I burst through the door of a low, light-green stucco cottage and scream, “They have taken my mother! The Communists have kidnapped her and are brainwashing her!” This nightmare began to interrupt my childhood sleep after my family moved from Okinawa to Kansas. I was 6 at the time.

From one perspective, my life has been like the Oscar-winning movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. Like Benjamin Button, my path in ministry went in reverse. I started as a theological educator and engaged academia for 12 years. Then I became a pastor.

When I came to the United States for higher education, I was a practicing Hindu and a seeker. Discipled by my Hindu mother, I followed and believed in the teachings of Hinduism without any concern until I was in high school. It was during my high school years that I encountered the Freedom Fighters who served alongside Gandhi to win liberation for India from the British.

About five years ago, I published “The Future of Evangelical Theology: Soundings from the Asian American Diaspora” (IVP Academic, 2014). I was motivated in that book by the observation that the so-called center of gravity for Christianity had shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South (Asia, Africa, and Latin America).

Theologian Amos Yong remarked that African Americans have a theology of liberation, and Latinx have a theology of the borderlands. He suggested that Asian Americans have a theology of exile, because of our status as forever foreigners wherever we are.

I live a small life. I teach, live alone, sing in choir, and commit Sunday evenings to family. My body, as it were, disappears into convention. But it is in the details that things get complicated: I teach religion at a Catholic all-boys’ school.

I had heard the story a thousand times. As a young man in China in the 1920s, my Gung-Gung (grandfather) Calvin Chao contracted the deadly disease of tuberculosis.

Theological reflection is an ordered inquiry into an individual or corporate experience in conversation with the wisdom of religious and cultural traditions. It produces a conceptual framework that leads to action.

I am pleased by this invitation from Inheritance magazine to reflect on the concepts that were powerful for me in understanding my identity as an API Christian. I begin by doing a riff on the prevalent stereotype of APIs as “model minorities”.

Back in India, some of my cousins’ children call me aunty. Actually, they call me mamima or kakima, depending on whether I’m their father’s cousin or their mother’s cousin.

Our kitchen is filled with all manner of children’s supplies. Sippy cups, plastic cutlery, and a half dozen small, white plastic bowls with blue or pink rims. We fill them up with cereal and pretzels, fruit and popcorn; basically, anything edible.

My students call me a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar; I published two books and wrote a number of articles on Dr. King, and am currently serving as co-chair of the Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Unit at the American Academy of Religion, the largest guild of religious scholars in the world.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles in 1981 to do my Master of Divinity program at the School of Theology at Claremont, I was full of dreams to learn from this “Brave New World”.

The church father Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” has long challenged theologians to interrogate the relationship between theology (Jerusalem) and Western philosophy (Athens). By reframing the question to, “What has Jerusalem to do with Beijing?” the theologian K. K. Yeo frames Asia as the primary context for doing theology rather than the West.

Born in the Philippines but having grown up in North America, I have lost much of what it means to be distinctly Filipino. When I returned to the Philippines to spend the better part of the 1990s as an international development worker, I rediscovered some of my ethnic heritage, including recovering my native tongue of Tagalog.

Being Asian American is complicated. It’s not just about our appearance, language, culture, mannerisms, or values. People who were adopted from Asia and raised in white families are Asian American. People who have been in the U.S. for less than a generation are Asian American. We do not share a common migration story.

Exactly 50 years ago, the identity “Asian American” was seized as a call to action, to resistance against oppression and solidarity with Third World liberation movements. Today, it is almost only a census label. Fifty years ago, the world was in upheaval, with the civil rights movement, Third World revolutions, and decolonization.

I don’t read dystopias. Not until now, that is. It might be because dystopias can be too grim or too cynical. I’ve heard from way too many people that after the election, they’ve foregone reading dystopian novels because it is just too real. And it’s true; there is already too much death around us.

Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019) would have had just the right words for a time like this. Her death is doubly cruel in robbing us of one of our foremost poet-theologians, one who could gaze into deep voids and tremendous griefs and from them craft creeds that could breathe for us when we could not. Rachel exuded an incredible influence on contemporary Christian belief and practice.

A few months ago, I became Asian American. Demographically speaking, that is. I received a green card to Trump’s U.S. From Malaysia, I landed at JFK airport in New York City in late 2018, having left it when it was Obama’s U.S. in 2016. Back then, you needed finer theoretical tools like postcolonialism to pull back the curtain on U.S. empire and critical race theory to pick apart layers of oppression.

When asked by a reporter in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre: “Do you see, today, white nationalism as a rising threat around the world?” Donald Trump responded: “I don’t, really."

Director Barry Jenkins’ film, “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018), stays faithful to the central theme of love in James Baldwin’s original novel while adding Jenkins’ own voice.

Though I spent a lot of time under her care, my Pau Pau and I didn’t speak much. Our exchanges were generally limited to one-way admonitions in her native Toisanese. Hehk fahn was her most common invitation — “It’s time to eat.”

Grandma was my primary guardian growing up. And like many of our guardians in Chinese immigrant families, Grandma was a mystery, a fish out of water. It may be because of how she mystified me that I never had the ears to hear her stories before she passed away.

The sound of sharp boar’s teeth hammered onto my flesh was surprisingly therapeutic. I felt a wonderful calmness while my husband and a fellow Filipinx American hand stretched my skin and my mambabatok left these permanent soot marks symbolizing powerful ancestral messages.