Arms Outstretched

March 22, 2025

The air is visible. It floats through the windows, slow dancing. The piano, keys browned, sags under the weight of the falling dust. The chapel has been eternally dirty despite Qing’s — our janitor’s — constant toil. There have been times when it’s less noticeable, but I can’t help seeing it today.

A podium stands in front, a hard wooden delivery bed of truth. In my childhood, Ms. Yang rested on it. For all five years I knew her, she sported the same immaculately circular bowl cut, a nod to some Taiwanese cosmetic style I neither knew nor understood. She was so thin her skin discovered her bones. I can’t remember how she sounded, but I do remember her woodpecker cadence, the tink tink tink of her sermons. She despised Halloween, thought it a celebration of the devil, so instead of candy she bestowed fortune-cookie slips of Bible verses. I imagined the children’s horror, disappointment seeping through their costumes. They’d learn to skip her house.

Sometimes she would send me and Sam to her office to retrieve craft supplies, and, hand in hand, we would make the trek across the building. We’d unlock the office door, tentative, and bolt as soon as we located the supplies. But when she sent me alone, I would linger. Spinning around on her chair and rustling through the cabinet drawers, I’d let the quiet of the carpet-thicketed room digest me slowly. I indulged in my perversity, lapping the sickly nectar of wrongdoing. In my investigations, I found few signs of life. Her desk had no marriage photos. Her folders had no papers. The only evidence of presence was a small wall of drawings done by youth in the congregation. There was one of Adam and Eve, emerging from their mud form. Or, at least that’s what I hoped the brown smudge represented. Most were filled with unrecognizable characters, huge circles and squares mimicking humanity.

During her sermons, she would distribute a pocket-sized serialized booklet. Each page featured a kid-friendly article that ended with an upbeat bible verse to memorize for the week. Raw bible stories would have been too much for us. We weren’t yet ready for their grimy morality. So, instead, she would narrate stories featuring Ellas and Stewarts and Patricias forgetting to do their homework or being late for baseball practice. I recall only one such lesson. She read to us a story about geese, about their resilient migration across miles of land, about their clever V-shaped flying formation. I learned that the strongest flies in front. In doing so, he bears the wind alone, finding only the clouds and sky before him. When he finally tires, he switches out with another. In the back, he relaxes, the wings of his family cutting the air before him. I cocked my head back; I could see through the rafters; I found the V in love. Any godly message has disintegrated with memory. But, even now, I admire those constantly-shitting creatures.

After each lesson, she told us to pray. The room would fill with the uncomfortable silence of children. Heads bowed, black hair spilled forward, we mimed prayer. To be dismissed, we raised our hands to signal we were done — in the Lord’s name we pray, ayyy-men—and wait for her to tap us on the shoulder. After an hour of sitting, tolerating, listening, we could leave. We wanted to be pious, but we were children. I’m sure she could hear our thoughts. I’m bored. I want lunch. I need to pee. And so on. She walked around languidly, tapping only those she deemed worthy, bestowing movement. Through slitted eyes, I’d try to peek, though I would only glimpse Sam’s dirt-caked shoes shifting impatiently in the corners of my vision. After we fled the main chapel room, we would wait in the hallway for our friends, and the chatter was a great relief. Right where we stood was a door rumored to lead to Qing’s room. Rachel told me he lived there with his wife. I wonder if he ever cursed Ms. Yang as we piled out into his living space, noisily shaking off our suppression.

One time, after watching a PBS special on dinosaurs, I wanted to ask her about when god created mankind. Did it happen before or after he spawned those massive lizards? Did god have to protect Abraham from velociraptors? Wracked with anxiety, I trembled for all 60 minutes of her lesson, fidgeting in my seat and shifting a stray pencil eraser around with my foot. When prayer time began, I ignored god, and instead kneaded my question over and over again in my head. This was my time to shine: I needed to sound smart, curious, biblical. I raised my hand at a calculated midpoint, a healthy 5 minutes. After she tapped me on the shoulder, I left to wait outside. The large wooden doors would creak and out popped another child, sweaty and excited. When the last child escaped, I re-entered the throbbingly quiet chapel. Still, regal, she stood behind the podium. Strangely enough, she didn’t look surprised by my return. In stutters, I asked my questions. I don’t remember her answer.

For all of elementary school, Ms. Yang fended for our salvation by herself. Under her watch, we grew from nothing. See it now: our eyes indent our heads; holes for ears form; our bodies bend inward in prayer. But just as I have no memory of when she first started preaching to us, I also have no memory of when she stopped. After we entered into middle school, James Tong unceremoniously took her place.

It took me a while to realize James had a lazy eye. For a few months, I worried he was bored by our conversations: he never seemed to make proper eye contact. After I found out, I would only stare at the lazy eye when I talked to him, wondering what it saw. It wandered aimlessly inward, giving him a kindly look, gentle and sad. His height accentuated this docility; even for an Asian man, he was short. Over the next few years we would sprout, one by one, to see over his head. We became aware that he had very little hair, the small tufts vigilant but sparse. But we, too, were growing to be gangly: hair, pimples, teeth erupted in places and directions we did not want them to go. In physical solidarity, he merged into the youth’s mass.

I never quite overcame my anxiety around him. I watched him closely when he talked with Sam and Rachel, nursing my envy. Their chatter had a familiarity that came only with divulging sin. The threads of holy childhood had fallen away. We were raw with real emotions, and disclosing them became our finest currency. Sure, we weren’t Catholics, but obsession with wrongdoing knew no denominational bounds. If you shared too much, you were a burden; if you shared too little, you were a liar. I was a liar. Sam and Rachel were perfect in their sin.

As middle-schoolers, we began Friday evening sessions in addition to Sunday School, all in the chapel. It’s strange how different it was at night. Gusts of night wind spun the fans and moonlight dappled the floor. Sometimes we entered into the chapel frenetic with the week at school to find candles and gentle guitar music. On Friday night, we always began with worship. James and a select few on the worship team would perform in the front as a band, singing modern Christian pop songs and, occasionally, hymns. The music would bleed out of the windows and float into the sky, pleading for mercy and truth. This time was holy. They are the only memories I have tainted by any god. It is what I miss most.

I had a favorite hymn. James told me that it was composed by a man after all four of his daughters were killed in a shipwreck. Shortly after the tragedy, he lost his life savings in a fire. The song is titled It Is Well With My Soul. When I sang the lyrics, I saw the destitute composer on the pier, waiting for the dead. The song would often move me to tears and I thought that I, too, knew sadness. It was good if we cried during worship, a unmistakable sign of piety, so I harbored the sharp ache in my throat proudly. But one time, when I was wiping away my tears, James asked me what was wrong. Taken by surprise, I told him I didn’t know. He stood there for a minute, looking at me. His lazy eye was dark with scorn.

After we sang, we played. The chapel became a nursery filled with screaming, desperate, overgrown children who had just touched god. I like to believe most people, too, remember their middle-school years like a high-pitched noise, a sound as irritating as a fire alarm or a flashing police car. The chapel walls quaked with humans who had just learned to love and to hate and to forgive and to envy. One game was our favorite. We would place a trash can in the middle of the room, and link hands. Then, we would pull — anyone who touched the trash can would leave the circle. We would spin, spin, spin around the big black container filled with our refuse. We would holler as we pulled each other towards the can. At the end of the night, we turned the lights back on. The ground would be littered with food, wrappers, pencils, coins. We did our best to clean, but we could only do so much. I would leave thinking— poor Qing.

Sometimes after the games, we would sit, panting heavily, around James. He’d regale us with stories of his wild childhood, his clumsy upbringing, his victorious adulthood. He told us only once about his work with youth in the inner city of Minneapolis. He talked about their destitution, their need. It seemed to me they were abandoned by god. One time, he had to run away from a gunfight, and after a while, exhausted and out of breath, he tripped. He rolled onto his back and above him was a street lamp. Bathed by light, he lay there. He met god.

His lazy eye swiveled over us. We sat, transfixed. I wonder what he saw in us, these well-dressed Chinese kids from the Connecticut suburbs. A group of children blessed enough to see no poverty, no violence, no pain. Perhaps he saw a halo of light on our slick black crowns. Perhaps he saw emptiness in our dark brown eyes. Whatever he saw made him leave our church shortly after.

The church, surprised by his departure, rushed to replace us with a pastor. After a month or two of getting volunteer parents to watch over us, the church leaders settled on Pastor Paul.

“Since I play a lot of sports, Pastor Paul sounds a lot like pass the ball,” he joked when he first met us. To take on the position, he quit his job at Wells Fargo. He was very proud of this and we were reminded of it many times. He was called on by god to quit his well-paying job. And so forth. Pastor Paul looked like someone who previously worked at Wells Fargo: straight-laced, business-oriented, emotionally stilted. After a few Fridays starting with “agendas” printed out for our reading convenience, we began really missing James. Well, at least Sam and Rachel missed him — I didn’t, not really.

In the middle of his tenure, he gave a sermon about Noah’s three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth. It’s after the flood. Humanity will soon burst forward from these three men’s loins. One day, Noah passes out drunk and Ham sees the nakedness of his father. In the morning, Noah awakens. He knows about what happened, and he curses Ham to eternally be the servant of Shem and Japheth.

“So, some scholars think that Ham represented African Americans, and Shem and Japheth represented White and Asian people,” Pastor Paul informs us, “That’s why the African Americans were enslaved”. He over articulates the words African Americans.

I looked at the screen, where there was a PowerPoint slide showing an clip art image of Noah’s Ark. I looked at the people on my right. I looked at the people on my left. Nobody reacted. My mind scrambled, bucked, sighed. What did Ham do wrong? What did the African Americans do wrong? I knew nothing.

In retrospect, it wasn’t just Pastor Paul’s fault that I left. For years now, Rachel and I had muttered worriedly about our spirituality in the back of the chapel. It was a bit of a game, these reenactments of doubting, leaving, returning, doubting, leaving, returning and on and on. The thrill of the departure coupled well with the euphoria of forgiveness. But at the very end, I clung to my faith. My prayers were feverish — Please, god. Please answer me. —but I would only hear my voice, miming a holier one. As hard as I try, I can’t remember the moment it ended. But there must have been a last day when I stood singing, arms outstretched to a god I thought I knew.

。 。 。

When I passed by the church, I entered on a whim. I’m almost surprised it’s still standing. When I walked through the sanctuary, the prayer room, the forest out back, my reminisces were vague. But in the chapel, I’m rooted to the floor. My eyes follow the stray pencil marks on the wall to the dust on the ground to the water lines on the ceiling. Its musty smell is caked with remembrance. It’s as suffocating as a womb.

I hear the door grind open behind me. Qing stands, staring, broom in hand. It’s a Monday —nobody’s supposed to be in here. For a second, I can’t move, feeling guilty and invasive. But after a second, the realization hits: he doesn’t recognize me anymore.

I shuffle past him, muttering an apology. I’m fearful of the wall’s echo, the ricochet of my voice as thin as memory. When I open the door, I’m blinded briefly by the sunlight.

“I knew you as little girl,” he says suddenly, and I turn back around. His smile is wide with the delight of recollection, and for a second I can only stare into the silver gleam of his fake tooth.

When I look up into his eyes, I can’t help but smile back. But I don’t say anything as I shut the door behind me.