German/American | Korean - Community Manager @ The Alan Turing Institute
My Grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 70s. At some point, they opened a restaurant in Chicago, where my Umma (Mother) worked after graduating from university. My Father happened to walk into the restaurant one day, the rest is history.
I like to think that being mixed-race and culturally-mixed has made me more open-minded by default, and curious about the things that differentiate us. I like to think that this means that I'm always interested in people first, and learning more about the world.
My Grandmother on my Dad's side was against my parents' marriage. The story goes that when my Father called his Mother to tell her that he was dating someone from South Korea, she said: ‘You're dating someone from the rice fields like 'Nam?’ and hung up the phone on him. It is ironic, as she herself is a product of immigration: German immigrants to New York. A lot has changed since that, but familial acceptance has definitely been a struggle, which has been oddly accompanied by the wider shift in perception of Korean culture more broadly. This ‘hallyu’ (Korean wave) has meant that my generation's experience of being Korean is very different from my Mother's, where people often celebrate my heritage (or even fetishise it), sometimes even more than I do.
For my Umma, this has only added complications to her bittersweet relationship with the homeland (which she left on purpose), and her experiences of exclusion and marginalization that were far more politicized and extreme than anything I have experienced. Korean immigrants were migrant workers who experienced the kind of racism and xenophobia that all working class immigrants know well. It also extended internationally, on her first trip to the UK she told me stories of being detained for hours as they interrogated her as to whether or not she was a North Korean spy. Her brother (my Uncle) 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, with an aim for moral clarity. It is vertigo-inducing to see the shift of perception for Koreans, from working class migrants to trend-setting pop culture giants.
It's a classic story, but as a mixed part of the diaspora, I often found myself playing into cultural ‘authenticity’ politics when I was younger, partially born out of my own insecurities about my place within Korean culture. I've sometimes found this to be the case in diasporic cultures, which end up fossilizing a version of the ‘homeland’ that no longer exists, as it too is constantly evolving (as is the diaspora itself). I've only found this to ease as my own insecurities have fallen away, or as I slowly realized that my racial identity is not representative of my entire sense of personhood, but rather a singular, albeit important part. My cousins and I have started to perform jesa (제사) in honor of our ancestors, particularly that of my harabuji (할아버지).
My experiences have highlighted something else that diverges from my Mother's experience. I am privileged enough to be living as an expatriate in another country I chose to move to, and not as an immigrant from a country I aimed to escape from. What is the difference between the two? One usually able to hold onto their culture, to not feel the pressure of assimilation in the same way. I know the experience of being different in another nation, but am now a watered down version of all the cultures that have come together to create me.