Re-release of Maxwell Institute Podcast #111 with Melissa Inouye

Rosalynde Welch: Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, our longtime associate at the Maxwell Institute, died on April 23 2024. We joined with many in mourning her loss and celebrating her remarkable legacy. Melissa was a gifted speaker, warm, funny, faithful and so smart. We wanted to rerelease some of the Maxwell Institute interviews and lectures she delivered over the years.

In this 2019 interview hosted by Blair Hodges, Melissa talks about her book “Crossings: A bald Asian-American Latter-day Saint woman scholar’s ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood. Not necessarily in that order.”

Crossings is my personal favorite of Melissa's many writings. As you'll hear in this interview, Melissa combined a scholar’s understanding of how institutions work with a believer’s experience of the trust and belonging in a Latter-day Saint ward. To me, this is what made Melissa's perspective on our religious life together so powerful. I hope you enjoy this interview with a consummate disciple scholar, Melissa Inouye.

Blair Hodges: It's the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Blair Hodges.

In this episode, we're joined by a bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar to hear all about her ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood, not necessarily in that order. And that description is actually taken directly from the subtitle of Melissa Inouye’s book Crossings. It's part of the Maxwell Institute's living faith book series. Dr. Melissa Inouye joined me to talk about the book months ago, when it was first released. We talked about her cancer in this episode, and since this episode's been recorded, she has some health updates. So stick around after the interview and I'll give you the latest. Questions and comments about this and other episodes of the Maxwell Institute podcast can be sent to me at mi podcast@byu.edu

Melissa Inouye joins us today. Melissa, thank you for coming on the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Melissa Inouye: Thank you so much for having me.

Hodges: And we're talking about the book that you published here with the Maxwell Institute's Living Faith series. It's called Crossings and has a really long really cool subtitle, which is, “A Bald Asian-American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures Through Life Death, Cancer and Motherhood (not necessarily in that order).” How did this book come about?

Inouye: It was kind of born in a panic when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, for the first time, and I thought, oh my gosh, what if my kids never get to hear me talk about kind of grown-up things? Because they're a little; they're currently 13, 11, 9 and 7, there-abouts.

Hodges: You don't have deep existential conversations with them each night?

Inouye: No. And this is like even two years ago, so they were even younger then. So yeah, I just thought I need to write this stuff down. And also in our family were famously forgetful. So I thought if I make a binder, like four versions of a binder, they're gonna lose it. So I need to make a lot of versions of this. So like, let's make a book. And then there's a lot of versions.

Hodges: And the introduction is a really cool metaphor, you say it's sort of a form of literary food storage. Sort of bringing in this Latter-day Saint idea of packaging something away for future time of need.

Inouye: Hmm, we're very prepared people, right, Latter-day Saints like to be prepared. So this was kind of like my prepper mentality.

Hodges: You're prepping like ideas and feelings and experiences instead of ammunition and fruit preserves?

Inouye: Yeah. And actually, it's kind of useful, not just for my kids, but sometimes for me. So I think I am actually currently in the middle of a cancer thing again, and it's nice to have thought about the meaning of all of this before. So I'm kind of looking at it being like, yeah, that's right I did say that. So, yeah.

Hodges: Yeah, we wondered like how much, because you did just find out just this past week that that cancer is returned. And that's another battle you'll be facing. And I'm really sorry to hear that. Let's talk about that a little bit later on. When people pick up the book, The subtitle suggests that they shouldn't expect this nice, clear narrative arc. I mean, the subtitle ends with “not necessarily in that order.” So talk about that a little bit, the shape of the book.

Inouye: That's right. Well, it's kind of random. And again, that's kind of born from the circumstances that brought the book out, which is, oh my gosh, you know, what can I get together to show my kids what I think, what I believe, and who I am. So all of those things kind of came together. I have always written my kids letters. Often when I'm traveling. I'll be on a train somewhere and I'll write someone a letter and then I just save them when I come home in a filing cabinet. But again, you know, we're just super forgetful. We just lose everything. So I took many of those letters and put them into the book. I also took essays that I had written and put those into the book. I took lectures from my university classes and put those into the book. So it's kind of random, but I feel like what holds it together is, you know what I think is important and what I've learned from my various experiences wearing different hats. And I hope that the randomness of that, the kind of diversity of those experiences, kind of speak holistically.

Hodges: Yeah, one of the things I like about the physical design of the book and shout out to Heather Ward, who designed the cover, is that it kind of evokes a patchwork quilt kind of a thing, there are these geometric shapes of different shades of colors. And it fits together really well. And I think that really speaks to what the book is like. It's kind of these… it's like a patchwork quilt, you've got all these pieces that come from other situations, and they're all put together in a way that makes this new thing, this new blanket that people can put on.

Inouye: Oh, I like that. I never thought about that. But that's definitely what it looks like.

Hodges: Do you think there's a message about the structure of the book itself, then people can take away from this because again, it's not this neat narrative arc that begins when you're a child and takes you through maturity and going on a mission and getting married. And, you know, there's a narrative arc to your life that you could have put together. There's a little bit of chronological order there. But the pieces themselves weren't constructed to be together originally.

Inouye: Right. I mean, I think this is one of the major points that I hope the book will make, which is that life is so messy. Learning is so piecemeal. Health and sickness are all mixed up together. Joy and sorrow are mixed up together. You know, everything is mixed up together. And we just have to accept that's how life comes to us.

Hodges: I think it's reflective of a lot of people's experience of how faith works, too, because there are pieces in the book, that are pretty straightforward about particular beliefs, you'll have a piece that has this pretty clear moral to it, people will read it, it's like, here's kind of the takeaway, then there are other pieces in there that are more explorational, to maybe make up a word, at this. There's not a clear message, but this feeling comes through in your writing. So I think we get to see you in different registers of your own faith experience, where sometimes in your life, you might feel more certain about particular things and other times you're exploring.

Inouye: Yeah, I think Latter-day Saints are pretty aware that we're not very creedal. We don't have very strong systematic theologies, even when we have kind of written rules, like the Articles of Faith, or the 10 Commandments, or whatever. We also have this understanding that sometimes rules are in conflict with each other, there's like a kind of tension between things. And sometimes I feel like the best way to understand is not to dissect the rules, or try to kind of draw straight lines from everything, but to see the bigger picture. And so often that for us, for Latter-day Saints, the bigger picture comes just in how we live our lives and how we encounter, you know, the experiences of mortality.

Hodges: And you see that as well in things you included from your work as a professor to like in the lecture. And those are a bit more straightforward, like you've spent a semester with these students. And there are these particular lessons that you want to point out from this. So those are kind of more direct, then you have other pieces where they're almost internal monologues, you know, you're kind of exploring ideas to yourself. So it's interesting to see you work through these different registers, depending on who you're talking to. And then to see them all in the book together, it makes for a really unique reading experience.

Inouye: Right. Well, I mean, some questions have no answers. You know, there's a letter that I write to my kids from the middle of dissertation research. And right in the middle of that trip, right in the middle of writing the letter, I find out that one of my good friends also a Latter-day Saint, you know, has just inexplicably passed away leaving four young kids all by themselves. And you know, I just, to me this is one of the age-old questions that people ask, like, Why did good things happen to bad people? Bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow some interventions, but not others? And I just don't think we really have answers to that.

Hodges: But you wanted your kids to know that you were thinking about it. That was something that you kind of think along with them. One of the risks, I think of writing letters to future children, is, for example, there was a man who passed away and he had written a series of letters to be given to his daughter each year on her birthday. But he wrote them off at a particular time in his life. That was kind of the problem of his approach was she would open it and but you know, your head pastor, she changed quite a bit, and he's still talking to her as the same person. I think one of the strengths of this book is there's a variety of experiences here that it's not quite as frozen in ember, I think. Did you think about that at all? As you thought about writing to future kids, whether you're able to give them that letter yourself, or whether they would need to read it in a book, did you think I'm not sure how they're going to be at that point? Did that cross your mind at all?

Inouye: Yeah, well, and that's why I included stuff that I wrote basically as a college student or as a missionary. So the writings in the book have been put together over a long period of time. So some “Long Departures, Long Returns” was something that I wrote as a senior or something in college. So that is closer in age, maybe to a future slightly grown up kid.

Hodges: Yeah, let's talk about that piece in particular, it's called “Long Departures, Long Returns.” It's the first piece in the collection. And it talks about how you went to China, when you were 19 years old, and you were leaving home in a big way, kind of for the first time. So it was a scary time, I think, for you and for your parents. And I see in this essay, young woman who's struggling with the idea of freedom versus fidelity, like feeling drawn to your family, but also feeling like you need to jump out of the nest, so to speak. How do you think your family's history in your own family's culture impacted the decision you made to leave home? Was it hard for you? I guess, was it an easy choice or difficult choice?

Inouye: It was an easy choice to leave. My parents have always encouraged me to study and to learn things. So going to China to study Chinese was pretty obvious. But I guess my struggle was realizing that I didn't want to do everything that I wanted to do, because my parents didn't want me to do some of it. I feel really bad if I did everything that I wanted to do in a way that hurt my parents. So I found myself being a little more cautious than I would normally be. Because I realized that my parents were waiting for me to come back. Thought I’d be fine anyway, because, you know.

Hodges: But they’re nervous too, because there are safety concerns. They're just being so far away from someone can make a parent feel vulnerable.

Inouye: Oh, yeah. And then in a foreign country where you don't speak the language and where things happen sometimes.

Hodges: Yeah. And you talked about how you could sort of pass in a crowd because you appear to be, to fit right in Chinese. But you don't have that deep experience. You don't know the language, you haven't experienced the culture directly. So you're kind of incognito among a crowd that would never suspect it.

Inouye: Yeah, I'm kind of bitter about that, actually. So my husband is this tall, white guy. And we were both missionaries in Taiwan. So he speaks excellent Chinese, is way better than mine. However, he gets way more props for his good Chinese than I do, because he's tall and white. And everyone's just impressed when he says, “Hello, how are you?”

Hodges: Because he had to work for it. Wow, what a great…

Inouye: Right, I also had to learn Chinese from scratch!

Hodges: Yeah, when you revisited that essay to prepare for publication, did anything new stick out to you? Because it leads off the collection, you're not going to start with a piece that you don't think has much power to it. Right?

Inouye: I don't think I changed it at all. Actually, for me, it shows how I've always chosen to do things that have a lot of inherent tensions in them. I find that interesting. I found China extremely interesting as a university student, and very attractive for all sorts of reasons. I'm interested in problems and problems are everywhere. Of course, like China is not the only country where there's problems. America's got problems, every country has problems. But I guess I liked that as the beginning. Because in some ways, that was the beginning of my professional life language as kind of opening the door to a new place. And I think also, this problem of language, the different languages that we speak, be they actual linguistic languages, or religious languages or languages of faith, all of these different languages are so important in how we experience life, and they really shape who we are, and they shape our experiences. And when we don't get them right, then there's these big interesting tensions as well. So I like that piece, because it talks about language that talks about kind of the ambivalence, it talks about being a stranger, but also being at home at the same time.

Hodges: Yeah, and this is one of the pieces as I mentioned earlier, that doesn't end with this. “And thus we see that such and such is the case,” it doesn't have this overt lesson at the end, it's something that people will sit with, and, and have to think about these ideas of language, translation, and also family and home and connection and crossings. Right, just the name of the book, you left home, you crossed the sea.

Inouye: Yeah, the piece ends with this image of a father and a daughter on a bike in the crowds outside this bus that I'm writing. And that was so powerful for me as well, this feeling of kind of universal connection amidst all this difference. And that has always stuck with me as well. Even today, China as a kind of geopolitical force is very controversial force people feel a lot of ambivalence toward China. I feel a lot of ambivalence toward, you know, the various political, legal, even cultural, you know, arrangements in China. But at the same time, I have people I love in China, I have, you know, friends. I know that we're all children of God. And I just hope that we keep on developing relationships and figuring each other out as people and not demonizing each other.

Hodges: Yeah. And that feeling gets evoked by your simple description of a man and his daughter on a bike. You don't have to draw it out. It's a really beautiful piece. You also have some Japanese heritage as well, has that informed your relationship to China? Because there's also been tensions between those two powers as well.

Inouye: Right, well, originally when I went to China I used my Japanese last name because it has Chinese characters in it that should be like being ______ on top of the well in a way. But I learned my Chinese history, and I switched my Chinese last name to my mother's side’s last name. Because history is so fraught, yeah. You know, my parents met at BYU and my mother's Chinese American, my dad's Japanese American at BYU. Those kinds of national differences don't matter so much because there's this phenomenon which we call Pan-Asianism. So in certain cultural contexts, the national boundaries don't matter. Like in America, no one can tell the difference. White people can't tell the difference between Koreans or Japanese or Chinese. Nobody cares. They just see a person with black hair. And maybe when you’re in elementary school someone made ching-chong jokes about you, doesn't matter if you're Japanese, Korean or whatever. At BYU there’s this famous ward called the Asian ward. It's like very famous, very historic word, the Asian ward. And Asians, it's like an ethnicity segregated ward. And it's still like enforced today. And that's where my parents met. That's where so many people that I know met, and they don't really care about these national distinctions anymore, they just are looking for someone who's like them who eats rice. That's what I think.

Hodges: So you grew up in a home where you had a mother and a father who sort of demonstrated this pan identity, then later on, you had to reckon with some of the differences between those cultures. Was that a surprise? Did that come on? Yeah. What was it like?

Inouye: When you actually go to China and actually go to Japan, you’re like, “Ooh, Chinese are Chinese or Japanese are Japanese.” But at the same time, you know, our family has preserved, you know, many of our ancestral traditions. In some ways, our family, like the Japanese side of the family are usually, were more Japanese than the Japanese, because our families Japanese kind of frozen in the early 20^th century.

Hodges: Like when they first came over, they brought that and then…

Inouye: Yeah, so it's before Pokeyman and yeah.

Hodges: Anime cartoons and stuff.

Inouye: Yeah. So it's interesting.

Hodges: Yeah, let's talk about another piece in the opening section. This has more direct message, it's called “Faith is Not a String of Christmas Lights,” which is a really powerful metaphor here. Most people don't automatically think of comparing faith to Christmas lights to begin with. So let's talk about this piece.

Inouye: Well, I have many frustrations with Christmas lights, because I always remember at Christmas time, we get ready to get all the decorations out, and we put them on the tree, big moment you plug them in, and then nothing happens. It's so anticlimactic. And I know that you know nowadays, Christmas lights can kind of avoid that they're better engineered, but like this did happen to me. And I always remember that kind of disappointment. They say, Oh, well, a bulb is out. And it's just so insulted that one bulb can mess up the whole strip. So the basic point of that essay is that in the church, sometimes people will find out something about church history that seems very ugly to them, that makes them very uncomfortable. And that kind of ruins their whole feeling that we could be on the right track. Because if we were so wrong in the past, if this big mistake was made, how could we possibly still be directed by God or led by prophets or, you know, susceptible to the spirit, kind of like the book itself, I just don't think that that's kind of neat narratives where one thing leads to another, are the way that God works with people, you know, we're always making mistakes. And we're a living church. The church's history itself isn't made of events in which one leads to another and this kind of perfect string. It’s made out of people's experiences and their relationships and prayers in their faith and their big mistakes. So all of those things are together. We're a living organism.

Hodges: What's an example of some Christmas light thinking that you've experienced in the church? Maybe that you've even held to in the past? I don't know if you always felt this way, or if this is something that you came to as your faith adjusted.

Inouye: Okay, right. So there's like a negative version of the Christmas lights, which is, if Joseph Smith wasn't completely forthright with his wife about polygamy, then he wasn't a prophet. Therefore, the Book of Mormon is fake. Therefore, the whole church project is bogus. So it's like a chain reaction, right? One thing leads to everything being bogus. There's like another version of that, which is just like the reverse, where people might say, The Book of Mormon is true, therefore, I have this feeling that the Book of Mormon is true, therefore, the church is true, therefore, we cannot possibly make mistakes. And I think both of those versions of explaining the value of our project are flawed. Because if you knock out any one of those junctures, then the whole thing blows up. And I do think that in our church, we do make mistakes, because we're people, you know, I'm part of the church. And by being part of the church, I had made it very flawed, because I'm a very flawed person.

Hodges: Do you think your academic work of studying about other countries and your own countries that you're deeply connected to through heritage, do you think that that's affected your view of how the church works? In other words, if you see something troubling in Chinese history, that's not the whole story for Chinese history?

Inouye: Yeah, I think when you study any history, you see that people mess up spectacularly. And then I also study religious history in particular, and I have such admiration for so many religious traditions and for the good things that I see. But when you see their histories you also realize that they're also the product of both divine and human hands. You know, there's people are involved in making religious history people mess up but people still find religion enormously valuable. So in the perspective of all the world's religions, I think that the Latter-day Saints tradition is as beautiful and as problematic as the other traditions that I see. But of course, being a Latter-day Saint myself, I have a special fondness for our tradition. And I see the things that we do really well. As an insider, I feel very deeply the power of God here and our tradition. So I just think that faith and truth are real, and things that are real are necessarily messy and often kind of contradictory.

Hodges: And when you take away that metaphor of the Christmas lights, I think it's a pretty common way of thinking about faith in the church, what do you then replace it with? If people can't rely on this line of facts that if you agree to one, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one? Then what does faith become? What is it replaced with? What kind of view do people have instead of Christmas lights?

Inouye: Well, so in the essay, I use this metaphor, a counter metaphor of sourdough bread, which is awesome bread created through a very complex and interesting process that has kind of moved along by what we usually think of as things decaying or going bad or becoming rotten, like fermenting is stuff going off, right. But that process of having a sourdough starter and this kind of culture of bacteria that you introduce into the flour unlocks the potential of those starch molecules, and it creates really awesome bread. And, you know, I'm not a professional baker, but just as a kind of amateur bread baker, you know, it's like, so complex, and the starter is so awesome. And it's alive, you know, the bread is alive, there's like little colonies of microbes growing in the bread. So I just feel that when we think about our church and our religious tradition, not as a mechanical thing, but as a living organism than those kinds of contradictions, different strains of being who we are, make more sense.

Hodges: That's Melissa Inouye. She's a senior lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. She received her PhD in Chinese history from Harvard. And her research focuses on the history of Chinese Christianity, modern ideology and modern China, global charismatic religious movements, women and religion, among other things. In addition to her new book Crossings, she also published a book called China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church. That was published by Oxford University Press in January 2019. And in a future interview, we'll talk to her about that book as well. Melissa, I wanted to talk to you more about some of the personal writings that the book has. So there's letters for your children, for example, that you mentioned. There's also a remarkable prayer that was composed by a group of women who are your close friends from California. Talk about that prayer.

Inouye: That is one of the best parts of the whole book. And I have to say that in the audiobook version it’s even better, because the audiobook version has 12 different women's voices. And it is awesome. It's really cool. And we recorded that in a studio all at the same time, standing in a circle around the microphone, many of the women who are involved are just like, wow, that was so powerful. So anyway, I think that's really cool. So it's kind of like an artifact of how awesome Mormon women are, and like how rich their minds and spiritual experience can be, even when they're juggling babies at a playground. So we had this in Los Angeles, and one of the wards I was in when I had pretty little babies. We had this kind of weekly, Park Day. And we just talked about things and started to discuss this article in the Journal of Mormon history, which had recently come out by Jonathan Stapling and Christine Right, talking about Mormon women's blessings for women who are about to give birth. And one of our group was, I think, eight months pregnant at the time. And she, you know, had read the article, and she's like, that would be so amazing, you know, to get a blessing from sisters who had had a baby. And so we thought, you know, what's a way in which we can kind of express that amazingness while showing deference to the church's current policy governing blessings. And so we said, let's write a poem. So for Mother's Day, for the occasion of Mother's Day, each person contributed one section of a poem, and then we put it all together, and eventually Segullah, how do you pronounce it, singular?

Hodges: I’ve always pronounced it like Seh-gu-lah, Segullah?

Inouye: They used to have a pronunciation guide on their website, but I couldn't find it again. Anyway, eventually, this Mormon women's writing blog, published it, and it's been there ever since. And I just think it's so beautiful and powerful.

Hodges: Yeah, it stands out in the book as something that was written by a group of people rather than just one person. And the decision to include that, was there any, women in the church don't give these blessings anymore? How did you introduce that into a book that's published by the Maxwell Institute and partner by Deseret Book?

Inouye: Well, that's a poem and it's specifically structured that way to show deference to the church's current policy. As literature, I think it's beautiful, and it's a representation of the richness of Latter-day Saint women's lives and our tradition of doing things together. We do cool stuff together.

Hodges: Yeah, that's part of what it means, like, the communal element of being a Latter-day Saint. With your research on China, obviously, communalism is also a really strong value in China as well. What are some comparisons you would draw there? Communalism is such an important value. There can be downsides to it, there can be benefits to it. Your work on China, has it shed any new light for you personally on how the church as a communal organization works for you and for your faith?

Inouye: One thing that I would say is that one of the kinds of major points of similarity between Chinese culture and Latter-day Saint culture is the pretty strong emphasis on roles. Certain people have certain roles and responsibilities. And those roles are hierarchically arranged. In many contexts, hierarchy is seen as a really bad thing, because it gives some people power over other people. And because that power is not always benevolent. However, both my family cultures, Japanese culture and Chinese culture, also have this sense of very well defined family hierarchies and roles and responsibilities. And as I look back on my life, and also the challenges that I currently face, those hierarchical differentials are also a source of great positive power for me. So for example, facing cancer again, when my uncle tells me to do something like you think you'll be fine, just accept the challenges as they come and overcome them one by one, try to rise them the best you can. That has so much power with me, and it gives me power. So I think that the rugged individualist approach to faith, to having faith, is not the only kind of way that there is.

Hodges: This is you a person sort of striking out building their faith finding out who they are…

Inouye: Yeah, and you know, some people say, you know, like, especially people who are really concerned with structural inequality, or people who are concerned with gender inequality, in particular, will often say, you know, all I need is me and God. And I do think that that relationship between me and God is at the core of my faith, but I also need other people. And I also feel that relationships have certain differentiated responsibilities. So for example, as a teacher, I feel my responsibility is different, and my relationship to the students is different from their relationship to me. So I don't know if this is a Confucian thing, or a Latter-day Saint thing. But I do think that hierarchy can be the source of human flourishing as well, for various reasons. So often, it's unfortunately abused. I do think there's great potential there. And it's, in many ways been a thing that I fought against in my life, but in other times at certain times, it's been something to which I cling because it I need it.

Hodges: And when you say there have been times when there's been difficulty to what do you do in those moments when there might be an abusive and inequality of power? What kind of things have you done? Or do you suggest that people do to deal with that element?

Inouye: I think we can try to say what's true. So if there are abuses of power, that they shouldn't be there. And we can point to common beliefs and values that we have and show how those abuses of power are deeply harmful and actually harm the standing and the overall project of the people who are causing those abuses or condoning them, or overseeing a system in which they take place regularly. I think one of the other good things about Chinese culture and the church is that they're held together not by this idea of kind of popular sovereignty, there's these other things that we believe hold the church together. Just as Chinese traditional Chinese people felt that the Emperor himself had to have the mandate of heaven. You know, I think there's a lot of power in the kind of moral voice and appealing to the common values that we have. That's where we have to do it. We can't just say, there's more of us than there are of you. So you know, sit down and shut up or something like that. That just doesn't work.

Hodges: That actually takes us to the next piece I wanted to talk about, which is a piece called “What Anna Said”. And Anna was a young girl who made some observations about her experience at church. And this is one of the longest pieces in the book, what Anna said. What did Anna say?

Inouye: Anna is a pseudonym for a girl and in my cousin's ward, in primary, in the middle of a Sharing Time lesson on the priesthood, she raised her hand, and she said, “But women don't get the priesthood,” and something like, “and the men are in charge of the women.” And my cousin said, What would you say? I didn't know what to say to that. So that essay is kind of about working through what we tend to say, and maybe why what we tend the things that I often heard said, aren't really sufficient nowadays, for the Anna's out there.

Hodges: What kind of things are those?

Inouye: There's the usual thing, which kind of equates motherhood with priesthood and says, Well, men have the priesthood, but women have motherhood. But the big problem with that is, you know, at the age of 11, a boy can have the priesthood and can begin to kind of progress that way spiritually. But we do not want girls to become mothers at the age of 11. That's very bad. So there's got to be something else.

Hodges: And there's also the fact that like, the parallel to motherhood would be fatherhood.

Inouye: Yes. Right. Right. And yeah, exactly. You say, you know, women have motherhood, and men have priesthood. What about fatherhood? Isn't that kind of sell fatherhood short? I mean, that's supposed to be really important and awesome, too. So I just don't think that works as kind of descriptions of men's and women's ultimate sacred purpose. Men do priesthood stuff women do mother stuff big, because again, women don't necessarily have control over whether they can bear children or raise children or you know, find a spouse with whom to raise children, and so on. So I think we can figure something out that gives women and girls more sacred purposes at church. And then there are other things. Some people say, well, men have the priesthood, but that's because women are so spiritual, they don't need it. Or men have the priesthood, but like, behind the scenes, women do all the work, and you know, are actually more powerful because of the work that they put in. And that's definitely true that women are spiritual, because you know, we are spiritual beings, and half of us are women. And I do think that Mormon women, Latter-day Saint women, work so hard within structures of power at church, and not all power structures at church are vertical, many of them are horizontal, and women play an active role within those. Nevertheless, that wasn't the problem. The problem was Anna was noticing just from what she saw that men and women didn't have the same visibility and the same kind of access to decision making power at church. And since young people, including young women are the kind of investigators of the church, they're the real investigators of the church, what they see matters. And if we want to show them the beauty and the power of the gospel, we have to realize that they see things that we didn't see when we are growing up. And that makes me feel really old, because, yeah, I just didn't see that. When I was growing up, I was extremely involved in my ward. I was like the junior ward organist.

Hodges: This is in California?

Inouye: Yeah, and I felt very involved, I just didn't really care. But people nowadays, like young people, women and men are trained to count. And they can look at something at a glance and kind of give it a gender reading. And they now associate things like sexism with very bad things. So I think there's so much that we can do to make it more obvious in our structures, our institutions, and our language that we value women. And to the extent that we have not done this, I guess it shows that we weren't paying attention to these things, now that we see them, we can definitely fix them. Because we definitely don't want to have the appearance of disrespecting women. That's, it's not just bad optics, it's just bad. We don't want to disrespect people. And half of us are women. So I think we can fix that.

Hodges: What are some of the new suggestions that you make in the book about how to begin doing that?

Inouye: Well, in the first place, we have this super awesome secret-weapon doctrine of a Mother in Heaven that we have had for over 100 years, since the beginning of our church nearly. And we could start using that doctrine more. That's really cool. The other day, I was at my home, and some people from this local church came and they were, they're kind of like Jehovah's Witnesses, but not Jehovah's Witnesses. They're like a local group. And they said, “Did you know that Elohim means the gods? And that we have a mother in heaven?” And I was like, “Yes! Yes, I believe that!” And they’re like, “What?” I think it’s really cool. It's something that we have. So why don't we deploy this weapon more often? I noticed that in President Nelson's conference talk, and last conference, he used the term Heavenly Parents, he said, the covenant path back to our Heavenly Parents. So if President Nelson can do it, we can. You know, like, when possible, let's say Heavenly Parents, since we believe in fact that we do have a father and a mother in heaven. And that's a way to communicate to our girls, that there is a path for them to become like God not to become a male deity, but you know, to become glorified, like Heavenly Mother.

Hodges: How about day-to-day church experience? So that's an example of a doctrine. People can think about…

Inouye: Well it’s not just in doctrine, like in day-to-day experience, we can just say the word “Heavenly Parents”. We can like talk to the young women and the young men about Heavenly Mother, right.

Hodges: Oh, I don't mean, yeah, I don't mean to downplay what it is. I guess the distinction I'm making is, that's a powerful paradigm, an idea that we have to discuss to talk about, but it doesn't necessarily change like who unlocks the door to let people into the church or who conducts a meeting or something. Right? You have some practical things as well that you talk about in the book.

Inouye: Right. Well, there are so many things that we can do. And people like Neylan McBaine have written more extensively about kind of actual concrete things to do, like in her book, “Women at Church”. But my basic point is that so many of the things that we do, or the way that things are done, is just habits. It's just ruts that we're in and the time has come to find new ways to do things. I mean, if you look at church history, we have made some drastic, not just policy changes, but you know, doctrinal changes and significant changes in administering things. And I think President Nelson's very dynamic changes like you know, and changing the format of the meeting and changing how we do visiting other people, and all these kinds of changes, signal that the policies and the habits that we are in are not sacred cows, there's just ways of doing what we think is important and I think we can change this. We don't have to worry about it.

Hodges: That's Melissa Inouye. She's talking to us today about her new book Crossings: A Bald Asian-American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures Through Life Death, Cancer and Motherhood (Not necessarily in that order).

Inouye: It’s a really long title.

Hodges: It's good. So you call some of your work in the book “fix it work”, that's the term that you use, and fix it work is kind of noticing something about how things operate, and then working to see it change, whether that's something that happens in your local congregation or whether that happens church wide, you just mentioned a few that the First Presidency is instituted. You know, this fix-it work doesn't always sit well with people, it can be uncomfortable for Latter-day Saints to talk about things that aren't quite working for them at church. I'm interested to hear you talk about your process of fix at work and how you tend to talk about it in your own ward. And in dealing with some of the discomfort that comes along with talking about it.

Inouye: So the currency in a Latter-day Saint Ward is trust, right. And so it's so important to develop relationships with people so that they know that you have their best interests at heart, you love them, and that you want to work with them so that we can all succeed together in coming closer to Christ. So it's really important to develop relationships in the first place, like relationships with trust…

Hodges: I remember that from my days in the MTC, that's the old missionary stuff.

Inouye: Right. But you know, I think when things are possible things that are sensible things that are good, you know, it's not too hard to see them. I mean, you have to know the audience. So my ward in Auckland is very different from some of the other words that I've been in. So for example, when my husband was in graduate school at UCLA, we went to the UCLA student ward, which is a very different demographic, from where we are currently in West Auckland. It's mostly Samoan, Tongan, Maori and with a range of people in different kinds of professions. From, there’s just like two lawyers and a bunch of a lot of teachers and people who do kind of other jobs or working with their hands. So I think it's really important to be part of your ward and to realize that who you are is, not all of who you are, is useful to other people all the time. Does that make sense? So people don't want to hear long lectures on the history of religion or anything like that. We're doing different things. But just for example, in the Primary Children's songbook, there's that song My Heavenly Father Loves Me like “whenever I hear the song of a bird”. So in that thing, there's something that says “walked by a lilac tree” and I don’t really know what a lilac tree looks like, but anyway. In New Zealand, the kids really didn't know what a lilac tree looks like. So we're thinking what's a really awesome trees we thought a kauri tree, like the New Zealand kauri, everyone knows the kauri trees are huge. They're really beautiful. And they're currently threatened. So in our primary, we sing walk by a kauri tree instead of walk by a lilac tree and just little things like that. There's another song recently where it's a maxim by Benjamin Franklin, “it's early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise,” something like that? So I just went to the song leader and I said, “Can we change man to like person? And in those days, like in Benjamin Franklin's days, man meant everyone, but nowadays, when you say man, like people think man, right, like the kids think, man, so now we think makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise, just like reasonable things right? Like that. We can change them so that the kids can understand what we're actually trying to say.

Hodges: But it doesn't always go smoothly, I assume. What do you do, when it doesn't go smoothly?

Inouye: When it doesn't go smoothly, you just kind of graciously say, okay, and you live to fight another day.

Hodges: Another one of the essays was written in the wake of a church policy that was established in 2015, restricting the baptism of children who have a gay parent who's married to a gay partner, what were you trying to do in that piece, because it was written at the time that the policy was announced. And now the policy has been rescinded. And the piece is here in the book, so talk a little bit about that piece.

Inouye: I was trying to show, much like the other essays in the book, to show the complexity of righteousness and integrity within the church. And I believe that there were people when that policy came out, it was heartbreaking to so many people. But I wanted to recognize that the intention of the people who created the policy was not to break hearts either. So I work with this group called the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, which is founded by Randall Paul and is a Utah based organization, their dialogue methodology and their kind of overall philosophy about religious disagreement is very sound. And the point is that when people are willing to challenge each other on very sensitive issues, it often comes from a place of deep integrity and love. Because if you think that what someone's doing is actually deeply wrong, it's a very loving thing to honestly tell them that you think it's deeply wrong. So what I was trying to do in that piece is show how we were as a people struggling to work through this very complicated new issue. It wasn't just a matter of some people being homophobes or other, some people being heretical and not having faith. It was so much more complicated. And in that piece, I talked about this kind of tension between charisma in institution building, which I also talked about in my academic book, and the point is that we need to have rules. This was a boundary keeping policy right? You may not go this far, we need to have rules. Religions cannot not have rules. They don't survive if they don't have rules. But they also need to have charisma, which is that kind of deep power, that deep joy that we feel when we feel the spirit. And that balance between the two, or the coexistence of the two, is a real source of tension. But they've both got to be there. And so I was confident at that time that we would keep working through things. And I think the cancellation of the policy shows that we are indeed still working through things. When that was announced, there was an acknowledgement that Elder Oaks said he hoped that this would be a positive thing that would help families and help saints follow the Savior's directive to love each other. So I think that, you know, we we're working through those tensions as a church, which is, good.

Hodges: That's Melissa Inouye. She's a senior lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. She received her PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. She's also a member I should mention of the Advisory Board here at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University. And a lot of her work for Latter-day Saints is focused on reinforcing the relationship between faith and learning as a positive thing. She's been published online and different places, also in print in Patheos, The Washington Post, and Meridian Magazine, the Ensign and other publications. She and her husband Joseph have four, she calls her children noisy and joyful, botanically nicknamed Bean, Sprout, Leaf, and Shoot. Melissa, let's, let's talk a little bit about cancer. The book follows the progression and treatment of cancer, began as colon cancer in particular. And not too long before you were diagnosed, your mother died from cancer. So you brought her experience to your experience of your own battle. What was it like writing about this for an audience, not just for yourself?

Inouye: It is kind of weird to kind of publicly discuss your colon with people. At the same time, so many of us have had lives that are touched by cancer. So it seems in some ways to be the most, kind of to me, to be one of the most accessible parts of the book, because we all know how that goes and how terrible it feels. And also, what happens when you live far away from home is that you end up writing lots of personal things in emails. So the things that are already written in the book about cancer are the emails, the actual emails that I wrote to my family and friends overseas. So they're already kind of publications in that sense, because so much of the communication is just more efficiently distributed by the written word anyway.

Hodges: But I should say even then, like, they're not just, when you say their emails, yeah, that is true that you sent them by email. But these are very well thought out messages. These are kind of more like old school letters, where you really spent some time on it, you say some big things. And it's not just, “Hey, what's up, this is what's going on,” and then like an auto signature. They’re emails, yeah, but they're more than that, too. And they're, they're really personal too dealing with your health.

Inouye: Yeah, well, yeah, I do love letters. I think letters are great. Again, this is just a function of living so far away. People never call me, like my family members never call me in New Zealand, except for when my father calls me like in the middle of the night, like at 2am.

Hodges: Yeah I was gonna say is that a timezone? Right?

Inouye: So maybe I think that is kind of like people are afraid to call because the timezone thing. So a lot of that kind of personal communication between me and my family does happen in the written form anyway.

Hodges: And you kept them updated on the diagnosis, the treatment, and the book sort of ends with a somewhat optimistic view of things are looking pretty good. But with these type of cancers, people aren't ever really totally out of the woods. Your mother had a recurrence of cancer. And that's what ended up taking her life as she was treated for cancer, things looked to be heading in the right direction, then it came back, and then she passed away. So it struck me as I'm reading those pieces, that there always was that fear of that possibility that it could come back. And you were reckoning with that in real time, as the book was being created.

Inouye: Yeah, there's an actual piece called “On Fear”. And I think about fear a lot. I feel it a lot. And I deal with it a lot. And I think the point is, it is unrealistic to think that you can not be fearful, that you can not have fear in your life. But as I say, in this essay “On Fear”, since fear is inevitable, since we've got to have it, might as well do something productive with it, like write a book, or learn how to train your mind in different ways or learn how to fix your mistakes.

Hodges: There's a quote here that has stuck with me, because I felt this as a parent. When I wanted to be a parent, I never thought about fear. I didn't think that being afraid was part of being a parent. I didn't think it wasn't. I just didn't think of it as, it just wasn't on the list of things that I would have wrote “how being a parent is”, I wouldn't put fear on there. But there's this moment here you say “to come to love another person is to feel fear on a whole new scale, the world becomes brighter and darker at the same time, the colors pop and zing but the shadows are deeper.”

Inouye: That's why it's so horrible to die. You know, dying it’s fine, but then if you leave your kids. That's super horrible.

Hodges: Or if something was to happen to a child too. There’s this fear, like love and fear are a lot more connected to each other sometimes than I like to think I guess.

Inouye: Right, absolutely. One brings the other.

Hodges: Yeah. And this particular letter “On Fear” was written to your children. Is that something that you see any of them being able to negotiate right now? Or is that a letter for later? Because it's a deep concept. Like I said, I don't remember ever having a discussion as a child or an adolescent, or growing up that fear and love went hand in hand. Obviously, I experienced it. My father passed away from cancer when I was 15. And so I guess I'd never heard it articulated, even though I've experienced it.

Inouye: I think when my first baby was born, my husband's parents sent him a note that said, now that you've had your own child, you know how we feel about you. So I think that is something that you really absorb when you've actually had your own child. It doesn't really, it didn't register for me until I did, or I guess it can also apply, I think, when you've fallen in love with someone, that person comes into your life in that really significant way. That's also probably a time when fear comes in that same way.

Hodges: Like the potential loss of a friend, like a dear friend, I have a dear friend who moved to a different state. And, you know, I was afraid. And I was sad, because it was a dear friend. So I see this happening in a lot of different types of relationships. The book ends, like you said, kind of on this at a place where we see you coming out of the treatments, things are looking good, and then things aren't looking good again. So you've got to fight, you've got to fight ahead of you again.

Inouye: Yeah, it’s a big pain in the neck, I'm definitely going to do it. So I just have to do what's in front of us and the scope of problems in the world. It's pretty small problem. I have a very easy life.

Hodges: What have you got planned now you're going to be doing some events for the book. We have a lecture coming up tomorrow here at the Maxwell Institute. By the time this episode comes out, that lecture will be available on our YouTube channel. So if people haven't heard it already, they can check that out. You're doing some other media events, talking to different people, any other projects that you're going to be working on to keep busy at all?

Inouye: No, just staying alive. I could burst into song right now.

Hodges: We'll put a music cue in red there with it.

Cool. Well, thanks, Melissa. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about the book. It's called Crossings: A Bald… oh, let's, I do want to ask one more thing here. The very first descriptor you give here in the subtitle is bald. That's something we share in common. Yeah, you're more clean shaven than me. In the book you talk about this is, when you do, when you shave all the way that's kind of like your most distinguished like, dress up look. Talk about your baldness, because when people hear of cancer, they might assume that baldness comes hand in hand with that, but that's not the case.

Inouye: No, it's just an autoimmune condition I've had since I was maybe had since before my second kid. So about 11-12 years. Yeah.

Hodges: And it was just kind of came on out of the blue like you just lost your hair.

Inouye: Yep. Hair today. Gone tomorrow. It looks good. Yeah, well, it is useful for some things. I think it makes me like older; people always think I'm super young. So it's nice to be a little older, relatively speaking. It’s nice at interfaith gatherings. People think I'm Buddhist, so they just love me ahead of time, I guess if they thought I was Mormon they wouldn’t love me ahead of time so much. It's very easy to maintain very efficient it’s probably saved me, you know, like weeks of productivity, just not having to deal with hair.

Hodges: Yeah, that's the upside I think of, and it's probably even more so because of different cultural ways that hair worked for men and women differently.

Inouye: Well, it is quite awkward to be bald among the beautiful or you walk into the store and they say “next sir”. And you're like, “okay”, and they're like, “oh, I’m so sorry.”

Hodges: Yeah, I don't have to deal with that. But as a fellow bald person, I will say I do miss the feeling of like wind going through my hair. I do miss that. You can't replicate that pull, the weight of having hair on my head. I can't replicate it.

Inouye: I just miss the warmth. That's really helpful.

Hodges: Yeah, I know how you feel. Solidarity with you. It's Melissa Inouye, a bald Asian-American Latter-day Saint woman scholars ventures through life death, cancer and motherhood. Not necessarily in that order. Melissa, thanks for doing the interview.

Inouye: Thanks for having me. Now it's life death, cancer and motherhood and cancer. But I guess it's not necessarily in that order. So it's yeah, there we go.

Hodges: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I reached out to Dr. Inouye during the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic to get an update on her health since it's been a while since this episode is recorded. In August 2019, Melissa and her family moved to Draper, Utah to be closer to family. She's currently working as a historian in the church history department for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And she says “I'm still doing chemotherapy treatments. But I've had a big surgery that puts me in a really good place for a patient who's had a stage four diagnosis.”

Thank you for that update, Melissa, we all wish you well. And you can check out her Maxwell Institute living faith lecture on our YouTube channel right now. It's called Making Zion and it was also printed in the Maxwell Institute's 2019 Annual Report which is also available on our website, check it out at mi.byu.edu/about.

Okay, on to our review of the month in Apple podcasts. This one comes from Shaney Stu, I think is how you pronounce that, she gave five stars or they gave five stars, and said, “This podcast is by far one of my favorites. The host is excellent. But what I really love is learning from the guests who offer so much to think about both spiritually and intellectually. I feel elevated while listening, and then I can attack my scripture study with new skills after listening. Thank you.” All right, well thank you for that review, Shaney Stu, and I hope to see more reviews soon. You can review us on Apple podcasts, leave a comment on YouTube or Facebook or wherever else you see the show. And until next time, I'm Blair Hodges, and this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast.