I’m 42 and I’m not successful, but I’m Korean American.  (Am I allowed to say that?)  My story begins in Seoul, Korea in 1970, the year of the dog, when I was born.  I was born into a very broken family.  My father was in the military and got intoxicated every weekend.  My life was completely torn upside down by my father’s rage, drunkenness & violence towards my mother.  You can still see the marks of emotional damage that those early years caused within my family experience. 

I was eleven when my father, a Korean immigrant in the U.S. army, tried to drag me to a psychiatrist. My symptoms? Unusual thoughts, erratic behavior, filial disobedience: I suddenly refused to eat meat.

I’m not the only Korean kid whose parents acted as if becoming a lawyer or a doctor were the only career options. For my parents, the doctor path was the first line of offense. Throughout high school, we were barraged by comments like, Don’t you want to become a doctor? Dr. Rosenberg is such a gentleman. He always pays his bills on time. Look how well his wife dresses. Along with some downright dirty, guilt-tripping pleas like, Wouldn’t it be nice to have a doctor in the family? Think of how you can help us when we grow old. Imagine if we developed heart problems… They found ways to weave these hints into any random occasion, bearing testimony to their faith in the Chinese water torture method. If you repeat it often enough, my mother once confessed, it will seep in.

I thought that way for many years because I had experienced much despair in my life. For a long time, despair kept me from thinking that my immigrant life would change. The future seemed dark and I did not have much hope then. Now I know our lives are not immune to hardship and suffering. As hope comes and goes, we must hold onto it and improve ourselves.

My relationship with a certain pickled cabbage, you could say, is complicated. Kimchee became symbolic of my Korean identity, for obvious reasons and otherwise. But my personal journey mirrors the evolution of the Korean American experience overall, too.

In Genesis of the Bible, there is a story of Abraham being tested by the Lord to offer his only son Isaac as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah.  When Abraham was about to kill his son, he is stopped by the Lord and is instructed to sacrifice instead a ram caught in a thicket nearby.  Abraham called the mount Jehovah Jireh, meaning that the Lord knows what is needed and will provide.

I was born in 1971 to a Korean mother and an African-American father. My parents met in Germany while my mom was in nursing school.  My dad was stationed in Munich as a member of the United States Air Force.  My family resided in Germany for four years and my mother visited Korea a few times in between.  I spent my first birthday in Korea and returned twice; at the age of two and then three.  At the age of four my mother and I moved to the United States, which is where we have been ever since.

Back in 1981, when I was ten years old, my life had become a foreign-language film without subtitles. Everywhere I went, people spoke English, which was a problem because all I knew was Korean. My mother, my two sisters, and I had made the trek from Seoul, South Korea to reunite with my father in New Jersey, and once we got our bearings, it was time to get to work.

Born in Seoul of a Chinese father and a Korean mother, people have always tried to locate my identity in fractions, particularly in America. Identity is easily fractured into incomplete portions, in the US we describe people as parts instead of complete comprehensive whole identities. Perhaps this tendency was born in the US constitution, in Article 1, Section 2, where slaves were described as 3/5ths of a whole person.