On Immigrants, Exile & Community | Eden Abebe ‘26

Have you ever felt the need to be special? Not just different, but set apart in a way that makes you feel seen and significant? As the eldest daughter of an Ethiopian refugee, I often carried this desire. I wanted to believe that my experience, my heritage, and my story were distinct. I wore this “first-generation Ethiopian-American” identity with pride, as though it were a badge that could explain everything, my perspective, my purpose. But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to understand that I am not unique in this story. I’m not the exception. I’m part of a much larger pattern of displacement, sacrifice, and survival that shaped my father’s life and so many others'. And that realization has far from diminished me, but rather has helped me find deeper meaning in who I am and what I am called to.

In At Home in Exile (our spring reading for Perkins Fellows), Russell Jeung explores what he calls “the cult of specialness.” In American Christianity and society at large, we are encouraged to seek uniqueness, to build ourselves up through personal growth, self-esteem, and privatized faith. I resonated deeply with his story in which he shares how he once saw his Chinese Hakka heritage as something that made him stand out. But as he traced his family’s history, he discovered a story not of uniqueness, but of common suffering, of discrimination, displacement, and exclusion. And yet, in this shared struggle, he found something even more powerful than specialness. He found the call to embrace this side of his story.

This identity, once a source of shame or otherness, became for him a lens to see the Kingdom of God. The Hakka people modeled for Jeung a theology of exile. Rather than striving for comfort or upward mobility, he invites us to embrace a guest mentality that reflects Jesus himself, the ultimate outsider.

As I reflect on my own story, I realize how often I’ve been tempted to pursue the American dream of comfort and security. But the gospel calls us to something more disruptive. Scripture names us “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11); people not defined by where we are but by how we live and walk in humility and hospitality.

Jeung’s writing invites us to reclaim our histories and not to glorify trauma, but to recognize how God redeems it. Just as he chooses to honor the values of his Hakka ancestors, I can choose to root myself in my father’s legacy.

This is why I continue to reflect deeply on what kind of community I want to build, and how my faith should shape the aspirations that I have in law. What would it mean if we stopped chasing uniqueness and instead embraced a shared identity as guests in this world, radically dependent on one another and on God?