KA:LL
Who wouldn’t love having good Asian food and doing church over the table?
“As a child of an immigrant family, I grew up with a church that was centered around the table. It was a safe place for Korean immigrants to come together and be grounded in our identity. It was a sanctuary for Korean foreign exchange students to nurse their homesickness. It was a space for immigrants to gain new strength to weather the harsh challenges of language barriers and long working hours. I grew up seeing my elders laughing and crying around this table, and they have raised us with such pride and resilience through this table.
However, as a “1.5 generation” immigrant Korean American – someone who arrived in the United States as a child or adolescent – I find that my immigrant experiences are quite different from my parents’. With my Korean heritage and American identity, I live in an interesting world of both and neither. I speak both languages fairly fluently, but it seems I know neither of them perfectly. I do grasp both spaces, yet many times I feel as if I am an outsider to both. My parents and I experience racism and microaggressions, but in different ways because we relate to American culture differently.
Indeed, many immigrant families are dealing with the intergenerational trauma of immigration, while their children struggle to adjust to different cultural values and norms of the societies where they find themselves. The constant pressure of code-switching is real and heavy. Many of my fellow Asian American/Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) who were either born in this country or were adopted are facing the challenge of being seen as ‘perpetual foreigners,’ where their American identity is denied and their heritage is unseen.
AAPI invisibility is a painful reality that many of us face day-to-day. Our history and contributions to this country are rarely celebrated. We are alarmingly underrepresented in politics, in sports and media, in management roles for business and education, and in the church expressions. With these unique challenges, our AAPI siblings are in desperate need of a faith space where their lived experiences can be affirmed and validated in their discipleship journeys.”—Danielle Kim
What is Ka:LL?
We are AAPIs and friends in solidarity who gather to enjoy Asian food together, expose and heal AAPI invisibility created by the model minority myth, and reclaim our Christian faith to liberate and re-create a world that looks more like the kin-dom of God.
