As a 2nd generation Taiwanese American mother with two young children, I am constantly learning how to shepherd my children’s individuality as well as their relational dynamics.
Runa’s story begins with the number 7. She is the seventh daughter out of seven daughters in her family. A few years later, her younger brother is born, and then a stepbrother joins the fold.
What have I done? I quietly asked myself this countless times the first year with our adopted child. Bonding was a challenge.
When I was a child, my go-to bedtime story was Jonathan London’s “A Koala for Katie”, a story about a girl named Katie who visits the zoo with her parents. In many ways, it seemed like he had written the story about me.
When my wife and I began dating, one thing I learned was that God had placed in her a desire to adopt. As a teen, Dorene was a fan of “Anne of Green Gables”, a story about an adoptee who grows to become an intelligent, strong, and resilient woman and teacher in her small town.
I’m sure it was a hot and humid day in Seoul, South Korea. Being seven months pregnant just added to her discomfort. She was 26 and traveling on a bumpy street through the city.
A mentor once told me, “Sara, you can’t out-dream the plans God has for you.” I slowly nodded back as waves of dissonance washed over me. Truth had collided with my functional theology. Did God have plans and dreams for me?
I was in sixth grade when the killing of Latasha Harlins became national news. Latasha Harlins was a 15-year-old Black teenager who went to a Korean-owned liquor store in South Central, Los Angeles, to buy some orange juice.
By now, many of us are at least casually acquainted with “the model minority myth” that Asian Americans are naturally (or “culturally”) hyper-disciplined, obedient, intelligent, and industrious. Good at math, capable doctors — bad at sports, nerdy at heart. Other people of color should “be more like them”.
In second grade, my teacher surveyed the class' ethnicity make-up to teach a lesson on sorting and categorizing. I remember looking at the paper, seeing the list of ethnicities, and reading those words: “Choose one”.
On an episode of “Parts Unknown” that took him to Israel, Anthony Bourdain approached a group of Orthodox Jewish men and asked if he too could pray at the Western Wall.
The summer before I started high school, my family was in a bad car accident in upstate New York. When we returned home to New York City, we were still nursing a number of injuries from the crash.
My romance definitely started out in a recognizable way: I swiped right on Tinder on an incredibly attractive 21-year-old guy named Cory. We matched, but I thought little of it.
In 7th grade my geography teacher — in the name of celebrating our respective heritages — split us up into cultural groups and had us research our personal and group ancestries.
“I’m in an interracial relationship.” I remember the moment I heard those words. I was sitting on my girlfriend’s couch as she talked on the phone with her parents, and she had just — after three months of dating — stumbled upon that revelation.
After unloading the last box of books into my new office, a voice echoed from the hallway. Eat na tayo! Eat na tayo! Pastor Kevin, let’s eat!
It was an unusually warm March night in Northern Indiana. The expansive Midwestern sky was illuminated with starlight, but the beauty of the night was dimmed by the ire in my heart.
Endo, Bonhoeffer, King. The teachings of these three Christian leaders swirled in my mind over the weekend.
Being Asian American is awesome. We are distinct for our diversity within one racialized group, our traditions, languages, religions, and stories of how we got here a wild tumble of beauty and difference, complicated by war and colonialism.
When informed that President Trump's administration has proposed a policy to check Chinese entering the U.S. for their social media, he thought that it aims to keep out terrorists.
During my recent personal and emotional struggles to accept the election of DT as the President of the United States, I have had to deal with some very un-Christian attitudes.
AS A CHILD I was taught that God was a caring God. He cared about what I felt and what I was going through. However, when my husband, Ben, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2013, that belief of God was challenged and questioned.
AS AN ASIAN AMERICAN, I often feel selfconscious or distrustful of my feelings of happiness. I never wanted to come across as happier than others because that could make me seem insensitive or noncommunal.
MY HUSBAND AND I never intended on living overseas, much less being overseas missionaries. But in 2014, we took a two-week trip to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and something inside us was awakened.
