Where Y'all Really From

Sometimes you expect to talk about poetry and knitting, but you end up talking about disentangling race, love and relationships. Or at least you do if you're Dan Wu and this week's guest, Danni Quintos.

Danni is an Affrilachian poet, a mom, an educator, and a knitter. She lives in Lexington. Danni's dad is from the Philippines, and her mom is half-Japanese, half-white. "White American, Japanese, Philippines..." Dan says. "Three countries that literally have been at war with each other, colonized each other, brutalized each other in every direction in that triangle."

Danni responds : "How do you decolonize when you're the product of colonization?"

Her parents met at a Japanese restaurant in Lexington, where she was waiting tables and he was a dishwasher who worked his way up to Hibachi chef. Danni's maternal grandparents loved their daughter's boyfriend. Her dad's side? Not so much.

"My dad's mother, she was born in 1939, in the Philippines," Danni says. "So she grew up during Japanese occupation, and has a lot of deep-seated resentment and bitterness towards all Japanese people, people culture, everything."

It didn't take long for a similar barrier to spring up in Danni's own life. "I had a crush on a kid who was white, for a long time--like one of those like nagging crushes," Danni says. She thinks she was around 7 or 8.

"I confessed my my crush to this kid, and he told me that a 'brown skin' can't marry a 'white skin,'" she says. "I guess because that was his understanding of the world, because he'd never seen an interracial couple. So to him, it wasn't allowed. He even put his arm up next to mine to show me."

On this week's show, Danni and Dan dive into what it's like to interrogate your own personal and intimate relationships through the lens of what poet Claudine Rankine calls your "historical self."

Oh, and they also talk about poetry and knitting... eventually. Danni's book, "Two Brown Dots," comes out in 2022, and she reads a poem from it on this episode. You can find more of her writing on her website.

After the Korean War, there was a sudden increase in Korean-born babies being adopted by families in Europe, Canada and the United States. By the late 1990s, that number had reached over 200,000. Now, those babies are adults, grappling with big questions about identity and belonging.

Sarah Trainor Graves was born in South Korea, adopted by an American family, and raised in Louisville. In this episode, she talks with Charlene Buckles about how having kids can change the way transracial adoptees think about their own roots.

In 2018, Sarah's oldest child, Miles, was born. "I remember someone telling me, Miles is the first person that you share DNA with that you're going to meet," Sarah says. "There was a sense of pride there, something that I had never felt before," she says. "He looks like me. I look this way."

But she knew he would eventually start asking the kinds of questions she wasn't sure how to answer, yet.

"Why don't Grammy and Poppy, my parents, why don't they look like you? Or why why do we look this way? I was totally ill prepared to answer those questions," she says.

Sarah dove into learning more about her own history and getting more in touch with her cultural identity -- a journey she says she's still on. "Because if I don't know who I am, and if I don't know where I come from, I can't raise a child that's half Korean."

Dan and Charlene sit down with University of Louisville President Dr. Neeli Bendapudi. She’s the first woman and the first person of color to lead the university. They talk about why Asian Americans tend to be overrepresented in middle management and underrepresented in leadership positions.

Dr. Bendapudi was brought on at UofL following some serious scandals. In the corporate and institutional worlds, we often see women and BIPOC replacing white male leaders in times of controversy.

“It’s called the glass cliff,” Bendapudi says. “Their likelihood of success is less because they’re not walking into something that’s smooth sailing.”

How can people in that position succeed when it almost seems like they’re set up to fail? “My mission now is to make sure there are many women and people of color who are in positions of power,” she says, “so that if one person fails, you could absolutely say that person is a bad leader, but you wouldn’t be able to say, ‘well, we tried a woman president—that didn’t work.’”

Where Y'all Really From is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, Podchaser, Rankings.io and the Eye Care Institute's Butchertown Clinical Trials.

It's our very first episode, so we gathered the whole team -- Dan Wu, Charlene Buckles, Nima Kulkarni, and Mae Suramek -- for a good old fashioned origin story. How did this happen? Why are we doing it? And how do we respond when people ask us, "Where are you from? No, but where are you really from?"

Where Y'all Really From is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, Podchaser, Rankings.io and the Eye Care Institute's Butchertown Clinical Trials.

Introducing Where Y'all Really From, a podcast about Asian Americans in Kentucky. Here's a taste of season one, launching Sept 21!

"Where Y’all Really From" is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, Podchaser, Rankings.io and the Eye Care Institute’s Butchertown Clinical Trials.