Ten years ago, I served as an AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) at a refugee resettlement office in San Diego. Begun in 1965 as a domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps, VISTA is a national service program that connects volunteers to anti-poverty organizations.

“Get out of my country.” Those were the last words that I could remember hearing. Everything else was a blur of images and fragmented memories: the fluorescent beer signs gently hummed and looked down upon us above the entrance.

With a sunshine yellow tracksuit, she was not hard to miss. As her arms rotated in controlled, windmill motions, my grandmother took her place among a dozen other Cantonese seniors at Washington Square Park in San Francisco.

I have power and privilege as a queer hapa yonsei pastor. This is not a sentence I would have imagined speaking just a few years ago.

On one particularly hot afternoon in Contra Costa, California, 20 Adult Education specialists entered an air-conditioned conference room, greeted by me and a couple of my colleagues. We were set to begin an undocumented student allyship training developed by the community college where we worked.

Sione Uvea Uipi lived life knowing that things were bigger than himself. He was born and raised in Fakakai Ha’apai, an island in the Kingdom of Tonga — one of the last standing monarchies in Polynesia.

In the library of the Alliance Evangelical Divinity School in Anaheim, California, I find Pastor Tai Nguyen hanging up a series of photos with an air of nostalgia, visual reminders of evangelism and his ministry in Vietnam before 1975.

Surveys agree: The first year of marriage is one of the hardest. Whether it’s getting used to living with another person or working out new financial priorities, it’s no wonder that the first year can sometimes feel like the opposite of marital bliss.

I will never forget the day I was crying in a little room next to the English chapel, holding my newborn baby as my husband was preaching on the stage.

When the clip of Professor Robert E. Kelley’s interview with BBC News went viral, several of my Filipino friends and I feared that the Asian woman in the background might be a Filipina, one of the countless women who had left their families to care for the children of wealthy families in other countries.

“What are you doing with your life? Why are you always throwing away your life for other people?” It was my first time home in over a year; apparently, my mother was not very happy with my decision to become more involved in activism around the Seattle area.

I had done my fair share of activism in college and post-graduation, but never quite long enough to see actual change on an institutional level. On paper, JoAnne Kagiwada had an impressive roster that placed her in the history books, and I was readying myself to meet a force of nature in this small-framed, Japanese American grandmother.

Serious business is being discussed around the conference table at San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center. Chinatown finds itself at the frontlines of a heated gentrification battle. Crime is rising. So are evictions.

“Lion”, starring Dev Patel, is a film that chronicles the journey of Saroo, an Indian adoptee who seeks out his biological family 25 years after he is adopted.

The 2008 and 2016 elections exposed our nation’s drastically divergent views on the state of race relations in the United States. In the intervening eight years, some believed that our country’s racial progress had reached the telos of “post-racial” society and required no further action.

Politics. One of the three things — the other two being money and religion — we are warned never to discuss lest it wreak havoc in our conversations. And havoc it does wreak. There is legitimacy to this warning.

Writer Parker Palmer traces his first experience of inner division back to the fifth grade. He describes how his life at home reading stories, building model airplanes, and immersing in fantasies told through the radio were his secret life veiled by a “performed” public life.

As a third-culture kid, I hold a fluid definition of home — one that stretches and surrounds the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the United States.

After six years as pastor of Union Church, I have found that leadership means constantly disappointing people. One of the most irritating but accurate truths about leadership comes from Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s “Leadership on the Line”.

“We have a new student,” my teacher announced. “His name is ... Key-O ... Thompson from California.” It was my first day at Rankin Elementary School in Arlington, Texas, and it was a rare moment I was glad to be the only Samoan in the whole school. The way she pronounced my name, Kaio, actually changed it into a derogatory word in the Samoan language.

The idea for Inheritance began with a simple mandate. Already publisher of a popular Chinese Christian magazine, Sean saw an opportunity to do the same thing for the “second generation”. Share some testimonies, encourage readers.

Arirang is traditional Korean folk music that has been passed down by memory for over 600 years. It wasn't until 1869 that Christian missionary Homer B. Holbert went to South Korea and scored it black and immutable onto paper for the first time.

During the first planning meeting for InterVarsity’s Chinatown Program, I sat with two other Cantonese American women eating dumplings from small plastic bags. We were sitting in Portsmouth Square, a San Francisco Chinatown landmark filled with Chinese chess tournaments and slow-paced exercise classes.

I grew up on a steady diet of Saturday mornings, pajamas, and cartoons. My brother and I would wake up as soon as the sun shone through the blinds. Together, we’d run to my parents’ room to ask them if we could watch TV.

It was a frigid winter in Junla-Namdo, South Korea, a country still scarring from the Korean War. In a dark corner of a semi-outdoor kitchen, Hana silently cried as she rubbed the cheek that had been crisply slapped by her abusive mother-in-law.