected our conversation, broadened it, and actually helped our conversation as a result.

Darrell Bock:
So that's a very vague introduction to our topic, but that's kind of where we're headed. So let me ask you kind of each in turn how you became sensitive or aware of this topic. And maybe you didn't become sensitive or aware to it. It's just been a part of your life. So Mikel, I'll start with you. How did this topic become an issue of awareness? So maybe that's the way to ask it for you.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, for those who have seen that particular show that you're talking about, I didn't share my story a little bit, that I was born in Illinois, but then moved to the Philippines when I was three years old. And I lived in Maryland for a couple of years as well. So interestingly, it was my time living between cultures, the Filipino culture of my family and more diverse cultures in Maryland and then also back in the Philippines, because I also went to a missionary kid school, so many of my friends were Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Koreans, people from Europe. So I was surrounded by international people a lot growing up, especially in my teenage years.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So earlier in my life, it was really made obvious to me, especially at an American public school, just how different my family was than the broader culture at the public school. And then even living in the Philippines but going to a missionary kid school, being surrounded by many Americans and other foreigners in the Philippines, that difference was obvious as well. And then after moving to the United States as an adult, did my undergrad at Biola University in Southern California, doing student ministry, seeing how Vietnamese refugees, primarily we were working with, were relating to the broader culture. And then even as a youth pastor in the San Francisco Bay area, having a church that was about half Chinese and half white was an interesting cultural mix as well that just brought home that difference and those distinctions.

Darrell Bock:
And Andrew, same question for you.

Andrew Feng:
Yeah. I think just growing up in a Chinese heritage church, there would be three congregations, people from the Mandarin-speaking congregation, the Cantonese, and then the English, which primarily would be the youth, the younger generation. And I think growing up now looking back, it's just slowly appreciating our cultures, our generations, and just realizing there was such a gap between the three different almost churches that existed in one building. So I think as we go into global missions, come into seminary and moving to East Asia and coming back, I think just the opportunity to redeem and reconcile, I think, is becoming more and more where there's so much opportunity here, rather than to walk away from it, to walk towards it.

Darrell Bock:
Okay. So you've actually raised an interesting sub-theme that I do want to kind of touch on as we move through. And that is even within communities, there are differences, and particularly in the Chinese community with different languages involved, different customs, different backgrounds. And then you've got the demographic issue of you have one generation, maybe the parents or the grandparents who moved here, and then there are those who have lived here all their life, who assimilated to this culture from the very beginning and the differences that that produced. So this is actually multi-dimensional.

Andrew Feng:
Yes, it's a little bit more complicated. And I think people see just like First Chinese Baptist Church, but it's a little bit more complicated than just the four letters outside.

Darrell Bock:
Very good. Yeah. Thanks. Ruth, how about you? How did the awareness of this come into your life?

Ruth Singsit:
Well, Dr. Bock, to begin with, I'll just give you a brief intro about myself. I'm from India.

Darrell Bock:
Okay.

Ruth Singsit:
And if you look at me, most people wouldn't even say that I am Indian or I look Indian. So from the very beginning, being in India and with this looks, I've always faced the reality that I'm different from the stereotypical Indian. But I was never made aware of that difference because I grew up in the capital in India, in New Delhi, and my friends never, never made me aware that I was different from them in any way. I didn't feel any discrimination as such.

Ruth Singsit:
However, when I visited England the first time, my sister brought it up, and she said that people are actually confronting racial issues. And I was very surprised that in a developed country that they would face something like that. Now, having said that, it's not that we, in India, we do not face these kinds of social and economic differences and clashes and conflicts. We do have our own sets of problems being a developing country, a third-world country. However, the racial issues that we see in the West, whether it's in England or you see here in the US, it's very different from what we experienced back in India.

Ruth Singsit:
However, I would also like to mention the fact that, for some reason, Asians, as such, whether it's Indians or Southeast Asians, they do give a lot of emphasis on white skin. The paler your skin is, they regard that as beautiful. So culturally, there is this sort of perception that the fairer your skin is, the paler your skin is, you are more beautiful. So I come from that culture where we don't have the black-and-white racist issues, but we do have something of that sort, but in a different way. Yeah. So my first experience of the Western racial issue was in England. And then coming here to the US, I was very, very surprised, especially in the last one year, of what has happened. It was like mind-boggling. It's at a very different level and a larger scale.

Darrell Bock:
Okay, we'll come back to that. That's actually one of the things I want to raise and kind of walk through with everybody. Kasey, your story?

Kasey Olander:
Yeah. I grew up here in Texas, and so I think that there are many times in our lives when we find out that other people experience the world differently from us. One of those things for me was moving out of my parents' house and going to college or getting married, for example. Another big one of those was I have done college ministry ever since I finished undergrad at UT Dallas. I've done college ministry at a couple of different university campuses. So there, I think, I've really gotten to see the nations converge, and students can realize that, wow, there's people from all different kinds of places. But then even if they're from the same country, as I am, people still experience the world differently. So I think in a lot of my interactions with students in such a formative time of life, in college, that that has been really helpful to see that, wow, it's really valuable to have these conversations. It's really valuable to understand that other people experience the world differently.

Darrell Bock:
Now, Andrew alluded to this, and I want to take a little tighter look at it. And that is even within the Chinese community, there are awarenesses of differences among the Chinese because of different languages and different cultural backgrounds. So even when we say someone is an Asian-American, we're actually hiding something, which is that there is a lot of distinction between the various groups. I mean, I didn't ask you, Kasey, what your background is in terms of family, ultimately where it came from. But in thinking about this, so we've got... I think about this part of the world. We've got Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Indians, Indonesians, I mean, Myanmarians, I guess that's what you'd call someone from Myanmar, Malaysians. When we say Asian-American or Asian, we actually are both revealing and hiding an aspect of the conversation. Does that make any difference to be aware of that, do you think? And that's just a wide, open question for whoever wants to step into it first and will take a shot at seeing what happens.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yes, it does. It does make a difference. So to think about the different categories of all the kinds of people that you just mentioned, Darrell, we have East Asians in Chinese, Korean, Japanese. And then there's the Southeast Asians, which Filipinos identify as Southeast Asian, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thai, people who live around there. And then there's the South Asians in India, Pakistan, people in Nepal, Bangladesh. And then there's this whole other thing called Pacific Islander, which as a Filipino is actually kind of weird because we can check Asian on the box on forms, but we could also check Pacific Islander. Sometimes they match those two things up together. So Pacific Islanders are Samoans, Native Hawaiians. And yet Filipinos, sometimes they will put Filipino as a box to force you to check it because Filipinos could say, "I'm Asian. I'll just check Asian." Or they could say Pacific Islander. Hence the PI in AAPI. So there's that.

Mikel Del Rosario:
And then also because of the Spanish colonization in the Philippines, many Filipinos, I'm one of them, has Hispanic heritage. So it's not just that my ancestors took a Spanish last name. We really do have ancestry from Spain. So in some of these forms, I may check Asian on the race box, but then it will ask for ethnicity, Hispanic or non-Hispanic, and I'll say Hispanic because I have ancestry in Spain.

Darrell Bock:
Interesting. So that answer just... I've got about four or five questions coming at my head at once. So let me pick one of them. Let's go back. You used an abbreviation that people may or may not know, AAPI. What does that stand for?

Mikel Del Rosario:
So Asian, Asian-American, or Pacific Islander. So it's kind of like a whole bunch of... It's all those categories I just mentioned jammed together into one thing that's not really one thing.

Darrell Bock:
Okay. And Andrew, my question for you is, it's related to this, is you talked about the differentiation among the Chinese. But don't these groups also differentiate with one another and how they view each other, and so aren't there kind of, for lack of a better description, internal... I don't know if rivalries is the right word, but internal dynamics that also come with this area that are a part of the reality of a person's experience?

Andrew Feng:
Yeah. I think even just to go back to the simpler context of a Chinese heritage church, there's a lot of the Hong Kong brothers that came over here as students, and they went into white American churches, became inclined to Christ, started house fellowships, and then became churches. So there was kind of like a first wave of Hong Kong. And then there's the Taiwanese-American, Taiwanese. And then there's this huge wave of mainland Chinese. And then now there's also Vietnamese-Chinese, Thai-Chinese, Filipino-Chinese, all these other Chinese that's kind of like banded under these top three other Chinese.

Andrew Feng:
And then you add age, whether you're first generation, second generation, third generation. Some of the English youth, the Chinese-American youth, they don't even speak any Mandarin at all. So it does get a little bit complicated. Once you go into the building, you figure out which congregation you're going to and then which youth group or young-adults group you were supposed to be assigned to.

Darrell Bock:
So Ruth, you put that all together, and I think that you've alluded to this already, and this is where I want to pick it up. But with all that that we've just said and all the variation that's represented in saying Asian, this last year has been particularly different. How?

Ruth Singsit:
You had mentioned in the beginning about Mikel saying that he felt like a ghost. That's exactly what I felt when it was going on. I was like, "Where is the Asian population here?" And we were talking just about black and white, but we have other colored people. I felt that we were being relegated somewhere in the corner, and we were not heard. We were not seen. It just became an issue of black and white, and that was the center stage of every conversation you saw on the social media. And it was like, is there no other color that is important other than black and white? We have so many colors in this world, and God has created us in so many shapes and tones. What about those? We need to talk more. If you're talking about diversity, we should include everybody, not just the blacks.

Darrell Bock:
Okay. So the generic observation is, is that when we walk into this area and we talk about diversity and we're thinking about diversity, if I can say it this way in somewhat of a positive sense, that there's going to be every tribe and every nation that's going to worship God. Revelation 5 to 7 gives us this picture. This is where God is taking us. His church is made up of people of diverse backgrounds from every tribe and every nation, et cetera. So it's important to appreciate the breadth of what it is that God is doing. So I'm hearing that.

Darrell Bock:
So the other question that I have, and this can be for either Ruth or Kasey, has anything been different in the last year? Have you gone... I guess the way to ask it is, have you gone from being mostly invisible to, all of a sudden, becoming visible in some sense? And if so, in what sense? And I'm thinking about the last year or so, or is it still pretty much the ghost existence?

Kasey Olander:
Well, it's interesting, Darrell, that you mention that because I resonate with a lot of the ghost things that they were talking about because I actually am... Yeah, my dad is Chinese, but my mom is Hispanic. So still, in a black-and-white conversation, those two are not represented, and so I agree. I think that the conversations are coming to light a little bit more, but I still feel more of the... that there's still more work to be done. There were books and conversations about how do blacks and whites enter into this conversation about racial reconciliation, and what is the Christian's role, and how do we bring the Gospel to bear on this situation? But yeah, I think that there's still work to be done as far as like, okay, what about other people who are involved?

Darrell Bock:
Okay. So I think we've established pretty much as a theme that oftentimes when we think about race, Asian and Asian-Americans, 1) are not seen, and 2) the actual complexity of what that category supposedly represents... I mean, if you're unseen, you probably don't appreciate that second layer at all. And so that becomes an issue and a tension to deal with.

Darrell Bock:
Andrew, I'm going to ask you... I'm actually fishing for something. I'm surprised it hasn't come up, to be honest. And that is, has anything been different in the last year or not?

Andrew Feng:
Well, I mean, we've been in the pandemic over the last 18 months, so it's been a little bit different. I wouldn't say for me personally it hasn't... I haven't experienced anything out of the norm.

Darrell Bock:
Okay. All right.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, I can chime in here a little bit because I think what we've seen with the COVID pandemic on some level has sparked some racial discrimination and hate against Chinese people and other Asian people. But I think what we're seeing is, for some people in terms of discrimination, really nothing has changed for us. But I think what we're seeing more in the news is that for other people, things have changed and things seem to be very different for them. There is a Filipino news site called Rappler, and they recently had an article called "What It's Like to Be Filipino-American in a Time of Hate." And really the story was really nothing. A woman was out in Michigan walking her dog, and she's like a guy came up to her and put his mask down, and she's like, "Okay, here we go." She was getting ready to be verbally assaulted or physically assaulted, and the guy just wanted to make small talk with her.

Mikel Del Rosario:
What I thought was interesting about that article is that some people have seen the news stories that have been put out there on social media. There's #StopAsianHate, the New York story recently about the convicted murderer who had killed his own mom, was out, and brutally murdered a 65-year-old Asian woman in New York on her way to church. So you see these things. And I think for some people, they are living with more fear because, whether or not they have experienced that kind of discrimination, they're seeing it discussed in the news and on social media. No doubt, some people have experienced an uptick in prejudice. But I think for many Asians, we see these things on the news, but we don't experience them in our own lives. So there's kind of two kinds of experiences, at least in that regard.

Darrell Bock:
So Ruth, let me ask you this question. How would you, or what would you say to someone who is hearing this and maybe even be hearing it for the first time? A light may even be going on. What would you say to them? What advice would you give them to help us all be more sensitive to these realities?

Ruth Singsit:
I think what I see really is a lack of emotional quotient in the way we interact with each other. And the scripture clearly says, Jesus says, "Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you." Somehow we know all our scriptures, Bible verses, Sunday school, that's been taught to us in the Sunday school, but when it comes to practicing it at the moment that's required, somehow we just simply toss it out of the window.

Ruth Singsit:
And added to that is the fact that we are not sensitive to the person. We're not present in the moment for that person. We do not engage in active listening. We do not engage in the fact that this person has a story, regardless of his skin or her skin color. There's much beyond that. We look at the person more as an object rather than the whole being. So there's a lot of things in that, Dr. Bock, when you ask me. I could go on and on. But these two things I would say, is that we really need to develop our emotional quotient, first thing. And the second thing is really, really practice treating others as we would like them to treat us.

Darrell Bock:
Would you say that one of the transfers of thinking needs to be that perhaps we tend to work out of stereotypes that we have, and we need to work more personally with the person we're interacting with? Might that be a way to say it?

Ruth Singsit:
Yes, absolutely.

Darrell Bock:
Okay. Kasey, basically the same question. What advice would you give to someone who is kind of hearing this and saying, "Gosh, one, I may have never thought of it. And two, this is kind of interesting to hear"? What advice would you give?

Kasey Olander:
Right. I would say that there's a way to ask good questions just to learn more about people, sort of like Ruth was talking about, getting to know the person and not just, as you mentioned, Darrell, the stereotype or your preconceptions or anything like that. So I would say not to make assumptions based on the way that people look. I think we've heard even just in this conversation that, yeah, the way that people look doesn't necessarily indicate what you might think about where someone's from or what language they speak or what language they don't speak. So I've seen that a lot with my students, as far as some international students or some who have immigrant parents or anything like that. Yeah, I think a lot of times people make assumptions, where really a better response would be to ask a good question or to be willing to learn and have the humility to think, "Wow! Okay, I may not have the answers that I want to have, but I would love to learn."

Darrell Bock:
Andrew, same question, because I think this is a very basic area of thinking through the interaction.

Andrew Feng:
Yeah. I think all of us have already kind of touched on it, but just the posture. I mean, all of us, as minorities, when people come up to us and talk to us, we can... I mean, people know when you're genuine, right? So if you're being genuine and people are trying to talk to you and they really actually care about you, I think that's... We're willing to maybe work together, talk together. But if we feel like, hey, you're just trying to get something out of us, if we feel like, hey, we want to hear the inside scoop on this, what's happening, then we really feel like, "Well, I don't want to be treated like a project."

Andrew Feng:
But I think the posture, and then just being inviting. If our other majority friends can say, "Hey," would be more proactive toward the minority demographics or be more inviting, I think that would go a long way. Just even going to us rather than always asking us to go to them. I think that idea of just them coming to us rather than us going to them, because even maybe in our culture, it's hard for us to go over to our white American brothers and sisters to share this.

Darrell Bock:
So Mikel, the thing that immediately comes to mind is really asking a set of genuine kind of, for lack of a better discussion, get-to-know-you questions or where you're from or what you're about that show a deep, personal interest. Is that a helpful way in?

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah, that's going to help you figure out who this person really is in the same way that you might have a Muslim friend or a Buddhist friend and you don't just go, "Well, I read a book on Islam once. I know everything about you." To really ask the person what their experience is because, for example, my mom's actually Filipino-Chinese also, so I have that in my background. I'm not your stereotypical first generation, but I'm actually not second gen. So I call myself 1.5 gen. I just made that up. So someone talking to me may assume that I just grew up in the United States my whole life, and there's a lot of things I still actually don't get about American culture and some things that I still find very movie-like in a sense. Like, I've only seen these situations in the movies.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So yeah. But then also on our side, and by our, I mean generically the Asian side, we also need to be understanding toward people. Some people don't mean to micro-aggress against you. They just... People have said to me, "Mikel, you speak really good English." I'm like, "Okay. Well, thanks." "I'm really curious to learn about your culture." Like, "Okay." So sometimes people don't mean anything really negative by it. They might be a little ignorant, but just to give grace there. But also on the other side, to ask people what their experience is because you can't just assume... There's nothing like being asked sitting in the exit row on an airplane, "Sir, do you speak English? Because you need to speak English if you're going to sit here."

Darrell Bock:
Wow! Yeah. So this might be a good place to kind of wrap up this first segment. Let me ask you... Mikel has shared a couple of things that can kind of happen that are awkward, but that happened. Any other examples? Because this may help people with things they might do unconsciously without being aware of it.

Ruth Singsit:
Well, I have a lot of instances of very funny, humorous questions being asked. Like, "So in India, do you have IHOP?" "Of course, we have. We have IHOP. We have KFC. We have McDonald's." "Oh, do you have a pub in India? Oh, do you have this car brand?" I mean, they can go on and on and on. It's so funny. I'm like, "You should come to India. You should just come to India and visit us and see for yourself with your own eyes what's there. It's not about elephants and snake charmers only."

Darrell Bock:
Yeah. You mentioned McDonald's. I've got to tell this story because this is one of my favorite Indian stories about when I visit. I hear Mikel laughing. He knows this story. I went into McDonald's because when I go to India, I react to all the curry. I don't handle curry very well, which means that my diet is very restricted when I go to India. So I went to McDonald's in the hopes of getting a hamburger, okay, walking into an Indian McDonald's and getting a hamburger. And of course, one of the cultural things that I discovered is some... I don't know if this is true of all McDonald's, but some McDonald's are very sensitive to the Indian culture. So there was no hamburger when I walked into McDonald's, and I'm going, "What else does McDonald's do but hamburgers?" You know?

Darrell Bock:
So it shows... And what, of course, it showed is I hadn't translated the fact that I had gone to India, and in the context of Indian culture, here's what goes on. In Israel, I walk into a McDonald's, and it self-identifies as a kosher McDonald's. So I'm sitting here, going, "Well. That's interesting. What exactly does that mean?" So there are these little things that you don't even think about that are a part of everyday life for many people, but it's not your everyday life. Kasey, you have any examples?

Kasey Olander:
I would say I think Mikel made a really good point earlier, because sometimes I get frustrated by these small things. Like, people have come up to me and just started speaking Chinese, assuming I speak Chinese, not knowing obviously that I'm only half Chinese or that I speak more Spanish than I do Chinese. Or they ask like, "Where are you from?" And I'm responding, "I'm from Houston," because that's really where I'm from. And people want to know, I guess, where my ancestors are from a long time ago. Yeah. Even my dad's grandfather was born here in the States. So anyway, I would say that I will confess that I get frustrated by those things. But like Mikel said, I think that there's a way to respond charitably on both sides, where people can ask good questions and really have the desire to learn and then also can respond with grace when people don't know.

Darrell Bock:
So Mikel's a 1.5, but you're a full 4.0. Is that right?

Kasey Olander:
Exactly. That's right.

Darrell Bock:
Amazing. Okay. Andrew, you want to give it... Do you have any examples that you can think of that... Because I think this helps people to develop their sensitivities.

Andrew Feng:
Yeah. I think just the communal nature of Eastern culture. I think even just in a classroom setting, I'm just looking around the room, all of us are students here, and just being aware that even us on campus, we want to be in a community. So even if either the prof or our white American friends would invite us into a conversation, that would go such a long way. Even just the first day of school or summer school is coming up, just being inviting. I think that gesture of bringing somebody into the circle. So I would say that's a more positive opportunity, rather than think of all the things that we have that has happened to us.

Darrell Bock:
Very good. Well, I want to thank you all for taking the time to introduce this area for people from perhaps a different angle than they're used to thinking about it. I think it's very helpful to think about our desire is to build the right kind of community, not just here on the seminary campus, but in our churches. And the more we engage and come to appreciate the different kinds of life experiences and backgrounds that people have, the better off we will be as we relate to people, as we've already suggested, not out of the stereotype, but on a person-to-person basis getting to know them. So I want to thank you all for taking the time to be with us today. And I also want to thank you for being on The Table. We hope you will be back with us again soon. We look forward to this conversation. We're going to follow up this conversation with a little more detail for The Table Plus part of our new Table experience. And we hope you'll join us there and join us again here on The Table soon.