When I was about seven years old, I sat with my grandfather as he drank his daily mug of tea. He was a great storyteller, and from him, I learned the basic form of what I do in my career studying Chinese Americans today. He told me the tales of the Four Great Novels, especially the travels of the Monkey, Sun Wukong, and his sidekicks in Journey to the West, but also enough of The Three Kingdoms for me not to be an... Read more
I was about five years old when I learned the term sexual harassment. It thoroughly confused me, so much so that I was unable to figure out what having sex was until I was far too old to have any excuse. I first heard the term on television. There, news reporters were prattling on about these two words sexual harassment and what it meant for our culture, which probably was the first time I had ever heard that word too. I was not sure what that... Read more
At least for me, an easy misunderstanding of the literary theorist Michael Warner’s first book, The Letters of the Republic, to the field of study on public spheres might be in his reading of letters. When I first started reading the text, I thought that he meant the epistolary form of communication between persons, as a kind of public exchange between the politicians we now know as the bourgeois revolutionaries of the American War of Independence (or the ‘Founding Fathers,’ if... Read more
Yesterday I served my last Sunday as the unofficial cantor until December at our temple in Richmond. The school year at Northwestern University is finally starting, and I am back for a third year of teaching. It was a fitting conclusion here in Richmond, at least for now. The Eparchy of New Westminster is on the New Calendar, so we just finished the cycle of eight tones, on the postfeast of the Elevation of the Cross no less. Next week,... Read more
In this time of the postfeast of the Universal Exaltation of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross, I would like to reflect on the reception of a brother of mine in the Lord whom I shall call Paul-san into our Eastern Catholic Church, together with the baptism of his youngest son. Paul-san and his family are from Hokkaido Prefecture in Japan, and they came to our temple in the middle of August. Paul-san was already a Catholic in the Latin Church;... Read more
Sam Rocha gave me three years to narrate myself on this blog, and I made the mistake of taking him literally at first. It is now the opening of my third year in blogging on Patheos, and I think I have a better handle on what this task of narration is about. Over the past week, I have logged my recapitulation of all of what I understood myself to be doing on the blog. I thought that the genre was... Read more
This is the seventh and final post in a series reflecting on what I’ve been doing on the blog. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth are here. I said at the beginning of this series that I had stumbled upon what I was looking for on this blog and that I would eventually get to it after telling the story of how I got there. Sam Rocha wrote me mid-series to tell me that it was kind of... Read more
This is the sixth in a series reflecting on what I’ve been doing on the blog. The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth are here. Two things happened in May that brought me back to reviving the blog after I was stunned into silence by discovering I had been writing about public transference, the bad intellectual habit of seeing the world as a mirror for one’s problems, all along. The first was that I went to see the Chinese... Read more
This is the fifth in a series reflecting on what I’ve been doing on the blog. The first, second, third, and fourth are here. Properly speaking, I became interested in psychoanalysis because my research assistant is obsessed with it. I still remember him walking into my office after the third or fourth class session in Asian American history. He wanted to talk about Žižek; he had heard me mention him in class. I was curious about why an undergraduate freshman... Read more
This is the fourth in a series reflecting on what I’ve been doing on the blog. The first, second, and third are here. Shortly after I returned to start another academic year at Northwestern in the fall of 2017, I had a conversation with Sam Rocha that once again changed my life. Of course, if there is anything that my friendship with Sam has taught me, it is that he never really sets out to change anyone’s life. He is... Read more
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