About Me
I wear several different hats to cover my coarse Chinese hair, which requires too much product to tame:
Writer, reporter, editor. Editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. Teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church in North Carolina. Parish associate for storytelling and witness at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley in California. Ph.D. student in theology at the University of Stellenbosch. Minister of Word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America (RCA). Cook. Gardener. Author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America (Harper, 2013) and co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times best-seller Wholehearted Faith (HarperOne, 2021). For a while, I also served as co-curator, with Sarah Bessey, of Evolving Faith. Resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where my husband and I moved in 2020.
Before that, I was a seminarian at Princeton Theological Seminary, where I worked as a farmhand at PTS’s Farminary. Don’t be deceived: When I got to the Farminary, a 21-acre experiment in sustainable agriculture that doubles as the world’s best classroom, I didn’t know anything about farming and I had more experience killing plants than nurturing them. But my work there changed me. That land taught me about the story of life, death, and new life that God has written into creation. Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand, my memoir about my time at the Farminary, will be published by Convergent, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in March 2025.
Before seminary, I was a full-time journalist. I was a contributing editor at Modern Farmer (R.I.P., print edition). For eight years, I was on staff at Fast Company, where I edited and wrote on global affairs (I led our award-winning coverage of China), fashion, design, and the intersection of business and justice. As far as I know, my stories have only gotten two people fired (I was not one of the two). The late senator John Warner once said to me, “You’re a good little interviewer!”
My writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. When big publishers were still pouring $$$$ into magazines, I was on the launch team of the now-defunct Conde Nast Portfolio. And before that, I spent seven years at Time, where I received my journalistic education. I was a London-based web producer and staff writer—my first cover story was on Britney Spears and her Swedish songwriter, Max Martin—and then a New York-based writer and editor.
I’m from California. My loyalty to the Bay Area is such that I’ve half-jokingly said that I’d be in favor of Northern California seceding so that Los Angeles is no longer part of us. Sometimes people ask, “But where are you really from?” I was born in California! Yes, I know what they’re really asking. The answer: still California. But also Hong Kong. My family is from Hong Kong.
I feel most at home reporting on religion (though my book Does Jesus Really Love Me? was my first—and probably only—major project on faith and sexuality, because wow, the emails you get when you write on this stuff). My life has been ecclesiastically promiscuous. My grandpa was a Baptist preacher, my uncle still is one, and my family is full of Sunday-school teachers, church pianists, deacons, and the like. My high school was allegedly nondenom, but its roots were Christian Reformed (many of the teachers went to Calvin); we had some zany Bible classes.
During my childhood, my family attended Baptist and PCA churches. In college, I did the nondenom/evangelical thing. In grad school and afterward, I went Anglican (I lived in England, so it seemed locally apt) and then stopped doing church altogether. Today, I call the Reformed Church in America home. I served as an elder at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., and in April 2024, after nearly eight years in the ordination process, was ordained a minister of Word and sacrament. Some days, I believe in God; other days, I want to believe in God.
I went to high school in Miami, at Westminster Christian, where I sat behind Alex Rodriguez in Mr. Warner’s world-history class. I graduated from Princeton, the London School of Economics, and Princeton Seminary. I’m a writer today largely because of Carmen Gonzalez, my second- and third-grade teacher at Black Pine Circle Day School in Berkeley, Calif., who first taught me about storytelling, and Charlotte Grimes, whose one-semester seminar at Princeton—the only journalism course I ever took—taught me that I was not a terrible reporter and might even someday be a good one. I was a 2011-2012 French-American Foundation Young Leader and a 2015 International Reporting Project fellow.
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Get to know me
Loves: my husband, eating, rice (esp. fried rice, esp. my mom’s fried rice), postage stamps (lovely little stories), the Oregon Ducks, wandering around new cities, hiking, weeding, England (the football team) and the U.K. (the place), the Oxford comma, Schitt’s Creek (esp. Patrick), clementines, the S.F. 49ers (mixed feelings about American football tbh), GBBO, Fozzie (my weird, old dog)
Enneagram: 6 with a 5 wing
Heritage: 31/32 Chinese, 1/32 Portuguese
Favorite books of the Bible: Job, Ecclesiastes, Hebrews
Favorite animal: Giraffe (awkward and enigmatic)
Alcohol of choice: Gin (Monkey 47, St. George Terroir)
Writing soundtrack: Audrey Assad, Dolly Parton, Troye Sivan, Beach House, Belle and Sebastian, Max Richter, Johann Johannsson, the Killers, Alison Krauss, Westlife, random bits of EDM
Preferred writing implement: Waterman fountain pen, Serenity Blue ink (such a pretentious name—it used to be Florida Blue)
Dislikes: Marzipan, Comic Sans, beets, the smell that towels get when they’re not dried properly
