Something Greater

About the Contributor(s): Jeanne Choy Tate, at age nineteen, crossed the American continent to "find my identity" and work as a live-in volunteer at the Cameron House mission in San Francisco's Chinatown. This marked the beginning of her lifelong involvement with Chinese culture and the Chinese-American experience. Through her roles as a bilingual-bicultural early childhood educator, a Presbyterian lay pastor, and a wife and mother in a biracial-bicultural family, she discovered that the interdependent values of Chinese cultural heritage are, in many ways, closer to values held by early biblical communities than those of modern individualism. Her experience inspired her MA dissertation with Robert Bellah on Chinese and American educational values and her PhD at Graduate Theological Union on culture and caregiving.