My name is Theresa and I was raised in Oakland, California all 21 years of my life. I found out I was born in Jiangmen, China in middle school.

I grew up in a POC¹ bubble living near Chinatown and attending schools that were predominantly Asian or Latinx. When I moved to Santa Cruz for college, I experienced a culture shock with the lack of accessible POC hubs in the area. The first year of college was also the year that I accepted God into my life. My emotionally tumultuous transition from high school to college led me to seek out a community, that is when I joined Intervarsity Christian Fellowship².

My family isn’t Christian, but occasionally my parents would drop me off at church Sunday services for daycare or summer programs at Salvation Army³ when I was young. My dad was a baptized Catholic(until he came to America) and my mom is Buddhist. My dad fondly reminisces Sunday mass and retreats he’d gone to with the Catholic priests and sisters in Hong Kong. He even possesses a little booklet that confirms his faith identity, baptized as a Catholic. As the third youngest among six siblings, Dad didn’t receive special attention from his parents. It was the Italian priests and sisters that showered him and the other kids with affection through treats like Coca-Cola, chocolate, and new shoes and shirts that their parents wouldn’t be able to afford. He hiked to the seaside mountains of Hong Kong with the Church for retreats and learned how to fish with the boys. He recalls how at one point he told his parents he wanted to become a Catholic priest, but his parents scoffed at the idea and told him that it wouldn’t make a substantial career. He decided he wanted to expand his horizons beyond Hong Kong and travelled to America through a refugee sponsorship of the Red Cross Hospital where he worked. He believed in the American dream, so he flew to California, which the Chinese called “Old Gold Mountain”. He came to San Francisco, California in 1971 with no friends or family, just church connections. Experiencing my own culture shock in Santa Cruz and briefly in China, I cannot fathom the loneliness, insecurity, and worries he must have had starting his life in a foreign country. He lived with Hong Kong students while he worked as a busboy at the pier.

Sometimes he sat by the ocean wondering if it was all worth it coming to America. 

He went into various businesses, but committed to his interest in jade and jewelry. He went back to China to meet the producers in jewelry factories, which is where he met my mom. My mother came all the way from North-Eastern China, Yanbian to Guangdong to find work. She hardly looked back after leaving her hometown, where snowy winters were so brutal that your ears could freeze and fall off(it’s also known for its beautiful ice sculptures). Yanbian is located halfway between North Korea and Russia and there are interesting Russian Orthodox church buildings there, perhaps a growing Christian population. My mom is half Korean, but she doesn’t speak the language anymore because she was sent to a Chinese school over a local Korean school. I was always fascinated with my mother’s Korean ethnic side since I didn’t find out she was half until I was an adolescent. My Korean grandpa was involved in the lumber business since the area was known for its timber industry. I learned that the ancestors of the Korean ethnic group migrated from Korea in the late 17th century to flee from oppressive landlords and famine and settled in Yanbian. Most ethnic Koreans in China are Buddhists, but there is also a growing Christian population. The only time I ever visited my mother’s hometown was the summer of fourth grade to see my grandmother for the first time in the hospital. She didn’t look very much like my mom, but she was very excited to see me. 

My parents’ backgrounds have definitely influenced the way I view faith and spirituality. My parents are accepting of common religions, like Buddhism, Christianity, and any mainstream spiritual practice. But I never completely told my parents why I believed in God.

When I explain a little bit, they still see it as a preferential religious lifestyle. My dad no longer believes in Catholicism as an organized religion because of the history of religious wars he’s read about, yet he still thanks God for a meal at the end of the day. I remember a time I invited my parents to a Cantonese church and they seemed to have been moved by the worship service. I didn’t understand all of the lyrics or the sermon, but I saw my parents’ eyes tear up. We don’t talk about that though. My childhood brought me to understand spiritual experiences that lie beyond church and spiritual groups. I feel the closest to God when I’m amongst nature. I hope to someday allow the same experience of wondering and discovering spirituality, faith, and God for my children in the future. I am worried about how the western Evangelical church culture could erase our ethnic identity. Churches don’t talk about ethnic identity enough and may not always tolerate our ethnic cultural traditions.

It hasn’t been an easy task to ask my parents to dig deep in the past and unveil unprocessed trauma. Recognizing this pain and challenge, I hope to continue this journey in understanding my parents better. Pray for our journey as a family and for them to know who God is some day.