April Zhu

I was born into Christianity as I was born into America. In my childhood, there was the church and the diaspora, and I could not imagine one without the other. I grew up in Chinese immigrant churches, where the vast majority of members were the first in their families to leave their home countries and to find Christ, usually in that order. I took these two things as inextricable, that salvation happens in borderlands and transit, that to sow seed in good soil, first the seed must be carried by wind or water. When my parents were young grad students at West Virginia University, other sinophone students and professors—in those years, mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan—invited them to Bible study in Mandarin. My parents’ vulnerability and loneliness in a new place made their hearts good soil for the Gospel. They became Christians and in doing so, like a railroad switch, set themselves on a track doubly apart from their parents’. They learned to pray in Mandarin, in America. The first church I ever visited