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

Summary

Being a Christian has nothing to do with being Chinese American—that's what Kristin T. Lee learned as a child. A fissure between her identity and what she was told to believe opened wide. In We Mend with Gold, she asks: What if we can bridge the divide?

Lee describes both the breaking of her young faith and the sacred art of repair. She examines how immigrant churches often assimilate to Western theology, even as they offer crucial spaces of belonging. Through lyrical storytelling about her upbringing in Asian immigrant churches as well as in white evangelicalism, Lee wrestles with history, ancestral stories, and what it means to follow Jesus. What might it look like to expand beyond the scripts we've been given and bring our questions to God—as well as building solidarity with the marginalized?

Drawing on Black, Asian, and other minoritized theologians, Lee separates the theology of empire from what Jesus preached and lived. Writing of the fractures in our families, churches, and the world, Lee relies on the Japanese art of kintsugi to describe the resplendence of a faith that repairs but doesn't paper over. And she offers pieces of the Asian American experience that attend to the breaking and the mending, the wounding and the healing. How might marginality bring us closer to God and others?