Photo by Sharat Ganapati

By Sharon Lee Song

A few years ago, I was invited to participate in a reconciliation meeting because I am Korean American. Our church had been leading the congregation through a sermon series on reconciliation and had recently shown a video featuring some of the atrocities committed by the Japanese toward Koreans during World War II.  One of the men in our church is Japanese American and felt really convicted, along with a sense of shame about what the Japanese had done, and wanted to seek reconciliation by proxy.  My church values racial reconciliation highly, which is one of the reasons why I was drawn to this church community.  I decided to attend but I didn’t know what to expect.

Two other Korean Americans attended, as well as another woman who was Okinawan Hawaiian American.  Outsiders would look at this meeting, and see five Asian people gathered.  They might have even assumed that we were all from the same country, or that we were related.  What struck me was that within a group that shared the same ethnicity, we were all so very different just between the five of us.

One man was Korean American, and grew up in Washington state amongst a mostly White American community.  He came to Southern California for college, and for the first time was surrounded by a majority of Asian Americans.  One woman was Korean American and had grown up in Hawaii where the majority of the population is Asian American, and then came to college in Northern California where she was in the minority for the first time in her life.  The woman who was part Okinawan also grew up in Hawaii, and was part Hawaiian as well.  The man who initiated the reconciliation meeting who was Japanese American grew up in Southern California and was third generation Japanese American.

I was born in Southern California, but moved to the DC area when I was three years old.  Then my family moved overseas to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I grew up there for four years while attending an international school where I had friends from all over the world.  It was an amazing, formative time, and when I became a Christian I looked back and knew that God had shown me a piece of the Kingdom through that international community.  I grew up with people that were all from different countries, and were of different ethnicities.  It was a rich time, where I was hungry to learn more from all of these people, with questions about the languages they spoke, what their countries of origin were like, what they ate, and more.  After four years in Malaysia, learning in an international community, I came back to the States for high school.  I experienced reverse culture shock initially, and then what followed was some pretty significant ethnic identity confusion.  I am Korean American but having grown up overseas for part of my life, and then thrusted back into my home culture which was a mostly Jewish American community near Washington, D.C.  I found out soon after moving back to the States that there was a term for someone like me:  Third Culture Kid or TCK.  A Third Culture Kid is a person who grew up in a different culture than their original home culture in which these multiple cultures create a “third culture.”  I felt like I fit in nowhere and everywhere.

It was quite an ethnic identity struggle that lasted throughout my teenage and young adult years.  In college, I hoped that I would finally find a way to fit in with other Korean Americans but was sorely disappointed.  I attended Korean Student Association meetings only to find that I didn’t think or talk like these mostly Southern Californian Korean Americans.  In my ethnic identity exploration, I even decided to research and write my senior thesis on my journey:  Ethnic identity formation and the internationally mobile lifestyle for American ethnic minorities.  It was not until after college when I worked at a non-profit for the Koreatown community that I came to terms with my ethnic identity more significantly.  Surrounded by other Korean American coworkers, I realized that there wasn’t just one way of being Korean American, and there was so much diversity in the Korean American Diaspora.  Within an ethnic group, there are subcultures and even multiple cultures, and it took me a long time to recognize that there was strength and beauty in this.

The strength in being multicultural also became profoundly apparent as I studied more the theology of racial reconciliation when I was an intern with an urban missions organization called Servant Partners.  We received this table (below) that opened my eyes.  I never realized that all of these key people in Scripture were all of the same ethnic group; they were all Jewish yet they were bicultural or multicultural, and they were all called into leadership roles.  Jesus was an ethnic Jew, but grew up for part of his life in Egypt in order to escape King Herod wanting to kill the prophesied King of the Jews.

Old Testament

New Testament

How does God use being bicultural or multicultural to shape the life of a person?  I can say that even with the pain of feeling rejected by my own ethnic group at times, and feeling confused about what it means to be Korean American and a TCK, I see the strength that comes from having different life experiences and perspectives.  I realize that growing up among people from different countries actually drew me to diverse groups rather than a monocultural ethnic group, and therefore brought me into greater understanding of the Kingdom of God where every nation, tribe and tongue is meant to come together for eternity, the new heaven and the new earth.

The reconciliation meeting that we had was a powerful one, where we shared about our diverse backgrounds, spoke about different painful experiences that our families had gone through and how it connected to the war.  We each confessed and spoke intentional forgiveness over what happened between our people groups from the war.  The strength of our multicultural experiences within our ethnic group and how that contributed to the Kingdom of God was dynamic, and deepened our experience of the power of reconciliation.  Through this, we could see that reconciliation and unity were bolstered by this strength, and how true reconciliation is central to the power of the Gospel.

Sharon Lee Song lives and works in South Los Angeles with an urban ministry community.  Inspired by her own transformation through self-care and soul care, Sharon became a certified personal trainer, Holy Yoga instructor, and spiritual director.  She’s committed to using what she’s learned from her training to support others in living healthy, sustainable, urban spiritual lives.