Leaving the majority

Bright-eyed Stacia Birdsall '02 stood in her kitchen in 55 Spelman stirring a steaming pot of Japanese curry.

"It's different from Indian curry," she said. "The Japanese use different spices and they only cook with potatoes, carrots and onions."

Birdsall, who is white, removed the pot from the stove and carried it out of the kitchen with a bottle of aojiso salad dressing that she had bought in an Asian food store while visiting Chicago during Fall Break. She placed them both down on a dining table already adorned with two small plates containing pickled cucumbers and pickled shallots.

"Many people ask me if I'm from the Midwest," said Birdsall, whose parents were raised in that part of the United States. But Birdsall sees herself as more Asian than Midwestern.

She sleeps on the floor on a "futon" — spelled like the fold-out couch, but with a soft, barely audible "n" at the end — a thin cotton mattress with a blanket that she rolls up during the day and places in the corner of her room. The lamp in the living room sits on a "chabako," an empty tea box that her family used for moving many of their belongings to America. And Birdsall sees herself growing old in Japan.

"I want to sit at the 'kotatsu' with the heater, and eat 'mikan' " — mandarin oranges — "and watch the stupid New Years specials on TV," she said, looking as if she had entertained this daydream before.

One of only a handful of white students in Manna — a Christian, predominantly Asian group on campus — Birdsall had, several weeks earlier, sat comfortably on a couch in a cross-legged position at a small investigative Bible study session in her room. She was surrounded by six girls with straight black hair whose families had originated in either Korea or Japan.

For Birdsall, to be a foreigner is to be a native.

Born and raised in Tokyo, Birdsall said that "when you're in Japan as a foreigner, your primary identity is as foreigner." The Japanese use the term "gaijin" — literally meaning "outsider" — to describe those whose ancestors were born outside the country.

"I think for most of my friends that was the identity they were most comfortable with," said Birdsall, who went to the Tokyo Christian Academy — a school with a population that was 60-percent American.

And as a gaijin, Birdsall said she was treated with a complicated combination of curiosity and respect. "You could almost play with your position," Birdsall said. "You could be totally different and it wouldn't matter because you weren't expected to be normal anyway."

She felt normal being different, and different when most people would think she should have felt normal. Birdsall moved to California in fourth grade, and though her parents originally told her they would be staying for only a year, they ended up staying for four. And during that time, Birdsall said, she never fit in.

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"I think I just really just missed the way things worked — really just the flow of life," she said. "It was what was familiar and I never really got used to America. The Japanese way always seemed right to me. The American way always seemed foreign."

She missed the local stores and her daily routine. She missed her familiarity with shopkeepers like the tofu maker and neighborhood grocer, and the traditional, courteous greetings that they would offer her.

While in Japan, when Birdsall would leave her home in the morning, she would say, "Ittekimasu" ("I'm leaving") and whoever would be in the house would say, "Itte'rashai" ("Be on your way"). Then, while walking in the street, on the way to school, those who knew her, even merely in passing, would say to her with a friendly smile, "Ohiogozaimasu" ("Good Morning").

Then it came time for her to go to college. "It was always sort of assumed that I'd come to America," she said. So she did — and once again found herself a stranger in her parents' native land.

It was through joining Manna as a freshman at Princeton that Birdsall managed to feel at home.

"The way people were — it was just familiar," Birdsall said. "It's been like my community at Princeton. Until that point I really didn't feel like I belonged at Princeton."

"It was all Asian and I was different, but I fit in — knowing enough so that I knew the majority culture but never knowing enough that I completely fit in," she explained.

While pouring "Genmai-Cha" — green tea with roaster rice — into small, handle-less ceramic cups, Birdsall recalled how delighted she was to find a package of seaweed in a gift bag that Manna gave her when she joined the group.

"Even simple things like dried squid," she said about a snack she commonly keeps in her kitchen cabinets. "I couldn't share that with PEF" — Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, another Christian group on campus — "because they'd be like, 'Eww.' "

And to varying degrees, most of the members of Manna agree that they joined the group in part because of a common cultural understanding. They are bonded by certain characteristics that come with being both second-generation Asian Americans and a minority group on campus.

"We have a lot of inside jokes," said Sarah Seo '02, one of Birdsall's roommates, after leading Manna's weekly female Bible study group on a Thursday evening. Her comment was met with laughs all around the room, and most nodded in emphatic understanding when someone mentioned being forced by her parents to take piano lessons as a child.

"We definitely have our Korean refrigerator and our regular refrigerator," said Matt Lin '01, who walked into 55 Spelman with other male members of Manna after their own Bible study — which they were conducting next door — had ended. He was carrying a Price Club-sized clear plastic container that he proceeded to pass around the room. It contained lychee jellies, sweet treats that are the size of thumbtacks, have the consistency of Jell-O and come in flavors such as grape, strawberry and pineapple.

Though some Asians Americans in Manna were initially reluctant to join the group for fear of boxing themselves into an excessively insular environment, once they became a part of Manna, they felt that they fit best with the familiar atmosphere.

"When I first came to Princeton," said Joyce Chen '02, "I said, 'I'm not gonna be in an Asian posse, or whatever.' "

Chen went to a public high school in New Jersey that had an Asian population of 3 percent, and consequently most of her friends were non-Asian.

"For most of my life," said Chen, "I thought I was white, because I didn't know that skin color could be anything other than white or black."

But once Chen joined Manna, she found a group that — rather than resembling a "posse" — became a source of support and a comfortable community. Chen said that she originally got involved in Manna because her sister — who was a member of the group — would sing songs from meetings that she thought were "catchy."

But sitting in a lounge chair with her Bible study guide resting open in her lap, now in her second year with the group, Chen said, "You have more in common with other Asians. I think this is where my family is, too."

It is this feeling — of the group functioning as a family network — that members, both Asian and non-Asian, cite as their primary reason for joining Manna rather than another Christian group. Manna shares several activities with other Christian groups on campus, and many members have attended meetings of PEF and Agape. But the majority of Asians who want to be involved in an evangelical Christian group eventually gravitate toward Manna, having been invited to one of its events by a friend.

"I felt drawn to Manna because they seemed to have more of a tie as a fellowship," Jen Kwong '03 said. Also a member of the a cappella group Kindred Spirit, Kwong had sweetly harmonized in a song of praise at the beginning of the Bible study session.

Once they had finished examining the week's Bible passage, taken from Phillippians, Seo asked the others what they would like to incorporate into the final prayer. Kwong — feeling stressed from all of her midterm assignments and tests — had asked the group to pray that she find enough focus and guidance to write her essay. Her eyes closed, Kwong's lids and entire body seemed to relax as she listened to her friends' words of support.

David Kim, one of the staff members of Manna, said an emphasis on community is central to the group.

"We don't believe in a certain privatization of faith. It has an implication on a societal level . . . The character of Confucian-based culture is a sense of community," he said, explaining that words of ownership are uncommon in the Korean language.

"In Western cultures," he added, "the individual is the focus whereas in Eastern culture the community is the focus."

Though the community-oriented nature of the group may stem in part from its cultural makeup, the family feeling of Manna transcends its members' ethnic identity.

"On the outside it seems the base [of Manna] is the Asian-ness of the group," said Owen Davis '99, a staff intern for Manna, "but once I got in the group I saw it was based on a faith in Christ."

Davis — who is white and was born in Sumter, a small town in South Carolina — joined Manna his senior year at Princeton, and has come back as an intern while he attends Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

Bearing the tranquil, content expression of someone who has recently discovered what he wants to do with his life and has already started down that path, Davis sat at a small table in the Frist Cafe. He passed on coffee, explaining that he would need the caffeine later.

While pursuing the completion of his formal education, Davis, who has dirty blond hair and gentle eyes, gravitated back to Princeton to pursue the relationships that he found in Manna — relationships that offered him guidance in choosing a career path. Now, his role includes training the leaders of the small Bible study groups, such as the one led by Seo.

"For me it was those relationships that really made me feel like I was an important member of the community even though I was a minority in the community," Davis said.

Still, Davis admits that it may have been his background that allowed him to walk comfortably through the door that led into the Manna community.

"I did not purposely put myself in a cross-cultural setting," Davis said, "but I think it was my background that prepared me to be a part of that group because if someone had asked me to join Manna as a freshman I would have said, 'Thanks but no thanks.' "

Davis "sort of grew up within the limits of a small town southern culture." Blacks and whites socially self-segregated themselves and the school he attended did not teach about the civil rights movement because its American history syllabus "didn't get that far." And though his parents did not prohibit him from becoming friends with non-whites, Davis said he never had a chance to build cross-cultural relationships.

But he wanted to learn what he wasn't taught and experience what he hadn't been exposed to.

Interested in understanding the tensions in his town — and in exploring his own identity — Davis enrolled in a freshman seminar at Princeton on the civil rights movement taught by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel.

"I knew that I was finding out something about my past by taking this course," Davis said, "and what struck me so much was how much people had struggled to gain civil rights and how those things still existed."

Davis continued to explore those issues that as a child had been out of his reach.

The summer before his senior year, Davis interned at the recently opened Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum in Savannah, Ga., which helps to preserve the Gullah culture. The only white staff member at the museum, Davis became knowledgeable about a geographically isolated and culturally distinctive group of blacks that lives in small farming and fishing communities off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina.

The internship at the museum helped guide Davis to his senior thesis topic — "Defying Redemption: The Rise and Fall of Republican Power in Postbellum South Carolina." His thesis focused on Beaufort County, S.C., where — instead of southern whites taking over the town at the end of the Civil War — black Republicans retained power until the turn of the century. Northerners had occupied the county and freed its slaves early in the war, and consequently, rather than live dependently as sharecroppers, the blacks in the county were able to live independently on the nearby islands, and preserve their unique culture.

The politics of Beaufort, however, eventually had an adverse effect on the black residents of the county. A new generation of whites, raised in the wake of the Civil War, grew up accustomed to their isolation from blacks. As in the rest of the South, eventually the whites reassumed their dominant role in the town's politics — taking control of the system while possessing a limited understanding of all parts of the county's population.

In researching and writing his thesis, Davis documented a history that had not yet been recorded. (He said that there was a history of the town until the Civil War, but nothing after it.)

And just as he pored himself into his thesis, Davis spent his time at Princeton immersing himself in activities and relationships that were both completely foreign to him and at the same time very close to home.

As a freshman, Davis joined the Gospel Choir — a group that is at least 90 percent black. Davis, who will admit that he does not have a terrific voice, joined the group primarily because it was an open choir. He had heard the group sing at a church service and after meeting the president, decided to attend a rehearsal.

"At first it was a strange experience because it was the first experience where I was in a minority," Davis said. "It was difficult, but it was the spirit of worshipping together that made me feel like I was part of the group."

In photographs on the Manna Webpage from past retreats, Birdsall and Davis' white faces stick out in the otherwise Asian group of Princeton students acting in skits or posing for pictures with their arms around one another. But the photographs are merely two-dimensional images — still shots saved on a screen.

At Manna's Saturday night prayer meeting at Murray Dodge, the spirit of praise and religious faith is seamless. All of the faces blend, and as the students clap their hands in song, they offer words of prayer that go beyond matters that are both worldly and superficial.