Make Yourself Useful

Some fragmented thoughts on the stories of those who died in the Atlanta killings, human flourishing, fading birdsong, and songs of solace

Lent IV + V
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Greetings, dear reader.

My feelings are still pretty raw. So I beg your grace for my imperfect words, my malformed thoughts, as I reflect this morning on the lives of six women whose stories I know nothing about. 

On Tuesday, eight people were murdered, six of them women of Chinese and Korean heritage, by a lone gunman. In the time since the killings, we’ve heard about Delaina Yaun, a former Waffle House server who was at Young’s Asian Massage for a date night with her husband and left behind a 13-year-old son and an infant daughter, and Paul Michels, a husband, U.S. Army veteran, and local business owner who was investigating the possibility of opening a spa himself.

Little has been reported yet about the other six people killed, all of whom were of Chinese or Korean heritage. The authorities have released only four of their names so far: Xiaojie Tan, a licensed massage therapist who owned Young’s; Daoyou Feng; Julie Park; and Hyun Jung Park. Against the backdrop of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence we’ve seen in the U.S. in the past year, it’s telling that these women’s stories are the ones that have gone untold. 

My mind wants to fill in the blanks. So I keep thinking about the six chairs at family dinners that now sit empty. Six pairs of chopsticks, unused. Six pairs of slippers, never to shuffle through the hallways again. Six cellphones permanently silenced. Six sets of dreams extinguished. Six hearts stopped.

I’d like to know who these women were—how they lived, not just how they died. What were they like as children? What were their favorite subjects in school? What brought them or their ancestors to this side of the ocean? How did they choose Georgia? What foods fed their sense of home? What made them laugh? Whom did they love—and who loved them?

Make yourself useful.

I suppose it’s normal in moments of such tragedy to look for resonance with one’s own story, for points of commonality and shared humanity, and I wonder if any of the women were taught that when they were growing up. This was the message with which I and so many other Asians were reared: Work hard, keep your head down, never cause trouble, and make yourself useful. 

Did any of the women have spouses or kids? My parents taught my sister and me by example. When they arrived in the U.S., my father delivered pizzas and drove a taxicab, while my mother worked as a hotel maid and a casino money changer. At times, I’ve wondered how my mom reconciled the casino work with her fervent faith, but I’ve never asked, because you do what you have to do. She and my dad paid their way through college and slowly built a life, hoping for better for my sister and me.

Make yourself useful.

How did Xiaojie Tan or any of these women end up in the spa business? Was it a pragmatic decision, compelled by their understanding of the market, or was it a passion project? Was it something they could do even with limited social capital? Was it a means to a practical end—a way to pay for a child’s education or to save for a better life? 

When I was a teenager, my school held an annual fair that doubled as a fundraiser. Every year, my mom was asked to set up a Chinese-food booth. The night before, we’d help her wrap hundreds of egg rolls and diced pound after pound of canned ham for the fried rice. The fried rice wasn’t the kind we cooked for ourselves—the kind I’ve shared with you before. Instead, it was meant to be familiar to the American palate. This was the only time of year we’d ever buy those frozen bags of peas and carrots, ingredients which we never used in our own fried rice.

Make yourself useful. 

So many Asians in America have ended up in service industries and in helping professions—nurses, motel operators, postal workers, manicurists, massage therapists, restaurant laborers, dry cleaners, bodega and gas-station owners and clerks. We’ve made ourselves useful. And then what?

After spending many hours thinking about my complicated mix of emotions, I landed on this: I feel as if I’ve let my elders down. Tan, Feng, and the two ajumeoni Park were all older than I am, and for some inexplicable reason, I want to bow before them in apology for not doing more to make this society a place of welcome and safety for them. I want to say sorry, because this isn’t the way we should have learned their names. I want to ask their forgiveness, promising them that I will be more useful and work harder, so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.

Yet I know that we’ll never be useful enough to earn equality. We’ll never work hard enough to belong. 

The outpouring of grief I’ve seen from my Asian and Asian American siblings over the past couple of days has so much to do with feeling unseen and unheard. There’s a sense that, as the Kentucky restaurateur Dan Wu wrote in the Lexington Herald-Journal, “you love us for our food, our movies, our martial arts, our anime, our labor, and all the scientific, literary, artistic, and cultural contributions Asian Americans have made to this country. But you do not value our lives.”

As I turned the mantra over in my head, trying to reshape something that, for better or worse, has implanted itself in my heart, it occurred to me that perhaps there’s another way to be useful. 

As Sarah Bessey and I have said so often, it’s vital that we’re for something, not just against. I want to be for human flourishing. There’s only one way toward that, and it’s a path paved with solidarity and marked out by love. It isn’t the work of any one person or even of any one community. It asks each of us, all of us, to show up in our own ways and with our particular bodies and with our own gifts, telling our stories with boldness and grace and listening to others’ with patience and curiosity. It compels each of us, all of us, to stand against hatred and for goodness in all its forms, recognizing that flourishing is incomplete unless it’s mutual.

In that spirit, perhaps being useful can mean loving ourselves well so that we can love others well too. 

Perhaps being useful can mean honoring those who have come before so that those who follow after us will have things just a little bit easier.

Perhaps being useful can mean telling our stories of beauty and resilience—through our traditions and our holidays, through our ancient legends and our ways of healing, through our curries and our stews and our noodles and our dumplings—and weaving them into the narrative of this society. 

Perhaps being useful can mean refusing to shame, even when we have been shamed. 

Perhaps being useful can mean finding collective courage and shared strength to challenge prejudices that have divided and diminished us for too long as well as to point one another toward wholeness and healing. 

Perhaps being useful can mean standing in solidarity alongside others who suffer, letting them know they aren’t alone, and reminding them—and ourselves—of our belovedness. 

Only then, I think, will we flourish.

What I’m Growing: The first seeds have gone into the trays: stock and yarrow. This year, I want to invest in beauty. Iron-cherry stock in bloom looks to me like a gathering of ladies in frilly, pale-pink dresses, while yarrow blossoms are miniature parasols unfurled. Yarrow, which is native to Michigan, makes bees and butterflies happy. Used by some Native American tribes as an analgesic, it can be used to make herbal tea that’s considered an aid to brainpower in traditional Chinese medicine. Given my current state of Coronatide brain, I figure it can’t hurt to give it a try.

What I’m Reading: A fascinating, sad study out of Australia, pointing to the fragility of diversity: Scientists there have found that a rare species of bird, the regent honeyeater, is losing its culture of song. The black-and-yellow songbird lives in the fragile woodlands that have been devastated by bushfires in recent years, drinking eucalyptus and mistletoe nectar. Its songs are passed down from generation to generation. “We believe regent honeyeaters are now so rare in the landscape, some young males are unable to locate adult males from which to learn their song,” the researchers, from the Australian National University in Canberra, write. “Instead the young males mistakenly learn the songs of different bird species they’ve associated with when developing their repertoires.” (You can read more and also listen to samples of the birdsong here.)

What I’m Listening to: There are all kinds of ways that friends can come alongside one another, and my friend Neichelle Guidry, who is a brilliant preacher and a beautiful pastor in multiple media, did so yesterday by sending me some songs. Two that were new to me touched me in particular. 

The first was “Dreamland,” by the British composer/pianist Alexis Ffrench. Have you ever been hugged a keyboard? I have now. “The idea was to transport people to a sort of resting place. A place where they can be at one with their thoughts and feel that whatever troubles they might have... they can just have a brief moment of respite,” he said in The Big Issue last year. ”An opportunity to rebalance and renew.”

The second: “Take Me to the Alley,” by the jazz singer Gregory Porter. “They will be surprised/ When they hear him say/ Take me to the alley/ Take me to the afflicted ones/ Take me to the lonely ones that somehow/ Lost their way,” he sings. “Let them hear me say/ I am your friend/ Come to my table/ Rest here in my garden.” Porter, who is from Bakersfield, California, is the son of a preacher woman who left an indelible mark on him. “I find that the closer I get to her energy, the truer I am to myself,” he told the New York Times in 2016. As I leaned into Porter’s sung solace, I couldn’t help but think of Jesus.

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One final thought: As I reflected last night on Porter’s song, an uncomfortable yearning rose in my heart. I hope those who were killed in Atlanta are resting in God’s peace, perhaps at that holy table or in that garden of which Porter sings. And also: I hope that Robert Aaron Long, who has confessed to the killings and who was reared in the same denomination I was, will find his way back to the God in whose name he was baptized, the God who embodied boundless love, the God who offers ridiculous grace. If I believe in that grace, which I say I do, I have to pray for him and his healing too. I have to see him as a beloved child of God too. As a man said to Jesus in Mark 9:24: “I believe; Lord, help my unbelief!”

If you have any thoughts that you’d like to share, I’d welcome the conversation.

As ever, I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together. I’ll try to write again soon.

Much love,
Jeff