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We lived in one of the biggest cities in China, but when I first started elementary school, we would meet in one-story huts whose roofs would leak during rainy days. We had not yet heard of McDonald’s or Pizza Hut, none of our homes were air-conditioned, and the best toys I had were the ones passed onto us by our relatives in Hong Kong. The first major change in my life occurred when my school moved into a brand-new, six-story building in 1994. Unfortunately, this was not the only major move that year. In the great transition from public enterprises to private companies in the early 1990s, many state-owned companies began to decline. Since our little apartment was provided by my parents' work, the decline of their state-owned company also meant the loss of our home. This was not particular only to my family. Others like my parents – in their early 40s and poorly educated due to the Cultural Revolution – suddenly found themselves without work and without a state safety net to support them.   

This became an important lesson for me not just in dating, but also in teaching the Bible. Some cultures may not have the categories through which we commonly communicate Biblical concepts.

These are the Chinese immigrants who, despite having been in this country for decades, often still feel like foreigners if they do not speak the language. These may be the people who have a very hard time coming to worship services on Sunday mornings because they work on Sundays at a restaurant or hair salon, or they live alone in some elderly housing and rely on the good-will of other church members to drive them to church. Most weeks their only interaction with the church is when the Chinese pastor visits them at their restaurant or at home on Thursday afternoons to have a short Bible study with them. Reaching them would require not only creative thinking on how to get past the language and cultural barriers, but also an evaluation of who are the visible and invisible members of the broader society. In many ways these less visible Chinese immigrants are the poor in spirit. They are the meek; they are the ones who mourn, and to them also, if not more, belongs the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Chinese media – including my family's social network – was buzzing with news of China's military parade in Beijing recently. The parade marked the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in China, and it gave the entire world a chance to see how far China has come in the last seventy years. Having lived through the turmoil of 1950s–1980s, many of my family members and friends watched the parade with pride.