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Dr. Melissa Inouye was raised in Costa Mesa, California. She served a mission for the LDS Church in the Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission from 2000 to 2001. She studied at Harvard College and delivered the Harvard Oration at the Class Day graduation exercises in the class of 2003. She earned her PhD from Harvard University in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Dr. Inouye's research includes the history of Christianity in China and the study of global Mormonism. Her current book manuscript project is titled China's True Jesus--Charisma and Institution Building in a 20th Century Native Church. Dr. Inouye has taught Chinese history and American religious history at California State University Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Auckland, where she is a current lecturer in Asian studies. Dr. Inouye, her husband, and four children live in the Henderson Valley in Auckland, New Zealand, surrounded by the beautiful Waitakere ranges, vineyards, and yes, a lot of sheep. Welcome, Dr. Melissa Inouye. [APPLAUSE]

Thanks very much to the Church History Department for inviting me to come and speak. It's a real pleasure to speak in this historic hall. As I sat here in the front, I had this kind of uneasily familiar sensation of trying to finish my sacrament meeting talks before the start of a lecture.

We have a mixed audience today, and so I'm trying to hit everyone. So hopefully it will have something to offer to people who are here. So I'm going to start with the story that I'm sure you've heard before. There was a Christian man, the son of a farming family with little education. He observed the preaching of the various denominations, like the Methodists and the Presbyterians, and he felt that these doctrinal disputations among them meant they could not all be God's true Church. One day he had a vision. He saw Jesus standing above him in the air. Jesus gave him a new revelation to correct the errors that had crept into Christianity over the centuries and commanded him to restore the true Church of Jesus Christ. Have you heard this story before? OK, who was this person? Him, too--Joseph Smith, him, too. But that's not the person this story is about. It's about Wei Embo, a Chinese man in Beijing who in 1917 founded the True Jesus Church. Members of the True Jesus Church today believe in their church is the only Christian Church on the face of the earth personally authorized and led by Jesus Christ. This story shows strong historical affinities between key elements of beliefs and practice within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the True Jesus Church, a religious movement in China. These affinities also exist in the case of Japan and in the case of immigrants who left China and Japan to cross the Pacific and made a home for themselves in the United States--my Chinese great-grandparents and grandparents. Today, my goal is to show these transnational crossings--to tell the story of Zion in Asia, Asia in Zion. First, I'll show how beliefs and practices that we tend to call Mormon are also present within longstanding Chinese religious traditions. Second, I'll use the history of my Chinese and Japanese-American families to talk about the history of Mormons as a racialized minority. Finally, I'll conclude with a short personal reflection on how Mormonism has shaped my own family. Now scholars are always giving annoying definitions, but in this talk, I'll use the official name--The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--when I talk about the ecclesiastical institution with administrative headquarters here in Salt Lake City. When I'm speaking more broadly about the history, the doctrines and the practices, the culture, the membership, the organizational forms, and identity associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I'll use the words Mormonism and Mormon. I'll refer to members of this Church as Latter-day Saints and as Mormons. So my overall purpose is to provide alternatives to this conventional interpretation of Mormon history as a story of institutional growth steadily radiating from Salt Lake City--the familiar narrative of how North American missionaries traveled outside the United States to establish branches that over time grew to wards, stakes, and temple districts administered by area offices. Instead, I'd like to provide some Chinese and Japanese examples of other fruitful angles from which to approach Mormon history. Part one of my talk focuses on the Chinese side of my family history. In this part, I'll show that Mormonism is more than simply an ecclesiastical institution. So it's a system of beliefs and practices that fit within a global and a local intellectual history. Part two draws on my Chinese-American and Japanese-American families experience of racism in the United States, including in Utah. I discuss their experiences as racial minorities, and I draw heavily on the work of Paul Reeve's new book, Religion of a Different Color--Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. The word Mormon was a label used by outsiders to classify a group of people as other, marking Latter-day Saints not only as members of a church with distinctive beliefs but as an entirely different group of people that was fundamentally inferior from normal American citizens. Awareness of the racial and ethnic dimensions of Mormon history is critical, because Mormonism is increasingly a global and a multi-ethnic religion. In part three, I'll offer some brief reflections on how much the influence of Mormonism, its teachings, rights, and culture have shaped my own family culture. So today's talk doesn't provide an in-depth historical argument based on research--the academic equivalent of a journey to the center of the earth. Instead, I intend to skip across the mountainsides to take you to three scenic outlooks that reveal Mormonism as part of a global historical landscape. Why do we need a new way? Well, in the first place, the narrative of the institutional expansion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is sort of an internally directed success story--a history most frequently told by Mormons to Mormons. The bulk of Mormon history, even global Mormon history, also happens to be written by mostly white North Americans. In this sense, this kind of history can seem like a bunch of people inside a train, exclaiming at the beauty of the places they pass and commenting on how full the train is getting, but never actually leaving the train. I've ridden this train myself. Maybe I'm still on it. But the problem with this history of the train ride--that is the history of the institution--is that first, you can only see so much from the train. And second, the tale of the train ride isn't very interesting if you're not a passenger yourself. But history that can be interesting and important to everybody is the history that can change the world. A second reason why we need to get away from this institutional train narrative is that in the case of Asian Mormonism, the history of Church institutions is fragmented, hard to follow, and not very long. The LDS Church has had a continuous presence in Japan only since 1947, in Hong Kong since 1955, and in Taiwan since 1956. In the train analogy, Chinese and Japanese would have boarded only a couple of stops ago, and so their history would seem relatively insignificant. But Mormonism is more than its institutional manifestation. Would you agree? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has officially existed only since 1838. Before this, it was known as The Church of Christ of Latter-day Saints, or as the Church of Christ. This is the name of the Church established in 1830. Even before an official ecclesiastical body had been formed, Joseph Smith had had several visions, brought forth the Book of Mormon, and gathered a group of fellow seekers. Indeed, many Mormons would probably assert that Mormon history begins with Adam and Eve. Academics might pin Mormon beginnings in the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, when numerous people and various Christian denominations in the United States saw visions, heard voices, and established churches that set out to restore the primitive Church of Christ. So if the institutional dimension of Mormon history has its limitations in telling the whole story, where then can we turn? To the histories of its people. The history of Mormons and Mormon communities it's not only broad in it's global extent but also deep, shaped decisively by the transmission of moral values and ideas about the world over many generations. It is a history of beliefs, practices, and internal and external relationships. The depth, the continuity, and the richness of Mormon global history comes not from the institution, but from its people. The history of global Mormonism is not like a train--a self-contained entity taking on new passengers at each stop. But rather it's like a river. This river began as a trickle and is fed by many streams and rivulets that run together, broaden, narrow, speed up, divide, and change course. Each of its small and large tributaries comes from a distinctive source and has a distinctive composition that becomes part of the fundamental character of the river itself. When people convert and accept baptism into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they're not suddenly swept off into a new landscape or suddenly transformed into an entirely different sort of Mormon person. It is not a sudden one-way process, but an incremental and mutual one. To return to the river metaphor, the river's character has changed as new minerals and sediment enter its waters. The rivulet adopts a new course, generally in the same direction as it was already headed but now subject to the surge and swirl of the large volumes of water as the river moves through varied terrain seeking the sea.

Just because it's kind of a complicated talk, I'm trying to use my family as a way to kind of anchor the talk. So here is my Japanese father and my Chinese mother. I'm going to tell the story of my Chinese family and my Japanese family. And in the first part, I'll focus mostly on my Chinese family.

OK, so let's talk about Mormonism in China. Here's another definition. Talking about China can be a bit complicated, because in the 19th and 20th century, China began to fragment politically but not ethnically or culturally. So the simplest way to put things for the purpose of today's talk is that usually Mormon history in China is referring to Mormon history in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are both understood as being part of a greater China. The train history of Mormonism in Hong Kong is quite start and stop. In 1853, Mormon elders Jose Stout, James Lewis, and Chapman Duncan left San Francisco and set sail for Hong Kong, an island off the coast of South China that had been a British colony since 1842. The elders arrived on April 28, 1853. Just six weeks later, having failed to make progress in language learning--of course--discouraged by the heat and high rents, they decided to return home. One alternative to returning home would have been to leave Hong Kong and sail north to mainland China. But in 1853, China was convulsed in the most destructive civil conflict in human history--the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1850 to 1864 and cost an estimated 20 million lives. Just to put that number in perspective, this domestic conflict killed one third--this Chinese conflict killed about one third of the estimated 60 million people killed in the Second World War. In June 1853, the Taiping rebels had captured the major city of Nanjing and were within striking distance of the treaty port of Shanghai, where foreign missionaries were allowed to live. There were, of course, many foreign missionaries in China at this time, but the Mormon elders, having failed to establish a foothold in the orderly British colony of Hong Kong, were deterred by the even more uncertain and dangerous situation on the mainland. I personally think they should have gone to China, because I find Mandarin much easier to learn than Cantonese. In 1949, after World War II, another attempt to establish an LDS mission was made but was cut short again in 1951 when the outbreak of the Korean War ignited tensions along the border with communist-controlled mainland China. The mission was reestablished in 1955 under 26-year-old Grant Heaton, a returned missionary from the 1949-1951 mission, who had learned both Cantonese and Mandarin. And there's been a continuous LDS presence in Hong Kong ever since. After 60 years, the number of actively practicing Latter-day Saints in Hong Kong is still quite small--3,594--which reflects the retention rate of around 28 percent. These actively practicing Latter-day Saints comprise 0.0004 percent, 4-10,000ths of the total population. So here we have an example of the limitations of the train narrative. Who but Mormons are interested in the history of 3,594 people? Which scholars outside of Mormon scholars would be interested in studying 4/10,000ths of the Hong Kong population. And yet if we move outside of the train narrative, Mormonism in Hong Kong and greater China fits into other larger stories in a significant way.

For instance, let's look at some of Mormonism's hallmark beliefs and practices and organizational forms, which include a restorationist claim to continuity with Christ's original Church, prophetic leadership through direct revelation in utterance and in new canonical texts, historical attempts to implement religious governance, temple rites, including proxy rights for the dead, a radically egalitarian lay priesthood, and a non-Trinitarian approach to God--that is a concept to the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost as separate beings. Now taken together as one package, these beliefs and practices appear distinctively Mormon. And yet many of these individual elements have existed within Chinese religious history for centuries.

This includes a history of Christianity in China, which is not quite as long as the history of Chinese religion but still quite long. So one example of this is a strong restorationism within the True Jesus Church, which I shared with you at the beginning of the lecture--similar story, different punch line. Another even earlier example of the overlap between Chinese religious tradition and Mormon history is a Taiping Rebellion, the same rebellion that deterred Elders Stout, Lewis, and Duncan from traveling to Shanghai in 1853. The Taiping Rebellion began as a Christian religious movement. Its leader was a man named Hong Xiuquan. Hong had a vision of God the Father--a tall man with a luxuriant golden beard who wore a black dragon robe and a high-brimmed hat. Weeping tears of anger and sorrow, God the Father taught Hong that many of the people on Earth had strayed from righteousness. He introduced Hong to Jesus Christ, whom He called Hong's elder brother. The Father commanded Hong to return to Earth to fight the forces of evil and transform the people. "Fear not and act bravely," He told Hong. "In times of trouble, I will be a protector. Whether they assail you from the left side or the right, what need you fear?" In the wake of his vision, Hong gathered a number of followers. They called themselves the Society of God Worshippers and preached the Ten Commandments. They began to identify the Manchus, China's ruling ethnic class, as the demon devils that the Heavenly Father had identified as evil to be rooted out. They armed themselves and began to sweep northward. Here you see a map of the progress of the Taiping Rebellion. So see if you want to locate Guangdong Province on the map of China. China is kind of like a chicken. Do you see the chicken on the far--like a chicken, head and the tail? So Guangdong is in the breast of the chicken. And it began in the southwestern part of China, called Guangxi, and slowly moved northward up to the very populous and prosperous region of the Yangtze River delta, where you see the cities of Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai.

So in March of 1853, the Taipings captured Nanjing, a former imperial capital city--a really big deal--and established their Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Every Sabbath day, the heavenly kingdom's citizen soldiers met in the chapel to worship in their military units, with 25 families under the guidance of one sergeant. They pooled their economic resources in a single sacred treasury.

Hong also produced a new translation of the Bible, correcting errors in the existing translations of the Old and New Testaments. Now, as I'm sure you've noticed, many elements of Hong's Taiping movement were present within Mormonism, such as the weeping embodied God, the communitarianism, and the translation of Biblical texts. The Western missionaries in China had mixed feelings about Hong Xiuquan and his Christian kingdom. On the one hand, especially in the early years of the rebellion, they were thrilled at the prospect of a Christian China under a government of Christians. Under the Qing dynasty, they lived in constant fear of local anti-Christian uprisings or anti-Christian edicts from the throne curtailing their work. If Hong Xiuquan overthrew the Qing emperor and established a new dynasty, he might protect or even mandate the preaching of the Christian gospel in China. Issachar Roberts, a Baptist missionary from Tennessee who had an audience with Hong, wrote a mildly favorable report of him in the early 1850s. Quote, "He is a man of ordinary appearance, about five feet four or five inches high, well built, round face, regular features, rather handsome, about middle age, and gentlemanly in his manners," close quote. Hong may have made his name as a destroyer of idolatry, Roberts wrote, but now seemed to be acting something in the capacity of a prophet and appeared to be struggling for religious liberty. Now on the other hand, the more Western missionaries learned about Taiping beliefs, the more leery they were of what they saw as Hong Xiuquan's heterodoxy, such as his claim that God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost were separate personages. For instance, in 1861, Joseph Edkins, a veteran missionary with the London Missionary Society, presented Hong Xiuquan with a copy of his essay titled, "That God is Without a Body is True," quoting John chapter 1 verse 19, which read "no man has seen God at any time." The ferocity of Taiping troops and the threat that they might attack the foreign settlements in Shanghai also helped cool foreign enthusiasm for the uprising. Western missionary opinions of the Taipings gradually shifted from favorable to suspicious. The Taipings were called fanatics and other names that reflected the depth of scorn the Chinese Christian establishment felt for Taiping beliefs and practices. In 1853, the Church Missionary Intelligencer, a publication of the London Missionary Society, wrote an update on the Taiping movement in China. It wrote: "They profess in the clearest manner faith in the expiatory sacrifice of our Savior is the only means of reaching heaven, and all together they present a most astonishing compound of truth and error. Some here call them Mormonites, some Puritans, some fanatics, and 100 other names. But the fact is we scarcely know sufficient of them even now to judge what they truly are and what they intend." Now "Mormonites" was a label coined as early as 1831 by outsiders describing the religious movement centered around the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. Later on, the term Mormon also entered popular usage. So why did foreign observers in China apply the label Mormonite to the Taipings? The Taipings had certainly not produced the Book of Mormon, though the revelations of the top leadership were published and studied along with the Bible. There were two reasons for this association. First, some of the Taiping practices, such as community organization that merged ecclesiastical and military, civic, and economic administration resembled those of Mormon communities in Kirtland, Nauvoo, and the Salt Lake Valley. Second, Hong Xiuquan had dozens of concubines, and in the minds of outsiders, Mormons' plural wives were no better than concubines. Finally, Mormonite was not a precisely defined theological term but a label coined to separate members of a certain group from the society of acceptable Christianity and normal human beings. This heterodox label facilitated the perception of Taipings and the Mormons as a homogeneous and degenerate groups worthy of expulsion or even extermination. Indeed, although the foreign community in Shanghai wavered on the question of whether to celebrate or resist the growing Taiping movement, in the end their growing conviction that the Taipings were not true Christians but heretics tipped the balance toward foreign interests, raising an army of Western mercenaries that was decisive in destroying the Taiping forces. In 1864, Qing and Western troops entered the city of Nanjing. Those Taipings who did not commit suicide were slaughtered. This connection between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and early Mormonism is fascinating. Not only were they contemporaneous movements similar in many aspects in their beliefs, practices, and organizational structure, but observers in China actually made a link between the two, despite the great distances and the gaps of communication at that time, and discussed this link across the pages of national Chinese church publications. This historical link between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and early Mormonism moves Mormon history out of a country-based narrative and into larger narratives of global Christian history. It also introduces Chinese history into the history of Mormonism nearly a century prior to the actual establishment of Mormon congregations in greater China. When Chinese and Hong Kong and Taiwan began to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints starting in the mid-1950s, in doing so--did I say late 1950s? The mid-1950s. In doing so, they also joined the Church to a long tradition of revelatory Chinese Christian movements that had set significant precedence and that shared significant religious affinities.

So I'm going to skip a little bit--going to skip some definitions. I'm going to talk about my Chinese-American family that came to the United States as a married couple in 1927. Here you see a picture of my great-grandfather Ju Jin Gor and my great-grandmother Gor Neui Jen and their children at the time.

They lived in Utah. That was the first place they came. They came straight to Utah. And my great-great-great-grandfather was famous in Utah for his celery farming. He was known regionally as the celery king, and according to my grandmother, he's very proud of this--pioneered the use of wrapping bunches of celery in rubber bands. All the other farmers tied it with twine or straw. So when you go to the supermarket and you get your celery that's in a rubber band--my great-grandfather. People came from far and wide to buy his celery seed. He and my great-grandmother lived very frugally, and by 1944, they had saved enough money to pay cash for 30 acres in Buena Park, California, at $500 an acre.

I'm going to skip a really interesting story about how my great-grandmother became friends with the neighbor family that led to their conversion to Mormonism, but if we have time at the end, I'll tell you the story about the cow.

So the Soderburghs, this family in Utah that befriended my great-grandfather and great-grandmother--the Soderburghs were Latter-day Saints, and religious conversations were part of their exchange. In 1938, Gor Neui Jen's two-year-old boy, Wayne, had died. Florence Soderburgh, the mother of the Soderburgh family, told my great-grandmother that the Church's temple ritual a sealing by proxy would bind her son to her and the rest of her family. Gor Neui Jen, who had grown up in China, was familiar with the notion of temples as a sacred space and a place for efficacious ritual. She already believed that it was possible for mortal human beings to become gods after death, as in the case of Mazu, Goddess of fisherman, and Guandi, God of war--both real major gods who had been real historical individuals. She also had a previous understanding of proxy rites. It was the duty of a Chinese son and that son's wife to make offerings of food and money for the benefit of the souls of the deceased. Chinese religion understands the souls of dead family members to be dependent on the living in a very real way. If the living did not nourish their ancestors in the Spirit world through religious rights of offering, they will starve. And vice versa--if the ancestors don't protect those who are living, then misfortune will befall the family. In 1944, Gor Neui Jen chose to be baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her major motivation for this was the understanding this right would qualify her for the further right of binding her dead son so closely to the entire family unit. At that time, her children old enough to be baptized were also baptized, and that's how my Chinese family became Mormon. Now before her death--here's my grandmother. They were married by an LDS bishop at a local member's house in Fullerton, California. Now before her death in her 90s, my great-grandmother instructed her children to continue to make ancestral offerings for her and her husband, who had never been baptized. And to this day my grandmother-- siblings, about half of whom are active practicing Latter-day Saints, meet at the family gravesite every spring to burn incense and offer fruit, boiled chicken, and wine. When I was living in Hong Kong recently, my family and I did the same thing for my great-grandfather, the father of Ju Jen Gor. Once a year on the Tomb-Sweeping Day spring holiday set aside for this purpose, we traveled to a cemetery near the PRC border. We tidied the tombstone and burned incense.

Now Tomb-Sweeping Day is an important family holiday for Latter-day Saints in greater China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and probably also in the PRC. In the past, some zealous North American mission presidents forbade Latter-day Saints from participating in ancestral rites, but current Church policies dictate that incense and offerings are decorum, not religion--gestures of love and respect in the same manner as laying flowers on a grave in a Western context. And yet in their ultimate purpose, Chinese ancestral rites are not much different from Mormon rites of dedicating graves of proxy religious ordinances for ancestors, because their enactments are the responsibility of the living to care for the souls of the dead. My great-grandmother Gor Neui Jen brought Mormonism into her Chinese family. She also brought Chinese religious understandings into Mormonism, a stream that now flows within Mormonism's global waters. In sum, the many intersections between Chinese and Mormon history suggest a number of new dimensions in which we can pursue the study of Mormonism. From an institutional perspective, Mormon history in China seems insignificant, but if we look at the bigger picture, we see that Mormonism in China exists within a tradition of Chinese Christian restorationist movement, such as the Taiping Rebellion and the True Jesus Church. This connection isn't interesting simply because it explains reasons why Chinese people might join the LDS Church. It's interesting because in many ways, the Taipings and the True Jesus Church were trying to accomplish exactly the same goal as the Latter-day Saints and were viewed as threatening by the Christian establishment in exactly the same way. Both the Taiping and the True Jesus Church precedence yield rich case studies of how interpretations of authentic authoritative Christianity have been expressed in a Chinese context. And if there's time at the end of the talk, remind me to share one really fascinating example from the True Jesus Church and the LDS Church about the translation of the Chinese Book of Mormon. Now here's some more pictures of Tomb-Sweeping Day.

Of course, Chinese expressions of Christianity are just as authentic as American expressions of Christianity or Greek expressions of Christianity. Jesus was a Jew who lived in Jerusalem. His disciples have done their best to interpret his teachings wherever they are. The case of my Chinese great-grandmother's conversion shows how Chinese who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints don't suddenly convert in the terms of exchanging their worldviews for those of white Americans in Bountiful, Utah. Rather, they bring deeply-rooted moral values and ontological assumptions into the Church. The view of Mormonism that one gets by studying scriptures, talks, and handbooks is just the tip of the iceberg. Mormonism is a lived religion, and those who live it also define it. Now I'd like to talk about race. So biologically, there's no such thing as race. Combinations of genes determine things like height, eye color, hair color, skin pigmentation, propensity for certain diseases, and so on. Biological anthropologists say that genetically there's no significant difference between human beings from one or another part of the world-- no way to genetically define or discern a black or Chinese or white person. Race is a social construct based on how people interpret physical, national, and cultural characteristics and use these interpretations to group people into categories. This is probably an imprecise definition. I'm not a critical race studies scholar, but I hope that it will suffice for the purposes of this discussion tonight. My Chinese-American and Japanese-American grandparents who had been born and raised in the United States and who spoke English as their first language were discriminated against and hated because they were not white-- because they were racialized.

Despite my Chinese family's friendships with some of their Utah neighbors, they still had to contend with racism. Their farmland had to be leased because Utah law banned Chinese and Japanese from owning land. These laws went way back into the latter part of the 19th century. For example, in 1888, Utah law banned Asians from marrying whites.

The racist discrimination enshrined in the laws of the land was reflected on the playground and on the neighborhood streets. As my grandmother was growing up in Salt Lake City, she remembered that local neighbor kids shouted "chink, chink China" at her and her siblings, and told them to go back to China, though all of them had been born in Utah and had never been to China. The boys threw rocks at her little sister as she walked home from school, hitting her in the head so she bled. As a matter of fact, Chinese were the first group to be officially excluded in US law. So here you have a cartoon that's actually in support of the Chinese, decrying the racist law of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. You see the Golden Gate of Liberty is closed, and the Chinese man, though he carries with him industry, order, peace, and sobriety, is locked out because of his race.

Now this racism also affected Japanese in the United States. And my Japanese family came to the United States in the late 19th century. Here's a picture of Sashichi Inouye, my great-grandfather, who came to Hawaii as an indentured servant to work in the sugarcane fields. He came from a beautiful farm in Inaibaru, Japan, to pay a family debt. And in Hawaii, he met the woman who he married, Mikano Inouye, and they eventually settled in California. So here are their children at the time--Mary Tomiye, Charles Ichiro, and Helen Kikuye. And the little boy on Sashichi's lap is my grandfather, Charles Inouye.

Here's my grandfather in 1920 growing up in Northern California.

If you look in this family picture taken around 1936, some of the people in this picture are sitting with us in the audience today, which is wonderful. If you look in the back, you see the Stanford pennant, and that's because my grandfather went to Stanford University. His sisters sacrificed and worked very hard to pay for his tuition to send him to school. Here he is a member of the Stanford boxing team around 1935. My grandmother was also born and raised in the United States. This is a picture of her from the late 1930s in Washington. So these are all-American kids, and yet in 1941 with the outbreak of World War II, Japanese came under a special suspicion.

Here is some slides--some pictures showing the scenes from the internment of Japanese-Americans beginning in February of 1942. All persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast had to pack one suitcase only to leave their homes, to leave their farms, their businesses their education and go to these prison camps, essentially, in the interior of the United States. Here's a picture on the left-hand side--on your left-hand side, you'll see a picture of the Santa Anita racetrack where they were first sent when they were first kind of collected and gathered up and sent. It was a staging area for the internment camps. And if you look at this picture, you'll see that there are horse stalls--the stalls for the horses that were then whitewashed to be turned into rooms. And they were whitewashed so hastily that in many cases they whitewashed right over the manure that was caked on the sides of the stalls, so that if you touched them, they broke open like green sores.

Both my grandfather and my grandmother were sent to the camp barracks at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. And this is a picture of how it looked in 1942. In the background, you see that unusually shaped formation on the mountain. That's Heart Mountain. Now it was prison, but the one good thing about the prison is that it was dating paradise. All of these young people were locked together, and there was nothing to do. So my grandparents met as teachers in the Buddhist Sunday School at Heart Mountain. On the left-hand side, you see my grandfather wearing the hat, and in the middle, wearing the white coat, you see my grandmother, Bessie Shizuko Murakami. So they were married in the camp. They had their first child in the camp. They made the best of it, but at times my grandfather was frustrated. And here's this very entertaining and poignant poem that he wrote, called "That damned fence." It starts, "They've sunk in posts deep into the ground. They strung up wires all the way around with machine gun nests just over there and sentries and soldiers everywhere. We're trailed like rats in a wired cage to fret and fume with impotent rage. Yonder whispers the lure of the night, but the damned fence assails our sight. We all love life and our country best. Our misfortune to be here in the West to keep us penned behind the damned fence is someone's notion of national defense." So this is the experience that my grandparents had--my Chinese grandparents and my Japanese grandparents--this racialization and discrimination. And yet, it is also the experience that Mormons had. Here you see this very interesting cartoon from 1881 from The Wasp, a California newspaper. And it says "Three Troublesome Children." So here you see the mother, Columbia. She's got these three troublesome kids. You see the Indian on the ground playing with soldiers, bashing them apart. You see the Chinese immigrant with a long [INAUDIBLE,] and on her left knee, you see the Mormon polygamist. So all three of them are the same kind of problem--three troublesome children. Mormons were included in with Chinese and Native Americans. So Chinese and Mormons were conflated in American popular discourse as despotic, low-class, lascivious, and un-American. And in this part of the talk, I'm going of quote heavily from Paul Reeve's work, Religion of a Different Color--Race and the Mormon Struggle For Whiteness, a really wonderful book that came out in the beginning of this year. So Reeve says that the Mormons and Chinese were seen as part of a national crisis. The conflation of the two groups, Reeve says, occurred against a backdrop of growing American consternation over what was frequently described as the yellow peril of Asian immigration. Activists, newspaper editors, clergy, and especially politicians decried Chinese immigrants as un-American pagans--licentious, filthy, diseased, imbecilic, opium-smoking heathens, people who are inherently incapable of progress. They were lewd polygamists with low morals, proponents of a new form of slavery, and adherents to despotic systems of government. In short they were racially inferior and incapable of assimilation. With the exception of opium smoking, Mormons were described by outsiders in the same ways.

Reeve points out that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Edmunds Act banning polygamy in 1882 were signed into law less than two months apart. In many ways, they were seen as long sought for answers to both oriental diseases then plaguing the American body politic. Reeve writes that sometimes social commentators across the nation linked them as the vexed Chinese and Mormon questions, or the Chinese and Mormon curses, or the Chinese and Mormon problems. Sometimes they debated which was worse--the Mormons and the Chinese--and how to best handle both. One California headline declared "Chinese and Mormons--Two Classes of People Who Must Be Made to Go." A newspaper in a Utah mining town concurred, "Polygamy and the Chinese Must Go." A report from Arizona announced, "We can stand the Chinese, but no Mormon polygamists."

More lighthearted, the National Republican joked, "There is one good thing that can be said about the Chinese--none of them are Mormons."

So not only--OK, and here you see the connection between the Mormons being linked with Chinese-ness and other Asian-ness--Asiatic-ness--and polygamy. So here you see a cartoon from 1886. You see is a white knight in shining armor--a European knight. And he's got a sword, and the sword is the Edmunds Act, which eliminated polygamy. And on the ground you see a Mormon with a dark face, dressed in Turkish clothes--the baggy pants, the curved shoes, the beard, the turban on the head, with a club of polygamy in his hand. So there's this orientalized image of a Mormon. Now not only were Mormons linked to the Chinese, they were specifically singled out as being in and of themselves physically different--a race apart, homogeneous and inferior. They were labeled as a class of people that was completely different and entirely peculiar, not just because of their beliefs but who they actually physically were. So this is a really wonderful quote that Paul Reeve found in his book, Religion of a Different Color. It's written by a Dr. Roberts Bartholow, an army doctor who was here in Salt Lake City for two years. So he knows his stuff. He's been here for two years, and this is what he says, "The Mormon, of all the human animals now walking the globe is the most curious in every relation." And then he describes them. They have "an expression of countenance and a style of feature, which may be styled the Mormon expression and style--an expression compounded of sensuality, cunning, suspicion, and smirking self-conceit. The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage, the greenish-colored eyes, the thick protuberant lips, the low forehead, the light yellowish hair, and the lank angular person constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance." So they were a new race--this new race, which is what we call racialization.

They weren't actually--they were seen as that. Dr. Reeve in his book has this other really wonderful image.

Not only were Mormons not normal humans, they were maybe even subhuman or a different kind of species. This cartoon is called "The Cephalopod of the Great Basin--Genus Polypi Mormoni Priesthoodi." I don't know if I pronounced that in the correct way. And it shows Brigham Young with these octopus-like tentacles coming out of his head, with kind of the characteristics of Mormonism, like tithing, polygamy, and so on--so a different species of human.

One visitor to Salt Lake City said, "If I were a scientific phrenologist, I would undertake some classification." She's talking about a Mormon worship service that she attended--a sacrament meeting, a Mormon sacrament meeting. "There were a few intelligent countenances interspersed with sly cunning and disgusting sensuality--in both male and female, a large mass of credulity, and an abundance of open-mouthed, gawky stupidity." Now you think this is funny, but this is actually--this was a popular view of the majority of people about Mormons at this time, which makes you question whether or not someday people will laugh at the views that we take for granted.

A writer for Harper's Weekly in 1858 said he had "never yet seen a Mormon but that something ailed his eyes. They are sunken or dark or ghastly or glaring. There's certainly some mania in all Mormon eyes. None of them can look you straight or steadily in the face." And finally, another wonderful image from Dr. Reeve's book.

One person analyzed the eyes and the shape of the eyes of those who were monogamous and those who were polygamists. So Dr. Joseph Simms argued that a person's inclination toward monoeroticity or monogamy versus polyeroticity or polygamy was evidenced in the shape and vertical opening of the eye. Dr. Simms wrote, "The amount of love for the opposite sex may be known by the fullness of the eyes and its quality by the shape of the commissures or opening between the lids of the eyes. When the opening is quite almond shaped," as in the case of Brigham Young, he said, "promiscuous love prevails in that form. If the commissure has great vertical measurement, the love is connubial." So here he compared the eye of Brigham Young to the eye of this woman, named Miss Margaret Fuller Osoli, who preferred to drown rather than leave her husband. So I've got to get back to my normal notes. So in sum, one of the powerful themes in American history is the story of racialization and discrimination against groups who are seen as fundamentally different and inherently threatening because of this difference, including Chinese, Japanese, and Mormons. For late-19th-century Americans, Chinese immigrants and Mormons were part of the same problem. Like Chinese, Mormons were seen as an entirely different sort of people--alien and unassimilable.

After the 1890 manifesto banning polygamy and Utah's admission to statehood in 1896, Mormons worked hard to get themselves on the other side of this assimilation fence by adopting the same mainstream American discourses of whiteness and white racial superiority of which they had only recently been the targets.

Now you come to the third part of the talk--the third view--reflections on a Chinese, Japanese-American, Canadian, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Mormon family. That sounds like too many families, but it's actually just one family. It's my family. So this is my Chinese mother, my Japanese father. Here is my Chinese, Japanese-American self. There is my Canadian American husband, and out there in Spanish Fork being babysat are my Chinese, Japanese, Canadian American, Hong Kong, New Zealand children.

And perfect. So I'd like to say two things about how Mormonism has shaped my own family, and I'll use my Japanese-American family as an example. And many of them are sitting here and if I talk about the faults of the Japanese-American family, I'm not talking about you; I'm just talking about my faults that I get from my Japanese-American family. So our family likes to say that we have bad tempers because we're descended from killers. We were samurai in Japan. That's why we have bad tempers. It's true that we were descended from samurai, and it's also true that we have bad tempers.

The Japanese society--Japanese culture is Confucian culture. Is very hierarchical. It's very patriarchal, and there's a focus on the group--on collective identity. And I'll say two things about how Mormonism has entered the stream of my own family, which is a first. And then we find where I said this. First it's in organizational structure. Mormonism has provided tools for my family--for keeping my family together--for rituals of togetherness that help to continue the importance that we place on community--on our family unit. So for example, things like opening and closing prayers opening and closing songs. Our family is famous for what we call, for lack of a better word, programs--kine of like there's a primary program. But we do lots of programs in our family, where we make all the children come together, and we preach, basically, about our ancestors--about this ancestor or that ancestor, or tell this story or that story. And there's something about the rituals of saying a prayer or having an opening song that set an atmosphere of teaching--set an atmosphere of transmission of knowledge, and also an atmosphere of reverence for the family. So that's a part of our family culture that I think comes directly from Mormonism that helps us to maintain our togetherness--to maintain our own family rituals as well as our religious belief. Another aspect of Mormonism that has changed my family, I believe, is the discourse of Jesus Christ and His teaching of unconditional love, of forgiveness, of tolerance, and of love for people, even when they're not doing their job, so to speak. In our family, or in myself, I feel like I learned a lot of determination and hard work and also kind of a tendency to be demanding of other people. And one of the great blessings in my life is the influence of the gospel, which counterbalances this in some ways--for not always demanding of people but which teaches us to forgive and to love unconditionally. And this is a great blessing and one of the great challenges and joys of my life.

So at the end of this talk, be sure to ask about the cow story and the Book of Mormon translation story if you're interested. At the close of this talk, I'd like to share some scriptures from 2 Nephi, which I'm sure you're all familiar with or which many of you are familiar with but which I think are very relevant for our discussion tonight. "Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men and women, and that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea; and that I rule in the heavens above and the earth beneath; and I bring forth my word unto the children of men and women, yea even upon all the nations of the Earth? For I command all, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I shall speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world." And of course, in 2 Nephi in the Book of Mormon--2 Nephi 26:33, it says, speaking of the Lord, "he invited them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black or white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth heathen; and all are alike and to God, both Jew and Gentile. So my three main points, because maybe you've forgotten at the end of this long talk--the first point is mostly for people who don't usually care about Mormon history. And I agree, why would you care about Mormon history if it's about people writing from the inside of their train? But global Mormon history is a river, not a train. And it intersects with very interesting aspects of Chinese history--of history all over the world. It's rich, and it's not just about 3,594 people in Hong Kong. We can look at these different dimensions, and we'll get different perspectives. The second is actually directed at my fellow religionists. So Mormons have been racialized just like Chinese and Japanese and Blacks. And the solution and that struggle to evade that racialization is a story of Dr. Paul Reeve's book, Religion of a Different Color--Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. That struggle for whiteness was the Mormon attempt to become assimilated into American culture. Now of course, the solution for racialization is not a struggle for whiteness, especially not now, but all are alike unto God. We're a global Church with many different kinds of people inside the Church. You haven't gone into the world, but the world has come here. So it's important to remember that and to take it seriously. This needs to be reflected in our own understanding of what it means to be a member of Tthe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Finally, Mormonism's religious resources include not only beliefs and rituals but also organizational structures. And these structures play out in different ways. In my family, it means that it helps us maintain our Chinese, Japanese, Confucian community solidarity. In places like New Zealand or like my current ward in Henderson Valley, New Zealand, which is mostly Samoans and Tongans, it helps to preserve--what I observe is that it helps to preserve certain cultural structures from the Pacific Islander cultures.

So my final point is that sometimes--the title of the series is Pioneers in Every Land. And I think when you think pioneers in every land, you probably thought pioneers in all the lands outside of America. Is that kind of what you thought? But you are one of the many lands where God works. And I think that sometimes we think that the pioneers were cool because they were the first--because they started something long ago, because they faced challenges that now seem foreign to our own--that we can rest on the laurels of our pioneer ancestors, so to speak. Because being a pioneer is something that a family does only once when they join the Church. But maybe we should realize that each generation has its own pioneers. What does it mean to be a pioneer? Pioneers aren't necessarily the first people to live in a place. It's not just about novelty or virgin land. When the Saints came to the Salt Lake Valley, there were already people here. It was home to Native American tribes who had been living here for thousands of years. Pioneers are people who do something hard, something that most people are not currently doing because of the difficulty. Sometimes they don't do it of their own accord; sometimes they're forced to do it. Sometimes the challenge comes to them and instead of them seeking it out. I am a descendant of Mormon pioneers. They didn't pull handcarts or where bonnets. They didn't walk across the plains. They did sail across the sea. They were excluded and driven from their homes and imprisoned. They did make incredible sacrifices in order to nourish their deepest beliefs. And I will be a Mormon pioneer by finding new ways to embrace our global brotherhood and sisterhood--to be a peacemaker and a representative of the Savior in our world that has moved into global territory. This is a triumph but also the beginning of a monumental challenge. I pray that we will take to heart the meaning of the great commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. Who is my neighbor? I think we all know the overwhelming answer to this question. I pray that the Spirit will give us strength to live up to this. I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. [APPLAUSE]

OK, do we have any questions? The cow story. So this is the story of how my parents--how my Chinese grandparents became Mormons. So they lived in a farm. They had their farm, and across the street from the farm, there was a woman named Grandma Floyd. And she saw my Jin Gor Ju, Ju Jin Gor, working every day in the field. And so she would sometimes give him food and give him milk. Now for a Chinese person, traditionally milk is just completely disgusting secretion that only the barbarians in central Asian steppes eat--drink. No reasonable person drinks milk. But he found that he liked it. So he bought a cow, but he didn't want to milk it. So they kind of came up with a symbiotic arrangement. So the grandson of Grandma Floyd, a member of the Soderburgh family, would milk the Ju family cow, and then they would split the milk both ways. And this kind of symbiotic relationship also continued. For example, the Soderburgh boys were much older than the Ju kids. They were young children. They were like you know single digit aged children, and the Soderburgh boys were teenagers. And so they went to my great-grandfather and asked for work on the farm, and he employed them on his farm. And that was how, though it was the Great Depression, they were able to pay for their LDS missions. During World War II, they also shared their ration coupons. So the Soderburghs didn't eat that much meat, and they gave their ration coupons to the Ju family, and the Ju didn't eat that much sugar, so they gave their sugar to the Soderburghs. So that was that. That kind of mutual exchange was what led them to eventually becoming LDS.

Any other questions? Yes. Oh, this is very interesting.

So sometimes when you're trying to express Christianity in a new cultural context--and this has happened many times. It happened in Europe. It happened in England. It happened in every single place it goes. This happens. But this is what happened when Christianity tried to be--when people in China were trying to figure out how Christianity fit within their context. So I'll do this first, actually. So the True Jesus Church in 1919, they're trying to restore Christ's original Church. They're trying to do everything just like the Bible. They're trying to adhere completely to the Bible. And they notice that the word for Jehovah is Ye He Hua, and the word for Jesus is Ye Su. So do you see a similar character there? The first one, right? Yeah. Now these are just transliterations, but a Chinese name is usually a three or a two-character name that starts with the surname first, and then it has like the two character or the one character personal name. So Ye He Hua and Ye Su look a lot like Chinese names. Ye would be the surname. So in 1919, they decided--they looked at the Bible, and they said clearly the name of God is important. And the Bible says to take upon yourself the name of God, so we must all surname ourselves Ye. So for a period of time, they all changed their names so they had the same last name as Jesus and Jehovah--Ye.

And how did this happen in the LDS context? Well, this is really interesting. So in 1957, Grant Heaton, the first mission President of the Hong Kong mission, was trying to put together a committee to translate the Book of Mormon. And the Chinese literary tradition is so rich, so deep. There's so many different ways that it works. It's just really astounding. So they decided that--I'll read this quote: "First, second, third, and fourth Nephi were to be written in the style of historical writing." And there is this style. "Alma, Mosiah, Helaman, and Moroni would be written in a military historical style. Ether would be written in an older literary style, reflecting on the date of its recording." And as an example, he mentions his brother. Brother Tsao Tsoi-Cheung was educated before the literature reform period of the 1930s and 1940s. His writing style is very elegant and typical of an older style. So just as in the original Book of Mormon that's written by different authors, different periods of time, they said, well, we should reflect this. And so they set about applying the richness and the complexity and the diversity of the Chinese literary tradition--historical historical tradition, religious tradition--all of these texts. And they drew on those resources to produce a translation of the Book of Mormon. Now unfortunately, with the transition to another mission president after granting--this this translation approach was abandoned, and the subsequent translations of the Book of Mormon had been in a unified or homogenized style of language, as they probably are in most other languages, which is interesting. I can see the problems that you've got--the the Book of Mormon being translated in these various local styles around the world, but it's still such an interesting idea--drawing on that same complexity and expressing that in the translation. Any other questions? Why did you choose to live in New Zealand? Well, maybe in that sense, I was also a forced pioneer. So we were living in Hong Kong--my husband and I. And he was a Hong Kong lawyer, and Hong Kong lawyers have terrible, terrible schedules, where if he came home early, he came home at 10:30 at night. Normally it was--well, yeah. And sometimes he came home at 2:00 in the morning. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. So we decided to switch, and I went on the job market, and I took an academic job at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. And this year he's been living a blissful life, which he says is like having Saturday every day--hiking and taking pictures.

Any other questions? We were in the war long before United States. I had a 17-year-old brother who joined the army to try to keep his younger brother out so his younger brother could go on a mission. All my brothers were in the war. There were only four girls left at home. We ran the farm the best we could.

We were given some help from Japanese, who came from the coast and lived on our farm. I was always sad, even as a child, that that happened. But I don't know what to do about it. I could not hear everything you said. Is your name Elder, or you go by--did I hear that right? What is your name? My name is Melissa. Melissa. And what were you introduced as? I'm a lecturer at the University of Auckland. A lecturer. I wish I could have heard everything, and I'm very sorry that I couldn't. It's not your fault. You speak quickly, and the words you say are good, but I could not understand it all. I am sorry that you've had this experience. I'm sorry that you feel that there is--and I know this has happened to all people, and I'm sorry. And I'm sorry for your experience as a beautiful young woman--sorry for your parents and your grandparents. But this happens.

It doesn't make America less than what God wants it to be.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I didn't know that they also went to Canada to work on farms. I knew that the internees also went to places in the United States to work, which is actually how they first came to Utah. But I didn't know that internees were sent to Canada as well. That's very interesting. Any other questions? Yes. Does the True Jesus Church still exist? Oh, yes it does. Yes, they're everywhere. You can find their website. You can read my dissertation.

Any other questions?

Hi. Can you share the story of how your Japanese family became LDS? Oh, yes. That's interesting, actually. So just as this woman so helpfully described, during the internment in World War II, towards the end of the war some Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave the camps and to go work in places around America and apparently in Canada. And in my family, Henry Mitari, the father of some of the people here, went to Utah to work. And he was a farmer there. And so after the internment camps, Charles and Bessie Inouye joined him in Sigurd, Utah, where they farmed. And at that time, my grandfather felt like it was important for his children to have some sort of religious training. Remember, he met my grandmother in the Buddhist Sunday School, so they were Buddhists. And his mother, Mikano Inouye, had been a very devout Jodo Shinshu Buddhist. But he felt like it was important for them to have religious training, and there was no Buddhist temple in Sigurd, Utah. So they allowed them to go to the local Mormon Church with the neighbor kids. And eventually my Uncle Dylan was baptized, and all of their children. And then they themselves were baptized later.

Any other questions?

I don't know a question, but I just want to say that when I was young, my father worked on the railroad in a small town, and his boss was a Japanese man. And the family that he had was well-respected in this small town. This would have been in the late '20s and the early '30s. And then when I grew up in high school, the internment camp, Topaz in Millard County, was brought into that and put in the desert west of Delta. And at that time, there were more people in Topaz than there was in the whole county that they had. And when I was in high school, we would go down, and they would be coming into school. But I never felt, and I was never taught, that there was prejudice, because I had known the other family. We had had that. And that although they came to the town that was there and they came in and out of the stores and things like that, I think that the people felt bad rather than prejudiced toward the people that had to go out there in the middle of the desert to live. So I think not everybody has had a negative experience that way, except--and I just want to know that everything. When I went to college, my roommate was a Japanese girl whose family had to come from the internment camp. And so I think that has been a positive in my life, you know, that I had to have that experience and know the good in all people. Oh, certainly. I feel especially at the individual level--the level of individuals or families or within communities--there are so many positive experiences as well as negative experiences of racism. I mean, I even married a white guy.

I do feel at that time, the reason why the Japanese--there was a national executive order to round up all of those Japanese-Americans and send them to camps--to remove them from their homes and from their livelihoods--that wouldn't have happened if everybody in America had felt kind, positive, feelings toward the Japanese. And it just behooves us in the present day to remember that these things have happened and to make sure that even though we think that we're nice, kind people--to make sure that we don't allow things to happen on the larger level--on the national level in politics or whatever--that would affect these racist approaches that we don't ourselves feel that we don't want to have. Anyone else?

You mentioned about the small percentage of members of the Church in Hong Kong. I'm interested in that, because my older brother--after he retired, he was called on a mission to go work on the temple in Hong Kong. So I'd like to know a little bit more about that. About why it's small, or about the really awesome-- About the Church and the activity and so forth in Hong Kong. And I'm curious, with such a small number--0.0004 was it?--percentge--how they were able to get a temple in Hong Kong with such a small number of people. OK, so there's two answers to that question. One is about density, and the second is about strategic location. So in terms of density, Hong Kong's an island that I think has the densest population--or one of the densest populations in the world. There's seven million people in this really, really, really small area on this island. So if you took 3,594 Mormons and put them on Vashon Island where my husband is from, they would be almost, you know, 40 percent of the population. So one of the reasons why the percentage is so small is because there's a lot of people in Hong Kong--a lot. The second reason for having a temple in Hong Kong is that it's very strategically located. It's kind of central. You can go to North Asia, you can go to South Asia from Hong Kong. It's easy to get to. It's a free society. The Hong Kong airport is really nice. It's just--things work really efficiently in Hong Kong, and it's a good logistical base. [APPLAUSE]