Marked Pages

I went to my church’s street ministry outreach yesterday. It was a planned cell group activity. Ten of us turned up in Petaling Street amid the busyness and noisiness of traders and tourists, and headed for the street church located in the heart of all this daily buzz.

Every Wednesday evening, the street people receive a free meal (dinner), a chance to bathe and wash, a place to stay over for the night and an opportunity to hear the Word. Every Saturday afternoon, the centre is again open for the street folks to enjoy watching a DVD movie (Christian) and tong sui. Many other organisations have set up similar ministries to help the street folks. Not all these organisations are Christian, but all are compelled by a larger intention to alleviate, to some extent, human suffering wherever they may find it.

Since my cell group sponsored the dinner (roast duck rice) for that occasion, we also served the people once they were seated. There were about 50 of them, mostly men, and their ages ranged widely from the 20s to 60s. Some looked more destitute than others. Some didn’t look like street folks at  all. I was told that they came from all over KL.

One thing my cell group members wondered about was how these people came to be where they were. Someone asked, “Why don’t they get jobs?” A fair question, because many of them were able-bodied and young enough. They didn’t dress in tatters either, but that’s probably because there is an active clothes donation drive ongoing anyway. They weren’t as unkempt as I thought, or as smelly as I thought. They looked ordinary enough … a bit grubby, but that was it. 

So what brought them to where they were?

I guess we will never know as much as we should about human vulnerabilities. I heard about drugs, alcohol, gambling … common reasons why people end up homeless and friendless. They sound so cliched, this list of vices … like things we learned in Moral classes to avoid. In any case, we would never do such things because we have too much good sense and character.

But life sometimes deals us tragic cliches. These street people are stereotypes … typically living out the consequences of giving in to “vices and addictions”. They are everything that moral fables warn children about. But most of them didn’t start out on the streets. They began where we are, before the great slide overtook them and threw them out onto the streets. They had names that their identity cards confirmed; they had families that no longer looked their way; they had jobs … some had real careers; they had money in bank accounts … some had made more money in one year than I would ever earn in ten …  Some were movers in business, CEOs and directors of their own companies. Yet when life dealt its blows, they fell faster than they could have imagined. Perhaps at one time, they had themselves looked at homeless people and beggars, thinking the same thing that we think: How did they get here?

However the means of getting yourself into the pit, the fact is, getting out is really hard.  Ask any street person. The problem is, street life, once you get used to it, is not so bad. These days, nice naive guys from suburbia come round to hand out food and clothes all the time. There are so many of them that you can work out where to go on which night to get a meal. Plan your weekly schedule around theirs, and you will never starve. Come festival days and things get really celebratory … you won’t need to work a day of your life if you don’t feel like it. There are handouts everywhere.

What is even better is that roaming the streets frees you from so much. There is no responsibility other than protecting your patch from other vagrants. There is no risk of bumping into someone you might know because no one wants to know you! There is no need to think. Anonymity has its advantages. It shields you from the burden of shame.

On the streets, life becomes simple. It devolves into basic needs like food and shelter. Without complication, without reflection, without hope–but also, without the possibility of failure (can you go lower than the streets?), street life is an ironic refuge for many …

Not all of us in my cell group were comfortable with the street people. They represent a life we would not want to live. Perhaps what is most uncomfortable for us is the niggling thought that in the grimy faces of the homeless, we see the possibility of our own reflections. Our common humanity and shared vulnerability look out from their clouded eyes telling us a tale that reeks too much of reality. Anyone can fall.

Anyone can be a street person.

Everybody’s into tracing their roots these days. But given my somewhat rojak history, I find it hard to identify exactly which root to follow in my genealogical investigations. Should I try Penang baba, Myanmar Chinese baba, or mainland Chinese Chinese? Being a 21st c Chinese of diasporic descent, things can get a little tough when you’re trying to pin down that elusive and slippery salamander called identity.

Where my main cultural base is concerned, I have to confess a few glaring inadequacies. I have never been able to speak Chinese with any facility or proficiency, and I can barely read the most elementary characters, even in simplified form. I can do a pinyin-style thing, but I would have no idea what I was reading.

When I was a child, my family vacillated between a determined effort (on my father’s part) to be entirely and traditionally Chinese, and the obvious westernised things we did/watched/read/said (on the part of my siblings and me). My father’s attempt to establish identity through preserving tradition and culture didn’t succeed all that well. We turned out to be hopelessly anglicised …

These days though, I envy my Singaporean nieces for their bilingualism. They speak and write both English and Mandarin effortlessly. Also, my mother has noticed that everytime their parents hover, they change their  keyboards from English to Chinese, which their elders do not understand. There is refuge in language … 

I have tried twice in my lifetime to learn Mandarin, and twice failed. I managed quite nicely the first time round, and pretty well mastered the pinyin. But I guess a lot depends on the kind of teacher you get and the kind of learning style you have. I would rather my teacher start with grammar, and systematically describe the rules to me. It makes for mental tidiness … I guess my brain needs orderliness, which is why I’m convinced that several steel grey cabinets sit inside my skull with files and papers appropriately tagged.

I have noticed though that Chinese lao shi (teacher) have a thing about ‘spontaneity’, inspite of their external and very evident stuffiness. And they do not like describing grammar rules at all! They make an unfortunate assumption about their students: if you’re Chinese, you should already know how Chinese works. Therefore, there  is no real need to explain grammar. Just learn the words. What they forget is that people like me begin with a half-baked sense of a dialect (say, Cantonese) and proceed into the regions of confusion where Mandarin is concerned. Do they even take the trouble to tell you that there are many times when Cantonese grammar doesn’t work the way Mandarin grammar does? Or that Cantonese has many more tones than Mandarin’s four? NO! They assume–and wrongly!–that you know this stuff! My question is, if I know it, why should I bother to pay you to teach me? Alas, the question remains unanswered …

These efforts at touching base with my culture and ancestry did not bear fruit that lasts. I once told my lao shi about my great-grandfather, who was an aspiring scholar before coming south and becoming a tin mine owner. Now this was something of family pride to have a Chinese scholar tucked away in one’s genealogy. My great-grandfather had passed his district exams and was duly called a xiu cai. He even had a name change then: it was customary to give yourself a scholarly name. My lao shi looked at me tellingly, screwing one eye almost shut as he pronounced authoritatively: “Form Three!”  Of course I quickly added that great-granddad had gone on to study for his provincials, at which Yao lao shi shot back with an uncompromising: “Form Five!” Well, family pride punctured, there was little left to do than to agree to learn a few Chinese songs much sung at karaoke joints. From thereon, I slip-slided down the path of tardiness in doing my homework … and soon, Chinese receded into the distant horizon of forgotten things.

After the failed language study, we made contact with my great-aunt from China, who was a veteran soldier of World War II. Or rather, she made contact with us. She impressed my parents’ Malay neighbour greatly by speaking Malay, which she remembered from her early life in Malaya. During the war, she was in Chinese Intelligence, which probably accounts for my secret desire to be a PI! She sent many pictures to us about the ancestral home. It is mainly mountains and hills, we being Hakka. The house that great-granddad built for his family in China more than 100 years ago has been divided up into different compartments. I cannot recall if it is now the location of some extended Wang family business, or if my cousins I-don’t-know-how-many-times-removed live there. But the house is really still standing, and they still call it the “new house”! Of course, it’s enough for me to look at a few photos … I don’t think a trip down the ancestral memory lane is anywhere on my list of things to do. Apparently, the home village is so isolated that even the  WW II Japanese soldiers missed the turn that led to it. Everyone was spared during the war!

Of course, my then 79 year old great-aunt wrote out from memory the entire list of generations of the family back 500 years. That was when we first turned up in Chunghua, Guangdong from Fujian. So in theory, I know half a thousand years’ worth of Wang ancestors. That sort of impressed me until I realised that 500 years in Chinese history is a mere inch in a mile …

One would imagine my confusion, therefore, being cast upon the gloomy tide of many cultures and racial links … drifting hither and thither amid the flotsam and jetsam of woebegone histories … The truth is, sometimes that hits you for a while. But living in such an annoyingly colourful and unashamedly epicurean world like Malaysia, the uncertain tide gives way more often to the sublime happiness that pure rojak spells! When some identity mist surrounds me, threatening annihilation, should I stare at the night sky wonderingly, asking such profound questions as: “Who am I? What am I?” or, in the more pragmatic realities of the day, sidle down the street to the nearest mamak stall for some good old pasembur?

All my “roots” wanderings have led me to a conclusion. It is a good conclusion because I like it. The thing is, being rojak and living in a rojak country like Malaysia really appeals. I like the heat and the silliness, the ignorance and the cincai-ness of things, and of course, the unending stream of cuisines that come from more countries and cultures that I could ever trace in my blood! In the end, I like the mixed-upness of life as a child of the dispersion. Would I ever try learning Mandarin again? Maybe. But Malay sounds just as good.

“I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do”  (John 17: 4)

“As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9: 4)

My church had our Missions week this weekend, and our speaker was James Hudson Taylor IV of Overseas Missions Fellowship. I was looking very forward to hearing him preach, knowing, as we all did, of his family pedigree. Having read of his great-great-grandfather’s sacrificial efforts to win China for Christ, I was keen to hear about the present generation of Taylor’s involvement in missions.

Pastor Taylor is up to his neck in missions, and like his forebears, has a great heart for all things Chinese. In fact, it is common knowledge that he speaks Chinese better than English–something we Chinese of the diaspora may wish to lament… His father, Jim Taylor was awarded honorary citizenship of Sichuan province in 2007, which goes to show how well the Chinese regard the Taylors.

I was impressed by the extensive work of missions accomplished by organisations like the OMF, the great body of research and work done in analyses of missions trends. The conclusion of bi-vocationalism (tentmaking) as being one of the most effective and significant ways to “do” missions today is not a new one. We have always known it, but it was brought home to me how holistic the gospel truly is … when we know Christ, everything about our lives should exude missions, for that is the gospel call. While we may not all be missionaries (chuan dao ren; lit. boat reach people), we should all rightly be known as chuan dao de ren (lit. boat reach kind of people; the sort of people who exhibit a missionary spirit).

Breaking the notion of mission work being primarily full-time missionary work is still important in our region. The distinction made between the sacred and the secular is a regrettable impasse that defeats and dissuades many Christians engaged in secular work from engaging in missions. We must take Paul’s point that when at Corinth, he worked as a tentmaker to the glory of God while working out his missionary calling to the glory of God … at the same time.

The missions impetus in us should be so strong and irresistible that telling people about the gospel that saves and changes lives should come as naturally as breathing. At Syrian Antioch, the Jews of the scattering or dispersion found that out (Acts 11). Some spoke only to the Jews, but then came others who spoke of the gospel to the Greeks (Gentiles) too. Irrepressible and irresistible would be apt enough words to describe those whose bellies bubbled with fresh and living water. You couldn’t stop them from talking about the thing that gave them life. Like fountains, they simply overflowed! The Antiochene church became known as the sending church of the first century AD, and indeed , it sent out its best workers to the field: Barnabas and Saul.  

Missions still has a lot of ground to cover in the world today. One challenge facing us is how to do missions in a world that has essentially become a global village. Jesus boldly proclaimed to His Father that He had “completed” the work which the Father had given Him to do. Acts 1: 8 promises us power and enablement to reach even the “outermost parts of the earth”. Until we finish the work that God in Christ has set us to do, we will not see the true fulfilment of that promise in our time. Nor will we be able to bring glory to God.

Yet in a way, we are full circle back to the time of Paul, and more recently to the time of the first Hudson Taylor. Both historical eras had a strong background Empire that provided the means of transportation and licence to travel to distant parts of that empire. In Paul’s day, it was the Roman Empire. In Hudson Taylor’s time, it was certainly the British Empire, of which it was boasted that the sun would never set.

Today, the network and structure of global society through business, the Internet, and migration, has allowed for a looseness and largeness of connection that we have never seen before. In so many ways, even as our task is clearly iterated and reiterated for us in John 9: 4 and 17: 4, the avenues for completing that task have become so enlarged and multiplied that not engaging in missions seems more unacceptable and intolerable than ever!

The challenge of Missions to us is that our contribution to God’s work can be accomplished through almost anything that we can turn our hand to. The opportunites, so to speak, are really endless. While it is still day, we must do the work of Him who sent Jesus. The night is coming, when no one can work (John 9: 4). The prerequisite is this, that we must carry in us a missions-oriented heart, an alertness to the creative possibilities God places before us, and a willingness to risk our all for what we believe has saved and transformed us.

If God, in His wisdom, has not called us to be chuan dao ren, then at the very least, He has called us all to be chuan dao de ren.

To such a call, we can only give our soul’s assent.