What do you consider your specialty to be?

I’m the director of the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, and it is one of Wallis Annenberg’s latest initiatives here to con- tribute to, support, energize, and honor older Angelenos. We are located in Koreatown, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles, if not the country. It’s been ranked really high in terms of diversity, language, restaurants, and immigration. All of those things make Los Angeles and the United States so beautiful.

We are on the campus of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and their new community building, the Audrey Irmas Pavilion, which was created as a way to bring a community space to Wilshire Boulevard Temple outside of the temple and the schools that they have here that are so wonderful. And so, at the bottom of the floor of the building that we are in, there is a grand ballroom, followed by wonderful meeting rooms and a chapel. We’re here, located on the third floor, and above us is a really gorgeous rooftop garden, where you can see the Hollywood sign, the [Griffith] Observatory, and all across Los Angeles. It’s a very striking place to [have] here in L.A. It just reminds me of what we’re here to do and how we’re here to assist, help, and bring life into this building that, without us, would be more of an event space. But now, with us, it can be an everyday space. And I’m really glad about that.

Could you tell us a bit more about what GenSpace is?

GenSpace is a community space dedicated to older adults. We also have the Wallis Annenberg Leadership Initiative here. I have two wonderful fellows who are USC graduate students and are working with me on that. We are looking
to open on January 9 to the public, like an open house for the public and members of Wilshire Boulevard, and then officially open on January 10. We’ll have programming for older adults, intergenerational programming, special events, lectures, and all these great kinds of educational and other types of enjoyable programming that are sur- rounded by a couple of key priority areas. But in terms of the space, it’s kind of arranged across four rooms, which are a fitness studio, a horticultural therapy space, an art room, and a tech bar. In addition to those things, we’re also really interested in wonderful storytelling, financial security, and safety. So, I’d say those six things are program priorities. We’re waiting for the space to finish up and put on the finishing touches. We’re putting in sinks and water bottle filling stations, and we’re currently throwing some very intentional, beautiful art on the wall.

So while we’re doing that, we’re looking for ways to engage the community. And that’s what brought us into conversations with KYCC and also with other kinds of nonprofit organizations here and around Koreatown. One of my first events here was back in March, when we had one of the first age-friendly vaccine sites in Los Angeles, including Koreatown. We partnered with the Karsh Center, which is a wonderful food pantry that has been around for 30 years here in Koreatown, to provide older adults, their caregivers, and family members with vaccines. Our oldest patron was 104 years old and was given the vaccine in the car. And then her two live-in caregivers also received the vaccine. We are delighted to be involved in these types of community outreach, doing a little bit more of that in terms of food distribution, partnering with the YMCA, and teaming up with nonprofits for Thanksgiving so we can learn more about community members and they can know about us and know that we’re here. 

And then the other thing that we’ve been doing is virtual programming. So we’ve been [having] intergenerational conversations between high school students at Loyola High and older Angelenos. And those ran all summer long while folks were kind of off Zoom for the summer. But now, with some schools still doing hybrid, we’ve been moving toward doing old-school pen pals, called GenPals. We’re looking forward to doing those starting this fall in a few weeks and have been recruiting both high school students and older adults for those programs — just trying to combat social isolation and ageism. It gives a chance for people to feel connected and tell their stories and [talk] about their lives to a different generation.

Could you tell me about your family history? Where are your parents from, and do you have any extended heritage that you’d like to mention?

I know bits and pieces about my family’s immigration story and about coming to the U.S., but I don’t know it all. I’d love to know more. My parents are from Los Angeles, mostly. My mom was actually adopted and lived in New York City for her first few years, across from Central Park, and then ended up moving with her adoptive parents to Los Angeles. They were English and German. They lived in Arcadia and owned a newspaper nearby. My mom went to school in Arcadia and then went to UCLA and got her undergrad and graduate degrees there. She worked in hos- pitals in Santa Monica and Westwood, around  Los Angeles, and then ended up becoming a nursing professor at UCLA until I was in middle school or so. Then she started working for community colleges and ended her career at L.A. Trade Tech [Technical-College]. She is still heavily involved in health and public health and has a wonderful philanthropic arm in terms of being on the health ministry at our church and caretaking for lots of friends and family.

My dad also grew up in Los Angeles, around Chinatown and Venice. He is a 1.5-generation immigrant, as his parents immigrated here, and his mom was actually pregnant with him when she arrived by boat from China. He went to high school here at L.A. High — a real local — and then worked for a bike shop and ended up working for JCPenney for nearly 40 years. He is currently post-retirement. He did a bunch of traveling, loved to come and visit me when I lived in other places, and did some great bike riding. During the pandemic, when bike shops were struggling to build bikes, he actually went back to work at an empty bike shop on Tuesdays where there were no people so he could just sell bikes, and he’s been working there ever since. So he’s been enjoying being a part of the workforce. It’s a really great second-career story during the pandemic. He just loves it. He loves educating people. He rides his bike about 100 miles a week. He’s incredible. He beats me every time — he’s so fast! He is very passionate about the lifelong sport that is bike riding. It’s really fun to watch him live that life and to be a part of it on smaller 20-mile bike rides.

My brother moved back in with them to help when my mom had two hip transplants in the last couple of years. He’s been such a great support. We are both half-Chinese and half-European, and we know a little about our family history. I know a little about my grandparents. My grand­father owned a laundromat here in Los Angeles, and my grandmother was working. I know a little about their immigration story and the life that my grandfather led while he was still here, trying to get his family to come to join him in the United States.

What was your childhood like, and how did that inform your later career?

My childhood was probably typical of many others here. My parents, especially my mom, were very passionate about our education and about being very involved in the com­munity, such as Girl Scouts, church groups, and youth groups. I was involved with the YMCA, so I could learn about the government and how it works. We played a lot of sports. I played soccer and softball year-round and swam. It was probably pretty typical that everybody else spent a lot of time at the beach. My mom was just always so passionate about health care. I would joke and just say, “I’m not going to become a nurse. I will not do that. I’m so different from you, Mom.” Like getting a child to rebel.

I ended up, as with many semi-well-adjusted children, seeing a therapist early in high school during some transition and thinking that I would want to be a psychologist — a clinical psychologist — and I lived that dream for a while. I had a [high school] assignment that said I was going to be a clinical psychologist. That’s what I was going to do. So I went to school to become a psychologist, and I am currently an experimental psychologist. But along my psychology journey, I basically realized that clinical psychology, one-on-one counseling, group counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc. are very impressive, well-researched, established, and tried and true methods with lots of innovation. It just wasn’t for me as a professional. I had a hard time leaving the hard stuff that I would hear at work and bringing it home. I just ended up finding that I also struggled with the grace that is psycho- logy and the grace that is therapy and patients. So I found myself looking for patterns, loving the research side of clinical psychology, and looking at the case notes, trying
to figure out what was going on or what systems could be changed to support someone rather than how some- one might need to change. So I took a very systems-level approach to a lot of my early involvement with being exposed to giving therapy.

I went through my undergraduate and master’s programs still with a focus on clinical psychology. And it wasn’t until almost my last year in my master’s program that my mentor was like, ‘Jennifer, you’re not a clinical psychologist.’ I was like, “What do you mean?” At that point, I’d been working on it for nearly six or seven years. And I was like, “If I’m not a clinical psychologist, then who is?” Because I am the most dedicated person out there. Yeah, he was just like, ‘That’s not for you.’ So I ended up switching. He was right. It was not for me. And it took a really strong, amazing man, Dr. Larry Myers, to tell me that clinical psychology wasn’t for me. And so I went on and learned more about experimental psychology, the study of systems and human behavior, animal behavior, and how we think and act. From there, I studied more about human well-being and health, and that brought me to study rural health, which brought me to aging and disability in rural America. And then, I was even frustrated with how slowly things moved in research. I actually pivoted and had a wonderful oppor­tunity to join some great colleagues at Nadler under the Administration for Community Living at Columbia University, The Health and Aging Policy [Fellows Program], which is one of the only policy fellowships on The Hill in Washington, D.C. that brings aging experts to The Hill to be experts and advisors in and around D.C., with the help of the American Political Science Association (APSA). And so, I totally pivoted and started my health policy journey. That is probably way more than you wanted to know. But no, it really was a way there; each of those pieces was so pivotal, and figuring out who I was before figuring out how I could give back to my community. My mom wanted us to write to my family and then ultimately aim to create a better world for those who are being marginalized, whether it’s by immigration status or by age. I’m really in a place where I feel like I’ve found that way.