About More Than Serving Tea

I am the mother of three. Wife of one. I live in the north suburbs of Chicago, and I work for a parachurch organization as a multiethnic director for the region. 

The title of the blog comes from the title of a book I helped author. The book is about the intersection of faith, culture and gender and it tells just part of an important story of Asian American Christian women.

How did we get the title? My first suggestion was “Serving Tea and Kicking Butt”. Yeah, that didn’t make the cut. We played around with it, and landed with MTST. We’ve gotten both positive and negative responses to the title, ranging from comments along the lines of “how much more stereotypical can you get?” to “I love the hope it communicates”.

For me personally, it connects the hope of “more” to that of a stereotypical image of both “Asian” as represented by the West and “women” as represented by the West, the East and by some interpretations of Biblical womanhood. I can still serve others, enjoy tea (I prefer coffee), embrace my complex ethnic/cultural/racial identity and my womanhood, all the while loving Jesus in an imperfect world.