Abstract
First, many thanks to Jennifer Hughes and Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook for making this forum possible! I want to express my deep gratitude to the four respondents who read and wrote so generously about my book. They spurred a conversation that fulfills something that, when I was writing it, barely held a shape, but that now takes more direct form: to engage fellow travelers in my adopted faith tradition and current practice in the Episcopal Church/Anglican Communion. Koh is correct when she identifies my CPE experience in 2009 as one that propelled me on this intellectual—and I can say here more explicitly, spiritual—endeavor. In the semesters following that summer when I was spending weekends and non-teaching days at Claremont School of Theology and the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont (Bloy House), completing my classes toward the M. Div., these clinical encounters found themselves in narrative form everywhere in my seminar papers, so much so that my liturgics/homiletics professor, Dr. Sylvia Sweeney, jotted in one of her comments, “Jim, CPE is the season that keeps on giving, isn’t it?” My time spent at Good Samaritan Hospital was one during which I was tasked to bear witness to those whose primary engagement with the world was one of suffering, and my vocation for those ten weeks was to stay with them in that suffering, or as Ili Levine, a student of my UCLA colleague Rachel Lee, put it so eloquently, to “stay with the bummer.” Learning to stay with the bummer is one of the hardest things to cultivate, because the bummer, we are told, gets in the way of so much that we are rewarded for, materially, socially, culturally, maybe even ontologically, to gesture to Reyes’s phrase that he returns to in his reflection. And yet, after reading these four essays, I have become all the more convinced that staying with the bummer might the thing that will allow human beings to live out their ends—the inevitability of all our finitude and something that might feel a bit like a species-wide telos.
All four pick up on the doubleness of the last phrase of the book’s subtitle, the ends of the model minority, in which I try to diagnose the ongoing power of model minority discourse in governing Asian American life, its persistent tug of making Asian Americans feel like there are no felt options to anything but success (and the racialized expectations of this form of life from non-Asian colleagues); and to suggest that something about bodily fragility and failure is a crucial means through model minority hegemony might finally begin to fall. All four writers speak to the seductive power of such investments: the ways that ablebodiedness—and as I’ve been exploring more recently, ablemindedness—imbues what we imagine when we figure ontological goodness, Reyes’s provocative phrase; the desire to find in others and in ourselves the capacity to heal, as Kwok so movingly puts it; Chu’s poignant rehearsal of the ways that law school education reinforced such narrow capacities and limits to professional performance; Koh’s eloquently economical phrase of the normative Asian American bodymind as exceptional. All of them actually gesture to, not an objection, but a corrective that I offer (alongside scholars like erin Khuê Ninh, Mimi Khúc, Takeo Rivera, and Heidi Kim), that the model minority is not a myth but instead a form of racial subjection, which is another way of saying that it is a mode of identity formation, to which there are for so so many people no felt options. It does no one no favors, especially Asian Americans, to continue to call the model minority a myth, as if for disaggregated data or anecdotes of immigrant downward mobility we might disavow the ways that the success frame overdetermines the narrative and empirical realities. Actually, let me backtrack and insist in this context that we call the model minority an Asian American myth if we honor the religious origins of the terms, as a foundational narrative that plays a fundamental role in a society or community’s sense of meaning or purpose, a covenantal story, if you will.
Kwok and Chu both speak to forms of training that mirror the rigor that characterizes medical training, whether it is Kwok citing Julia Ching’s novitiate or Chu’s own legal education. It is indeed a kind of learning that is more often than not endured for its promise of guaranteed reward, a measurable outcome of initiation into a guild that manages its own through more often than not voluntary discipline. The education only formalizes what medical practitioners like Pauline Chen have called the “hidden curriculum” of medical education, the culture that inculcates and suffuses young initiates starting from gross anatomy class during year one, all through med school, internship, and residency, and reinforced once one assumes the status of attending, a cycle repeating itself over generations. Not written down yet relentlessly enforced, it is yet another arena of social life that demands no felt options even when it militates against human tendency, whether it is the suppression of genuine grief or revulsion at human dissection, or terror at working a Code Blue, or feeling the deep sense of failure when calling a time of death. erin Ninh has been borrowing from the late great Lauren Berlant, and refers to the model minority as “genre,” its secular corollary to the religious inflected power of the term “myth,” “‘an emotionally invested, patterned set of expectations about how to act and how to interpret, which organises’ not only aesthetic productions like movies or poetry but temporal experience: how we each narrate and understand our everyday lives.” Call it myth or genre or hidden/explicit curriculum: at some point it stops working, an event horizon where exemplary, exceptional performance no longer achievable takes on the unbearability of failure and you and I have been taught that that life is best left unseen, unwitnessed, because to do otherwise would be to reveal the genre of the rigor of this life as one that in the last instance is ideologically indefensible.
Reyes asks, “What stories are the necessary first steps to show the body otherwise, a body that is still blessed and beautiful?” Likewise, Koh wonders what can woundedness teach us, in our common life together, as well as in our theology? Kwok queries forms of healing that don’t involve cure. What they each wonder are the ways that even in our most ablebodied and ableminded, hyper-productive, materially rewarded moments in life, reified and naturalized in gated communities and class hierarchies, we are all, always, haunted by our inevitable falls, our ends, the haunting of inevitable denouement that meets Pharoah and pauper. As Avery Gordon once wrote, specifically of the Argentine middle class during its military dictatorship but could apply to our contemporary ableist modes of imagining the good life, haunting is also the mode by which the middle class [insert ablebodied person], in particular, needs to encounter something you cannot just ignore, or understand at a distance, or “explain away” by stripping it of all its magical power; something whose seemingly self-evident repugnance you cannot just rhetorically throw in someone’s face. Haunting is also the mode by which the middle class needs to encounter something you have to try out for yourself, feeling your way deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness until you do feel what is at stake, the madness of the passion. (Her emphasis, but it may as well have been mine; Gordon 131)
The Christian story of Easter is principally about God willing to be haunted by the mortality of God’s creation. A couple of years ago I delivered probably the most depressing Easter Sunday sermon ever when I said the following: But when resurrection became a moment in history, when Jesus was raised from the dead, you and I need to reckon with the fact that resurrection was not like creation because Jesus’ very first thought was likely some iteration of his last on Good Friday. The most vile and violent forces that humanity can muster distilled into this one person came rushing back in that moment in that dark night when Jesus took that first breath, there, in the tomb, before Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome would arrive on the scene. Resurrection is not clean slates. Resurrection is not good as new. Resurrection, to borrow from Leonard Cohen, is not a victory march; it is a cold and it is a broken Alleluia. Henri Nouwen reminds us that Judaism also bears this wisdom of the pedagogy of woundedness when he rehearses the Talmudic story, of Rabbi Yoshua ben Levi coming upon Elijah and asking the prophet, “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah replies, “Go and ask him yourself.”
“Where is he?” “Sitting at the gates of the city.” “How shall I know him?” “He is sitting among the poor covered with wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds them one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed: if so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.’”
Indeed, I’ll cite one of my favorite poems, by Albert Saijo, who sees in Buddhism a related wisdom to staying with the bummer and reveling in its utter humanity:
Bodhisattva Vows To Be The Last One Off The Sinking Ship — You Sign Up & Find Out It’s Forever — Passenger List Endless — Ship Never Empties — Ship Keeps Sinking But Doesn’t Go Quite Under — On Board Angst Panic & Desperation Hold Sway — Turns Out Bodhisattvahood Is A Fucking Job Like Any Other But Different In That There’s No Weekends Holidays Vacations No Golden Years Of Retirement — You’re Spending All Your Time & Energy Getting Other People Off The Sinking Ship Into Lifeboats Bound Gaily For Nirvana While There You Are Sinking — & Of Course You Had To Go & Give Your Lifejacket Away — So Now Let Us Be Cheerful As We Sink — Our Spirit Ever Buoyant As We Sink
In each of these examples from three different faith traditions (and we can find strains of this in most religions), we are invited to embrace the non-normative, non-ablebodied, and non-ableminded as the one to whom divine blessing rests. To do so is to reframe the biblical narratives of healing, even and especially the healing stories, signs, and wonders in the Gospels not as expressions of a curative miracle toward a reconstructed ablebodied/mindedness, which always reinscribes curative violence, but a form of healing as restoration to community in one’s extant, wounded bodymind. To do so is to dispense with the monarchical, triumphalist language of omnipotence, restitution. To do so is to stop calling God Almighty, and to give God a different disposition: gracious, tender, fragile. To do so is to insist on forms of intellectual rigor as tender and fragile. To do so is to reimagine the classroom as a space of care, of care as theological education’s first learning objective. My hope is that teachers, in seminaries and divinity schools and everywhere, from kindergartens to graduate seminars, can be first and foremost chaplains of human experience as the precondition for being teachers of theological or otherwise knowledge.