Being A Body

I wasn’t raised in a Christian family. I only entered the “Christian bubble” of a Southern Baptist youth group in junior high, where I pledged myself to abstinence before marriage at a True Love Waits conference and absorbed other conflicted messages about the life of the body. Growing up in a Chinese immigrant family, though, I wasn’t taught to distrust my body or subsume it under other, holier pursuits. If anything, my mother was overly focused on health. “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything,” she repeatedly admonished me. Her view reflects the extreme end of the…