At age 17, Kawasaki Eiko boarded a ship from her home in Japan and headed to North Korea, a land depicted as paradise on earth with free education, healthcare, food, and ample jobs. The year was 1960, and Kawasaki and hundreds of other Zainichi Koreans—ethnically Korean residents in Japan—were desperate to leave the poverty and discrimination they faced in Japan after World War II. Propaganda by North Korea and groups representing Koreans in Japan provided a seemingly simple solution: move to North Korea.

When British divers earlier this month located the group of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand, only one boy, 14-year-old Adul Sam-on, could communicate with the divers in English. 

“What day is it?” Adul asked the divers before telling them the group’s greatest need: food. By that point on July 2, the Wild Boars soccer team had been stuck in the Tham Luang Cave system for 10 days, eating birthday snacks, drinking water dripping from the cave walls, and digging deeper into the cave to keep warm. 

On May 1, four days after the historic handshake between the leaders of North Korea and South Korea, a group of North Korean defectors gathered on the shores of South Korea’s Ganghwa Island, only 8 miles from the North Korean coast. Under a cloudy sky, they threw into the ocean hundreds of watertight plastic bottles filled with rice, USB drives, dollar bills, and antibiotic ointment. Taped to each bottle was a plastic-wrapped book of Genesis and a study guide.

Mary Li Ma and her husband Jin Li collaborated to write Surviving the State, Remaking the Church: A Sociological Portrait of Christians in Mainland China. Through hundreds of interviews with Christians all across the country, Ma and Li show how Christianity transforms the lives of believers, including their views on education, marriage, charity, and nationalism. Here are edited excerpts of my interview with Ma, who grew up in China and professed faith while earning her Ph.D. in sociology.

How did you come to Christ?

TAIPEI, Taiwan—On a sweltering summer day with a heat index of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, a man and a woman in formal attire posed on the steps of Shan-Chih Hall in Tatung University. The train of the young woman’s blue gown fanned behind her as her fiancé—perhaps near heat exhaustion in his three-piece suit—held her waist, obeying the direction of the photographer.

Thanksgiving at bars: On Thanksgiving night, I tucked into the holiday staples: turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, veggies, and pumpkin pie. Yet instead of eating with extended family on a long wooden table in the warmth of home, I was at On Tap, an expat bar in Taipei, with my husband and a friend, as a rerun of Monday Night Football played on a large TV. The food was mediocre at best, but it’s hard to complain: Turkeys are hard to find in Asia since they need to be imported from America, so getting to eat the foreign bird at all was nostalgic enough. 

Ian Johnson is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the persecution of Falun Gong adherents in China. His new book is The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017).