www.koreanamericanstory.org

Hold the Date for Our Annual Benefit

Please hold the date for KoreanAmericanStory.org's Annual Benefit which will be held on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 at the 5th floor loft of the French Culinary Institute in SoHo.  The theme will be "A Celebration of Multi-Cultural Korean Americans". Our special guests will be Marja Vongerichten, cookbook author and host of the PBS series "Kimchi Chronicles" and Will Demps, former NFL player now entrepreneur/model.

Click Here for more details

Watercolors

The week after he returned from the hospital, she came home from teaching her fourth grade class to find him listening to Beethoven and pushing himself around with a broom and dustpan on his lap. She called it the accident again, and he whirled his wheelchair around so his back was to her.

“I'm talking to you,” she said.

He zoomed over to the boombox and boosted the volume. The music filled the room like water. She waited for him turn it down again. He scooped up the tiniest amount of dirt; Beethoven's noise cascaded onward. “I can't hear myself,” she said.

The day of the accident, he'd worked out a plan to find his birth mother in Korea, though she'd said she didn't care about his past or skin color. Their housekeeper, the bitch who came once a week and wanted to sleep with him, had encouraged him.

Now she couldn't help asking what she'd meant to ask the day of the accident. She yelled it over the music.

The Burden We Carry

Living in Korea hasn't been easy.  Well, as easy as I thought it would be.  When my husband received his assignment to South Korea, I breathed a sigh of relief.  He’d just returned from a deployment while we were stationed in Hawaii, right after an internship year as an Army Psychologist.  Needless to say, I was ready for a breather and I thought I was getting it.

An assignment to Korea meant that a deployment was almost not happening during our tour there.  Even more in our favor, my parents had immigrated to the US from Korea 37 years ago, making me ethnically Korean, although not nationalistically Korean.  Korean food was my comfort food, I thought myself fluent in the language, I could somewhat read and write Korean and I was curious about the place my parents came from so I thought I would be more comfortable at our new duty station than the average military family.  The closer our move date got, the more excited I got.

Ha.  I laugh at my old self.  It’s not like I could have changed our duty stations.  One does not tell the Army where one wants to go or doesn’t want to go.  One simple goes where one is sent.  And I am that one’s wife.  But.  I should have known that like other cities and other places we were sent to, Korea wouldn’t be any different.  Where people live, it’s all the same.  

In Korea I found it’s the same too.  Just with more jostling, loud talking and Han – that indescribable holding onto of pain and longing that creates a layer on relationships I don’t quite understand yet here.

Burial of an Other Life

The other day my parents told me they had bought their cemetery plots in Zimmerman, Minnesota, side by side.  Despite the jolt of morbidity that ran through me, I understood the practicality; my adoptive parents were sensible, well-prepared people.  At the ages of seventy-three and seventy-four, they were deciding how to close the last chapters of their life.  My parents and I talked awhile at their oak kitchen table with the spray of daffodils in a white creamery pitcher over our cups of lukewarm coffee.  I made the proper inquiries about the cemetery location and how they arrived at that decision (my mother’s family grew up on a farm outside the small town of Zimmerman).  I commented my approval as they expressed their desires to be buried as they wished, relieving others of the burden.  I was struck with how we do not have a choice in how we come into this world, but we have a choice in where we wish to finally be buried.  

Happy in Korea

"God," said Paul, saying it like gaaaawd.  "Korean guys are a bunch of homos!"

I was about to tell him to pipe down, then decided it wasn't worth the trouble.  Your average Korean probably wouldn't know what he was talking about any more than we knew what they were talking about.

It was true, however, that in the disco we were in (some glassed-in thing that was supposed to look like the inside of an aquarium) guys were dancing together.  Not just dancing, each in their own little world, but dancing.  Slow dancing together.  Arms around each other.  Touching.

I tried to look disgusted as I knew Paul expected me to, but to tell you the truth, I was fascinated.  See, the thing was, the men didn't act gay; they weren't all swishy or limp-wristed or whatever.  Most of them were dressed in conservative suits, and during the fast numbers, they danced the same way as any drunk guys would do in the States.

But no way would guys in the States clinch like that, like those two were doing to the strains of "Beseme Mucho."

The bigger guy had curly hair, whether permed or natural, I don't know.  His face was beet red and he was clutching a smaller guy whose glasses were sitting lopsidedly on his nose.  They were both smiling.  Around them, the salmon-colored lights beeped on and off, big plastic blades of "seaweed" shimmied.

Refugee Cheap

I’m not sure what it is about being a hyphenated American, but nearly every immigrant group seems to claim two qualities for themselves that set them apart from mainstream Americans. The first is that they’re not punctual. The second is that they’re cheap.  Indeed, ethnic stand-up comics often joke that their respective immigrant group functions not on regular time but on (Korean / Indians / Jamaican/ etc.) time and that their (Korean / Indian / Jamaican/ etc.) father was so cheap he would only let them use x sheets of toilet paper per bathroom visit.

Some academic types may insist that such self-identifying as tardy and cheap by Koreans and others may serve as a subtle critique of what’s viewed to be an overly precise and profligate American mainstream. Others may suggest that such self-identification is, in fact, an implicit self-congratulatory pat-on-the-back for members of the immigrant group who are looking back on the sacrifices of the past that have allowed them to prosper in the present.  Indeed, the portraits of extreme stinginess are only funny if such deprivation has led to some material gain. But I’ll leave such conjectures and inquiries for far brighter minds than mine. All I can do is draw from my own humble experiences.

Did my family run on Korean time? No.

Were my parents cheap? Absolutely yes.

Multi-Racial Korean American Population

This chart shows the growth rate of Multi-racial Korean American population vs growth rate of overall Korean American Population.  The key points are:

Click on the image for a larger PDF file of the chart.

I Am Korean American: CULTURE

"I Am Korean American: CULTURE" is the last in the series of 5 videos produced by RKTV. These videos explores what it means to be Korean-Americans today.

If first generation Korean-Americans formed communities in order to help one another survive with their poor English skills, second generation Korean-Americans have come together to 'prosper'.

Having been born and raise in the United States, second generation Korean-Americans have naturally absorbed and internalized American culture. However, they have also been influenced by their parents to experience and absorb Korean culture as well. How can we define this unique hybrid culture?

Second generation Korean-Americans have formed 'fenced communities' in order to share and celebrate the unique culture they have created for themselves. What do they find inside these fenced communities and what kind of culture are they creating? In this episode, we explore various social communities that second generation Korean-Americans have established.

Among the most well-known communities are 'NetKal' - a community of second generation Korean-American leaders who have achieved success in American society, 'IAMKOREANAMERICAN' - a website on which Korean-Americans from across the United States come together to share their life stories, and 'Kollaboration' - an organization dedicated to bringing the Asian-American talents into the mainstream entertainment industry