The Poor Woman. Wai Ching Angela Wong. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002, 176 pp.

Although the title seems to echo one of the most common representations of Asian women as poor (or Third World) victims, the book actually makes a critique of that representation. For Wong Wai Ching, the common representations of Asian women as poor, suffering victims, and then as heroines who struggle to rise above their situations reflect the reality that Asian feminist theologians simply carry the baggage of their national, regional and/or postcolonial identity. Such an identity is often linked to their respective national struggles for reconstruction and decolonization, and also to a growing regional identity of “Asianness”. Hence, it is usually put in opposition to a Westernized or modernized identity. Ironically, however, she pointed out, those images of national reconstruction and decolonization are basically tied with the Western or Enlightenment values of progress, freedom and democracy.

As Asian theologians wrestle with the need for contextualization, indigenization, or enculturation of Christianity, which is often seen in many places as a “Western” religion, they engage in efforts to recover indigenous historical and cultural resources while trying to address socio-economic realities. For Wong Wai Ching, however, the postcolonial subject embodies a self-contradiction: of being an Asian Westernized subject.

Using arguments of Stuart Hall, Wai Ching claims that the Asian “collective cultural identity”, which heavily depends on the anti-colonial struggles of the century, is not innate, static, or monolithic. Rather it is subject to a continuous play of history, culture and power. It is variegated, depending on the different ways people are positioned by and position themselves in relation to different questions around which boundaries often get re-sited. Hence, there is an interactive relation between one’s shifting location and one’s contingent identities.

Consequently, for Wai Ching, the concept of Asia as a unity and of the Asian experience as represented merely by the victim and/or heroic fighter of Western imperialism overlooks the multiple levels of existence of Asian peoples. A native of Hong Kong, where the East and the West have met and intermingled in more ways than one, Wai Ching herself represents a multiple or hybrid identity.

Many natives of Hong Kong see the British colonization in a better light, unlike the way their Asian neighbors view their respective colonizers. Many Hong Kong people tend to view their life under British colonization in a better light as compared even to their life under Chinese sovereignty. Hence, Wai Ching challenges the tendency of Asian scholars to simplify and generalize Asianness as a homogeneous identity: of being poor and suffering victims of Western colonization and imperialism. Such a tendency is true of theologians who then locate Asian theologizing with the poor, underprivileged Asian subject as opposed to the West. She argues that a homogeneous representation of Asianness negates the multiple interests and identities of women and other minority groups of Asia.

As professor in the Modern Language and Cultural Department of the Chinese University in Hong Kong, Wai Ching has utilized literary and cultural resources in her teaching and research. In this book, which is an updated version of her doctoral dissertation, she analyzed some narratives of two famous Hong Kong fiction writers. She points to the possibility of integrating conflicting identities – “between national and postcolonial politics, indigenous cultural values and Christian worldviews, and between the multiple social and economic crossings of East and West”. She therefore calls for an acknowledgement of more heterogeneous narratives of Asia that would enable new and wider imaginary spaces for differences to emerge – among different groups, their different experiences, and their different theologies.

This book challenges traditional theological formulations as well as sociological and cultural thinking about identity. It is definitely a valuable contribution to Asian theologizing and definitely to Asian feminist theologizing. (This is an updated version of the review that was printed in CCA News, December 2002.)

- Hope S. Antone