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

"A smart, searching look at the need for more inclusive forms of Christianity in the U.S." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

A daughter of the Asian American church wrestles with faith, exile, and belonging.

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--such as liminality, displacement, and exile--that attend to the breaking and the mending, the wounding and the healing. How might marginality bring us closer to God and others? What do we lose when we "make it"? And when we expand our notion of who belongs to our family, what do we gain?

We can repair the seams between our cultural identities and our faith, Lee claims. By leaving room for mystery, we encounter God's love. We mend the fractures--between and within us--with gold.

Kristin T. Lee is a writer whose work has appeared in Christianity Today and Sojourners, and a primary care physician serving Boston's Chinatown community. She writes about faith, culture, books, and solidarity at The Embers and is a contributing columnist to The Covenant Companion. Her passion is highlighting literature written by Asian and BIPOC authors via book reviews and reading groups on Instagram. Lee's work is informed by her experiences as an adoptive mother, host to refugees, and friend to those affected by incarceration.