Pachinko, Bullets, and Butterly Wings
+ some updates on *Othered*
I took two seminary courses during the fall of 2023—one on the overarching narrative of scripture (and life) and the other on social justice and spirituality. In both courses, the professor for each briefly quoted a lyric from The Smashing Pumpkin’s song, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”.
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
We were discussing systemic injustices including abuses of power within the church, poverty, exploitative industrial practices, and so on. My professors quoted this lyric because imagery can communicate despair and emotion in a way that statistics, graphs, and charts cannot. Numbers can certainly tell us how many people are being oppressed by the powers and principalities in the world, but metaphor communicates how the oppressed experience their oppression.
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.1
At the end of the semester, I picked up Min Jin Lee’s novel, Pachinko, for the first time. I wasn’t expecting to find so much synchronicity between my seminary reads and recreational fiction reads, but I did.
Pachinko is a breathtaking work of fiction that illuminates systemic oppression from the perspective of one family over the course of time, beginning in 1910 and ending in 1989. The primary characters are the members of a Korean family whose lives are narrated while enduring Japanese colonization. The family starts out poor, living in a fishing village. One of the members marries and moves with her husband to Osaka, making the transition from South Korea to Japan. In both places, the family is under the Japanese gaze, but in Osaka they feel the weight of marginalization to a greater degree.
The family struggles to survive. Thriving isn’t an option. The children suffer taunts from their Japanese peers at school. One son, Mozasu2, tired of the abuse, drops out of school, and goes to work in a Korean-owned pachinko parlor. But there is a stigma with Korean pachinko owners. Most believe them to be gangsters. But Mosazu finds that his boss, Goro, is a very kind, compassionate man. Goro acquires wealth through his business, but when he needs services, he consciously patrons the businesses of people who are struggling to feed their family.
When Mozasu goes to meet Goro for his first day of work, Lee writes:
Each day, before the store opened, Goro would gently tap a few straight pins on the vertical pachinko machines with his tiny rubber-coated hammer. He was tapping the pins very, very slightly to alter the course of the metal balls to affect the machine’s payout. You never knew which machine Goro would choose, or which direction Goro would direct the pins. There were other pachinko parlors in the area that had decent businesses, but Goro was the most successful, because he had a kind of touch—a true feel for the pins. The minuscule adjustments he made were sufficiently frustrating to the regular customers who’d studied the machines before closing hours for better payouts in the morning, yet there was just enough predictability to produce attractive windfalls, drawing the customers back to try their luck again and again. Goro was teaching Mozasu how to tap the pins, and for the first time in his life, Mozasu had been told that he was a good student.3
(There’s a mild spoiler ahead if you plan on reading Pachinko for yourself.)
In the story, Mozasu does really well—well enough that he can send his own son, Solomon to the best schools. He doesn’t want Solomon in the pachinko business. Mozasu helps his son go farther than he could, and he knows Solomon has the capacity to succeed. Solomon goes to Columbia University in the U.S., but he returns to work for a British bank in the land in which he was raised. Yet, despite all his education, years of assimilating, and conforming, Solomon loses his position with his company because of the stereotype of being a Korean on Japanese soil. Losing hope, Solomon returns to his father to learn the pachinko business.
Despite success and wealth, they are forced to play a game.
An alt-rock band from Chicago and a literary fiction writer from Seoul, South Korea could both find their own words to lament systemic oppression. Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins wrote that despite all his rage, he was still just a rat in a cage. Min Jin Lee shows us that despite assimilation and education, marginalized communities had the pins tapped against them. Both Corgan and Lee could communicate how the system uses and abuses people. There is always someone who controls the cage. Someone who knocks the pins into place.
This semester, I’m in two new classes—a church history class covering the 16th-18th centuries as well as a class that surveys different expressions of Christian spirituality across time and space. As I read the words of Jesus and observe how he lived his life in the gospels, I know that the Christian faith was not meant to be a game that favors the fortunate. But so often, it does.
We know this because spiritual abuse exists. Religious trauma exists. Racial trauma in the church exists.
Jesus came to liberate people. But history has born witness to powerful leaders in the Church building cages, tapping pins into place. In Las Vegas language, the House always wins.
Resistance is speaking truth to power and being persistent in unfolding the truth before a watching world. Resistance is opening the cages, setting the captives free. It is pointing at and naming the systems of injustice in the world that exist at every level of society. Resistance is building tables of inclusion so that the oppressed can feast. It is flipping tables that exist only to oppress others.
I’m glad Billy Corgan and Min Jin Lee wrote their words to name what keeps people in chains. And in that same vein, I wrote Othered to shake the shackles off our feet too.
Some Updates
I recently found out that Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) of Othered are out in the wild. People are reading them and highlighting them, and it’s been really cool to see.
I meet with my marketing lead and publicist in the next few weeks to iron out what it will look like to launch Othered out into the world. I’m being incredibly mindful to make the launch fun and life-giving, for both myself and everyone. There will be a “launch team,” but it might not look much like other book launch teams you’ve experienced in the past. I will consider it a personal win if I can keep it off Facebook.
For those interested in the Othered “launch team” (which I hope will look more like an early read-through group), preordering will be a prerequisite. If you’ve already preordered, keep that info handy!
I’m still loving my seminary program (M.A. Spiritual Formation) at Northeastern Seminary. I have people regularly DM me (and I can’t get to all of the DMs because of time) who ask about seminary. I love it. And I love the seminary I go to. If you ever have questions, you can always ask in the comments!
I just finished my first contract with a non-profit, Made for PAX, where I was able to mentor a few emerging BIPOC writers as a part of their inaugural PAX fellowship. I loved my experience. Which leads me to …
I just signed another contract with PAX to serve as facilitator/educator for their Contemplative Activism and Spiritual Formation fellowship track for fall 2024-spring 2025! PAX will begin to share more info on the upcoming fellowship soon, so if you are a part of the BIPOC community and interested in Contemplative Activism and Spiritual Formation, you’ll be able to apply soon. (Follow PAX on all the social channels for more info on this and other fellowship tracks.)
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You can find past posts from Othered by visiting jenaiauman.substack.com.
I am a child of the 90s and a lover of angsty rock, so I appreciated the Smashing Pumpkins quote.
The Japan-oriented spelling for Moses.
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko, (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2017), 254.
I appreciate this essay on injustice, church, and about the power we don't hold and your use of stories and metaphors. I write a lot about injustice and have been in activism spaces for decades. In other words, I've read a lot about this topic, so you can believe me when I say this was well done. It definitely inspired me to consider my tables and who is invited to them.
On another note, i've never heard of these machines. Fascinating! I'll have to add this book to my TBR shelf, although I'm probably more interested in the cultural dynamics than the machines.
PAX and mentoring that way sounds very cool. What a great space for those in the BIPOC community.
I expected injustice in the world. I didn't think it would exist in the church when I was in my 20s. Here I am in my 6th decade and I'm struggling with the modern church in America. The name "Christian" is no longer a good thing. I even had a non-believing child tell me that I wasn't a Christian, because I didn't act like the judgemental, exclusionary people who called themselves Christians. It breaks my heart that Jesus is being so poorly represented by people who should know better.