Thanks, hsugear and ennahart, I too have seen that book (“following jesus w/o dishonoring your parents”) — as well as the more recent one called “more than serving tea”.

I just wanted to clarify that the “Asian values” that I am referring to are the values of the overseas-born and then US immigrated Asians who are NOT Jesus-followers. The “journey” that I was referring to in the post that caused them to have a  “defense” and “survival” mode is the journey of getting here — always having to defend themselves and fight off mean people and save all they could. It makes sense that they would have these values.

In this post, I definitely don’t mean Chinese people in China because I have no idea what life is like for them over there. Also, I had no intentions of conveying Asian-immigrant values as evil in my post — only that it is often at cross-purposes with Jesus’ purposes.  So, yes, Kanfood, I agree that Asian values are good — except when they are pushed on a follower of Jesus to be the ultimate authority in your life.  The values of “family” should not be above the value of the Kingdom of God.  When you have to choose one, it better be the Kingdom.  But this is the problem.  What I’ve seen is that immigrant overseas born nonchristian Asian parents often (not always but often) push their values and ideals above Christ’s.

For example, being a part of a Chinese church for a decade, I’ve noticed that immigrant Chinese parents are ok with their children going to church to be ‘good persons’ but once Christ becomes more to them than a morality teacher, the parents are very unhappy. Once these ABCs decide that they have to give up their careers to be missionaries, for example, the parents get very upset. This may not be true for all cases, obviously, and it usually happens in homes where the parents are not Christ-followers, but this is what I keep seeing. And most ABCs that sense God calling them to do something outside of their parents’ ideal (e.g. engineers, drs, etc), give up on their calling or at least are right now in the mode of doing what makes their parents happy until a later date when their parents might be ok with it. If only parents would release their children to do what God calls them to, I can’t even imagine what the AA could do!

I think the point of my post is to say that I am both Christian and Vietnamese American. I can’t give up either; I will always be both, but one must take precedence over the other as the Master of my life. Jesus keeps calling me forward & I’ll keep obeying, but it’s gonna keep being AGAINST my parents’ ideals for my life.  So it’s going to keep being a painful push and pull.

@licoreen - interesting.  thanks for your thoughts…

Being family-oriented is pretty cool, but you know the problem is that, in my experience, the Vietnamese-family motto is: “family first, second, third and last”.  In my experience, this means that family is priority and “others” outside of my family should not get the same kind of love and attention as my own family.  This CLASHES with Jesus who tells us to love Him so much more than our families that it almost seems like we are hating them.  Who are my mothers, brothers and sisters?  They who do the will of God, He said.  Anyone who has left home, brother, sisters, mothers, fathers and children for the sake of the gospel will receive a hundredfold as much in return.  In these three examples, Jesus breaks down our traditional idea of what a family is and expands it to others outside of those in our blood relationship.  He tells us that blood-relations are not priority.  Priority is Him and doing His will.  Here’s a good example of how the Asian value of being family-oriented and looking out for others clashes with being a Jesus-follower:  It’s ok to serve at a soup kitchen to help homeless people, but it’s not ok to bring a homeless person home (in fact, it’s not even ok to give money to homeless people).  Here’s another example, it’s ok to give money to orphans or send money to a nonprofit who helps orphans, but it’s not ok to take one into your home and care for him/her as if he/she were your family.  (Of course, I’m speaking of Asians who are not followers of Jesus.)  Our parents’ views of our fostering has been that “it’s too hard work.  it’s too much trouble to take care of a baby…so you shouldn’t do it.”  but if it was a biological baby, they would NEVER say “it’s too much trouble, you shouldn’t have a baby.”  They would say that the sacrifices to take care of that little baby would be worth it.  Why?  Becuase that baby is your own (blood-relation).  But when it is a baby or person that is not related to you by blood, it is NOT worth it.  You shouldn’t bother. This clashes with Jesus.  Because He tells us that true religion is this:  to care of the orphans and widows and to love your neighbor as yourself.  How much would you love yourself?  How much should you love your own?  That’s how much you should love an outsider too.