Beginning each morning by writing a to-do list, I feel immense satisfaction whenever I cross things off. It signals that I finished this, that I made something of my day. This compulsion for constant productivity, I am sure it stems from the way I was raised. Famously coined by legal scholar and writer Amy Chua, the term “tiger mom” refers to a parental figure with an incredibly authoritative child-rearing style—in other words, my parents.

I should be writing a personal statement for a doctoral program I’m applying to. I should be writing a one-page fluff essay talking about how much my dreams are important to me, how I’d be a good fit for the doctoral cohort, and how much I want to pursue an advanced degree. But I’ve gotten  distracted, and I’m writing this instead.

During my freshman year, on weekends, I would take the subway from Morningside Heights, looping around 42nd Street and back up to the Upper East Side to work at a newspaper and magazine store owned by the Chois. Their son, Byung, was a high school friend, who also attended Columbia. He knew I needed work and connected me with his parents. 

My family and I immigrated to the US when I was 8 years old and since then, all I could remember was that our days were a blur. My sister and I attended a public school nearby, trying to fake our way into the language, the culture- everything.  And as for my parents, they worked in various factories from dawn to dusk 6 days a week. Survival was the theme for most of our days together. I remember feeling lonely and as a kid, I craved the “i love you”s, “you’re doing great”, a hug, or even a pat on the back. At school when kids talked about going “Up North” on weekends or on a holiday, I sat silently forcing a smile on my face when all I wanted to do was cry. 

For the longest time, I resented my parents for not taking us anywhere- for not giving me a story to share at school- for not spending time as a family. 

About 6 years ago or so, my husband and I were at my parents’ house and I was looking through some old photos. What I didn’t see were family vacation photos because that didn’t exist. What I did notice were a few photos of my parents at their factory jobs and at their dry cleaning store. In these photos, I gradually saw them get older. I also noticed their eyes- eyes that screamed survival and equally, hope. I knew, at that moment, the hope was not about them. It was for their 2 young girls.

We get ready to sit down to eat dinner as my umma brings out all her homemade banchans, scoops out a warm bowl of rice for each of us as I help her get dang-jang-jigae (soybean paste soup) for us. My dad, who said nothing until now, asks “are you hungry?”. The question that gets asked too many times in our household feels like not enough for once. It feels warm, like a hug.

I never actually knew how poor we were growing up. There was no way of knowing from the way my umma feeds us. There was never a lack of delicious homemade Korean meals. The thing is, we had family dinners every single night growing up and I know even this is a rare occasion in many families now. 

Everyone has their own language of saying I love you. You just have to see it with your heart, not your eyes.

Here I share with you a poem, a love letter to my parents. 

The other day I drove into Manhattan and I ran into a big march up lower Broadway. A thick blanket of protestors marched peacefully and powerfully. I got out of my car and stood on the corner to cheer them on. A white woman got up close to take video of me clapping and later a young black woman doubled back to hand me a white rose. I wondered what brought me this attention. Was it merely because I was showing support?

This morning I asked my mom if she wanted to go to the LA protests with me. I wasn’t sure what she was going to say or if I was dishonoring her by asking this question because of our family’s painful memories connected with the LA Uprising decades ago. In the ‘92 Uprising, we lost our family business, which led to bankruptcy and set off a series of devastating circumstances in our family’s history. But surprisingly, my mom responded, “Of course, we must go. I was going to ask you to go together.”

I have a lot of thoughts about participating in the protest yesterday. I also want to make it clear this is the perspective as an Asian American male.

The process of creating a book, regardless of the target audience, is deeply involved and requires a plethora of patience and many hours of revisions. I cannot tell you how many different goldfish I painted before finding one that my children really engaged with, or how long it took me to compile a list of animals to include in the book, in the first place. Not to mention the seemingly impossible task of actually marketing a bilingual baby book, that isn’t in Spanish, to bookstore owners and distributors.

My name is Brian Bomster-Jabs, and I am a Korean Adoptee. I was adopted when I was 5 months old and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. When I arrived, I had a brother waiting for me. Two years later, I would have a sister. Both were also adopted from Korea, and the three of us were all raised by white parents. Growing up in Baltimore, I was exposed to different culture than what the majority of Asians Americans would experience

Each time I walk by a dry cleaners in the city and see an Asian couple behind the counter, my chest tightens. And here at my parent’s store on Long Island, where I intend to spend the rest of the day, I start to feel the pressure.

Probably each one of us said it at some point when we were small children. Some of us said it almost every night. Some begged and pleaded. We laughed and giggled and screamed when our pleadings were granted.

I’m a 21 year-old college student living in the Midwest. As the number of years I’ve spent in the States started to catch up to the number of years I’ve lived in Korea, my Korean-ness began to blur. Friends brought me questions about Korean politics, and students in my Korean language class asked me about Korean history, to which I responded with hesitation and uncertainty.

A musical journey from awkward childhood piano lessons to one night with Yiruma

What’s the worst part about living with a parent who has Alzheimer’s?  Their repetition of words and phrases is a simple annoyance, the frailty of their human body is understandable, and their inability to feed themself is predictable.  Yet the constant desire and wish for some light to dawn on them, only to find that your hope will always be crushed, is just daunting.

One summer my wife and I toured half of the Silk Road through China. We were dating then. It was my first time traveling in a guided group—I had always traveled alone, cut off and trying for immersion, which might have been a way of reliving of my adoption. Tour groups are common for Korean Koreans, so my wife was used to traveling this way. She had been born and had grown up in Busan, where we met.

A few months before my son’s due date, I called my mother to ask her to help us out with our baby.

She said, “I think American babies are different than Korean babies.”

“What do you mean?”

“American people take their babies outside right away. You would never do that with a Korean baby. American babies must be built stronger. I don’t think I would know how to take care of an American baby.”

Growing up, my mother did not teach my sister and me about Korea. She did not teach us Korean. She did not feed us Korean food, and by middle school, my sister and I balked at her stinky jars of kimchee.

My grandmother was born in a year of famine, a hunger she never knew. A hunger she hungered for in missionary dreams. Starving in a heartland whose pulse, it seemed, had stopped; beat on in the hearts of those who could not return to it. A pulse in the burnt and sweated temples of bent-over coolies. A rhythm in the steps of my great-grandmother, deliberate and defiant dances at the Wahiawa Korean church. Her howls pierced the silence of the temple where the Japanese prayed, her neighbors in this country, her overlords in the other.

In popular culture, Asian Americans always seemed concerned with building bridges from old country to new country, first generation to second generation. The books I read and the movies I watched featured disconnect and miscommunication between two separate worlds. Watching “Flower Drum Song” with my third-generation mother, I often felt my narrative didn’t match the typical Asian American tale of struggle to be understood.

My father immigrated to America in the 1970s hoping to find better vocational opportunities. Back then, Korea was still in the process of recovering from the effects of war and the prospect of job mobility was limited. Dad was always a bit of a freethinker and I am pretty sure that even in his earlier years he had a desire to venture out of his homeland.