[This review of “We Mend with Gold: An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American Christianity” by Kristin T. Lee was first published here: We Mend with Gold [Review] - The Englewood Review of Books]
Kristin T. Lee’sdebut book turns a childhood divided between Chinese immigrant faith and white evangelical belonging into a case for a Christianity that does not ask anyone to choose. I started this book expecting an immigrant-church-versus-assimilation story with the pressure to fit in and the slow drift from whatever your parents practiced toward whatever the majority culture rewards. What I got instead was the argument that the immigrant church is not trying to help anyone assimilate in the first place. Its real gift is a place where people can meet God in a language and rhythm that already feels like home, without translating themselves into someone else’s version of faith first.
Lee grew up believing her Chinese American identity and her Christian faith were two separate and sometimes competing things. This memoir follows her movement through that split, borrowing from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, where the potter does not hide the crack or try to make the bowl look like it was never broken. Instead, the gold runs right along the break, so the fracture becomes part of its new beauty. Lee uses that image for the break during the years of feeling like her culture and her Christianity could not both be true at once.
The first half of the book describes the break itself. She writes about her journey to understand and navigate those two worlds and how that led to her eventual discovery that her heritage is a true gift to her faith. In the second part, Lee further describes the particulars of that gift as she breaks down the features of this Asian American theology.
I had read plenty of Black theology and liberation but had never come across Asian American theology, so that intrigued me and kept me reading. Through that lens I learned that marginality could become an avenue for empathy rather than a wound to hide and that exile teaches a kind of simplicity that assimilation avoids. And ancestral paradigms, the ways her family understood the world before Sunday school, can open ways of seeing God that majority-white spaces could not. Lee is also honest about how she got there, through studying Black theology and the Black church first, and only later through Asian American voices making a similar case from her own heritage.
Particularly moving are the closing chapters on choosing proximity to the marginalized and loving across divides. Lee unapologetically calls the readers to expand their faith to embrace other groups (particularly black and queer communities) to work collaboratively toward ministries of justice and compassion.
Readers who grew up trying to disappear into a white-majority church will recognize the tension she names. Those of us who spent our formative years in mixed or majority-white congregations may come away with a clearer sense of what immigrant churches actually hold in trust: the particularity, the cultural memory, the sense of belonging that gets lost when difference is treated as something to smooth out.
Some readers will resist the theological territory Lee explores. Inclusive, Scripture-rooted frameworks often get labeled as “progressive” or “liberal” before they are understood. But for anyone curious, even if the word “progressive” makes them hesitate, her reflections offer both challenge and reward.
What gives the book its weight is Lee’s refusal to choose between grief and gratitude. She names the cost of trying to vanish into whiteness, and she names what she found on the other side: a faith repaired, not replaced. Like the kintsugi bowl she returns to throughout the memoir, the fracture she found in her faith becomes the line of gold that now makes that faith shine.
Sounds great!!!! How'd you hear about this book?