Korean Like Me
MARCH 21, 2021
Four Korean women are murdered in an Atlanta spa. I sit quiet at my desk; I scroll. I read about Hyun Jung Grant and her love for soondubu and galbi, Korean dramas, how she used to make kimchi jjigae for her sons. In her picture, I mark the subtleties—high cheekbones, almond eyes—that would identify her to me in an instant, if I met her on the street. Korean like me. Like my mother, who makes me kimchi jjigae whenever I’m home, binges Korean dramas late into the night.
It is a recognition that breaks my heart.
**
It sounds crazy, but sometimes I forget that I am Korean. Well, that’s not exactly right. It is always there, in the kimchi cravings and the bits of conversation I pick up on the street, in the dark hair and monolid eyes that stare back at me every morning from the bathroom mirror. But sometimes it feels less important. Raised in America, it has always felt a little less important. With my perfect English, my anglicized name, I have always been Korean second. At least in my own mind.
This does not make it any less a part of me. I know the fear of my Korean name, rage-soaked, in my mother’s mouth. I celebrate the new year with warm bowls of tteokguk. I scorn kimchi as a health-foods trend. This relationship—me and my Korean self—is my most complicated one. It is the first thing that others see: my features, my skin, my telling last name. They ask where I am from; I tell them, North Carolina; and before they open their mouths again, I say: my parents are Korean. Their eyebrows raise, the clarity illuminates. I always know, have always known, what they are really asking. That is why I answer before they can.
When I was younger, it embarrassed me—looking different from my light-skinned, blue-eyed classmates, eating rice and dumplings for lunch instead of sandwiches or spaghetti-o’s. As I got older, I wondered why my blonde friends got all the attention from boys, why they were considered prettier, more desirable, than me. I wanted to be like the skinny, popular girls in my grade. So I learned. I wore my hair long, dressed like them. I ate white food, sang white songs. I hid everything below the surface, so that only my appearance might betray my heritage—damage I could quickly mend, when others realized how little it mattered to me. It was a switch flicked off the minute I left my house, an imperfection I could control and rectify.
In college, I found Asian friends. Korean friends. And with them I discovered a warmth and acceptance that I had rarely before found outside my family. We cooked together, laughed together; I showed them the K-pop music videos I used to watch on repeat as a middle schooler. When feeling especially homesick, Sun and I would go to the Korean restaurant right off campus and speak Korean to the waitress and each other.
In California, I learned how it felt, for the first time, to not always be the minority in a room. Just last week, I visited San Francisco’s Chinatown for the first time since I moved here. I meandered through the packed little stores, searching the aisles for my favorite childhood snacks; and although I couldn’t find them, I relished the cramped and chaotic energy around me: products disarrayed on shelves, boxes lining the linoleum floors. The disorder lent me a sense of sanity. It anchored me in place.
**
Sometimes, I walk the streets and allow myself the delusion of protection. Here, in the city where I first felt welcomed, embraced, by seeing around me those whom I resembled. In the city with a deeply complex and violent history against Asian immigrants. The city that excluded and interned us, told and showed us that we were unwelcome, committed acts of hatred against us to prove its sincerity. The city where today, people who could be my grandparents are beaten, assaulted on the sidewalk; I see the photos of their eyes, swelled shut, of purple bruises spreading like disease across their noses and foreheads, their gentle bodies pummeled by hatred and fear. And still I walk, headphones in, as if I am safe. As if I do not check in every storefront window I pass that I am alone—unnoticed—unfollowed.
My dad offered to buy me a taser, if I wanted one. I may yet take him up on that offer. It angers me deeply, the responsibility that I must bear for my own safety. As a woman—a Korean woman—in a world where women are attacked and murdered every day for the crime of walking alone at night—in a city where my own kin are knocked unconscious by horrible, racist people and left to awaken, bleeding and deserted, to determine whether or not they deserved it.
I have always struggled with my Korean self. And somehow, this tragedy has bred a connection stronger and more intimate than any I have ever felt. I yearn to share in the heartbreak and rage borne by this senseless killing, this violence that we have all known for years now, that we have fought to voice to no avail. For the first time—I let myself grieve—I let myself mourn. I call my mom. I cry.
Later, I will buy myself a bowl of kimchi jjigae, maybe, breaking my self-promise not to order in on the weekdays. I will unwrap the contents from their plastic bag, damp with condensation, and the smell of gochugaru will hit the roof of my mouth in that particular way it does. I will spoon in the rice, let it soften, mix in. I will sit and eat slowly. I will let it fill and warm me, every inch, and through this little ritual I will try and find some peace.
Header image courtesy of The New York Times
