I am a Chinglican at table.
For some people, this might sound offensive. It sounds too much like “chink,” someone commented a while back. It evokes the old stereotype of “John Chinaman” coming off a boat ready to cheat his way through North America by day and smoke opium in squalid conditions at night.
But it also reminds me of something Taiwanese American pop star Wang Leehom (王力宏) said about his musical style, what he dubbed “chinked out”:
Well, the “chinked out” style is a school of hip hop – that’s the way I like to think of it – that incorporates Chinese elements and sounds…I think that saying this music is chinked out. I don’t want to offend anybody. I want to repossess the word, and this is a word I heard growing up in New York. It was derogatory at the time. And you know, I hope I can make it cool.
Of course, if you’re Chinese and reading this, you might think I’m worrying too much. Chances are, you didn’t think of orientalist and racist stereotypes, but the word Chinglish might have occurred to you. You know what happens when people like us second-generation North American types go mixed in Chinese and English because we can’t say everything in Chinese? Or when our friends across the Pacific stick in a random English word in their Chinese? That’s Chinglish. Chinese and English.
I decided to call myself a Chinglican because a) I speak Chinglish most of the time and b) I couldn’t really justify calling myself an Anglican when I’m not English. I became Anglican later in life because I was attracted to its strong liturgical tradition, which was really different from the Chinese free churches in which I grew up that taught me that rituals were bad because they were insincere. Sure, I enjoyed the spontaneity and the loose structure–and I still catch myself humming 7-11 songs (seven words, eleven times) from English-speaking worship leaders who thought they were cool because they knew what Vineyard, Passion, and Hillsong were–but there was something about Anglicanism that really attracted me.
A former Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s and early 1970s, the late Michael Ramsey, put it this way. He says that the British monarchy didn’t make up Anglican Christianity with the multiple divorces and what-not of Henry VIII and the later consolidation under Queen Elizabeth. No, he says,
it was the Christian church as it had always been despite these changes, still possessing the Holy Scriptures, the creeds, the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, and the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons.
To put it simply, Anglicanism is really just supposed to be the English expression of Christianity as embodied in the church catholic.
And yet I’m not comfortable calling myself Anglican. I suspect it’s because I’m Chinese, and if you think about it, the only way I can be Chinese and Anglican at the same time is because the British colonizers brought Anglicanism (and Baptists and Wesleyans and Catholics and Presbyterians) to their colonial sites in their empire that never slept in the mid-nineteenth century, and even then, it took a while before Anglicanism gave up its claim to whiteness in the colonies. Coming out of a free church tradition, Anglicanism is refreshingly structured and liturgical. But every day I’m Anglican is another day I spend reflecting on the intersections between religion and imperial colonization and how this “I’m not quite white enough” and “I’m not quite Chinese enough” is a product of a colonial legacy.
If Leehom is resisting American racist tropes with his “chinked out” music, then I’m using Chinglican in that same postcolonial spirit. I’ve been confirmed as a lay person in the Anglican Communion, but if confirmation means anything, it’s about the Holy Spirit equipping us with gifts to strengthen the catholicity of the church. Colonial dominations, with all of their power differentials and discarnate stereotyping, just seem inimical to anything that looks like the church of Jesus Christ. To call myself Chinglican is, I think, acknowledges the baggage of race and imperialism in the Anglican Communion as well as my own particularity in racial and ethnic formations even as I seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether we are Anglican or Chinglican, free church or liturgical; it matters that we are at table. The Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac puts it best:
We are accused of being individualists even in spite of ourselves, by the logic of our faith, whereas in reality Catholicism is essentially social. It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery…For it is in this, it is in the intimate understanding of this mysterious Catholica, that is to be found, it seems to me, the fundamental explanation of the “social” repercussions of Christianity in the temporal order, as well as a preventive against a “social temptation” which could cause corruption in faith itself if it were to yield to it.
To be a Chinglican at table is to say that even though my starting point is as a Chinese North American Anglican Christian, I think of myself as at table–in fellowship and dialogue–with people who don’t come from where I come from. Some of these people might even be in the colonizer category. Yes, to call myself a Chinglican is an act of resistance. But it should also be an act of forgiveness. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf was particularly helpful as I wrestled with this:
From the perspective of contemporary Western sensibilities, these two things together–divine love and human repentance–addressed to the victims represent the most surprising, and as political statements, the most outrageous and (at the same time) most hopeful aspects of Jesus’ message.
That’s why you’ll find most, if not all, of my posts over at the communal blog, A Christian Thing. Sure, there’s lots of food for thought when you and I do theology out of our own backgrounds, which sometimes is just code word for baggage, especially if you become increasingly aware of the colonial processes that formed you. The thing is that that’s just not where Christianity ends up. Christians end up at table with Jesus Christ partaking of his body and blood with each other.
That’s where this Chinglican wants to end up, at least.
chinglicanattable 