Brad interviews writer Scott Okamoto, author of Asian American Apostate, his wry and ironic story of leaving religion while teaching at an evangelical university. Okamoto’s often-chilling accounts reveal that such schools, where prayer and trite theological debate erupt in any lecture, demonstrate anything but higher education. Stories range from a classroom declaration against interracial marriage because it causes painful pregnancies, to grading a paper entitled, “Why Obama Is a Nazi,” and to the times Okamoto, a popular teacher, was disciplined by school officials for keeping standards for writing. Okamoto’s personal reporting gives you the inside story of how America’s evangelical schools encourage not a life of the mind but White cultural power. More than that, you’ll see how Okamoto found clarity about who he was not, and who he was coming to be.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I have today someone who I'm so excited to get to talk to, someone who I actually kind of talk to all the time, but I get to talk to on the mic at this point, and that is Scott Okamoto.
So Scott, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
I will try to behave.
You say that every time I see you.
You just launched your book, which is out with Lake Drive Books and our friend David Morris.
And the book is called Asian American Apostate, Losing Religion and Finding Myself at an Evangelical University.
And I want to just stop and say, you know, these interviews that I do are usually pretty focused.
You know, I want to keep these interviews ones where people They hit play, and they're listening to a journalist, scholar, writer like you talking, and there's not a lot of filler in there and stuff.
But I'm going to just stop here and say, I get to interview a lot of people, and I'm really blessed that way.
Jeff Charlotte was on, and Catherine Stewart, and Andrew Seidel, and all these folks that I just think are amazing, and Chrissy Stroop, and all the folks that we admire.
And there's me.
And what I want to tell you to start, Scott, is that you're my friend, and But you're, you're an Asian American writer.
It's, it's AAPI month.
And it just means a lot to me that you wrote this book and that I got to read it and that it exists.
So thank you.
Thank you for doing that.
I'm going to come back to that at the end, but this, this means a lot to a lot of people and I hope you, I hope you understand that.
So.
Thanks.
Let's talk about you.
You, how did you get to be an Asian American apostate?
Well, you had to be a non-apostate to start.
So, uh, what kind of church did you grow up in?
Uh, where do your parents come from?
Where do you come from?
Where do you grow up?
How do you get to what you call evangelical university in your book, which we'll talk about in a sec.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, I started out as just an Asian American.
You can go over the 23andMe issues of how that happens.
Um, the apostate thing came later.
So before you, before you were an apostate, you were an Asian American something.
You weren't an apostate.
You were an Asian American.
Evangelical.
Christian, evangelical, church kid.
Middle-class, uh, boring nerd, uh, band geek, all these things.
So yeah, I grew up at a, a proto mega church.
I think it's a mega church.
I don't know what the cutoff is, but it was, it was a large church in, in Pasadena, uh, predominantly white.
And was all in because when you start when you're a kid, so I know your story, you converted later in life and went all in.
They got me early, you know, the graham crackers and apple juice had me and songs, you know, Jesus Loves Me.
When you just, when you just said graham crackers, I thought I was going to have to edit out something.
I thought you were making a, nevermind.
Go ahead.
You were talking about food.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I don't have to edit it out.
Sorry.
I don't even want to know.
Okay.
Yeah.
Graham crackers got me.
And so year by year I get older and I'm now, you know, middle school, high school, and you know, it's getting intense.
You gotta, gotta be Christian.
You gotta evangelize.
You gotta spread the word.
You gotta be fully committed to God, the Bible, teaching.
And I was.
I was that kid in high school that would argue with my teachers about faith issues.
Usually they had no idea what I was talking about.
But I was doing it.
Started to deconstruct a little in college.
I did intervarsity.
And so, you know, you start asking questions.
You learn that there really aren't answers to a lot of these questions.
And I met people who I was taught were supposedly depraved and evil.
You know, who were gay or non-binary and found them to just be normal human beings like anyone else.
And, uh, you start pulling out these threads of your faith and it starts to fall apart.
And so by the time I get to APU teaching English, I had a foot out the door, but I was really trying to hold on.
And I thought being at this supposedly flagship evangelical university would I don't know, help, help me regain my footing in Christianity that I felt was sliding away.
And really it just, just booted me completely off.
Well, let's, let's talk about you and your family at church.
You have two, you know, you have two Japanese American parents and they're both born in camp, what we call in Japanese American community camp, which means the incarceration camps that Japanese and Japanese Americans were put in during World War II.
So both your parents are born there and yet somehow find themselves In a church in Pasadena, it's actually quite a famous church.
It's called Lake Avenue Church.
And if you're a nerd like me who is into 20th century evangelical theology and history, it's quite famous, close to Fuller Seminary anyway.
But it's the kind of place, Scott, where 80, 90% of the people are white.
So how is it for you and your parents even to exist in that space as a family unit?
Yeah, especially back then.
This is, we're talking about the 70s, late 70s, early 80s.
It was probably 80 or 90% white.
I think it's, it's a lot less so now, but yeah.
So I get asked all the time, cause when I, when I tell people, my parents were super patriotic, that people are confused.
They're like, well, weren't they in the camps?
You know, how do you come out of something like that and be patriotic?
Well, they were stuck in those camps simply because they were Japanese, Japanese American.
And their way of responding to that was to be super American when they got out, to prove to their communities, to their neighbors, you know, co-workers that they were, they could be trusted.
And so like my dad became an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts and he not only was drafted in the army, he re-upped after he went to dental school for a second stint.
Um, so my parents were, were super patriotic.
I was always told, yeah, you gotta, you're, you're an American and you're just as good as everyone else.
And, um, so with that mindset, I think my parents, when they became sort of the born again style of Christian, They gravitated toward white spaces because in their minds, that's where success is.
That's where American-ness can be fully expressed.
And so, yeah, it was a I was trained really well by them to just like walk into those rooms and say, yeah, I'm American.
I wasn't always seen.
I learned very quickly.
It doesn't matter what you think about yourself.
If the society around you does not see it that way.
Um, but yeah, so you and I, you know, learn how to play the part to make people feel comfortable around us.
And so we could, so we can move on so we could succeed.
Well, you write about that in the very opening pages of the book, and I want to read a little bit of that because it touches on that very sentiment.
You say, When I identified as an evangelical Christian, no one looked at me and assumed I was a Christian.
Even after people learned I was a Christian, I was considered an Asian Christian, especially in evangelical settings.
In quote-unquote diverse evangelical settings, my Asian American identity made me noticeable.
And so I think You really capture it there, that even when you're a church and you're a Christian, you're praying and you're playing in the worship band, people are like, oh yeah, we got an Asian guy up there.
Or he's one of, and they're wondering, did you just convert?
Or are you part of the Korean church down the road and you came to visit?
I mean, that's what they're thinking rather than you're just one of us.
There's always a sense of having to explain yourself, is what I took away from that.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, other than my close friends who knew me, but...
Yeah, anyone who doesn't know me and sees me in these settings, you know, they bring with them their assumptions about what Christians look like.
It's not my picture on the felt board or in the kid's body.
There's no Asians.
Yeah, especially back then, you know, it's different now, I think, you know, with the diversity being this buzzword, which means all kinds of things.
But yeah, growing up in the, in the eighties and, um, It was just survive by doing your best to approximate whiteness, to perform this dance for them that made them feel safe, that made them know that I was on their side.
And so I think we overcompensated and probably put down our actual identities so we could fit in.
Yeah.
Well, and this brings us to the real kind of heart of the book, which is your time at Azusa Pacific University as faculty.
You go there to teach English.
Now, right off the bat, friends, I should tell you, this is my alma mater.
I know even Azusa Pacific very well.
And we were there at the same time.
We were there at the same time, and we didn't know each other because, well, I don't know for a lot of reasons, but one of them is I was so caught up in my ministry, which was half an hour away in my hometown, that I was rarely at APU.
I only lived there for the first two years and then I moved back to my hometown.
I got married.
So I was really not somebody who was on campus a lot, but we were there at the same time.
And so anyway, our conversation means even more to me just because it's the same university that we're talking about.
But what's fascinating to me about this book, there's so many aspects of it, but one of them is that it's really, you're somebody who knew white evangelical spaces.
And you arrive at this university thinking, well, yeah, like I I kind of grew up in this world.
This is not going to be like a qualitatively different.
I know how to play the games and I know what the architecture of the space is like.
But here's what you say again in the prologue to the book.
You say, my working at an evangelical university both othered me as a person and encouraged me to decide whether I wanted to just play the sidekick role of another emasculated man or go all in to my identity as a Japanese American.
The Asians who are successful in white evangelical spaces lean into the assumption that they are perpetual immigrants new to the cultural landscape who need to be welcomed by the benevolent white people.
New people are just happy to be there.
New people, and new is in quotes, come into every room needing assistance or welcoming.
New people don't encourage revolution or support students who push back at oppressive policies.
New people take shit from white nationalist culture and ask for seconds.
And I think you, correct me if I'm wrong, but I take it you're putting new in there because it's not about whether or not you are actually new in terms of you came to this university, this state, this country, wherever, you know, recently, but it's about acting new in a subservient role.
And so it's just astounding reading the book that it's really your time at this university that leads you into this kind of This journey of ultimate realization about who you are and you decided early on you say you're not going to be a new person.
Why did you decide that and what did that mean going forward?
It was made very clear to me from the very first faculty meetings that they expected people expected me to just smile and nod and You know, not, not, not ask any hard questions or not, or not, you know, I have, you know, me, I have a kind of a sarcastic sense of humor.
And it didn't go over well.
Like, you know, I would say something in a meeting and people, you know, a few people would burst out laughing and then the rest of the room's like glaring at me like, how dare you speak this way?
And nothing even offensive or anything.
Just, you know, funny.
Me being me.
Because that's how I learned to get along in the schoolyard and in college was have a sense of humor.
Um, but in strict fundamentalist evangelical spaces, uh, I, I think they expected me to be quiet and submissive and docile.
And so when I wasn't those things, it kind of freaked them out.
And so I can still picture like some of the flares I would get sitting around a table in a meeting.
And so, yeah, it kind of forced me because I knew what to do.
Like you said, I knew what I needed to do to win them back over.
And it was these moments where I was just like, you know what?
Maybe I don't want to win them over.
Maybe, maybe I'm tired of this.
Maybe I've been doing this my whole life.
Um, cause I knew I could do it.
You know, I, I knew how to charm people and play, play to their expectations, but I don't know.
I was, I was turning 30.
I think it was in my late twenties and I was just like, man, I just, I just want to be who I am.
And, you know, and I think at the time I was still very, pretty Christian.
I was hanging on and I thought, well, I'm going to help them understand and see, uh, Asian folks, Asian American folks for who they are.
And that was pretty much, I might as well just like throwing a grenade into the room because that was not ever going to be a viable option.
My colleague Wendy Lee from Skidmore and others say this too, but Wendy's really the one I always think of saying this is that a lot of folks think of Asian and Asian American people in this country as either pet or threat.
You're either a pet who needs to accept that role.
As you said, quiet, docile, willing to be thought of as cute.
In these spaces, let's just be honest, Asian women are usually gawked at and Asian men are usually ignored.
If you don't believe me, you can read a great piece on this by Angie Hong in the wake of the Atlanta massacre in the Atlantic.
That's a great piece that fleshes that out.
But, you know, you decided, I'm not going to be a pet.
And so when you use sarcasm, when you spoke up as a complex human being, it was like, you're a threat automatically.
You're, you know, yeah.
And not everyone was laughing.
No.
Some were, to their credit.
You know, they got it.
But yeah.
And that's when I also realized, man, some people see you for who you are and you, you hold on to those people for dear life.
You know, those, those few people that see you as a fully formed human being that you are, um, who, who are not Asian American, who are not, um, and so that also taught me that, uh, yeah, to build commute, to, to be part of communities where you are seen and to, to stop playing this game of centering whiteness and white nationalism in this case.
So this brings us to, you know, there's so many ways that your experience at ISU Specific traverses, I think, many of the things that people feel and perceive when it comes to white evangelicalism, to white Christian nationalism in the country now.
Surely for the last decades, and that is you have these experiences surrounding race, surrounding sexuality, surrounding belonging that are, I mean, it's really when you read the stories, you're just like, I can't believe this happened.
And yet I went to that university.
I know they did happen.
So I want to I want to ask you if you can to share a couple of stories with us.
I mean, just a couple out of out of dozens that are in the book, because this is just a little sampling.
There's a story that I like to call the Kansas mom.
Yeah.
And it really is about race.
It's about marriage.
It's about the kinds of marriages that, well, it's about the kind of marriage I come from, which is an interracial one.
You're also, you're married to someone who's not Asian American.
So the kind of marriage you're in.
So.
Yeah.
What happened with Kansas mom in your classroom?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We are, we are crimes against nature is where we're going with this.
Um, and, and yeah, and I tell the story partly because it's just one of those mind-blowing stories, but it's also to make the point that, um, so before I tell the story, that it's not just that these things happen because they do.
These things happen all over the place.
It's that people who think this way are welcomed and, and praised and, and, and centered.
So it was early in my time and I was teaching argumentation.
And I don't know if other schools do this.
Do other schools do this?
They have a day where they invite parents of freshmen to spend, I think it's like three days on campus.
And they're invited to come to the classes.
Does that happen anywhere else?
Yeah.
You know, in my experience as faculty, it's usually one, they're usually allowed in like one day of class.
Like, I'd usually get an email in October that was like, parents weekend on Fridays.
Is it okay if a couple of parents come hang out?
If not, you need to let us know.
Cause you might see Jack and Helen in the back there.
So let us, you know, make sure you're okay with it.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it does happen.
I wondered about that.
I didn't, I don't remember that at UC San Diego.
So anyway.
Um, like I said, I know how to, I know how to do the dance and I'm good with parents.
And so, you know, as a kid, I was always that, that kid who, who could talk to the parents and win them over.
And so I was fine.
Yeah.
Come on in, you know, let's, let's do this.
And for the most part, the parents were cool.
They were excited to be there seeing a college class.
So this one class we're starting to talk about argumentation.
And how to, you know, choose a topic to argue about, something that has nuance, something that has multiple sides.
And one, one young woman suggested the topic of interracial marriage.
And, you know, we thought, we discussed it and I thought about it and I was like, well, this probably won't work because there aren't really arguments against interracial marriage.
Um, boy was I wrong.
So Kansas mom, and I knew this because she had, when they, I had them introduce themselves and she said she was from a really large church in Kansas.
And I knew, I knew her son in the class.
And so she raises her hand and I'm thinking she's going to be like, you know, yeah, this is just how ridiculous to even, you know, Have an argument again.
No, she goes, she said something to the effect of, you know, well, I know this woman who's white and she married a black man.
And just the way she said black man, I was like, oh no, this is not, this is not going to go well.
And the other two moms next to her were just nodding along like, yeah, yeah.
And she said, yeah, they got married.
And then when she got pregnant, she had a really hard pregnancy.
She had so much pain.
And then she hits us with, I just think that's God's way of telling us that we're not supposed to marry out of our kind.
And the other moms are just like, yeah, yeah.
Now my students are horrified because my wife, my wife never came to class except for this one time she came to this particular class because she had a day off.
My students all knew I was in an interracial marriage and they're sitting there with their mouths open like, and this poor son of this woman is like just turning white.
And he, and he, I remember he sort of put his head down like, Oh, please stop talking mom.
And, um, I kind of motioned for the class, don't, don't say anything.
Cause I was, I was new.
I was only maybe a year or two in and I was like, yeah, it's okay.
It's okay.
And I tried to move us on to another topic.
Um, but it's just, we all just couldn't look each other in the eye.
You know, it was like, we had just witnessed something pretty awful.
Um, and the moms were just so happy to be talking about it.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Yeah.
They, they totally agreed, you know, Cause that's where they're from.
And that's when I realized, and I say in the book, like something about me, you know, if I were black, she wouldn't have said that, but something about being Asian in her mind, I was docile.
You know, I was, I was white accepting or white passing or whatever, you know, it was close enough.
And so she felt completely comfortable to be, to say all this and, uh, without any shame whatsoever, you know, it wasn't, she didn't even apologize for it.
Um, so yeah, that's when I realized this, this woman is welcome here.
This will, this woman fits right in and that's what, this is the vibe of most of her church.
That poor black, uh, man.
Uh, if he goes to that church, Jesus, yeah.
Well, and I think what you said there's really actually so insightful and important is that, you know, there's always a moment, I think, and there's a long history of this, and you can go through that history if you'd like, but there's a moment when white folks are like, hey, if we can divide and conquer the people of color, Separate off some of them.
Convince them that they're the good ones.
And then when we, you know, work to oppress or disdain other people of color, black folks included, then they'll be with us, you know?
And I think her looking at you like, right, right there, Asian professor.
You're not going to say anything.
You don't disagree, do you?
You're one of the good ones.
Yeah.
She assumed because I work there.
You know, that's the perception of a place like APU, that that's what everyone thinks and it's totally fine.
And yeah.
Well, so your students in that scenario were embarrassed, because they felt as if there was a faux pas around race.
But there's another story, and you actually have told this before, but if you don't mind telling us again, about when Barack Obama was elected, and the disappointment felt on campus, and some things that happened in your classroom then.
Would you mind just giving us two minutes on that one?
Because the students don't get off so easy in this one.
Yeah, like all of the students.
Because there were hardly any black students at the whole school, much less in any of my classes.
So it's the morning after the election, students are coming to class just despondent.
Literally, a kid came in, thumbing through, looking through Revelation, trying to figure out, you know, which curse we're experiencing.
So everyone's sad.
Everyone's... Some people are literally crying that, you know, the Antichrist has been elected.
Hitler's been elected President of the United States.
And then I noticed students were laughing as they looked at their... This is flip phone era.
They're all laughing as they look at their phones.
And I, and they kind of leaned over to this kid next to me and I was like, what do you, what are you looking at?
And he showed me a text message that said, be sure to get your Obama Christmas ornaments so you can hang the N word from the tree.
And I looked around the room.
How many of you received this text message?
And almost all of them had, even a couple of Asian American students.
um, and a Latino student or two.
So this was going around like the whole dorm system of, of students.
And, and most of them were laughing.
You know, there were a few that were pretty upset when they got it, but you know, they were forwarding it.
It was just like, okay, Obama's elected, so we can be racist now against black people.
It's, it's on.
It's, it's, we have permission.
It was, was the vibe.
And so, wow, that was, we made that a teachable moment for the rest of the semester.
Well I've heard you tell that story before and it still leaves me speechless in terms of it's just the kind of you know one of the things I take away from this book and these stories really illustrate this is the kind of culture you need for that kind of permission to be granted implicitly so for a mom to say that about interracial marriage for these kids to send around that mean like the kind of culture you need On campus to just exist, right?
It wasn't like, hey, I sent that meme to this guy I know in the class who I who I know will be sympathetic with me and will like it.
It's like, I'm going to send this to the whole class, the whole freshman dorm, and I know that most people will just eat it up.
And if they don't, well, they're outnumbered.
And what are they going to do anyway?
Right.
I mean, yeah.
And then similarly, you know, I wasn't there in 2016, but when when Trump's elected, I hear the same vibe happened.
It was just like, but it was the opposite.
Instead of being despondent, the vibe was like, hell yeah, you know.
We won, and F you to all you, you know, whatever, non-white, non-straight, non-whatever.
It was a kind of a violent vibe on campus.
At a lot of schools, yeah.
And one of the things about Azusa, the town, right, Azusa Pacific is in Azusa, California, which is, you know, if you can't picture that in your mind, you're not from Southern California.
It's right near Pasadena.
But, you know, when I did live there, I only lived there two years.
But one of the things I would do is I'd go play pickup basketball at a park nearby, not on campus, nothing to do with APU.
And when I would go play basketball, it would be like 30 guys and it would be like 10 black dudes, 10 Latino dudes.
There was like a number of Samoan guys that played, right?
A couple of Asian guys and like two white people, okay?
And that's who would be playing basketball at the park.
And then you go up the street and you enter APU campus and we get everything you're describing.
And so it's also just a stark contrast with the community surrounding this school and the people who live there.
One of the things that is just a big part of the book and a big part of your story is your allyship with the LGBTQ students who were persecuted and were driven underground and not really allowed to exist as themselves on campus.
How did you get involved as a kind of underground faculty leader of the LGBT group on campus?
Well, I had made it known in my classes that, I don't know if everyone knew I was affirming, but they knew that I was teaching a kind of Christianity that was loving of all people.
And I made sure that included LGBTQ folks.
Apparently that was a pretty radical thing.
I didn't think it was.
And so when this group of kids decided to form, at first it was called the GSA, the Gay Straight Alliance.
They asked me to be their, you know, faculty advisor.
They didn't need a faculty advisor, but they felt like they needed someone from the school to sort of help validate what they were doing.
And so I was honored, but I was also terrified because it's one thing to just sort of quietly slip things in into your class about, you know, yeah, you know, maybe you should really consider how your Christianity affects your view of the world, in particular, maybe you should really consider how your Christianity affects your view of the world, in And so that's easy enough to do.
And I got in trouble a little bit for that.
But I knew that joining a group that was planning on having events and meetings and stuff was next level.
And, you know, at first, you know, I didn't say yes right away.
I was like, can I think about this for a day or two?
And most of these kids I knew from the multi-ethnic programs and some of the feminist groups, there was a lot of intersectionality there.
But I quickly came to the realization that, yeah, no, I have to do this.
You know, this I'll do my best to stay secret.
And at each meeting we had, we read from a charter that said, this is secret.
We could all be in huge trouble.
Eventually students were kicked out because of course they found out.
Our first thing we planned was like an art night, which was like a at seven palms, which is this very public area where everyone read poems about being queer.
And I think I read something.
People sang songs.
The campus pastor showed up asking what this event was.
And so it was, it became public, you know, secret, but not secret very quickly.
And my name was quickly attached to it.
And the board of trustees had meetings about it.
And my name was on the sort of the bad list in the administration from that point on.
So, um, but you know, I think I write in the book.
I was honored that they asked and I was honored to do whatever a cishet dude can do.
You know, it's how sad that was that I was their only option to them because they asked other professors and the other professors were like, yeah, I sympathize, but no, I can't, I can't jeopardize my career that way.
There's a lot of folks, there's a lot of great pages in the book about that whole experience, and it's harrowing, and it's not isolated.
I mean, you know, those kinds of groups exist all over the country at evangelical universities, at LDS universities, and it's something that is widespread, and you know, it really shows a lot of who you are, that you're the faculty member who said yes, and attended, and supported them in any way possible.
People don't forget that.
You know, I think one of the things people don't realize about being a college professor is there's hundreds of kids that come through your class.
A lot of them you'll never see again, but, but a lot of, but, but many of them will stay in contact with you and they'll remember you.
And I know that those students remember you and are thankful.
Um, we're going to run out of time.
I want to zoom out now.
Uh, you know, I hope, I hope people listening have gotten a nice sense of the kinds of stories in this book.
And, uh, but one of the things about the book is that it's, it is about deconstruction.
It is about race.
It's about gender.
It's about sexuality.
It's about your, uh, identity, but it's also about rediscovery.
And.
And I know you personally, so I know this to be true about your life, but you write about it near the end of the book when you say, once I figured out how to define myself, I didn't care about catering to white expectations of who they wanted me to be.
And once I deconstructed from religious faith, I was free to explore everything this life has to offer.
And I just thought it's really worth talking about that because I think there's people listening who aren't sure what comes next for them.
They're not sure if they'll ever move past where they are right now.
And I think some of them are wondering if that's true because of their racial identity, because of their sexual identity, because of the things that they've experienced in the spaces that you talk about.
So once again, it's AAPI month, you know, wondering if you just want to reflect on very briefly the path of rediscovery that happened for you after leaving and the ways that your life is now kind of full of complexity and wonder and community and friendship.
Yeah.
Thanks for asking about that.
It, I, it's, it's embarrassing, but it's not, it wasn't rediscovery.
It was like, it was just discovery.
I mean, I knew I was Asian American.
I knew I was Japanese American and I knew I was starting to learn about the history, but it wasn't until I had the contrast of Azusa Pacific and evangelical culture with a group called the Tuesday Night Cafe here in Los Angeles, which is an art space, activism, bridge building space, that I started to see an example of people who were just unapologetically who that I started to see an example of people who were just
You know, I mean, we all we all, you know, put on masks and we all, you know, code switch to different situations.
But I hadn't realized the degree to which I had done so in evangelical spaces until I met these people.
And these people became my people.
They became my community.
And so I lived in this, like, complete contrast between Whiteness centered at APU and church, which I had stopped going to a while back, and this other community.
And so I realized I was, I was just, my mind was colonized.
But even as I was not, no longer considering myself a Christian anymore, I still had this colonized mind.
You know, it's funny when I, each chapter of the book starts with a flashback and I have this one It's about worship and kind of identity, but like a vineyard pastor basically told me I had an angel of worship on my head.
And I wrote that as a kind of a funny thing about theology.
But like, as I was writing, I realized I was picturing a white angel.
And I ended up editing it and writing that.
Yeah, you're all picturing a white angel, aren't you?
And everyone I've told that story to is like, yeah, guilty.
And no one's picturing an Asian angel.
No, for all God's people, the angel could be any race.
But it's not.
It's always a white angel.
Especially an angel of worship.
That's a prestigious position for angels, I'm guessing.
Now I'm just picturing a white hipster angel, though.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Looks like Sean Foyt.
Damn.
Okay.
I'm going to poke out my mind's eye.
Okay.
Reset.
Everybody picture an angel that looks like Morgan Freeman.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
That's good.
We'll do that.
Morgan Freeman.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's better.
He's problematic.
How about Sandra Oh?
How about Sandra Oh?
Let's go with Sandra Oh.
In Christianity, that's a huge ask to de-center whiteness in America.
Um, but even outside of it, you know, I'm, we're celebrating AAPI heritage right now, and it's always important and it's always challenging because as we celebrate our identities, we're, we, we do so in contrast to this culture around us.
Um, and until we don't have to do that, we need this month.
We need Black History Month.
We need Women's Awareness Month.
We need all these, these months.
Uh, we need more than a month, but we, we need to have moments where we practice this de-centering of, of whiteness.
And I'm not saying anything negative about whiteness.
I'm not, it's not like whiteness is necessarily inherently bad or insidious.
It's just, that's the majority culture.
That's the thing that we're always measured up against.
There's work to, work to be done.
And, and the good news is to your point earlier, it's great work.
It's, it's fun.
It's, it's adventure.
It's.
It's so fulfilling and it's so just mind-blowingly great to, to have people in your life who see you for who you are and that you relate to and have, you have shared histories and shared experiences and, and, and not shared like the Asian American identities.
Is this this group of people with black hair?
I think they all have black hair.
I used to say they all eat rice, but they don't only eat rice.
There's no common language.
There's no common culture, religion.
It's a political group.
Deeply heterogeneous.
Yeah.
So we are learning about each other.
We're learning about, yeah, just the idea that we belong to this group is an honor and a privilege.
Um, everyone should find that, that kind of center that doesn't necessarily depend on the majority culture around us.
I have to say, I got to hang out with some of the group you're talking about, the artists, the writers.
In the book, you talk about a Gilmore Girl.
You know, one of your friends was on the Gilmore Girls show.
And you just have this great group of people who are musicians and creatives and just really good folks.
And I got to hang out with you all.
And it really was one of these moments of like, Feeling affirmed and enriched just by being in the group, and it's one of those things where I wish everyone knew what that felt like, because I don't think everyone does, and so it really is amazing.
We need to wind down, but I want to touch on something that is important, and that is that there was a reviewer who talked about your book, and they were like, it was a weird review, because they were like, good book, Yeah.
Next sentence, really good book.
Next sentence, really enjoyed this part of the book.
Yeah.
Next sentence, I like the book.
And then at the end, it's like, but it's, it's written in a grading way.
It kind of grates on you.
The, the tone and the language that's used and stuff like that.
Here's my interpretation, Scott, and I'll let you respond, see what you think.
But you know, when I read that, I thought, This is the way that folks talk about Asian-American writers who are supposed to be a pet.
And it's almost like what happened is this reviewer went to an Asian grocery store and was like, really enjoyed the large selection of fish, really enjoyed the large selection of rice, really enjoyed the large selection of noodles, really enjoyed the large selection of broth, and on down the line.
But you know, the supermarket smelled like fish and broth, and it also just smelled like rice and Asian people.
So, you know, kind of B minus.
Like it was almost like, hey, I really like all this stuff, except for...
You are not doing what I think you should do, and the way that you are appearing and presenting in the world is not what I'm used to, so it's grating on me.
The supermarket smells weird.
The prices aren't listed the way I'm used to.
The customer service isn't the same.
So, you know, I'm going to give it three out of five stars, right?
Like Asian people know, just a little secret.
I'm going to give everyone listening an inside tip.
If you're looking for like a good Asian restaurant, you go with the one with three stars because all the Asian folks give it five stars and then all the white folks give it one star because they're like, terrible, terrible service.
Anyway, so if you find them one of the three stars, you know, you found the right one.
Here's the point.
That's how I interpreted that review when they called your book grating.
What do you think?
Yeah, I think that's mostly it.
I mean, they specifically pointed to the overuse of the F word, which I did on purpose.
You know, I didn't, it's, I think they thought I was just like, I had Tourette's or something and I just can't help myself.
I'm such a depraved, angry Asian person that I'm like, fucking this and fuck that and fuck.
You know, it's a gag throughout the book, you know, it starts with the parts of speech and I talk about how I get in trouble for trying to use that for parts of speech to teach composition.
And then and then and I even told the interviewer that I I kept using because I don't actually swear that much.
I'm not like a sailor or something.
But I kept the gag going through the book.
I sort of gently pushed back at the model minority myth and this expectation that we're supposed to be these docile, respectable people.
So, yeah.
But yeah, I think what you described is the subtext of what this person was saying, because Um, the examples that they brought up was, you know, it was the day after the election that we just talked about in 2008, and everyone's crying, and I'm just walking around the campus saying, F U, F U, F U. You know, you, you crying by the coffee shop praying, F U. And it's funny to, it's, there's two kinds of people in this world.
There's some that find that passage kind of funny and even, uh, healing.
And then there's some that are just like offended and say, you shouldn't talk that way, especially as an Asian American, you know, you should know better.
And I think that's, that was a vibe that they were getting at.
I just, yeah, I guess I just, it's, and we'd have to go, we'd have to go investigate, but it's, it's, it's hard for me to think of a memoirist, somebody writing about their life being, you know, they're usually when people are like that, it's authentic.
Real.
Raw.
And here it is like, when it's an Asian American writer, it's like, you're supposed to be polite.
You're supposed to bow.
Are you not bowing now?
Are you not saying thank you in a Confucian sort of reverence?
What's wrong?
And anyway, that's how I took it.
That's that's real.
That's because because you and I both have experienced that, you know, as as people who I used to be a professor, you're a professor.
We're in you're in these places of authority, even prestige in some people.
They don't even it's like subconscious.
They don't they respond negatively to that simply because it doesn't fit with the picture in their head of what we're supposed to be.
Yeah, and that part I get, and that's fine.
But anyway, I'll leave it there.
I don't want to rant.
This is one of those moments where...
If I had a large Diet Coke in my hand and got going on the caffeine, could probably spend three hours just ranting on the subtext of this whole idea.
Diet Coke, that's all it needs to set you off?
That's it.
I don't even drink anymore.
So at this point, when I have a large Diet Coke from 7-Eleven, things get wild.
Things go off the rails.
I don't even, that's all it takes.
It could be like a latte with an extra shot.
You don't know what's going to happen at that point with me.
You know what I mean?
Unpredictable.
Yeah.
Giving me some ideas.
All right.
I want to say two things.
One, speaking of Sandra Oh, you know, famously uttered these words, it's an honor just to be Asian.
And reading your book, Scott, I thought about that a lot.
And I really just want to say that there's many times throughout the week that I feel that, but reading your book made me feel like it was an honor and it is an honor just to be Asian.
I also spent this morning and I discovered this artist named William Tongi who's a singer and he's Tongan, he's from Hawaii.
And he's on American Idol right now, which I don't watch, but his father died.
And he redid this song by James Blunt called Monsters.
And some of you listening may have strong feelings about James Blunt.
I don't know.
That's fine.
But his cover of the song is absolutely devastatingly beautiful.
And I may have cried for half an hour this morning listening to it.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
No one was around, so no one will ever know.
But I might have.
One of the lines though, it's really a song about saying goodbye to your father who's died, but one of the lines is, don't be afraid, it's my turn to chase the monsters away.
And, you know, he's telling his dad, sleep well.
It's okay to rest now.
And one of the things that catches me about your book is that you didn't have to write this book.
This stuff happened a long time ago.
You've had a lot happen in your life since this stuff happened with your family and health scares and a lot of things.
This probably hurt at times to write.
It probably brought up a lot of memories and wounds that you didn't have to do.
But by writing it, you stepped up and you helped chase monsters away.
And that's pretty cool.
So I appreciate it.
Now you're gonna make me cry, man.
Thank you, thank you for saying that.
It was hard, and in some ways it wasn't.
It felt cathartic to get it all down.
And it was good to have this time to look back.
I think if I had published this just in the years right after, it would be a very different book.
But because I've had time, I've met people like you and people in this deconstruction world.
It's given perspective and so it kind of chases the monsters away from myself as well.
And so I hope that is the case for people who read it.
It can be off-putting and grating and chase the monsters away.
How about we say that?
Well, we're just blowing away stereotypes left and right today, because two Asian men crying in public, this is amazing.
Who knows what we're going to do next.
You may actually hug or something.
So before we really get in trouble, we got to stop and say, where can people link up with you?
Where can they find out what you're up to regarding this book and everything else?
I'm on Twitter, R.S.
Okamoto, and my website rscottokamoto.com is kind of the hub.
Full disclosure, it has a very nice endorsement written by one Dr. Bradley Onishi for the book featured prominently on the front page.
And I'm in Pasadena if anyone wants to have coffee.
If anyone wants to go fishing, if anyone wants to go up to Mammoth, find me there.
Yeah.
Yeah, Mammoth Lakes.
I actually tried to rewrite a slogan for Mammoth Lakes, the city that said where white people go to ski and Asian American people go to fish, but they didn't write back.
I don't know why, because if you're Asian American and you live in Southern California, you've probably been fishing in Mammoth Lakes.
So anyway, all right.
We're really inside baseball at the moment.
A lot of people listening are like, What are they talking about?
Exactly.
So let me just say, friends, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
We have a lot of big news coming.
We're going to share that with you soon, as soon as we can.
But for now, we'll say help us on Patreon, PayPal, Venmo.
This is an indie show.
We do this all ourselves.
And we do it three times a week.
Couldn't do it without you.
Look for it's in the code and the weekly roundup this week.
