Abstract
The invitation to participate in this roundtable came at the right time in my life. I am, at this point, fulfilling the requirements for a clinical pastoral education (CPE) unit, required for my presbytery for ordination. Although Jim only briefly refers to his own CPE experience at the beginning of the book, it is clear that his chaplaincy experience intimately informs his literary analysis of Asian American memoirs of illness and institutionalized medicine. In fact perhaps the clearest description of what Jim attempts in this book can be found in the introduction: Perhaps most crucial for me that summer [of CPE] . . . was to engage in as generous a reading practice of any story I encounter[ed] and to see what happens when one is as open and vulnerable and curious about another’s telling as one has the bandwidth to allow. I jettison none of the critical armature I’ve accumulated . . . for animating the forces that underpin any text, in whatever form, is vital to see its worlding . . . But rigor can be—and indeed, must be—tender. (p. 24)
Jim’s invitation to the reader is to refuse a particular foreclosure of a person’s narrative, even as larger structural, social forces may threaten to narrow that narrative to a singular and totalizing one. It is a refusal that is not only about how Asian American lives are narrated, but also where we locate the power of critique, a point to which I will return at the end.
But to begin—the critique of model minority discourse is well-known in academic circles and has been increasingly taken up in more public venues; both scholars and popular authors have documented its harmful impacts on Asian American mental health. That being said, Jim’s book critically turns its focus to how the model minority body is imagined and enfleshed in the American racial landscape, finding resonance with Catherine Ceniza Choy’s scholarship on Filipino American nurses. The mythos of the model minority subject is wedded to a well and able body, a normative figure because it is exceptional. From one vantage point, then, the memoirs and celebrity of South Asian doctors such as Atul Gawande, Paul Kalanithi, Sanjay Gupta, and others may confirm the natural telos of the American Dream; from another, these memoirs have been forged through the pedagogical crucible of empire, immigration policies, and institutional, modern medicine. And in fact, citing Craig Irvine, there may be a particular reason for why physicians are drawn to literature: “Literature, like science, discloses the face of the Other (which as Other, is invisible) by clothing its nakedness in forms . . . [literature] mirrors medicine’s representational, intentional structure.” (p. 77)
Institutionalized medicine’s representational logic is what allows for it, in part, to also be open to ethical critique. Jim’s analysis shares similarities with the critique offered by Christian ethicists, for example, Allen Verhey (The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus, Eerdmans 2011). The violence of medicalized death lies in the paradoxical reality that the attempt to cure often comes through unbearable suffering. But Jim then goes further by narrating modern medicine’s limits through the experiences of Asian American physicians themselves, physicians who themselves are marked through race. It is potentially the nexus of this marking, alongside a patient’s suffering with the institutionalized mandate of impossible cure, which pushes toward the possibility of another way of being an Asian American physician. This possibility creates space for the patient to be other than patient, and for the physician to be “beside” as a physician chaplain, rather than “behind” or “above” or “behind” the patient as the gatekeeper between life and death.
Over the course of the book, Jim unravels or un-narrates the fictions of a well and abled model minority body, an Asian American body. Illness, rather than wellness, becomes the hermeneutic by which not only other kinds of Asian American subjects can be narrated, but also a new kind of sociality. It is a sociality that is not only about interdependence and connection between subjects which have been formerly positioned through binary racial and social constructs, but also new identifications between the living and dead, the inanimate and animate. The capaciousness of Jim’s vision extends as far to have us question the “naturalness” of familiar modes of temporality, productivity, and wellness that are the mechanisms of “capitalist immortality,” the building blocks of Max Weber’s “Protestant work ethic.” We might even dare say that in the book’s epilogue, Jim calls for a thick, sensuous, and porous economy of grace.
I am curious to see how Jim might respond to two questions, one regarding other possible texts and the other disciplinary. One, how might Jim expand his analysis to include memoirs of either caregivers (familial or professional) or chaplains, and who would he include? Throughout his book, Jim calls our attention to Asian Americans who offer otherwise subjectivities, subjectivities that resist the expectations of the abled model minority body. Would the inclusion of caretakers and chaplains add to the plenitude of the kind of care he describes, or instead confirm the cooptation of care within the confines of a medicalized and capitalized system? The examples of Joshua Williams and Lucy Kalanithi are given as offering endings that gesture toward Asian American narratives that do not hew to the triumphal expectations of the model minority. I would be interested in memoirs that more explicitly center the experiences of caregivers or chaplains themselves, and how they might intervene into the medicalized physician-patient dyad.
Two, to return to my initial observations—Jim offers a way of reading these memoirs that holds together the open posture of a chaplain and the critical one of the literary scholar. As he writes, the chaplain’s experience of being beside a patient’s woundedness—illness, suffering, death—without reducing these phenomena to diagnoses or symptoms is easier said than done. From this perspective the diagnosis is easier because it allows us a measure of distance from our own fragility. We fear woundedness because of how it may confirm the failure of our salvific attempts. And it is a parallel fear, Jim implies, that animates a certain strand of Asian American studies—to name and critique model minority discourse not only to free Asian Americans from it and restore what was deformed to supposed wholeness—ends up replicating a certain politics of recognition.
Indeed, then, what can woundedness teach us, in our common life together as well as in our theology? The temptations of theology can be said to be akin to theory’s; this temptation is, and has been, to create a world through the act of naming, a naming that is borne of critique and foreclosure which refuses the emergence of all other possible worlds. It is a foreclosure that may emerge from conviction or faith, but also fear about theology’s continued relevance and survival. In this sense, Jim’s alternative vision of reading points to the importance of affect and materiality in the construction of care, an epistemology grounded in curiosity and open-heartedness rather than defense and mastery. I would be interested in hearing Jim’s thoughts on the cross-disciplinary possibilities between theory and theology, of whether he thinks the crossing of the two is possible or even necessary. For now, I want to thank him for writing this beautiful and tender book, for affirming the sacredness of life through, and not despite, our wounds.
