I grew up in Singapore, so I am always trying to learn about America. I learned much while interning for 12 weeks at The Chicago Tribune and taking a 45-minute ride on the “L” (Chicago’s nickname for its elevated public train system) back and forth each day. 

I’m in Love with a Church Girl has all the elements of an entertaining movie: blazing guns, beautiful faces, drugs and alcohol, love and death—but without the gore, the bad language, and the sex. That’s because the real drama is main character Miles Montego’s born-again experience: from ex-drug dealer to straight citizen, sin to repentance.

To take a full, hard look at mankind’s broken relationship with nature, just YouTube the famous car race scene in the 1978 film Grease. 

John Travolta’s character smirks and flicks his gelled hair while striding his white steel Greased Lightning. He and his nemesis skid along a narrow stream of tarry water, under bridges and past expressways, while their fans cheer by the concrete banks.

The morning I became a U.S. citizen, I stood between a well-groomed Vietnamese woman and a rotund Mexican man. In front of me, an Armenian with a ponytail raised his point-and-shoot camera. Behind me, a Korean young lady in heels texted rapidly into her iPhone.

NILAND, Calif.—A large white cross perches on a brilliant mountain of bubble-gum pink, Grinch green, and candy red. It looks like a Christian hallucination of Dr. Seuss—but this colorful mirage sits in the middle of a seemingly endless California desert of parched sand and prickly shrubs near the town of Niland. Population: 1,006. 

When I was a little girl, my father always told me I was “the most beautiful girl in the world.”

I believed him with the kind of pure-hearted trust a daddy’s girl has for her father. And then I grew up.

After a long day, Mike Scott has something to look forward to. 

Often he sits back with a glass of wine in his 1920s Spanish-style home, watching eight chickens scuttle and peck around his verdant backyard while the sun sets over the hazy Los Angeles cityscape. The chickens’ routine is oddly comforting.

“It’s not just the children,” Scott said, gazing down at his flock. “The adults get mesmerized while watching the chickens, too.”