There is a diversity within our racial category that defies naming (AAPI/AANHPI/APIDA, etc). What assortment of letters fits who we are?

Umma embraced her role as Samonim, serving with a luminous smile. I never bought it. I judged it the face an Umma puts to protect her child from worries, even when her child became an adult and knows that life forces roles on you. Come Sunday morning, she was smiling.

I’ve made peace with the tenuous understanding that we have. I’m scared of imagining a relationship with my family that’s not fraught with shame and misunderstandings.

This weekend, we celebrated the second birthday of Nemo, the child of two women who are giants in our community, who has grown up in and with the community. I saw this child who is filled with all of the different emotions we experience in human life, and his parents affirming each one with love and grace, holding space for those feelings. In the children of PAAC, including my own, I saw so much hope. These are children growing up knowing their families will love them for exactly who they are and will be, unconstricted by the restraints I grew up with (a world full of strict gender conformity and restrictive, toxic theology).

When the ordinary is too much to bear
and the days have bled one into another,
when the to-do list is too long
and everywhere we look seems to demand
more than we can give,

In January 2017, I was in deep in wedding planning mode. We were trying to save money on a DJ and trying to make decisions on some truly mundane choices. Should “Don’t Stop Believing” be at the beginning to get people on the dance floor or at the end as a final send off? Who can I trust to operate an iPhone to play “Concerning Hobbits” as my fiancée walks down the aisle, who will know how to fade out the volume at the correct time?

The religion I knew while growing up was about being right(eous), and I believed it was the only way to do religion. It didn't sit well with me at times, but I didn't know there were alternatives. I thought the Good News was that some of us, if we believed (and were very good but it wasn't our goodness that saved us but we still had to be very good), we would be "saved." The only thing that mattered in eternity was how right we were in our beliefs. Putting an end to injustice on earth wasn't as important as convincing people of how certain we were that we were right(eous).

As I write, my family is vacationing in Costa Rica. We spent the first portion near the base of the Arenal Volcano in the Northwest and then this last third in the Central Highlands, specifically the Los Angeles Cloud Forest. Among other ecotourist activities, we’ve gone mountain biking and white-water rafting, done a hanging bridges and canopy (i.e.,zipline) tour, looked for wildlife during nighttime and early morning hikes, and soaked in the hot springs like the self-respecting Asians we are.