PANA Institute for Leadership Development

By Christopher Chua, Project Director, Historical Documentation Project

Though almost a cliché in some circles, it bears repeating that there is no such thing as objective history. History is storytelling of a particular type, and unlike what we may have assumed or have been taught when we were in grade school, history does not give us a complete picture of how things were in the past. If it did, we would know more than we do about what it was like to be a Chinese laborer in the old American West, about what it was like to be detained on Angel Island, about what it was like to be a Chinese American Christian supporting ecumenical efforts in the mid-19th century. Sad as it may be that we do not know as much as we would like about these things, the redeeming point to note is that recorded history is not immutable. We add to our understandings of the past every day, and in each instance that we become more sensitive to the gaps in our knowledge is an opportunity to revisit the official record, to add to it, to change it, to re-tell the story.

Scholarly history, however, relies heavily on verifiable facts, and any re-telling is inevitably met with the question, "What proof do you have?" Thus, it is crucial that primary documents are preserved as foundational building blocks for new tellings of history which invite in the voices we have not heard before. The Historical Documentation Project at the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown is an endeavor dedicated to preserving just those historical building blocks as they apply to our church. What is being gathered, organized, and preserved might be thought of as the raw material of which a critical account of Asian American Christianity would make use.

We might think of this material more specifically in three categories:

1. Institutional history. The church is an institutional body with all sorts of functions, including administrative, liturgical, sacramental, and evangelical ones. Much of this history is recorded in what the Presbyterian Book of Order terms "minutes and other official records of the session" (G-10.301): session minutes, minutes of congregational meetings, minutes of the board of deacons, and minutes of the board of trustees. However, any member of PCC recognizes that much of the work of the church is carried out at other levels and that the rationales, discussions, and negotiations so significant to who we are and what we do as an institutional body often are not reflected in the documents named above. We have committees and task forces, each with their own records; we write letters to individuals and sometimes to such bodies as the White House; we publish articles in newspapers; we cooperate with other institutions and blend our institutional memories with theirs.
2. Ideational history. The church is also about ideas, commitments, beliefs, and confessions. As much as what we do binds us together, so too does what we profess as a collective body. Christianity is, of course, not about a single theological orientation, and what theologies and theological emphases are preached from the pulpit, broadcast in evangelical radio programming, and discussed in Bible studies both differentiates our church from others and traces a historical evolution of ideas within the worshipping community.
3. Relationship history. Finally, the church is about people — about friendships, about animosities, about cooperation, about estrangement. Though more than simply a collection of individuals, our church, like any other, is characterized by the people who are a part of it. Preserved in letters and photographs and videotape, the unfolding of interpersonal relationships against the backdrop of the church fleshes out the reality of church history as a history of people, a history to which individuals both like and unlike us will be able to relate when they sift through these stories decades from now.

In this work of protecting our material history, the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown is privileged to have found allies in many different quarters. The PANA Institute (Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion) at the Pacific School of Religion has provided early and continued staff support and project design expertise. The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley provides technical support, as well as an eventual permanent repository for the archives. And finally, we are fortunate to have received $75,000 in grant monies from the Rockefeller Foundation, which recognizes both the importance of the work being done and the promise of partnership efforts among institutions. Each contribution of effort and resources is both a validation of the contributions of this church to Asian American Christianity and a validation of Asian American Christianity's contribution to community life and to the history of the nation. Each pledge from our partners is a validation that we have a story worth telling.

To learn more about the Historical Documentation Project or to contribute materials, please contact Christopher Chua at (510) 849-8244 / cchua@psr.edu, or David Soohoo at (650) 323-7808 / dsoohoos@netscape.net.