Tell us a bit about your own AAPI heritage.
My mother is American, and my father was Japanese. I was born and raised in Tokyo as one of six kids in a bi-racial family. We grew up speaking Japanese with our grandparents but English at home and at the international school we attended. Both my parents were consummate volunteers alongside many other accomplishments, my father started an outreach food program for homeless populations, and my mother at 85 still delivers food every week to individuals at 4:30 in the morning! My dad also assisted the Asian Rural Institute, which brings scholars together to learn about sustainable organic farming practices. When I call my mom weekly, she tells me about her daily sweeping of the road in front of her home, (including her neighbor’s areas), and her hobby/mission of taking a bag out to her local park to make sure it stays weed-free. She was a daughter of an amateur rose hybridizer who was a founding member of the Rose Hybridizer’s Associa
It is one year since I began writing this column on Mothering Sunday last year and we are still in crisis. The Christian Gospel has always included a message of recreation, whether that means the new life of Baptism as indicated in Galations chapter 6 verse 15 (“a new creation is everything”) or a new created order, as described in Revelation 21 verse 5: “Behold I make all things new.” As we come out of this Covid crisis we need men and women of vision, not only to get back to normal but to make a new normal. To get to this new normal we need to love God, love one another and love the soil, so as to realize a re-creation of the life that God has envisioned for us. Yes, we need to get back to many things as they were, but also to go beyond that and mend what is broken.