“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?”
In elementary school, I wished that I were alive during the civil rights movement. The country’s history of violence against black people made little sense to me. How could a whole nation be so terribly bigoted to people on the basis of their skin color? Maybe they had never personally met any black people. Maybe no one had ever taught them in school or at home that black people deserved the same access as whites to education, votes, and opportunities (little did I know about all the other stuff: food deserts, incarceration, the cycle of poverty, gerrymandering, racial profiling, etc.). Maybe what they needed was for someone who knew better to yell sense at them, and maybe they’d realize the error of their ways. I wanted to travel back a few decades to sit next to Rosa Parks, or to walk into school with Ruby Bridges and yell at the angry white parents, or to pull away the firemen blasting protestors with fire hoses in Birmingham Alabama. In my childish fantasy, once the perpetrators heard a defense against racism, an appeal to love one’s neighbor, coming from the mouth of a young girl, they would snap to their senses and feel a much-needed sense of shame and contrition.
In those righteously indignant daydreams, I was white.
I’m sometimes nostalgic for how naïve I used to be. The grim truth is that if I went back to the 1950’s, as a Chinese girl, I would be as foreign and other as the black people I tried to defend. I would be labeled as a communist at best, a circus sideshow and freak at worst in a country that grew up with yellow peril. The same people trying to defend white America from mixing with “coloreds” considered me a “naturally secretive and untrustworthy” (Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives) barbarian from the orient.
The other side of the coin was that I didn’t know how many more injustices are perpetrated today. In elementary school, the civil rights movement was a story with a happy ending. Everybody got what they wanted, and that’s why I could sit in my New York City public school singing kumba-ya and “This Land is Your Land” and go to ESL with kids every color of the rainbow. What I didn’t learn at the time was that Jim Crow was very much alive, very much well. That the Birmingham scene would be repeated at the Dakota Access Pipeline; Dreamer kids arrested by ICE just for existing in the wrong place; universities were simultaneously being decried for affirmative action policies and for being duped by the hyper-rich (and white) with nary a slap on the wrist. The story is by no means over. Despite what our paltry American history education may say, it may have barely even begun.
Cut scene to now. I’m a Chinese-American medical student in an American medical crisis originating in China. I’ve spent the last two decades growing up, an all-American girl, in a sleepy suburb of New York. As everyone’s lives flipped inside-out into a strange alternate quarantine reality, I felt like my own America was being flipped inside-out. It was one thing to read news articles about anti-asian hate crimes. It was an unpleasant lurch in the stomach to hear the president repeatedly call it the Chinese virus, watching racial scapegoating generate a new ugly hydra head as a political tool (though not new to the president’s campaign). But what hurt me the most, what made me cry into my N-95 in a quiet office behind the emergency department at 5 AM, was seeing social media comments by my very own neighbors, referring to Chinese people as savages and filthy, telling them to keep their bat fried rice to themselves. Some were comments on an article about China sending much-needed ventilators to New York City, saying they didn’t want help from a dirty people. Saying China could keep their disease-ridden ventilators.
These comments were on a local Facebook group meant for the school district I grew up in. The writers and likers and sharers were my neighbors, former classmates, former teachers, and local shop owners. Many of the denigrating comments were liked by the admin of the group himself. I had originally joined with the hope of seeing if there was anyone forming local support groups, perhaps to get groceries for the immunocompromised or provide services. Instead, I found the terrible footprints of a long-latent xenophobia that I had somehow failed to see, growing up in suburban upper-middle-class America.
The same village that raised me, that kept news clippings of my accomplishments, that taught me to sing “Proud to be an American” at my 6th grade moving-up ceremony, had decided that in light of recent events, my history of immigration, the great American tradition (immigrants, by the way, make up 25% of all doctors) somehow now made me less American, that my ethnicity would always speak louder than my nationality, and that accumulated history of interaction with Asian-American neighbors, coworkers, and friends could not supersede the ingrained cariacature of the Chinaman.
Those were my neighbors. Later that week while volunteering in the ED, some staff were outside my office eating food donated by local restaurants. One remarked, “We’ve gotten a lot of Italian food. And a little bit of Indian earlier this week. Where’s like, the Chinese food?” Another quipped, chuckling at his own wit, “I don’t think anyone wants to see Chinese right now.” That was in my hospital.
One day, in the middle of lunch at home, my dad said out of nowhere, “Maybe I should buy a gun.”
“Dad, that’s ridiculous. I’m pretty sure that’s the least essential thing you could get right now.”
“But if wài gúo rén (foreigners) attack us, who will defend us? How can we be safe?”
I insisted there must be a better way. “What if we just helped out in the neighborhood?” I had drafted up a flyer to put in the mailboxes on my street offering grocery delivery to the elderly. If our neighbors knew we were helpful, if they knew we were not a threat, maybe they’d come to our defense.
My dad was skeptical. “It’s not a good idea. Just lay low. Don’t draw attention.”
I was stuck. I bounced back and forth between two warring inward identities: a ravening social justice Valkyrie and a wistful, prayerful watcher. Part of me wanted to rip the sky apart and rain blood and fire on the secret roots of xenophobia. Part of me wanted to give more, to donate more, to volunteer more, to help my neighbors, to prove somehow to my fellow Americans that I was somehow worthy of being called by the same name.
Part of me wanted to turn to Jesus, to be washed of all my anger and frustration. Another, stronger part, wanted to hide from Him, lest He take my anger away. I needed that anger. Asian Americans need that anger. Xenophobia doesn’t deserve forgiveness. One night after reading a particularly terrible string of social media posts, I dialed R’s number with shaking hands and said, “I’m so angry. I want to write. I want to defend my people.” He didn’t discourage me, but we stayed there on the phone, silent, as I sobbed. “I need to spend time with the Lord.” I hung up. My shift at the office lasted for another two hours. I sat there as the sun rose, opening my bruised, wrung-out heart. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” The words of Dr. King pulsed in my head for the next three weeks, as my feelings percolated.
It is a privilege, an Asian-American privilege, a model minority privilege, to have gone this long in America without seeing it systematically target my race. My countrymen who are native American, who are Hispanic, who are black, who are middle eastern and middle eastern-appearing, who are Jewish, have experienced far, far more than any of the bruises my people have sustained so far. And it doesn’t make my experience any better; there is no comparison between ugly things. I could only repent when the light came to me: if your heart were really for all people, why didn’t it hurt quite as much reading about these things happening to other people? Or do you, too, only care about people who look like you?
Jesus’ heart was not like that. He was born into a world where people of different races couldn’t even eat at the same table (Gal 2:12). Foreigners were surprised when Jesus specifically came near to talk to them (John 4:9). Lepers couldn’t be touched, couldn’t even live within the city (Num 5:1–4), yet Jesus touched them (Lev 13, 14; Mark 1:41). He had a heart for the proud and self-righteous right along with the adulterers (Luke 7:36–50). He did what I so viscerally couldn’t: He loved those who hated Him (Matt 5:38–48).
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’
But I tell you not to resist him who is evil; rather whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And to him who wishes to sue you and take your tunic, yield to him your cloak also;
And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.
To him who asks of you, give; and from him who wants to borrow from you, do not turn away.
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
But I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,
So that you may become sons of your Father who is in the heavens, because He causes His sun to rise on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers, what better thing are you doing? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
You therefore shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I must have read this passage scores of times. But I never realized just how impossible it was to execute. For the first time, I, in all my shelter and privilege, am part of a persecuted group. Without doing anything but existing, I have enemies. It’s finally time to put all my Christian morality to work, right?
No. In the moment of truth, I find myself more like the young man in Mark 10, who could not fulfill the one command Jesus had given him, to sell all his possessions. It is not in my heart to turn the other cheek. It is not in my boiling blood. I cannot even ignore my enemies — how can I bare my other cheek?
The more I looked deeply inward, the more I saw how impossible it was for me to keep the new commandment of the Bible. It took me a long time to realize the solution wasn’t in me at all. The young man failed because he trusted in riches (Mark 10:23–24). Jesus was instead calling the young man to trust in Him (Mark 10:27).
Of course I can’t love my enemy. But Jesus died for them (Rom 5:7–8). I couldn’t turn the other cheek, but Jesus healed the ear of one of the people coming to arrest Him (Luke 22:51). Every fiber of my being screams against slander, but He stood silent in the face of curses, lies, insults, and humiliations. With me, this is impossible. But all things are possible with God. And if He lives in me (2 Cor 13:5; Col 1:27; 2 Tim 4:22; Rom 8:10), then what need have I to carry out the commandments all by myself (Rom 8:2–4)?
In the light of His love, my feeble simulacrum of neighborly love shines hollow — my good deeds were in part still trying to protect myself and my family. But His love has left no room for self-service. The more I see my impossibility, the more I see His possibility.
I thought America needed more voices of protest — and it does, and it has them, and is getting more. But what America really needs now is more light to drive out the darkness, more love to drive out the hate. More Jesus. Less me.
