Camy has graciously joined me today to tell you what it’s like to be a Christian in the Asian culture. To celebrate the release of her second Sushi series book I’m giving away two copies of her book Only Uni. You know the drill, leave a comment telling me you want entered and an e-mail address or blog address to contact you if you win the draw. I’ll pick the winners a week from today, March 28th.

Here’s Camy:

Being Christian In the Asian American Culture

I became a Christian in college, and that’s where I found out about the Asian American Christian subculture.

I had gone to a church in Hawaii, but the majority of people in Hawaii are Asian, so the fact the entire church was Asian wasn’t unusual.

However, in college, I attended churches with mixes of ethnicities, and I also discovered the Asian American Christian Fellowship group. Many of them went to all-Asian churches.

The concept of an all-Asian church wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but in the midst of the mostly-Caucasian churches I’d attended in my college years, it stood out. I also discovered that there’s a certain focus the pastors have in an all-Asian church, in which they tie in their faith with the demands of the Asian American culture.

For example, many Japanese Americans are Buddhist, and they are supposed to honor their ancestors by ancestor worship. To only worship one God is like asking them to dishonor their ancestors.

When the Japanese American pastor at my church talks about evangelism to family members, he will often start off from this premise of Buddhist family members and honoring ancestors. I never hear anything like this at the mostly-Caucasian churches I’ve attended.

Our pastor will also address other typical Asian American issues like the expectation of taking care of your elderly parents even if they require 24-hour medical care, or the stereotypical Asian parent expectation of nothing less than straight-As. This kind of teaching, relating my faith to my culture, has helped me to be both solid in my beliefs and also honor my non-believing family members.

There are also Asian churches dedicated to a certain ethnicity—like Chinese churches, Japanese churches, Malaysian churches, Singapore churches, Taiwanese churches. It’s the same sort of thing where the pastor relates our faith to the specifics of each ethnic culture.

Some people say I should go to a more multi-cultural church rather than “segregating” myself in an Asian church. However, in praying about it, I felt called to an Asian church—maybe for my work with the youth group, or maybe for my leadership of one of the worship teams. I also enjoy the fellowship of other Asian American Christians who truly understand my non-Christian parents and grandparents and friends, and the mentality of the Asian American or Buddhist culture.

I also hope that my novels give readers insight into the Asian American Christian subculture. I know that a lot of things I go through are actually similar to other people’s experiences, even though they’re not Asian. I think that we all have similar struggles with different aspects of our faith, and it’s refreshing to see our struggles in someone else’s life, in someone else’s ethnic culture.

Camy Tang is the loud Asian chick who writes loud Asian chick lit. She used to be a biologist, but now she is a staff worker for her church youth group and leads a worship team for Sunday service. She also runs the Story Sensei fiction critique service. On her blog, she gives away Christian novels every Monday and Thursday, and she ponders frivolous things like dumb dogs (namely, hers), coffee-geek husbands (no resemblance to her own…), the writing journey, Asiana, and anything else that comes to mind. Visit her website at http://www.camytang.com/ for a huge website contest going on right now, giving away five boxes of books and 25 copies of her latest release, ONLY UNI.