Abstract
How does one narrate a body in a state of less than perfect health? The body is in perpetual movement between growth, decay, vitality, and death. What scholars and researchers of the micro and molecular parts of the body have taught us and what many religious and philosophical traditions know is that death, life, health, disease, growth, decay, and yes even resurrection all happen at the cellular level all the time. The body simply is never in a state of perpetual health. There is no model body. James Kyung-Jin Lee’s book is a reminder for all people to remember that fact.
But if to be “in good health” is the story we tell ourselves about the desirable body, how does that impact narratives of communities and groups of people who are not in a perpetual state of good health? If the metanarratives we share about the body are that to be healthy is to achieve ontological goodness—and I am aware ontological goodness is not really a thing people say—then how do we offer care and love for those for whom this is at best not a reality, and perhaps more accurately, a flat out lie?
By leveraging Asian and Asian American memoirs, Lee brings us into a fascinating, heartbreaking, and visceral world that can teach—hence the world pedagogy in the title—through narrative. Narrative pedagogy, the practice of teaching through stories, offers a glimpse into how people might reimagine the engagement of all bodies. What is most instructive about Lee’s text is the juxtaposition of how memoir can at the same time push back on narratives that do not include the diversity of states of being of the body, and at the same time, memories can reify certain meta-narratives about good health being the norm. The model minority myth of the Asian American community becomes a narrative to wrestle with in this tension. In every chapter, Lee addresses the tension with the ways memoirists navigate how the model minority impacts and shapes how care givers imagine and understand the body.
Lee’s work traces the multifaceted narratives that accompany the model minority myth, especially in health care. From the migration of doctors from South Asian countries to broader immigration narratives of Southeast and Eastern Asian countries, memoirs have come to shape a broader imagination about who doctors are, who patients are, who should aspire to be in healthcare, and who should aspire to be in good health. Lee’s chapter, “Doctor Undone,” does a particularly good job of showing how these narratives shape care: from treatment plans to bedside manners and the chaplaincy capacity of doctors. No reader will walk away from this chapter thinking doctors and the broader healthcare system should spend less time listening to the lives and experiences of patients.
Lee also surveys the memoirists’ theoretical interests and professional backgrounds, which range from the medical field, psychotherapy, critical theory, all the way to poetry and the broader humanities. The memoirists, likewise, represent a wide-ranging field of expertise, tracing popular works like the beautifully composed and the New York Times Bestseller, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, or Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir. Lee explores Fred Ho’s Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at a Cellular Level and S. Lochlann Jain’s Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. The diversity of narratives and experiences weaved together theoretical and medical knowledge with the pain and heartache of loss so often the subject matter of the memoirs.
As a reader outside of Lee’s demographic, I was left with a few questions that have implications for us who sit with cellular death and seek to learn from others.
What story are we telling ourselves about the body in the tension between life and death?
What stories do we teach, share, and pass on about our bodies and material reality, especially in context of the non-material narratives that frame the context of our bodies?
What stories are the necessary first steps to show the body otherwise, a body that is still blessed and beautiful?
I ask these questions because memoir is a powerful tool, no matter what the narrative is, at giving those outside an experience some understanding of those bodies not like their own. The particularity of the writer’s experience can be a window into the reader’s own soul as well as a gateway to empathy. In a way, it would help us broaden Lee’s question: “What might it mean for health-care practitioners—especially, but not exclusively, physicians—to see their identity, their vocation, their agency partly, if not primarily, as witness bearers to these narratives . . .” (p. 92). Reading a memoir is a form of capacity building for pastoral care and chaplaincy that Lee points us to. Narrative pedagogy, as a method for gaining empathy, is an incredible tool.
Important to educators, I wonder if we could extend Lee’s analysis and study beyond the Asian American memoir experience? According to the Center for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics System, at the end of 2022, the average life expectancy of Indigenous people in the United States is sixty-five years. For African Americans, life expectancy fell to just over seventy years. Whites live only slightly longer at around seventy-six, but not as well as the broad spectrum of Latinos at seventy-eight, or Asian Americans at eighty-three years. 1 The data can certainly be broken down further—women live longer than men; for some communities, the cause of death drives down life expectancy, such as deaths due to gun violence, poverty, lack of access to health care, high infant mortality, and increased heart disease due to social causes. These data tell a story about who matters in the United States. The memoirs of groups beyond Lee’s subject, some of which were included such as Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, offer narrative insights about what it means to be human. Most importantly, we have never had access to as many diverse memoirs as we have today. Lee’s method would be an influential teaching tool of empathy beyond this social group. From medical students to hospital chaplains, to pastors and religious leaders, the reading of memoir is an entry point into the lives of people for whom the helping professions serve.
The takeaway, however, is not just to pick up Lee’s book to understand how to read memoirs. Certainly, educators from all backgrounds should learn how to read and engage memoirs as Lee does. But to the student, doctor, friend, family, or the person standing in a coffee line, I say to them read a memoir—and then pick up another, and another. Lee’s text is a teaching tool and model for educators about how to engage these stories and put them in context with larger and dominant narratives. Cultural stories—both the helpful and not, like the model minority myth—are what drive the definition of what does it mean to be human. From bodies that deal with plagues, disease, who live excessively long and in other cases, targeted for early disposal, from healing stories to stories of death in a tomb, and of course resurrection that seems to defy it all, our sacred traditions have wrestled with these questions of the body.
In many ways, our sacred traditions have been declaring as Lee has to pay attention to the way we talk about bodies—especially those that are not in the prime of their age and health. As Lee points out, all bodies are already in various states of being. What does that mean for religious leaders who need to provide theological insights, prayers, or comfort to those wrestling with the shock of disease, death, and disability, and refuses to equate all bodies of difference against the “model body.” What if we took the diversity of bodies as the norm and designed and delivered care—medical and pastoral, but also, educational, and emotional care—with the non-normative body as ontologically good? I apologize to the reader. I could not let go of ontological goodness. We need not just the analysis but the prayers and practices that refuse to petition to our gods for a return to health/normalcy. In short, we need new theologies and practices of care that see the non-normative body—however we define normative—as the divine state of the body.
Narrative pedagogy focuses on the story. Memoirs, as a particular kind of story, are markers on the path to a deeper more compassionate understanding of the human experience. Lee’s work reminds us to walk on the path that embraces all the seasons. The trees provide shade and beauty in early summer, but also the decay of fall provides a beauty in color. The death and preservation of energy in winter is part of making way for the next season, when trees seemingly resurrect and bloom in spring. So too does the body. Lee’s work is a beautiful sign at the trailhead to enjoy the diversity of stories and stop accepting summer as the normative story.
