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With wisdom, humor, and refreshing honesty, blogger and journalist Dorcas Cheng-Tozun writes about marriage, work, and crossing cultural boundaries. After business school, her husband helped found what has become a multinational social enterprise that provides solar-powered products for households without access to reliable electricity—and where she also worked for a time. The business has taken their family all over the world, into situations life-giving, infuriating, and awkward. Dorcas writes with wit and clarity about the strangeness of having a full-time housekeeper in Nairobi, of being mistaken for a prostitute in Shenzhen, and of chatting with royalty at Davos, finding profound lessons in each situation. She also writes about the pain caused by her husband’s work, the pressure on their marriage, and her own reactions to it, in a way that’s very raw and self-revealing. There’s no vanity in her; she’s willing to let it all hang out for the sake of helping other marriages. Her book Start, Love, Repeat is the vehicle for hard-won wisdom about how to make a marriage work when one person seems married to a legitimately consuming job.

Biography

Dorcas Cheng-Tozun is an award-winning writer and the author of Start, Love, Repeat: How to Stay in Love with Your Entrepreneur in a Crazy Start-up World. She is a columnist for Inc.com and a regular contributor to Christianity Today. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Angry Asian Man, BlogHer, Foundr, and Relevant. Previously, Dorcas worked in the nonprofit sector for a decade. A Silicon Valley native, she has also lived in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Kenya. She is married to d.light cofounder and CEO Ned Tozun; they have two adorable hapa boys.

 

Current projects
February 2018

Following the publication of Start, Love, Repeat in late 2017, I continue to seek kindred spirits along this turbulent start-up journey. I am fortunate to connect with amazing entrepreneurs and their loved ones through my ongoing Inc.com column, essays for Christianity Today and other publications, speaking engagements, and via social media.

I can’t help but write what I am living, and my serial entrepreneur husband gives me plenty of material to work with. As a stability-loving second-generation Asian American who is married to an adventurous, dream-big Turkish-Jewish-American, I’ve often had to wrestle with competing values around calling, family, community, culture, risk, and healing. My most honest writing reflects these tensions as I explore what it means to pursue God-honoring attitudes and actions in marriage, parenting, civil society, the church, and other cultural contexts. My most powerful spiritual encounters tend to happen when I confess my utter confusion to God and allow him to show me a way forward that I previously hadn’t considered.

This year our family, including our six-year-old and infant sons, is relocating to Kenya for a second time. I have no doubt that God has more to teach me about myself and this world he loves so much, lessons that will one day make their way onto a printed page.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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