German/American | Korean - Community Manager @ The Alan Turing Institute
The story goes that my Grandmother (on my Dad's side) was originally against my parents' marriage. When my Father called his Mother to tell her that he was dating someone from South Korea, she hung up the phone. It is ironic, as my grandmother is herself a product of immigration: German immigrants to New York.
This struggle for familial acceptance, which is not at all new within mixed families, has been oddly accompanied by a wider shift in the perception of Koreans more broadly: from working class migrants to trend-setting pop culture giants. The 'hallyu' (Korean wave) has meant that my generation's experience of being Korean is very different from my Mother's, where people celebrate my heritage (or may even fetishise it), sometimes more than I do.
For her, this has only complicated her relationship with her homeland, where her experiences of exclusion and marginalisation have been far more extreme than anything I have experienced. She has been detained for hours and interrogated about being a North Korean spy. Her brother was a part of the student protest movements against the dictatorship, and has had friends imprisoned in both the USA and South Korea. These experiences are a far cry from my own, but ones that I hold close in order to not forget where I come from.
These days, I live as an expatriate in a country I was privileged enough to move to, and not as an immigrant from a country I aimed to leave for a variety of reasons. What is the difference between the two? The first is usually able to hold onto their culture, and not feel the pressure of assimilation in the same way. But while I know the experience of being different in another nation, I am now a watered down version of all the cultures that have come together to create me.
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