(light music)
- My name is Taneka Hye Wol Jennings,
and I was born in 1985,
so that makes me 34.
And I was born in Jeonju-si, South Korea,
so Jeonju City.
I came to the United States when I was three months old.
I was adopted into a white American family
that lived in New Jersey.
In comparison to some friends I have who are adoptees
who grew up in the Midwest, per se,
I had a kind of different experience.
I had more Asian American, Korean American influences
in my life and I identified primarily as Asian American
and Korean American and not as much as an adoptee.
I wouldn't say I didn't have any racial identity issues,
but I would call it more of an ethnic identity journey.
That's where I have a very similar story
to most transracial in our country adoptees
in that my parents, I think, expected me
to identify more as white
or to just identify as a non-racialized person.
For me, being Asian American and being Korean American,
particularly growing up on the East Coast, meant diversity,
diversity of ethnicities, that are part
of Asian American identity,
diversities among what it means to be Korean American.
I was an adoptee.
I had friends who were of all different kinds
of backgrounds, religions, worldviews, upbringings.
And then, I think, coming to the Midwest for college,
there was a much more, I felt homogeneous kind of sense
around being Asian American
and particularly Korean American.
And in the college I went to was a faith-based school,
so there was an even more homogenous kind of identity
around what it meant to be Korean American.
I think that, if anything, threw me into an identity crisis.
I enjoyed the academic rigor at some sense, I guess,
of my college experience,
but it was not a place where I would say I had
a very happy sense of self,
at least definitely ethnically.
And so I think once that I graduated from college
and moved to the city of Chicago,
I began to look more for a sense of myself.
Around that time,
I met the Korean transracial adoptee group
in Chicago called KAtCH.
And I think that opened up an entirely new world to me
that I had never even kind of considered.
When I met KAtCH for the first time,
I was really weirded out by the whole experience.
Because for me, being a Korean adoptee
meant being a party of one.
And I was familiar with how to navigate having
a very kind of different internal dialogue
and then having a certain kind of external dialogue
around being Korean American,
being Asian American, et cetera.
And although I would say I was struggling
to really understand myself in that way at that time,
post-college, it took me a long time, I think,
to feel comfortable in that space
and to really feel like I had a strong group identity.
Originally, when I met HANA Center,
it was two different organizations.
It was Korean American Community Services
and it was Korean American Resource and Cultural Center.
I think I just kinda gravitated towards KRCC.
They were really open to adoptees
and something I didn't know at the time
was that they'd always had adoptees in leadership positions
in that organization and always had
a strong sense of home for adoptees.
They're really strong on advocacy and human rights
and progressive issues impacting
the Korean and Asian American community,
so I think through the local Korean adoptee community,
I started to get more involved with that.
And I'd always been interested in human rights issues
and social justice and had just not really had, again,
a language, I think, or a community to understand
what that meant for myself
outside of it being what is a majority culture,
more of typically a Black and white dialogue.
Where do Asian American
and Korean American human rights fit in?
And so I think I was drawn to that work,
and as I was understanding myself more deeply
and the history of Korean adoption and some
of the human rights issues and abuses
that go along with that,
I really was becoming more deeply open and able
to be engaged.
I joined the board
of the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center,
and then those two organizations, KRCC and KACS, merged.
At the same time, we were doing more work
around Korean adoptee human rights issues,
specifically starting to do advocacy work
around the Adoptee Citizenship Act
and trying to activate the first national network
of adoptees focused on human rights issues.
Through this merger of these two amazing organizations,
I joined the staff and I just kind of kept diving in.
And at this point, I'm deeply involved in KAtCH,
you know, the Korean adoptee community,
and then working with Adoptees for Justice,
which was formally known as Adoptee Rights Campaign.
And then with HANA Center, you know, KRCC and KACS,
and it's just all merging together
and becoming something very beautiful
and a way to continue doing the work that I have been doing
in advocacy and organizing,
but in a very much more personal sense.
My adoptive father has passed a few years ago,
and it was an event in my life that had a big impact on me.
One thing that he had said when he was kind of like
getting towards the end,
he kept talking about living life with no regrets.
I think similar to how I try to appreciate the chaos
and the beauty of life and the choice
and the no choice at the same time.
I like what my adoptive father said in the sense
that I try not to live life
thinking about regrets.
There's always things that we could do better as people,
but I feel extremely thankful,
not just for any particular thing.
I'm not you would classify
as a quote, unquote grateful adoptee,
but I probably am not also what some people might try
to say angry adoptee.
I don't appreciate those definitions.
And I guess I don't think of life
in terms of regrets very often.
I more so think about how to live every day
to the very fullest.
To me, to be Korean American means
whatever we as Korean Americans define it to be.
One pretty maybe interesting lens
that I think as adoptees we bring to being Korean American
is that we have a little bit of more of an unusual story.
I think about 1 in 17 Korean Americans was an adoptee,
so we're not that unusual.
But we do tend to challenge dominant narratives,
I think, around what it means to be Korean American
and not fit like a very stereotyped version,
just like lots of Korean Americans.
And so to me, the important thing is that we center always
those who are most impacted by something,
to understand what that thing is.
And so if we are talking about what it means
to be Korean American, to me,
exactly what the Legacy Project is helps define that.
We go out and we find every Korean American
that we can and we try not to privilege
one story over another.
So to me, it's just our collective experiences and history
and culture that we have inherited
and the culture that we make and what a friend of mine calls
sometimes our new citizenship that we make
when we haven't had choices over parts of our lives.
And that community, to me, that's what it means
to be Korean American,
just our collective Korean American experiences.
One thing that I think is very much part of my being part
of this community and is part of my working at HANA Center
and being active with the Korean adoptee community
is the pain that I think many of us are experiencing
in this current social political moment
and the trauma that we're experiencing.
Some of us are reexperiencing things,
like for adoptees, this notion of family separation
and what's happening to some of the kids in the families
at the border is extremely triggering.
I think, to me, it goes along with again,
how do we understand ourselves as Korean Americans,
as immigrants, adoptees, for me?
It's hard not to just cry for the world
and for the things that we do to each other.
We seem to forget our history so quickly,
where we came from, things like war and poverty,
not even having enough to eat or having someone try
to control us or take away our dignity, our human rights.
We forget so quickly and we wanna embrace
that model minorityness.
Why can't we embrace our shared liberation instead?
Can we not build coalition as people
who have been impacted by injustice,
by people who know love and who also know fear?
Can we not come together and be more united
in calling out some of these anti-immigrant attacks
for what they are and some of this hate for what it is?
And it's not just about calling it out to me,
but can we be brave and put our money
and our time and our resources into things
that advance a more just, more loving world?
I'm so thankful to know people who are brave
and to be mentored and to be challenged
by the people impacted by injustice around me
who are fighting every day and wishing that
for our community, that we can experience the freedom
that comes not out of trying to, you know,
please any status quo or meet any status quo,
but that comes out of really knowing who we are,
whatever that means, and our Korean Americanness,
and then giving that and not being afraid
of where that will take us.
I really wish for our community that we can build
that multigeneration of people.
That's the thing that we bring,
like folks like adoptees who challenge those narratives.
I don't think everyone's ready to experience that from us,
but I think we have the ability to challenge things
in our community in a unique way.
We remind people that there is no one identity.
And then hopefully, people can look inside themselves
and realize that they themselves are not
just this very like cloistered off person.
And we're all just so related to each other.
My name is Taneka Jennings
and this is my Korean American story.
(light music)