To Be Seen and Valued: Reflections on AAPI Heritage Month
It has been over 40 years since President Jimmy Carter signed the first commemoration of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage month into existence, though many Americans have only recently become aware of it. This is not an indictment on my fellow Americans, but rather part of a pattern of erasure and silencing of AAPI folks that is deeply familiar to AAPI community members like me.
The last couple of years have been difficult, to put it lightly, for the AAPI community. #StopAAPIHate, a database for reporting attacks and threats against AAPI people, was created in 2020 when the rise in attacks on my community, elders and women in particular, skyrocketed. Since its inception, more than 11,000 reports have been submitted…and by a community that has a history of remaining silent about suffering. I cannot tell the fullness of what we’ve experienced as a community, or even what I personally have experienced since this rise in AAPI targeting. I have been followed in stores, as well as out to my car, and been harassed in ways that shook me for days. Ultimately I decided to avoid public places as much as I was able to for the last few years. My heart still starts to race when I enter a store and I plan the fastest way to get in and out with what I need.
As an AAPI Woman, Filipino American to be most specific, I feel like I live in a space between. I never quite fit. I was born in Chicago and have ancestors on my dad’s side from West Virginia who have been there since before the American Revolution. But I also cannot go past a month without being complimented on my English, or being asked some sort of question that shows the person speaking to me assumes I’m foreign. As often as it happens, it still jars me when it does. Though most are well-meaning, these moments tell me that people do not see me as belonging—I am “them,” or “other,” and cannot be seen as being part of “us.”
Over the last few years, as some of the hate crimes get air time and those in the AAPI community begin to speak up and speak out, more people have begun to pay attention to the lived experience of AAPI Folks. But it’s still a tension of in-between-ness every day as I hold both my Filipino culture and American life together. I know I’m not alone in feeling like I am straddling two cultures that can be so very different at times. The AAPI term is a massive and expansive umbrella that covers more than 50 ethnicities, but I have yet to meet an AAPI person that hasn’t had some form of this tension in their identity.
Within the church, that tension does not disappear—Sometimes it is made more stark. The ways in which many Western Evangelical churches worship is set to aesthetics and cultural preferences that are distinctly Western. Growing up half-Filipino and living in the Philippines as a child, I was used to an expressive and fully-embodied faith experience. Worship and community were fully engaged and intertwined.
I had my first major existential crisis at about 10 years old when we moved back to the US permanently. We began regularly attending a Western-style church service. It was cold, it was quiet. I was so scared we had somehow left God behind in the Philippines because I didn’t feel that same deep-rooted and joyful presence in church. We had been to the US before, and to church here, but I don’t think I paid attention to the way church was happening until the permanence of living here sank in.
I still deeply long for a community that worships without being very self-conscious and reserved. Don’t get me wrong, I love Summit, but I also clap on the 2’s and 4’s. I love people so enraptured with the Word and engaged with a teaching that “Amen” bursts from them uninhibited and unashamed.
Being AAPI can feel so strange in a predominantly white and Western-style church. Being socialized in America, I’ve learned to adapt to the Western defaults in most places I go. For example, eye contact in the West is a sign of confidence and seen as a positive thing. But in Filipino culture, eye contact is an intimate way of communicating, so prolonged eye contact is considered rude and invasive outside of family. With elders, we use a form of greeting called “Pagmamano,” where we grasp the hand of the elder, touch our foreheads to the top of their hand, and say, "Mano, po." This causes us to look down and away, which is a sign of deference and respect for the elder. I am still horribly uncomfortable with the amount of prolonged eye contact I have to navigate and return in order to be seen in a positive light in majority-culture spaces.
Most of the time, adaptability has offered me access and ease of movement in lots of places and within different groups, including the church. I have developed a careful consciousness about how to exist day-to-day so that I do not disrupt or distract. As an AAPI woman, being singled out for being different can feel horribly vulnerable and unsafe, as the last few years have highlighted for me and my AAPI sistren.
Yet, the very things that make us different—the countercultural community values of most Asian cultures—are a huge advantage when it comes to connecting with the gospel and the Hebrew Bible. There are tons of commentaries written by Western authors and thousands of sermon hours spent exegeting on the concept of an honor-shame culture to the more individualistic Western worldview. Many AAPI folks like me can simply look to our own family dynamics and resonate with the expectations, tensions, and communal bonds encapsulated in scripture. These values define and permeate our cultures.
This type of family and community structure comes with its difficulties, don't get me wrong. Imposter syndrome, living in the wake of the sacrifices of previous generations…one can struggle to find oneself beyond expectations. That said, I am especially grateful that AAPI and Asian cultures value shared responsibility for the wellbeing of one another. This allows for an understanding of not only corporate sin, but also of the necessity of genuine reconciliation and the value of lament. I don't know how I would have made it through these last few years as an AAPI woman without other AAPI women believers holding space for each other in our grief and our fear. We carry fear for our children, elders, sisters, and ourselves. We carry each other just as we carry in our flesh the legacy and power of generations of Asian women and communities that have endured the unimaginable for a chance at hope.
If I'm honest, I'm holding onto a tenuous hope that I am carving a path for future generations of AAPI women and folks to be seen and valued as more than tokens and afterthoughts. I'm praying that in my lifetime I'll be seen as a whole person made in the image of God who connects to our Creator in a way, with my community, that is valued as highly as the ways most familiar to the church around me.
Elizabeth Cronlund is the Community Development Manager for Summit Church. Born in Chicago, but raised in The Philippines, she sees the world through the lens of a multi-ethnic woman and third-culture-kid. She is a Certified Nonprofit Professional (CNP), has a background in Federal Disaster Management, as well as Asian American Leadership development. She currently attends Northern Seminary, pursuing a Master’s Degree in Christian Community Development. You can reach out to her here!