Photo by
Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天

By Sarah D. Park

On an unconscious level, I think that I’ve made it a personal challenge to never be described as friendly. The sound of the word bothers me. The connotation of the word bothers me. “Friendly” is the word I use to describe someone when I don’t have anything better to say. A generic pass that someone is easy to talk to, accessible, deferential.

I know what conclusions people come to when they see me walk down the street. The mechanisms of the model minority myth are ubiquitous and consistent: non-threatening, educated, and a good person to ask to take your group photo. Friendly.

But I think my life is a better service to God’s work by not being friendly. My hope is that this might be true for my Asian American people as well.

What if instead, when I walk into a room, people don’t know what to expect? My body would be a source of tension, because my experiences complicate the conversation in ways that need to be addressed in order for us to move forward? What if our unnoticeable bodies — in contrast with our character, our voices, our convictions, our expressions — created such cognitive dissonance that we cannot help but be seen?

The narrative of the model minority myth is such an effective invisibility cloak that the access I have to different spaces sometimes astounds me. I’ve trespassed into staff only sectors of hotels in search of a rooftop, walked into restaurants like I owned the place so I could use the bathroom, and went up to police officers to ask a question during a protest. I seem absolutely non-threatening, and I live toward challenging that perception. To become threatening. To become a threat.

As Asian Americans, we do not have privilege, but permission in our society to thrive, so long as it is convenient and beneficial to those in power. Being friendly places agency in the eye of the beholder, for they believe they have access to you. And this is another yielding of power that I refuse to accept. So while we have permission, let’s do some damage. Let’s disrupt the existing narrative rather than become threatening for its own sake, and in doing so, declaw a tool that erases and invalidates people.

What does it look like for Asian American Christians to be a threat? A threat to theologies that bind women? A threat to white supremacy that relies on our silence? A threat to those who cage our children at the border? It won’t look like how Black people do it. And it won’t look like how Brown people do it. This is our work to imagine, experiment with, and press into.

Jesus was not friendly. (Being a friend is different.) I am comforted by the one who overturned tables in the marketplace, who called out the Pharisees on their hypocrisy, who became such a threat to empire and his own colluding people so as to be executed on a cross. And the best part is, he did not look the part.

Sarah D. Park is a freelance writer whose work focuses on the cultivation of cross-racial dialogue with a Christian faith orientation. She is also a story producer for Inheritance Magazine and manages communications for several organizations. She currently calls the Bay Area her home but is an Angeleno through and through.