Patricia Lin of Berkeley wears a Magen David ring, recites the Sh’ma every morning, and itches for any chance to read from the Torah.
She feels Jewish to the core. But when she gazes around the Jewish community, at synagogue and in Jewish publications, “I find no faces that look like me,” she said.
That’s because Lin is a Chinese-American Jew.
Though she wasn’t born Jewish, childhood influences certainly pointed her in that direction. She grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood near Boston. Almost all her friends and mentors were Jewish. Her Taiwan-born parents even drank Manischewitz wine because they liked its sweetness.
So when Lin felt the need to pray as she got older, she picked up Judaism as if it were second nature.
“I just knew it was the right thing. I’ve felt at home in the Jewish community in a way I’ve never felt in the Asian community,” said Lin, a lecturer in history at U.C. Berkeley.
Lin will speak about the history and current experience of Asian Jews on Sunday, May 2, at the San Francisco Main Library Koret Auditorium. Sponsors include the Institute for Jewish & Community Research and the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.
Her conversion to Judaism a few years ago may seem like a modern, melting-pot phenomenon, but Lin said historical documents show that Jews lived in China since the 11th century. They looked Chinese, spoke Chinese, but prayed in Hebrew.
Marco Polo’s 13th-century journals describe seeing Jews in Beijing, probably traders who originated from Persia and intermarried. The Jewish population peaked at about 5,000 during the 17th century and lived mostly in Kaifeng, a city in central China. Lin has a Haggadah from China that is more than 300 years old.
The last Chinese rabbi died in 1850. Although the Jewish community eventually was absorbed, more than 50 people still list Jewish ancestry in government documents, Lin said.
But aside from the history books, Lin, a member of San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, found that Jewish and Chinese cultures have plenty in common even today.
“Both emphasize education, family and food,” she said. “Chinese, like Hebrew, reads from right to left. And Confucianism advocates one God, ethical behavior and tikkun olam [repairing the world], although they didn’t call it that.”
Blending the traditions further, after her conversion ceremony at a Liberal synagogue in London, she celebrated at a kosher Chinese restaurant.
Both cultures, Lin has slowly discovered, have black, painful periods in history, too.
When Chinese nationalists took Taiwan from Japan after World War II, they went on a bloody spree, murdering thousands of suspected oppositionists on the island. Militants rapped on doors in the middle of the night yelling for identification papers. Lin’s father watched one slice off the head of his neighbor.
Lin didn’t realize the extent of her parents’ traumatic past until she attended at a conference on children of Holocaust survivors.
After she listened to survivors’ stories, she worried that people would not consider her “a real Jew if I was not connected to the Shoah directly.” Lin then began to ask her parents more about their experiences.
“The conference gave me a way to understand my own childhood, and why I had emotional pain and outbursts,” she said. “I wish there were survivor groups for my parents because they don’t talk about their experiences.”
Jewish rituals have also helped Lin bond with her parents. A few years ago her father needed open-heart surgery and asked Lin, the only religious person in the family, to pray for him.
When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Lin’s rabbi made hospital calls. “My mother was grateful because she has no community.”
Although Lin sees her conversion “as a partial rejection” of what she believes is an excessively conservative Chinese culture, she stresses that “being Jewish does not mean a rejection of being Asian.”
Some Asians peer awkwardly at her Jewish jewelry and seem to imply “you’re not really Asian,” she said. At the same time, most Jews scratch their heads and stare when she enters a synagogue. “You don’t look Jewish,” they say. At each new congregation, Lin wonders if she should pray loudly to prove she belongs.
Several Jewish families that adopted Asian babies have asked Lin how she copes with suspicions from both sides.
“There isn’t one way to look Jewish,” she replies.
“Jews have been all around the world, and we should welcome this diversity. Asian-Jewish children will still have to deal with some animosity. We have to educate. A lot of synagogues have multicultural Judaism classes. It’s not just in history, but happening now.”
Although Lin said the tension among different movements of Judaism toward multicultural Jews at times seems “insurmountable,” she’s never thought of backing away from mixing with other Jews.
On a trip to Israel three years ago, Lin walked right up to the Western Wall during Shabbat while her tour guide nervously scrambled to stop her, warning her it’s not a place for tourists.
She also spent time soaking up the atmosphere of Mea She’arim, the fervently religious quarter in Jerusalem, to the shock of her friends, who thought she walked into the lion’s den.
“I liked walking through there. I do get angered when people try to impose religion on me. But at the same time we need to learn more about the ultra-Orthodox, because we can’t have a dialogue if we refuse to respect them.”
Applying such lessons to her own experience, Lin notes that if people don’t learn more about Asian Jews, she’ll always remain a stranger within the Jewish community.
But from Lin’s perspective, the Jewish future is anything but strange.
“I want a Jewish home. I want Jewish children. I love reading Torah. I love davening. I love Jewish music. Being Jewish influences my whole way of life.”