Face, Authenticity, and a Global Gospel

Reflect on the Gospel’s journey from a “white gospel” to a global one from Steve Hong  

The following was shared at Portsmouth Square by Kingdom Rice volunteer Hubert Pun in my absence. This was part of “Love in Action” – a 4 mile survey of what it looks like to live out God’s peace in North Beach, Chinatown, the East Cut (Salesforce ‘hood) and among the adult entertainment epicenter of San Francisco.

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I’m Hubert Pun, filling in for Steve Hong, the one who was supposed to be speaking. He had to back out because of health issues in his family. From this square that we stand on, he and his non-profit Kingdom Rice has trained thousands of missionaries, seminarians, and church goers. This includes students from my former ministry in the Tenderloin, along with pastoral staff and leaders from New North church where I serve as an elder.

• Chinatown wants its visitor to focus on its face:
  • This face is expressed visually. If you’ve ever walked Chinatown’s main drag, Grant Ave, you’ll know this is the face of Chinatown. the one shown in countless movies, TV shows, postcards and social media. 
  • Chinatown’s architecture is a prominent feature of this visual face. The architectural flourishings are literally a facade. This architecture is not Chinese; neither is it American. 
  • It was fabricated in the minds of white architects, designed to cater to what white people thought Chinese buildings should look like. 
  • After the great earthquake and fire destroyed Chinatown in 1906, anti-Chinese sentiment was high. This white-influenced architecture, palletable to white people, was a plan concocted by a Chinese businessman (Look Tin Eli) to rebuild Chinatown right here. 
  • Some of Chinatown’s food is another feature of this face. For example, fortune cookies and chop suey represent food that’s not Asian, and not American either. But dishes like chop suey were created to satisfy white people.
  • More than Chinatown’s architecture and food, Chinatown’s people had to wear a fabricated face for their surnames.
    • Because of Chinese exclusion, quotas for Chinese immigration were not significantly lifted until 1965. Before then, most Chinese went by falsified paper names made possible by the great fire of 1906 that burned all City Hall citizenship records. 
  • Chinatown’s face is expressed in ways that hit all your senses, but also expressed by the falsified paper identities most every Chinese carried. Together, these aspects of Chiantown’s face kept Chinatown from being displaced for good; these faces spelled Chinatown’s survival.

• Behind this face is the real, authentic Chinatown:
  • That is, behind the pretty architectural flourishing envisioned by white architects are single-room occupancy rooms, 100 sq feet rooms without a toilet or sink. Hundreds of families live in these substandard conditions. 
  • Similarly beyond the food made for white people and tourists is the real cuisine. Those menus are the ones written in Chinese characters and posted on the walls of restaurants. You certainly won’t find chop suey nor egg foo young on those menus.
  • And behind the falsified paper names are people’s real surnames. For example, my wife Lana’s original family name was Huey, but the entire immediate family came over with the paper name of Wong. To outsiders, they were Wong, but in Chinatown, they were Hueys. 
  • My father and his older brother paid a few dollars in 1950 when he first arrived in this country to live in his family association building’s attic space.  These family associations populate the alleyways of Chinatown, tucked behind the face of Chinatown most typically see. 

• Now, how does this whole concept of face have to do with this very park (Portsmouth Square) we’re standing on and how does this relate to the Gospel?
  • Briefly, we have to take a historical survey of the land you stand on. 
  • In 1846 on this spot the American flag was first raised in San Francisco without any regard to the indigenous peoples, the Ohlone, the Ramaytush Ohlone, and the Yelamu. Why here? This was the first port of San Francisco. The waterline was just a block away on Montgomery Street, which is the name of the Captain who raised the flag. 
  • The dramatic announcement of gold discovery was made here on May 11, 1848, and this was a game-changer for Chinese who resided in the war-torn, poor Guangdong province of China. With the gold rush, thousands of Chinese came to seek better fortunes in San Francisco. (One of San Francisco’s nicknames was “Gold Mountain”.)
  • Essentially, this square marked the beginning of San Francisco. SF’s first City Hall was a block north of here, and the Hall of justice occupied where the Hilton stood before it was built in 1970.
  • Eventually the socially mobile could move up the hill away from this square, aided by the invention of the Cable Car which happened right there on Clay street (point southward). With  anti-Chinese sentiment growing, there was no opportunity to own land, nor have any other rights.  so by default, the Chinese were left in this area which eventually  turned into a ghetto. 
  • Crudely put, Chinatown is here because of explicit racism. Like other people of color, Chinese were seen as sub-human. 

• How does the Gospel tie into these Chinatown ideas of face, facade, and their real selves? This is a mixed bag.
  • On one hand, most every denomination wanted to plant a church here, so beginning in 1853, about 12 Christian churches were planted here, which is a disproportionate number of churches for this ‘hood. These churches represent the foundation stones of present generations of Chinese Christians
  • Yet, there’s a dark side to the planting of all these churches in Chinatown. They came on the heals of Manifest Destiny along with the colonization of China. In other words, part of the motivation to share the Gospel was to assimilate the Chinese to whiteness. In an age of Chinese exclusion, this was one way to make the Chinese more acceptable.
  • So just like Chinatown’s architecture and food that had to appeal to white people, the Gospel preached from the very square we stand on was a “white gospel”, one that was inherently individualistic and one that appealed to guilt.  
  • But the Gospel was never just about guilt. The cross of JEsus certainly brought righteousness to guilt, but also honor to shame, and power to fear, reversing all the ways the first sin separated Adam and Eve for God in Gen 3. 
  • The default Gospel, in its traditional crude form, guilt-trips individuals by focusing on what we’ve done wrong. Sharing this Gospel to Chinese inadvertently centers whiteness as a pathway to Jesus.
  • Rather, every ethnic group ought to be able to approach Jesus directly, without needing to go through another culture. This was always the Gospel that Jesus embodied. one that replaces our shame with honor, fear with power, and guilt with righteousness. The most accessible book on this subject is called the 3D Gospel. 
  • We want to leave about 3 minutes for questions. we won’t answer them now because we feel we want to maximize space for the most number of questions. (write down questions)