Melissa-Inouye
Picture of April Young-Bennett
April Young-Bennett
April Young-Bennett is the author of the Ask a Suffragist book series and host of the Religious Feminism Podcast. Learn more about April at aprilyoungb.com.

Coping with Contradiction with Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

Coping with Contradiction with Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
Melissa Inouye

In this episode of the Religious Feminism interview series, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, a senior lecturer in Asian studies at the University of Auckland, discusses her experiences living in a variety of countries where she was a religious minority, being a racial minority within her own religion, and integrating the contradicting values and messages she has collected from her cultures, faith and scholarship. She also discusses how her battle with cancer motivated to publish her thoughts and experiences in her new book, Crossings: A bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar’s ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood (not necessarily in that order). You can find episode notes for the Religious Feminism Podcast here at the Exponent website: https://exponentii.org/blog_tag/religious-feminism-podcast

Links to Connect and Learn More:

Coping with Contradiction with Melissa Wei-Tsing InouyeCrossings: A bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar’s ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood (not necessarily in that order) by Melissa Wei-Tsung Inouye

Audiobook of Crossings (Mormon feminists in particular might enjoy this book on audio because it includes a poetry reading reminiscent of women’s blessings.)

Audio

Listen to the podcast.

Transcript 

April Young-Bennett 

Welcome to the Religious feminism podcast. I am very excited about our guest today, who is a longtime friend of mine, and I’ll let her introduce herself. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Hello, thank you so much for having me. My name is Melissa Inouye. I’m a lecturer in Asian studies at the University of Auckland. I’m also a practicing Latter-day Saint and I have a dog, four kids and one husband. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

That’s a big household. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

It is, with a lot of dark hair. It’s the worst. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

I have a similar household. I have a husband, four kids and a cat. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Oh, does it shed a lot? 

 

April Young-Bennett 

No, no, it’s a cat. So it’s very finicky about cleanliness, which I like. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Well, I was just thinking today as I was brushing Bertie—That’s  his name. He’s like a lab cross—And I was thinking how we got him when he was a puppy, and he’s basically as old as my life with cancer because when I was diagnosed, we started to think about the summer holiday, when our kids usually go back to America and they’ve gone for a really long time. So I thought I would have just had surgery. I’ll be here all by myself. I’m so sad. So then we got a puppy. Yeah. So, yeah, I was just remembering that today. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

So I understand that it was your battle with cancer that inspired you to write your upcoming book. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Right. Well, it’s just basically like this horrible uncertainty of it. When you first get a diagnosis and it just comes into your life and you realize that things that you took for granted, like when you know my youngest kids in high school were going to blah blah blah or how will I afford to put this kid through college, blah, blah blah, that’s way down the line, and it never it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t have those kinds of problems. And I thought my kids are so young, there’s no way I can have super-deep meaning-of life kinds of conversations with them. And I can. But, you know, their concerns right now are young children’s concerns. And so I’m just supposing I’m not around forever. What could I leave behind? And the really funny thing is, actually one of the main reasons I wrote this book is because our families are always losing things. I thought I could put things together in a folder or something, but it’s bound to get lost. And so I thought, what’s something super redundant? Hard to lose. It’s a book. There’s gonna be copies out there. Maybe they can find one on Amazon if they lose the first one. Of course, it’s become a little bit more than just a project for my kids now, but that really was the original idea. Something that couldn’t get lost quite so easily. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

That it’s really out there. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Really out there? Yeah. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

I love that and the title of your book is? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures Through Life, Death, Cancer, and Motherhood, not necessarily in that order. I haven’t read that, so I could have said the whole thing properly. It’s too darn long.  

 

April Young-Bennett 

That is a lot of adjectives that you put in front of yourself. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

They actually made me cut some, actually. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

Oh really? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

It used to be longer. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

Which ones did we lose? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Something about being in New Zealand and coming through Hong Kong or something. It wasn’t a lot of really important ones. The basic one is basically where we are. I can’t even really remember. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

So you originally started this project with the idea that you were going to share your thoughts with your children, even if you weren’t there in the future, and then you decided eventually to share them with everyone right? So what led to that change? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Part of it, I was I was thinking, if I want my kids to grow up as Latter-day Saints, I hope that they grow up in a culture that has changed a little bit from where we are now, that has come a little—I hope they grow up in a culture where, where they want to be Latter-day Saints. I’m raising kids who notice things like numbers of men and women. And I was once listening—we’re listening to this—you know that story? It’s like, maybe it’s like a Hans Christian Andersen story about the fisherman and the fish that he catches who gives him wishes, and then he gets nicer and nicer houses because his wife makes him always wish for more houses. Have you heard of that one? 

 

April Young-Bennett 

I have. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Yeah. So really, the climax of that story is that she becomes the king, and then the emperor, and then the Pope. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

Okay. I didn’t remember actually where that story went from there. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Well, in that story, she eventually becomes the Pope and at a certain point I was explaining  the story and I had to explain that in the Catholic Church there’s a Pope and actually usually the Pope is a man, so this story is kind of making fun of the wife for wanting to become the Pope. And one of my sons said, that’s really stupid that only men can be in charge of the church, huh? And it’s like ohh, so all of this is to say that… 

 

April Young-Bennett 

So did you give him the news about his own church? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

I did, I did actually, that only men are currently hold the priesthood, and then I went on from there. But my point to all this is to say that kids these days pay attention to these kinds of things. They notice power dynamics and when there’s a drastic inequality in the power dynamic between men and women, or certain kinds of people, they notice that and it feels wrong to them. So then I thought, writing for other people is also kind of like writing for my kids because obviously the most influence on the child’s life comes from his or her parents, but in terms of their religious life, if I want my kids to grow up doing Latter-day Saints and to go to a church called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I hope that’s a welcoming place for them and a place where these kinds of questions are kind of thought through and discussed. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

What are some ways that you hope that your book will help to open those doors and to make people more welcoming within the church? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

For my kids, I wanted to show them that I felt it was possible to be a lot of different things, including a feminist, a smart person—actually I’m not that smart—a professional scholar, a Latter-day Saint, a mother and someone who lives in different countries. It is possible to be a lot of different things and it can be okay. It can work out like that. I feel like one of the fears that I had when I was younger, when I was their age, is that I couldn’t pull that off, you had to kind of be one kind of person or do something one way, or else everything else would come crashing down. And I haven’t found that’s the case. And I found it’s these different parts of my life that make my life very difficult at times. Like all those things I just said, motherhood, scholarship, Latter-day Sainthood are also rich and wonderful parts of my life in other ways, so I just didn’t want them to miss out on that. I think that at church in general. We don’t have to be worried about some of the things that we worry about. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

Why don’t we go backward a little bit? And since everyone who’s listening doesn’t know you as well as I do, let’s tell them a little bit about your life. You’ve lived in lots of very exotic—exotic to me—places. And done lots of interesting things. Do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

Sure. So just to tell you a little bit where I’m coming from. I grew up in Southern California. I was in the same ward basically for my first 18 years of life. My piano teacher was a member of the ward and was a major kind of influence on me. Everyone knew my parents. They were super involved in the church community. And I just knew who I was supposed to be and where I belonged.  

One thing that was kind of interesting was that I’m Asian American. My father is Japanese, and my mother’s Chinese. In the context of our local ward, we were an ethnic minority. In the context of Southern California, we weren’t. There are Asians running all over Southern California. And so I didn’t really feel like a racial minority, except for when I was at church and especially when we went to Utah to these kinds of other places where there aren’t quite as many Asians, and then it seemed like a bigger deal.  

But I guess all this is to say that I feel like my primary ethnicity, the kind of thing that made me feel different, was that I was a Latter-day Saint. And I just identified very strongly with that and wanted so hard for that to work out. And yet even when I was in high school, there were some things that kind of made me wonder. Which part of my world was most correct?  

So for example, learning about the theory of evolution and then having my Sunday School teacher say that was ridiculous. There’s no way we came from monkeys.  

And going to BYU to interview for, I think it was the Hinckley Scholarship, so here you have people who’ve been recruited who you know to be good at school at a church university and I asked these other super smart, very competent girls what they thought about evolution. And they’re like, well, we think it’s okay.  

And then I pulled out, I think it was Doctrines of Salvation, which my bishopric member had given to me in response to this question. And I said, but look at this. And they read that and they were like, oh well, I guess we don’t believe in it? And there was just such confusion.  

And so that was kind of one of the early experiences in which I began to worry that my multiple worlds couldn’t hold together. Not to quote from movies, but you know the movie like into the multi of the spider verse you had like a lot of Spiderman and they’re all in a multidimensional space. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

Oh, right, yeah. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

And they can’t be together because their DNA decomposes. So I thought it was like that, like these completely different worlds and they just didn’t work together. And later on I I’ve had a range of experiences. I went to school at Harvard, which is, you know, a pretty liberal place on the East Coast in an urban area and I met a lot of kinds of people that I had never met in, you know, Orange County, California. And I also went on the mission to Taiwan and eventually began to study China, and eventually, when I was married, my husband and I lived in Hong Kong for a period of time as well. Now I live in New Zealand. 

So I guess what I’m trying to say is over the course of my short life, I’ve experienced a lot of different cultures and I’ve been very impressed at how quick people are in a certain cultures in a certain context to define right and wrong according to certain things that are actually culturally contingent. And when you cross across all those worlds, you realize that it’s impossible for everyone to be completely right about at least some things at the same time. And you start to see how different things can fit together. And how the world doesn’t explode, it’s fine. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

So you’ve had a lot of eye-opening experiences because you’ve been to so many different places and because you surround yourself with people who are sometimes different than you. 

 

Melissa Inouye 

I think so, like in China for example, when I was in China this one time, our kid was one we were living in this city in central China, and every time people saw us, every almost every single time, they would say, where are that kid’s socks? It was the summer. Where are the kids socks? And what are you feeding him?  

And if we didn’t say? If we didn’t—whatever we said, they would always say, that’s the wrong thing. You have to feed him steamed egg with little bits of pork and chopped up shrimp every single time. Like if we did not feed the kid steamed eggs with little bits of pork and chopped up shrimp, we were abusing him. And we should be thrown in prison. And you know, it was very striking that this is the story we got every time we ran into someone. So clearly this is a very strong cultural belief. And I I just got used to being wrong all the time. You know, when we’re used to being wrong then you also don’t you feel… I don’t know. It’s just very eye-opening to know that whatever you do, you’re wrong. But you’re not going to die, you know? And you would be right. 

 

April Young-Bennett 

You have sort of an immunity to being wrong. 

Melissa Inouye 

Uh, uh. I wouldn’t say an immunity to being wrong, I mean, because clearly you don’t want to make certain cultural mistakes. That’s also really important. You know, you can be rude in so many different ways in a culture with which you’re not familiar. And no one wants to be rude or inconsiderate or anything like that bu when you just know that you’re going to be wrong, I think it makes you a little humble. Not just about your own personal capabilities, but it also makes you a little bit more humble about the process through which people come to cultural certainties. And you realize that sometimes those certainties are quite contingent depending on where you’re from. It is nice to see that. People try their best. And they do the best with what they’ve got.  

And basically the one constant that I see is parents all over the world love their children, and if they’re holding a baby about any like where within about two inches of the if the baby’s head is within two inches of their face, they always kiss the baby’s head. I feel like this is a constan. It’s probably not, but just in the places that I’ve seen. That’s kind of the most consistent thing, most consistent conclusion that I can draw is when people are holding babies with heads close to their faces, they kiss the baby’s heads.  

 

April Young-Bennett 

I do that.  

 

Melissa Inouye 

It’s is so tempting, right? That the baby’s right there?  

 

April Young-Bennett 

Do you have any advice for other people who maybe are experiencing things where there’s conflicting beliefs between maybe their culture or their religion and things that they’re learning in school, and they’re deciding how to reconcile those things? 

 

Melissa Inouye 

What I say in the book is that good is something that exists in multiple dimensions. I think sometimes we search for very systematic ways of thinking. We search for theories or philosophies or models that show how everything fits together. I just think the nature of reality is that lots of things don’t completely fit together. But we have the capability to decide what’s good, what’s real and what’s valuable in our lives. And if something is good or real or valuable, it’s worth pursuing. Even though sometimes you know that multidimensional aspect of it is a challenge. I feel like one thing that the world needs now is not only people who are comfortable with contradictions, but people who can hold things together on different sides of those contradictions. So to be quite specific, for example, in politics in America, it’s so polarized and something can come across social media about someone that you don’t know, and it can be so easy to just kind of pile on that person for being a horrible person. 

But what I think religious communities give to us, the gift that all religious communities give, is interaction with other people who are really different from us, with whose ideas we may not agree, who may by one measure or another be a quote unquote, horrible person or ignorant or slacker and all these things that I’m saying, you know, could be applied to myself in one way or another. But when you’re actually interacting with people in a religious community, you know who they are. And you have opportunities to kind of redeem yourself in many ways in these multiple dimensions. And I think that religious communities are so important today because they’re one of those face-to-face, person-to-person relationships, where people can be people with each other.  

When people are with each other, they’re messy. People are so flawed. People are so imperfect. But I do feel like the solution to the problems that we have now is not in a perfect platform or a well-crafted manifesto or a creed or a certain kind of litmus test, but it’s just in people. And I think as we learn how to embrace each other as children of God, then we’ll be better able to deal with these problems and to cooperate and to forgive. 

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April Young-Bennett is the author of the Ask a Suffragist book series and host of the Religious Feminism Podcast. Learn more about April at aprilyoungb.com.

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