![]() His vibrato was steady, with a lilting note of elegy. My father began with patient reverence, restrained if not exactly relaxed, warming into an eager, bolstered tenor. On Christmas, we sang “O Holy Night,” which I loved for its majestically drawn-out vowels. We sang nineteenth-century hymns like “How Great Thou Art,” my father’s favorite. I felt a thrum of anticipation as the pianist began, and we rose. ![]() Joint worship also meant that the congregation sang the hymns together. Pastors delivered the sermons in English and Chinese, alternating line by line, dragging out the morning while I imagined Pokémon in jungles. A few times a year, including Easter and Christmas, we had a joint service, in which the two were combined. ![]() Our church held two services each Sunday: a large one in Chinese, which immigrants like my parents attended, and a smaller one in English, for second-generation congregants like me. My eyes followed the teasing line of their arms as they reached up to smack the ball like a punishment. At church outings to Laguna Beach, I watched high-school boys play volleyball in the wind, bare torsos licked with a scrim of salt. I imagined circular tables with white tablecloths, indoor smoking. As we passed through the City of Industry, billboards advertising the Spearmint Rhino strip club spoke of a forbidden world: blond women with windswept hair and gaudy, glittering eye shadow. We attended the Chinese Alliance Church in Glendale, and I dreaded the forty-minute drive there as much as I dreaded the sermons. I grew up in Diamond Bar, about thirty miles east of Los Angeles, in a house with popcorn ceilings, a glass cabinet with ceramic figurines of angels, and a woven Thomas Kinkade tapestry above the mantelpiece that said “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” My parents, both immigrants from Hong Kong, were pious. Perhaps this was simply life in the suburbs. When I was a child, I associated the Christian life with glacial stretches of boredom, punctuated by unannounced aesthetic bliss.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |