(March 11, 2021) Amber Varela, studying at Lighthouse Christian Academy, Los Angeles, brings shares a ReachOut testimony...

On 24-hour shifts, rifle-ready Lee Yih would peer across the border into East Germany, guarding against Soviet troops that never came. On his days off, the U.S. Army soldier fought with his wife and got stoned.

‘I was really aliened, Lee says. ‘I was just a loser, just not functioning in life.’

Before he lost his way in life, Lee Yih says he was born with great ambitions to be rich – a stark contrast to growing up as the offspring of a date rape in a single parent home. Being Asian, he felt like an outcast among all-white classmates in Mount Joy, Iowa.

Feeling lonely, unloved
‘I hated to be Chinese. I told my mom I wanted to be white. In the town where I grew, there were no other Chinese people and I wanted so much to fit in. Basically, I had no identity.’ His mother bristled at his rebellious rejection of Asian culture, so she shipped him off to Taiwan to learn Chinese when he was 15 years old.

‘I got worse problems because where once I felt so Chinese in Iowa and so foreign and not fitting in, now I was really not fitting in because I’m in China and so American!’ he recounts.

Then a friend invited him to a Christian camp. ‘I got snookered into going to a Baptist youth camp,’ he remembers. (more…)