Jeanne Choy Tate

Jeanne Choy Tate

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.

Her recently published book, Something Greater: Culture, Family, and Community as Living Story (WipfandStock 2013) draws on the author’s experiences in San Francisco’s Chinatown to contrast intergenerational childrearing in biblical and Chinese communities with American individualism. Awarded third place as a Presbyterian Writers Guild “First Book,” Something Greater explores individualism and cultural diversity in American society. Available on Amazon and on Kindle at bit.ly/JeanneTate. Visit my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JeanneChoyTate.author.