A Church Like Water: An Oceanic Turn in Asian American Theology
Part One
Luna Kim Yeh, Public Scholarship Editor and Program Manager at the Center for Asian American Christianity.
The power to know and the disciplining of space/time are imperial projects insofar as they claim the mastery of self over others and of humans over their environment.
-Gary Okihiro
I have a recurring dream of breathing underwater. In the moment, if there be such a place, this is not a beleagured scenario. It is simply the uncanny ability to make a home within an ecology of possibilities. There is an oceanic state out beyond the dream and the wake. When the tide turns, and retreats back into the sea, we learn to discern the debris, the desires, and the designs of a social imaginary. Call it the coastline of a public consciousness. As waves break and give shape to shores over space and time, a literal writing of the earth, it begs a question worth framing geographically: How might we map our social formation?
The late historian Gary Okihiro defines social formation as a “theory [that] purports to explain the structures of society in their totality and their changes over space/time (…Space/time because they are intersecting, relational constructs)”.1 In this way, a shoreline can represent a littoral zone of social forms washed upon the beach: the gendered, racialized, capitalized conquest of continental landmass over and against the wide open, fluid, destabilized darkness of an oceanic imaginary. Political histories might imagine the irresistible force of ocean meeting the immovable object of land. Land being a concrete occasion of bordered stalemate and tensioned stability. Yet they do not account for the indiscernible way a shoreline is shaped over time–that is, the ruthless and relentless ways of water to penetrate and subdue rock.
Bruce Lee once shared the origins of his iconic delivery, “Be water, my friend.” It was his very attachment to mastering the art of detachment that propelled him out on the open waters by boat, and in a moment of weakness, he punched the South China Sea. Then and there, the water responded by not responding, becoming itself the wisdom of detachment. He divined, “This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.”2
Elsewhere in time, Gary Okihiro has taught how imperial and colonial desires of propertized, boundaried, and containered world-systems can become internalized in a social formation of theological desire and practice. His work reminds us “that space and time are human creations and experiences and as such are subject to contestations and reconstructions, movements and changes, varieties and standpoints,” suggesting that our own history of Western formation can be built upon “glib assumptions of solid space and inexorable time”. 3Okihiro opens up his landmark, or perhaps we should say seaworthy, trilogy on the fluidity of space and time with a story:
Mau Piailug, a master navigator, referenced a star compass in his head. With Polaris pointing north and the Southern Cross south, selected stars rising indicated east, and others, setting, showed west. Locating the canoe’s position on the open ocean depends upon estimates of speed and direction. Piailug plotted his progress in relation to a “reference island,” which sat well out of sight over the horizon, and familiar stars whose rising and setting indicated directions. His objective was to keep his canoe stationary as the imaginary reference island moved from the bearing of one horizon star to another until the island had moved past all the horizon stars, marking the completion of the voyage. Piailug’s mental plotting system allowed him to break the voyage into manageable segments marked by the movement of the island from one horizon star to the next and enabled him to calculate his position. In his world, thus, islands move and canoes reach their destination by holding steady.4
This account of cosmological perspective and navigational ingenuity is a source of wisdom for the Asian church, both American and global, today. Indeed we hope to see how the very boundaried and propertized diagnostic methodologies we employ to characterize such geographical distinctions are problematic frames of today’s secularized worldmaking. In an age where Asian presence across the earth is narrated as migratory, transnational, and destabilized, might we do well to flip this script and say that the propertized concept of “land holdings” is actually grounded in a penetrative, extractive, and rapacious desire to consume and exhaust. Consequently, is it safe to claim its contrast to the “movement of the Spirit” which embodies the discipline of staying the course in turbulent waters? As such, Gary Okihiro is infamous for his Asian American counter-narrative:
Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to take the wealth of America; Americans went to take the wealth of Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to conquer and colonize Asia.5
With Okihiro, we can move from a temperate zone, seemingly fit for societal life as we know it, towards what could be called a church of the tropics. “Tropicality thus takes its place alongside such other geographical imaginaries as ‘darkest Africa,’ the ‘Orient,’ and the ‘Pacific world’--constructions which … were mobilized not only to vilify the foreign, but also to demonize domestic undesirables in Europe’s inner radius.”6 So before we exoticize the tropics in our minds, with our landmarked, fetishized tourisms, let us not forget how the “tropical” wor(l)d shares an etymology with “trope,” meaning a “turn,” signaling the learned navigability of our lived, written, experiences on the earth. Indeed, it is to such a theological, and now with Okihiro, a geographical metanoia that we now turn.
This is a turn to the ocean. Or better, to again avoid our commodified fantasies of resort communities and beach privatization, an oceanic turn. Asian American anarchist, poet, and scholar Jackie Wang has been doing us all the immense favor of recovering the Freudian notion of “oceanic feeling” for our contemporary hyper-politicized moment.7 This is the phenomenology of cosmic oneness that Freud himself did not deny might exist, but confessed to have never experienced himself. Wang wades into these waters in order to mar our attachments to neoliberal imaginaries, opening us up towards new, affective waves of community.
Is this merely a spiritualist framework that we can conveniently strap on like a life vest to avoid drowning? By no means. Gary Okihiro’s work reveals to us our cosmological and political groundings and investments in the static grounds of boundaried, propertized, buffered, containered, continental landmass.
Such cartographies are inscribed and memorialized, not only on our world maps, but also seared into our psyches as the given grounds for what it means to walk, or worse, upon the earth.
The economic and political desire of colonial imperialism has given shape to the very grounds of our Christianized Western civilization. By fetishizing and exoticizing a commodified Asia in the meantime, we would do well to imagine the church in a different form, inhabiting a different space, navigating a different temporal wavelength. Here we might find a direct correlation between the imagined hermeneutics of orientalism or the fantasies of island worlds and the fluid movement of Christ’s body, pierced and politicized by the conquests of secular, gendered, racialized capitalism. What Gary Okihiro, Bruce Lee, and Jackie Wang reveal are the tactics of a fugitive communion eluding the social formation of a temperate society; a church like water, a tropical band of believers baptized into an oceanic imaginary.
Luna Kim Yeh is a Public Scholarship Editor and Program Manager at Princeton Theological Seminary's Center for Asian American Christianity. He is a member of Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis, IN and serves as the Director of Congregational Engagement at Englewood Community Development Corporation.
Okihiro, G. Y. (2016). Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. Duke University Press, p. 12, 179.
Lee, B. (2001). Bruce Lee: Artist of Life. J. Little, ed. Tuttle Publishing, p. 35.
Okihiro, G. Y. (2010). Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones. University of California Press, p. 1.
Okihiro, G. Y. (2008). Island World: A History of Hawai'i and the United States. University of California Press, p. 1.
Okihiro, G. Y. (2014). Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. University of Washington Press, pp. 28-29.
Livingstone, D. N. (2002). Science, Space, and Hermeneutics. Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, pp. 46-47.
Wang, J. (2020). Oceanic Feeling & Communist Affect (zine). Friendship as a Form of Life.