Long Post about MK Identity Issues

It's interesting to me that I have titled this with an implied apology. But I do feel a sort of embarrassment/irritation with these parts of myself. But the apology (and warning) out of the way, let me get down to my post.

My writing teacher suggested that I read the writing of other MKs when I told her I was writing about my MK experiences. She tells us that we learn to talk by imitating and that we learn to write the same way. So we shouldn’t be afraid to read writing that’s doing exactly what we want to do, because if we stick with it long enough, it will become more than imitation.

So I took her advice to heart and have been looking for writing about the MK experience. I haven’t done an extensive search, but I Googled several search terms and searched through Amazon, and I was surprised at how there is almost nothing written by MKs about their experiences. I found two memoirs, both written by people in my parents’ generation. It made me wonder if we are just such a small segment of the population that it’s natural that not much would have been written/published. Or is there something about the experience that makes it hard to write, or hard to publish.

Also, when I did find writing, it was almost all about MKs who are still Christians or who went on to become missionaries themselves. I did find one book, Through Isaac’s Eyes, which seems to be written by an MK who is willing to talk about how he felt sacrificed by his parents’ decision to go to the mission field. It was published in 1996 by a man born in 1955. He waited until long after his father had died. Maybe his father’s death inspired the reflections that led to the book.

I am really, really enjoying this book. It’s clear writing that gets to the heart of Evangelical Christian beliefs. He does such a good job writing about his father and how the beliefs and culture of the religion made his father the man that he was. And the father he portrays is a genuinely loving man who is incredibly tender and wise and gentle with his son. His father was a preacher who decided to go to Vietnam in 1967. Daniel Barth Peters, the author of the book, was 13 when his parents left to go to Vietnam. He was the youngest of four children, and the only child to go to Vietnam. A little over a year after arriving, the mother and son were evacuated because the war became so serious.

What I respect about this book is the ordinariness of his MK experiences. He focuses in on the little things, the little moments, the moments of cross-culture shock and shame. I like that it’s not a book like the Poisonwood Bible where the father is such a fanatic. It’s not an extreme book about abuse and sick, twisted faith. It’s a book about a loving father and a respectable faith experience. It’s about a father who knew when fundamentalist beliefs were crazy, about the calm, rational choices that the father made for his own faith. And yet that faith, which can inspire respect, also was the source of profound, life-long pain for his son.

It’s a book that can publish this quote on its cover: “Your book stirred me deep down in my heart. I wept and rejoiced at the love your daddy had for Jesus.”—Bill McCartney (Founder, Promise Keepers)
When I read that quote, I thought, “oh, maybe this isn’t a book that I’ll relate to so much.” But then I started noticing what the author hides in more symbolic language. I noticed the silences, the way he comes right up to the edge of his own doubts and anger and stops short of spelling it out. And I realized that I probably have a kindred spirit after all.

I’m going to put some quotes from the book that I feel like I could have written they so poignantly capture emotions that I’ve known (or still know).

“To be in the world, but not of it, was the most bittersweet knowledge that a boy my age could have. I had heard of it and even sung it—
This world is not my home,
I’m just a-passing through.
If Heaven’s not my home,
Then, Lord, what will I do?
But until this moment that song had been just a Sunday school chorus that we sang….Now, however, I realized we believed those words. We acted on those words.”

“All that had been mine…was either gone or in a barrel in the basement of a house that was no longer ours. The things that had brought me such happiness, defined my status in the neighborhood, were now as irrelevant as Daddy always believed they should have been. I did not know then that I would never again be able to sort out the piles of my life, throw some away, stuff the rest in a barrel and snap on the lid.”

“Starting the ninth grade was almost as frightening as the war.”

“Then he turned to me and said, “You new here?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you from?” he asked.
I was stunned. I could not answer. I no longer knew. The question made my feet feel no longer attached to the earth, as though I simply floated. Oh sure, I walked here and there and rode my bike, but that gravity of the soul that keeps one attached to the earth was gone. I became conscious of myself in a way that made normal living impossible. It was as though I knew that I was adrift in the universe, that I had no power to determine my own direction or fate, that life was bigger than I was. Not only could I not control it, I could not even influence it….I was no longer even a traveler, for travelers have a sense of where they come from and know where they are headed. I looked in at life from the place that only I knew. A private place, a lonely place.”

“I had no idea of what to wear or how to act. Carmen’s motherly instincts took over enough to get me some white jeans and a new shirt so that I looked almost normal. But looking normal was a long way from my sense of life. Ever since coming back I had been trying to participate in talk about baseball and girls and television, but it always seemed that while my words and theirs were derived from the same language, mine were empty of meaning, hollow….My body walked and talked and laughed, but there was a new distance between myself and it, and between myself and the people around me. This distance was new and sharp. I felt out of place when I first arrived in Saigon, yet I was still somehow present. But life back here, especially among all the kids…whom I knew and had grown up with, existed on the other side of a clear thin wall. I could see them through it. I could see myself acting on a stage while standing outside of it, unable to even push my hand through that clear thin wall.”

This comes at the end of the book, and he’s talking about an expensive football his father gave him as a gift when he returned from the mission field. Later, he feels such guilt about having that expensive gift when orphans were being bombed in Vietnam. His father comes in to talk to him.
“His explanation may have helped me go to sleep that night, but it did not diffuse the confusion—was this a bomb, or was it a special gift from Daddy and God? The confusion settled into a permanent discordant resonance and left me to walk an uneven, rutted road, first lurching to the left and then to the right.”
(I don’t think I’m reading into this to see the football as symbolic of the faith he received from his father.)

And a final reflection on his father:
“There on the front lines, his body on the line, Daddy was able to kill the self, the carnal self, and move to that spiritual state of being filled with the resurrected Christ where joy and sorrow mix and confuse the mind but clarify the vision of the heart.
I cannot see through Daddy’s eyes, or through Mother’s, the ironic self-fulfillment that came with self-sacrifice. I can only see through Isaac’s eyes—for while he left the other kids behind as adults, it was me, the favored heir, whom he tethered down on the altar of Saigon. An act that confused us both by the simultaneous joy of obedience and horror of human sacrifice.
Total surrender to God’s will. In God’s will is perfection. In God’s will is security. In God’s will is the knowledge that all things work together for good, even the sobs of little boys in the night longing for big brother, even ducking for cover as the shrapnel flies, even the decision to send Mother and me home, and for him to stay. God’s will is that we present our bodies a living sacrifice. God’s will is for the son to be sacrificed. This is the old, old story.
This ideology of sacrifice, of ultimate denial, of humans bearing the pain of the universe by the giving up of the self and the giving up of what one truly loves as the way to God, this is the Christian story. This story is rooted in the God/Jesus story, but does God condemn us to endlessly repeat it for our own salvation? And in sacrificing me, why is it that Daddy had the Epiphany of his life?…”