We Mend with Gold: An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American Christianity

In her penetrating debut, physician Lee uses the Japanese art of kintsugi, the practice of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer, to illustrate how she repaired a faith fractured by a childhood steeped in Western theology. Lee grew up in an immigrant church in Iowa that practiced Chinese customs but hewed to white, patriarchal religious tradition—she imagined Jesus as white well into adulthood—and remained captive to a “very rigid form of Christianity” until her faith began to break down in college. In 2015 she came across blog posts from Glennon Doyle, spurring a quest for a more “legitimate, authentic faith.” Seeking out the works of feminist and BIPOC theologians, she learned to dismantle the strictures of Western Christianity and bring her culturally specific experiences as a Chinese American to reading scripture and connecting with God. Lee draws out with particular care how she’s used challenging parts of the Asian American experience to deepen her faith, contending that marginality can foster a closeness to Jesus, allowing believers to uniquely empathize with other groups that American Christianity “has silenced and negated.” Combining vivid personal experience with broad-ranging theology, it’s a smart, searching look at the need for more inclusive forms of Christianity in the U.S. (Apr.)