A Really Short Skirt

My acting teacher, Mark Lewis, is always saying that we need to learn how to advocate for our characters. He told a story once about how his mentor left an acting classroom in tears because the actor who was performing a part was not putting his heart into it. "That character is trapped on the page," he said to the student, "you are the only chance he has to be heard."

There are so many things about acting, and my acting classes, that I want to understand but don't. And the idea of advocating for the characters--not just faking their emotions--was so hard for me to grasp. So when I was assigned the part of Georgie in "Spike Heels" by Theresa Rebeck, I had no idea that I was about to get the chance to see just what Mark was talking about.

The first thing I noticed about the part was that Georgie liked to use the f-word. Her final speech of the scene was just littered with it, and I had mixed feelings. While I'm not opposed to swearing on occasion, I don't want to be flippant about it. I do hold a distinction between a character and myself, so I didn't automatically rule it out. At a small Christian college, Mark would never assign a part like that without first knowing the actor. But in Acting II, he leaves it up to the student to make her own decisions about what she will do with the text.

I read the play before starting rehearsals, and I finished it in tears. It was unlike most of the plays I'd read, and it was absolutely not the best. But something in Georgie's character struck a chord in me, and I felt the first tug of wanting--really wanting--to do her justice. To advocate for her. She was a girl who used her sexuality brazenly to get what she wanted or needed, because that's how the world she knew worked. The scattered f-words in my scene were nothing to most of her lines in the play. My heart broke when I read her words about how she made a big fuss and yelled, but in the end she always did what those more powerful than her--in this case the men taking advantage of her at work--wanted.

Rehearsals began and the work was much more intense than anything I'd done before. I was out on a limb with Georgie, and I knew it. I felt like I had nothing in common with her, nothing I could relate to except that I wanted to do her justice. I chose to swear because I cared about her--if I hadn't cared I wouldn't have left the f-words in. But I felt that I had to play her as she would be seen. But over and over, when we did the scene, I felt like an impostor. What did I really know about her life, and how could I possibly play her?



The day we did the scene in class, I changed into a really short skirt. Like, really, really short. If I bent over you would have seen my panties, and I wore spike heels and a tank-top. I felt incredibly self-conscious. When Mark asked me how I was doing, before the scene began, I said, "I'm wearing a really short skirt." He asked me to come out from behind the couch I was unconsciously hiding behind, and I stepped out to stand in front of my classmates and accept their gaze. It was terrifying. When the scene was over, I told Mark that I didn't feel like I could play Georgie. I just didn't have the experience. But he shook his head and said, "You've stood in line at the supermarket and seen the magazines. You know what it's like to be a woman in this culture."

We continued rehearsing, and I began to feel more comfortable in the scene, if not with Georgie. And then I decided to do a monologue from a different part of the play in class. I chose one of Georgie's rants at Andrew, the man who has taken her under his wing and is, somewhat unintentionally, also taking advantage of her. That day I was so nervous I was shaking, but as I did laps around the room, trying to focus on "winning the scene," as Mark would say, I knew it was either go big or go home. I was nothing like Georgie, but I wanted so badly to advocate for her. It was new and terrifying to feel that way.

I've never acted like I did the day I gave that monologue. I think everyone in the room could feel my focus as I stood in my bare feet and my negligee and shouted more profanities at Josh, one of the guys in the class that Mark asked to help me. "Pause after you say the word," Mark said. "You chose to say it, and you need to own up to that." As I stood before Josh--a huge, muscular man--and shouted in his face, I felt for the first time in my life like I was doing this character justice. I was advocating for a character who had no one else to do it. And she was no longer trapped on the page--not for the few minutes each time I strapped on my spike heels.

I don't think that circumstances make bad decisions okay. I think the character was responsible for all of her decisions, and I'm not justifying women like Georgie who choose to live the way she did. But through the experience, I gained a little bit of understanding, and a little bit of respect. And I loved her. More than anything, I just loved her. She needed to turn her life around, and the way the play ended, that wasn't gonna happen. But what enabled me to play her was that love, and that deep desire to make her voice heard.

The effects of Georgie were farther reaching than just my realizations. On the last day of class several people spoke about my short skirt, and the way they judged me as soon as I stepped into the room. Just like people would judge Georgie--and perhaps rightly so. But I hope that if the class got anything, they would understand her need to be heard. And I hope the next time they see a woman like Georgie, they won't condemn her without loving her.

~Ruthie

Cambodian Sex Trade

During my vacation, I was unexpectedly stuck in Phnom Penh while waiting for my stolen passport to be replaced. Upon arriving in the city, my roommate and I didn't have a hotel booked and ended up heading to the closest hostel that seemed decent. Everything about it seemed fine - location was great, rooms were big and clean, owners were helpful - until I woke up in the middle of the night to hear English speaking men making a ruckus with Cambodian women. They were audibly very drunk and in the process of the completing the night by getting the women into their hostel rooms. The next morning, I sat outside my room in order to get a better wireless connection and witnessed one of saddest scenes. The two men where young Americans and they were in the process of paying and sending off the Cambodian prostitutes they had brought back in the night.

The women's eyes were bloodshot and though they laughed and smiled at the men as they said goodbye, the look of emptiness was unmistakable. One girl sat across from me while waiting for her friend and my heart broke for her. I don't know how exactly to describe her expression, but in addition to emptiness, it contained sadness, weariness, and hardness. It was not the face of a woman who liked herself. I felt repulsed by her, but hut for her; however, the real repulsion came when I looked at the men. Deep, deep anger, loathing, and hatred was inside of me. I felt nauseous. A very long string of curses came to mind, but I won't write them down. What misery for all involved. What evil really does exist.

A woman can legally work as a prostitute in Cambodia when she is 18 years old, but many are forced, or sold, into the work. I don't know what these two women's stories were, but bumping into them gave a whole new meaning to the anti-trafficking signs posted all over the country. Many hotels in Phnom Penh specifically state if they are "No Sex Tourism Allowed" locations and I quickly learned to look for such places when booking places to stay the city.

Please take time to watch the following videos. The third one isn't possible to embed, but please take the time to click on the url.

This is the largest form of slavery in our modern world. This evil does exist beyond your computer screen. I've seen it now first hand.

~Hannah





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXlg9bacB1o

One Woman's Story of Abortion And Merciless Redemption

I just finished reading Chi An's A Mother's Ordeal and I couldn't recommend it more. During the first few chapters, I was bored with the typical tales of the Cultural Revolution. You can read a slew of other books, all full of horrible, dehumanizing descriptions of China's chaos. But by half way through, Chi An's tale grabbed me in the gut and I found myself waking up to an extremely personal admission of victimization and guilt unmatched by other such memoirs.

Chi An tells her story of growing up, finding a husband, and starting a family, all against the backdrop of China's population control policies. After suffering the cruel delivery of her first child and the forced abortion of her second, Chi An finds herself bitter and self-focused. Willing to do anything for the benefit of her own family and despite deeply suppressed ethical qualms, she takes charge of enforcing the One Child Policy within a local work unit. It is not until she accidentally becomes pregnant for a third time while living in the US with her husband that Chi An wrestles with her deepest longings and deepest guilt. The couple decide to fight to keep this new child alive and in the process are forced to separate all ties with their homeland.

Better than any educated argument or theological belief, Chi An's words from the heart reveal a universal longing for life and the guilt that ensues when it is prematurely ended. Growing up in a world where logical and practical arguments for abortion abound, Chi An continues to be plagued by the human desire to conceive and bare children and when in the end, she becomes complicit in the forced termination of a generation, she and her colleagues suffer from nightmares, recurring sights and sounds, and emotional torment all oriented around the "little hands" that will come after them for justice in the next life. There is no reason Chi An should suffer from guilt considering the positive environment towards abortion in which she came of age, and yet something inside her refuses to accept the actions both committed against her and by her as innocent.

What finally intrigued me most about her account lies within its closing chapters as Chi An retells her first experience with Catholicism. In a beautiful reflection on why people would worship a "dying God," Chi An simply and movingly describes the apologetics of the cross from an outside and Asian perspective. I am doubtful if Chi An took time to catch up on John Stott or Tim Keller's theology before writing down her thoughts on a couple pages (nonetheless predating Keller! ;-), and yet she sums up all of their grand arguments and thoughts through the layman's lens of a Chinese woman who has lived through hell and for the first time ponders what kind of God would be so real that no person could dream him up.

And yet, Chi An falls short of reveling in the grace that lies waiting for her. She senses that there is a vast significant meaning to Christ's death, but she cannot find what it is. Instead, she finds redemption and hope through confession and a new calling in life to set right her imbalanced scales of justice. She declares to have found redemption, but she dares not hope to have found mercy and grace.

The whole of A Mother's Ordeal is well worth reading, but if you never pick it up, at least read below. It will save you the gruesome operating table scenes, but fill you in on one woman's heart full of fear and hope. Fear of a Heavenly justice that she cannot understand and hope in the value of life that she has both betrayed and protected.

"Two hours later, after I had been moved from the recovery room to a regular hospital ward, my baby was brought to me. As Wei Xin looked on, I stretched our my arms to take her from the nurse, suddenly aware of the significance of the moment. It was for the sake of this tiny human being that I had endured so many months of long-distance blackmail and personal torment. I drew my infant daughter close to me, thankful that Wei Xin and I had chosen to defy the authorities, exulting in our triumph.

..."'You are safe now, my little 'illegal' daughter,' I whispered. 'Whatever happens now, no one can ever take you away from me.'

"By the time I returned from the hospital, the first article written by Steve about our case had appeared in Catholic Twin Circle magazine. It closed with an appeal for concerned readers to appeal the INS on our behalf. A surprising number did...

"I was moved to tears of gratitude by these letters, even as I struggled to understand what had motivated their authors to write. Why should these people, strangers all, care what happened to us and our baby? What did they hope to gain from such an act? I had grown up in a culture where only people who knew you well - kinfolk, coworkers, classmates, or close neighbors - exerted themselves on your behalf, and even they expected favors in return. And yet hundreds of Americans from across the country had taken time to petition their government on our behalf. I did not know what to make of such generosity of spirit. 'The American people have good hearts,' Wei Xin and I told Steve wonderingly.

"'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' Steve replied. 'Americans would not like to have their government forcing them to abort their unborn children,' he added, 'so naturally they sympathize with you.'

"This 'Golden Rule,' as he told us it was called, had a familiar ring to it. The Analects of Confucius contained a similar precept: 'Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.' But the more I reflect on the two formulations, the more I realized how different they in fact were. Confucius had merely forbidden people to wrong one another, not encouraged them to perform positive acts of charity. Living under such a rule, no wonder so many Americans had written letters on our behalf - and with no expectation of a return.

"The awareness of what others were now doing for me convicted me anew of what I had earlier done to others. Not just once but a thousand times I broken both this new rule and its Confucian variant. I had done to other women what I did not want, and had finally not allowed, to be done to myself. The horror I had hoped to leave behind me in China came back to torment me anew. What good is your regret? I sneered at my reawakened conscience. How does it help the troubled and despairing women, now forever barren, whom you tortured, aborted, and sterilized?

I abandoned myself to the care of my tiny daughter in the weeks following. Holding her in my arms, I could finally let go of the memory of the other little girl or boy who had been taken from me twelve years before. But the joy that my ‘make-up’ baby brought to me was not untempered by sorrow. She was both balm and wound, consolation and accusation, for her very presence seemed to speak to me of all those other children who were absent, who would never be. I had won my struggle to give birth, but how many hundreds of women had lost theirs? I was able to hold my daughter, but how many others would never hold theirs? What right do I have to this child, I thought bitterly, after what I have done?

“One day Wei Xin, looking rather abashed, told me that he wanted to go to church. ‘I know that we were taught by the Party that all religion is superstition, but a lot of my friends at work go, and I would like to find out what it’s all about. Besides,’ he said wryly, ‘if the Communist Party is against it, maybe we should be for it.’

“Wei Xin’s suggestion came out of the blue. There were no Christians in either of our families. My parents had been atheists, while Wei Xin’s had been Buddhists. I had been force-fed Communism, which was virtually the state religion of the People’s Republic, since I was old enough to talk. I was not about to submit myself to some new cult, however pleasant sounding its rules. I didn’t know whether the benevolent heaven of Chinese folklore existed or not, but trying to find out had never seemed to me worth the trouble. I thought Wei Xin foolish for even suggesting that we make the attempt.

“It was by appealing to my concern for Tacheng, who would be entering the sixth grade that fall, that Wei Xin convinced me to go. As far as I could tell, he was receiving no ethical instruction in the public schools at all. Teachers in China placed a heavy emphasis on learning right from wrong, even if it was confounded with Marxist ideology, but all that was missing here. Wei Xin told me that it was in America’s churches, not in her schools, that such things were taught.

“Walking through the doors of Saint Michael’s Church the following Sunday, I had a strong sense of trespassing on forbidden ground. Attending services in China was either discouraged or entirely banned. I had never before been inside any religious edifice, unless one counts the Buddhist temple I had helped a horde of fanatical Red Guards demolish during the Cultural Revolution. The only Christian church I knew of in Shenyang had been converted into a warehouse in the fifties by the government.

“I looked over the hundreds of people present with interest. Mixed in with the Anglos were Mexican Americans, Filipinos, Korean Americans, African Americans, Vietnamese, even a Chinese family or two. No one had ordered these people to come. Like Wei Xin and me, they were all here because they wanted to be. As we sat down I was struck by the realization that this was the first time I had ever taken part in a meeting not organized by the Communist Party for its own purposes. But for what purpose had these people voluntarily gathered here? To practice the Golden Rule? To improce themselves? To socialize? To adore the deity of love?

“I understood almost nothing of what followed. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be so much chanting and singing, so much standing and kneeling, and so much invoking and summoning in a religious service. I followed as well as I was able, which was hardly at all. I caught only the odd phrase. ‘As it was in the beginning, is now…’ What was in the beginning and is now? ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’

“I was fascinated by the painful figure on the cross that hung over the altar. Why would anyone worship a dead God, I thought to myself. Chinese god images were always robust and happy – fat, laughing Buddhas without a trace of suffering in their features, or sturdy figures of Guan Gong, a famous general whose body carried no scars from his numerous military victories. Of course they were also easy to dismiss as mere excrescences of human desires – happiness and success embodied in little wooden divinities. But the idea of a dead God was simply absurd. Surely the fact that this man had been killed proved that he wasn’t God at all. Who would want to kowtow before a defeated creature, I thought, unless he was not a mere creature at all but the Creator? But then why had he allowed himself to die? It was almost beyond belief, certainly beyond the human imagination. The wildest dreams of human beings, I was sure, could not have begun to conjure up a dead God. Perhaps there was something to all this after all.

“I remembered the hundreds of women I had forced to have abortions, how they had writhed and screamed and cried. And I remembered my own abortion, and how I had writhed and screamed and cried. If this tortured figure was God, then surely he understood the pain and suffering that I had felt and caused. Was there in his death some larger meaning?

“From the time I was a small girl, I had been eager to help others. It was for this reason that I had become a nurse. At time, I had allowed myself to be twisted by selfishness into acts that I regretted, but my one true desire was to serve, to love. How could I have gotten to be thirty-eight years old and not realized this? That I had hurt and injured others was a failure to love.

“Wei Xin and I enrolled in adult classes, Tacheng in catechism. Months later I made my first confession – and felt at peace with myself for a long time. The little hands that had been clawing at me could no longer reach me in the new place where I lived. My mind laid to rest the little-boy-who-wouldn’t-die to his rest. From now on the only baby’s cries that would wake in the night were those of my newborn daughter.

“I was forgiven, but justice demanded that I do more. I would spend the rest of my life doing good to others – a goal I happily adopted, for it corresponded to my own deepest wishes. I did not know which way the scales of justice would tip when I had completed the course; I would only try to weight them in favor of mercy. In caring for others, I would be atoning for my past crimes. But how could I help women still in China? I resolved to begin by telling my story to Steve, however painful that might be, so that he might write it.”

~Hannah

Thoughts On Mary During Advent

During my senior year of college, I was researching early 20th century feminist philosophy and struggling deeply with God's design of the sexes. I had not intended to find myself in such a quagmire; rather, I started the research project with the intention of better understanding feminism's roots in order to better refute it. And yet, by Christmas break I was fighting against bitterness and questioning what role womanhood played in God's eternal plan. It's a typical question among women who start to think through these things, but I couldn't escape wondering why God seemed so male-centered. He revealed Himself in terms of the male gender, He created Adam first, He gave headship to the male half our race, and when He came to be one of us, He entered the flesh of a man. None of these issues shook my faith in God for redemption, but I just could not help ask... why? Was there any way God acknowledged my sex as important to His plan, or were we just along for the ride, to sit and watch God's grace unfold from the sidelines?

About the time these questions were the most pressing, I happened to go see The Nativity Story. I had no big desire to see it originally, but went along with my family for some holiday entertainment. It is beautiful how God often uses the unexpected to answer some of our deepest questions. The movie was beautiful, but what struck me most was the harshness it displayed. In particular, watching the birth scene clicked with me. Watching Mary scream as her body is ripped by the Child leaving her to enter the world on a mission of redemption started to awaken in me the idea that the nativity is evidence of God's deep love and commitment to both genders in His eternal plan. I didn't continue exploring the thought at the time, but it gave me enough peace with the issue to finish out my senior thesis with peace and confidence in who I am as a woman.

Today, though, I was looking through an art book and being drawn to the Medieval section, I was reminded again of the nativity as a sign of God's value for both sexes. The Gothic Catholic paintings depict an importance in Mary that we Protestants have missed for centuries. Mary was not a deity, neither was she purer than any other human under the sun. But Mary was an integral and crucial part of God's plan for redemption and the ripping of her body foreshadows the ripping of Christ's body for the sake of humanity.

Not to be taken lightly (particularly in the ancient world), giving birth is a bloody, brutal, and beastly sacrifice of one body for another. If women feel undervalued in the redemptive plan, it is because we have not recognized in Mary the inclusion of womanhood by God. The male gender was acknowledged for redemption when Christ used a man's body for the work of atonement on the cross. The female gender was used for redemption when Christ submitted Himself to the blood and screams of birth.

Our visual culture misleads us concerning womanhood, particularly at Christmas. Birth is not quiet and peaceful. Mary was no gentle angel. The problem of the Medievals was not that they liked to paint Mary and the Christ child. Their problem lay in failing to recognize the true significance of her story. No wonder woman's role in God's plan has been lost - they took the nativity story and cleaned it up to be decorative art. A true understanding of the nativity would have produced terrible scenes of placenta and umbilical cords, blood and sweet, tears and pain. We would think of the nativity as gruesomely as we think of the crucifixion. And we would be inspired to worship the true and living God for the splendor of His will.

The story of the nativity in its true meaning points us to the cross. In these two events, Christ's earthly life began and concluded, and both were marked by bodily suffering. In Christ, God reconciled both sexes of a fallen race to Himself and declared grace and mercy for those who seek Him. There is peace between God and humanity, and as a result, between man and woman. And at the end of time, we will both be resurrected, our bodies complete and renewed. The story of redemption is a story of wholeness and one where God forgets none of his creation in the drama.

The Christian community fears feminism, and rightly so, but I believe some of feminism's roots stem from the same questions I dealt with during my senior year. A history of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Mary's role in God's redemptive story has played a disastrous role in the church to the point where we see her either deified or forgotten. If only recognized God's use of her as similar to crucial male figures (such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, etc.), maybe modern women would have a better understanding of their status as God's daughters whom He chooses to use. I don't know if the makers of The Nativity Story share any of these thoughts, or if anyone else was as struck by it, but I am extremely grateful that the movie dignified Mary with a painful birthing scene and recognized (perhaps unwittingly) that woman's greatest moment was being included in the redemptive story so intimately that God would submit Himself to her bloody body.

~Hannah

Droves of Filipino Women

Recently, I was traveling with my friend Sarah in Hong Kong. We were walking through Central on our way to ride the Peak Tram and we came across swaths of Filipino women sitting on pieces of newspaper in bus terminals, parks, and church steps. There were literally hundreds of them everywhere and we could not figure out what they were doing, especially since they were calmer, politer, and better dressed than prostitutes or the homeless tend to be and they seemed to have a strong sence of community amongst themselves as they read, played cards, or styled their hair. We researched it once we returned home and this is what we found. Yet another amazing situation of Asian distress which breaks my heart. After reading this, Hong Kong's sheen started to wear off a little and I realized that while Hong Kong's wealth may far exceed my city or other cities in this part of the world, it might not be too different from the rest conerning its inability to care for the weakest in society. Immigration is rough for all involved, but hardship doesn't have to be a done deal.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2D61F39F93BA1575BC0A966958260

http://ezinearticles.com/?Women-of-Faith---Hong-Kongs-Filipino-Domestic-Helpers&id=1868537

~Hannah