Frank walked past our gate many times each day as he tested the remote car door openers he assembled in his house. This business paid his bills, but he found it boring at times and enjoyed our banter across our shared wall. My wife and I had just moved to Taiwan and had no Chinese language skills to speak of. Frank had enough English to get us started. And from there we built vocabulary one word or phrase at a time.
We were neighbors on a dead-end alley of row houses each 13-feet wide. Across the way was an imposing 3-story wall that gave our alley a sense of “closed-inness.” In contrast, walls and gates to our houses were waist high, fostering togetherness. Frank and I hung out at our shared wall multiple times a day. He’d also hang out with Kim and our boys.
One day our older boy, Robert, went missing. The neighborhood felt safe enough, but he was only 2-ish, so we looked for him anxiously. We hunted everywhere, going as far as the playground a block away. Neighbors joined us, shouts of “Shaio Luobuo” (their version of “Little Robert”) heard ricocheting off the rowhouses.
Finally, someone discovered Robert next door in Frank’s house, quite unaware of the fuss he was making by having gone missing. Frank, who hadn’t heard the shouts, knew Robert was there, but didn’t know we didn’t know Robert was there.
When our Stephen was born, Frank and his friends hosted a meal for us. The spread was amazing, except that Kim, still less than a month out from giving birth, was only allowed to eat chicken-foot soup, a local custom. But these Hakka friends took very good care of us.
It was a sad day when we moved away. We’d been neighbors for a couple of years and had visited his parent’s home in Miaoli. We stayed in touch as long as we were in Taiwan. When we moved to the Chinese Mainland, contact became impossible in those days before internet.
As I wrote in my book, Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom, I learned much more than just words and some fluency from Frank. One day a couple of Mormon elders came by. Word had it that Mormon missionaries by the thousands were being sent to Taiwan to learn Chinese so that when the Mainland opened, they would be ready.
To the folks in our working-class neighborhood, the idea of someone so young calling themselves “elder” seemed silly, if not downright rude. In a culture where old age is revered, youth are not considered adults until they get married or turn 30. “Elder” is reserved for those of a much more mature age – a status I have only recently attained.
I asked Frank what he thought of what these “elders” had to say. Frank, in his late twenties at the time, replied, “What can someone who is under 30 teach me about eternity?”
In that moment, my hanging out with Frank paid high dividends in cultural education.
While my formal Chinese teachers occasionally disagreed with what I was learning from Frank, he was what I needed to grow my fluency. He spoke the Mandarin I was learning, as well as Taiwanese and his own native Hakka, a minority Chinese language. He and his friends flowed in and out of their three languages, not missing a beat. But though he was not trained as a teacher, he was careful to use only Mandarin with me so I could get it right.
His given name was Chin Hwan. His family called him Hsi Fan or “Boiled Rice”. “Frank” was his chosen English name.
The door to his house was always open, welcoming, but also because he went in and out of it all day long. The first floor was his shop, where the fobs were made. He’d walk down to the end of the street to ensure they worked from that distance. Besides the usual buttons opening a car door or trunk, the fobs could turn on a car’s engine, something that wasn’t yet common in the U.S. in the early 90s.
His business partner and other friends were around all the time, and they became our friends as well. It was the perfect neighborhood in which to settle in and get connected. Frank’s gang helped us navigate all things local, including stinky tofu. Whatever it took for the sake of intercultural exchange.
Today I have two reminders of Frank. They are paper cuts he made, a hobby of his. These papercuts, as you can see in the photo, have intricate patterns and pleasing colors. They are a different style of papercut than what we found in Northwest China with its bright red paper. A different style of intricacy.
I look at them hanging in our house today and think of what patience it took to create those works of art. And that was Frank, a patient guy who had time for a family of clueless foreigners who had landed next door to him, totally without warning.
We who make it our business to visit and inhabit the borderlands of this world all need guides. Local people who understand their own world and are willing to slip out of their comfort zones to help us acclimate.
I’ve found local guides wherever I’ve lived, even here in the U.S. People who reach across whatever divide there is to embrace the newcomer. When I moved to Texas, Darryl Shaw and Billy Mack Patteson taught me how to fit in – or not. When we moved to Portland, Eunice Swanson helped us buy our first house; others she gathered helped us get it move-in ready.
And I’ve learned to be a guide for others. When we lived in China, we became guides for new arrivals coming to learn the language or teach in our schools and programs. Sure, they needed local guides, but they were glad for the help of a fellow sojourner who was but a few steps ahead of them. Besides providing language training opportunities, we gave them the comfort of faith-based community and helpful pointers on cultural adjustment.
Returning to the U.S., Kim and I found work that embraced newcomers – refugees and immigrants from lands far away. And we also embraced kids in need of guides who found themselves without safe families.
Borderlands are found everywhere. Sometimes they are like black holes where people get lost, never to emerge again. You can find such black holes in the streets of your communities, places where people have lost their way and no longer fit in with the society moving past them.
Many of these black holes are as invisible as the people who inhabit them. Whatever has formed their void, these people live in the margins behind walls that hide them from the rest of us as we obliviously go about our ways.
I’ve known people who, attempting to enter new cultures and settings, didn’t properly adjust or survive the transition. They either wound up fleeing back to the safety of the familiar or hid out in self-made cocoons, never venturing out.
At their best, borderlands are like portals, carrying us into new worlds where we can grow and share our Father’s love. That is really what we are called to do – all of us. We are called to reach out beyond our safe havens to embrace the unfamiliar and the unloved. We are called to cross cultural lines for the kingdom.
Frank’s neighborhood was such a portal.
That tiny alley was home to people who spoke several different languages. Across from us, in a house hugging that huge wall, lived a family who spoke one of the aboriginal languages on the island. Grandma also spoke Japanese from the decades when Taiwan was controlled by the Land of the Rising Sun to the north. Her grandkids spoke only the Mandarin they were learning in school and the more common Taiwanese.
One day those neighbor kids asked us what language Robert was speaking. It was just babytalk, sounds that would soon morph into English or Mandarin. We understood it little more than the neighbor kids did. We told them it was Robbie-hwa, hwa meaning language. So, Robbie-hwa became the 7th language spoken on that street.
People were always interacting in the street. When our other adjoining neighbor got married, the entire alley was transformed into a tented banquet hall. We were invited to a seat at the table right outside our gate where we ate all kinds of amazing dishes. The bride and groom being vegetarians, many of the dishes which looked and tasted like meat were anything but.
In a sense all these neighbors became our guides. They helped us see into their world, helped us navigate all the things we had to learn to thrive. They became friends, if only for a season.
Years later, thanks to the wonders of the internet and Facebook, Frank and I reconnected. When COVID hit, Frank shipped boxes of protective gear for the volunteers in our food pantry here in the U.S. When typhoons or earthquakes have hit his island, I’ve looked to see how they are impacting his area – and checked in with him to make sure he is safe.
He’s also subscribed to this blog and we’ve exchanged notes. I don’t know how good his English is these days; I know my Chinese fluency has deteriorated through lack of regular use the past 17 years. I’m grateful for online translation services – even with their limitations.
These digital translators, while not always accurate, are in fact another type of guide. We find it helpful to know something of Chinese and English to make sure it is not giving us Robbie-hwa.
Which is a lesson in guide use. No one guide is sufficient. Each guide sheds special light on the new world we are entering, but only a piece of it. Frank taught us about Taiwan and Chinese culture from his perspective. It took a host of people to teach us more.
We who call ourselves Christians are guides who point others to Jesus – at least that is our intended purpose. In that we are imperfect, we sometimes mislead. But even at our best, no one of us shines a complete picture on who Jesus is.
Which is why we have what we call the Church, not a building, but a global and historical collection of interconnected Christians, a very large collection at that. Again, the Church itself is less than a perfect reflection of Jesus. But the more we see of the people of God and not just one random individual, the more clearly we see Jesus.
Jesus himself is a guide. He points us to the One he calls God the Father. “If you have seen me,” Jesus said, “you have seen the Father.”1
I don’t know how well you can say that about us individual Christians – that if you’ve seen us, you’ve seen Jesus. But hopefully you can see something of Jesus in each of us. And together as the Church, the body of Christ, you can see a clearer reflection of who Jesus is – hopefully – until we see him face to face.
You know the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”? Well, it’s true as well that it takes a village of guides to help us navigate the borderlands of life.
Are you in need of a guide as you navigate borderlands or other transitions in life? I have four ways I might be of help. One, you can leave a question in the comment section below for me to answer. Two, you can follow this blog by subscribing – for free – as we talk about faith, justice, and all things intercultural. Three, you can read my book, Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom. And, four, you can hire me as a coach.
Photo: Frank, his papercuts, Robert, and a very long bean
- John 14:9 ↩︎