Canter Bridge

James Chien Zo digs below the surface of intercultural contact in a fascinating contribution to Missiology: An International Review that draws from his own Asian-American immigrant experience (XXXII/1, 2004). In fact, he hints at his agonies by way of the ‘r’ word:

The most unequally treated people in America are not any one particular ethnic or gender group, but the immigrants. Because of their inability to survive in the mainstream, the Chinese immigrants are often labeled as racists by the equality activists, and most painfully, also by their own children.

I met Zo in Pasadena last week at a conference that brought together mainland Chinese, Anglo-Saxon Americans, Asian-Americans, and a smattering of other ethnicities. It was in fact a test tube for the kinds of damaging interaction and/or productive exchange that he explores in his brief article.

Assigning relative weights to different factors that prominently include the often undiscerned power that individuals bring to cross-cultural contacts, Zo illuminates the damaging potentialities of good intentions. It is one thing for his Chinese-speaking Taiwanese-born grandmother in Los Angeles to fraternize only with people who share her language and culture. It is quite another for a person closer to the center to make similar choices.

Zo is withering with regards to the claims made by religious missionaries—especially those engaged in ‘short term’ work—as a result of their forays into the lives of communities less endowed with power than they.

Yet his purpose in making these observations is anything but cynical. He glimpses a way towards authentic community across boundaries in the imitation of Jesus. Those interested in participating in the kind of community that is the desideratum of Mr. Zo – whether by means of the imitatio Ieso or not – will benefit from getting out the archives of Missiology: An International Review.