Faith Imagination and the Fight to Belong: A Conversation with Ken Fong

You also mentioned that when you arrived at Fuller, it was flourishing in terms of the Asian-American community.

Can you tell us a little bit about like the demographics of the Asian-American student population at the time?

Yeah, number one, no Korean Americans.

Crazy.

Yeah, so try to get your mind around that.

It was predominantly Japanese American, and I would say maybe 20% Chinese American, because at the time, and this is going to lead up eventually when we talk about Dr. Hoover Wong and what he was dealing with, but most Chinese churches that I knew of saw Fuller With suspicion that it was too liberal.

And so they would, you know, send their kids specifically to Dallas Seminary.

And if they couldn't go to Texas, they would go to Talbot.

So, you know, already it was a very Japanese Asian-American experience.

The Japanese United Methodist churches, the holiness churches.

Hmm.

They were the ones.

They were all kind of involved in that Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society, the GEMS experience, the Mount Hermon camps, the GEMS music ministry.

There was this huge network of Asian-American, primarily Japanese-American churches, especially in Southern California, but even reaching to Utah that was feeding students to Fuller.

Now, Ken, this whole thing, I mean, we have to slow down a little bit for two things.

First thing is the fact that when we talk about Japanese Americans, like you actually at some point have talked about why Japanese Americans have been so significant.

And in your book, you talk about this thing, like why you thought that, like, you know, when you wrote the book, like in the 80s or whatever, about how Japanese American churches were specifically, maybe reluctantly, you said, the vanguard of the Asian American ministry, even though a lot of the other Asian American ministries were all ethnic specific, they were moving toward this like broader Pan-Asian ministry.

Can you just talk about that a little bit? Sure.

Several things come to mind going all the way back to my dissertation.

The Japanese and Chinese immigrated around the same time to America, but the difference was Japan was in a much stronger embracing of Western culture, and they were in a much stronger position with the U.S. government.

So they didn't have the – there was no Japanese Exclusion Act.

There was the Chinese Exclusion Act.

And so they were actually able to bring over, even though they were picture brides, women that weren't being trafficked.

They would get married, have children, establish families.

Just to be able to establish families, even if their original intent was to go back to Japan one day, many times they ended up putting down much deeper roots than the Chinese Americans, which had bachelor societies.