Both and Neither (Pt. II)

(For pt. I see here)

    Sometime last year when my mom took Warden and I out for lunch, she brought up the idea of travel - how nice it would be if she could take me to Korea to meet her siblings, see the cities, the countryside, the ocean. I reminded her that my paperwork was inadequate - that if I had maybe just one or two more pieces of identification to prove I was a citizen for the process of getting a passport, that it would be possible. I paused, turning to Warden with a joking smile.
    “Actually, now that I think of it, if I were to get married to an American, in addition to my other papers the marriage certificate would probably be enough for me to get a new passport.”
    Though Warden and I laughed, my mom became very thoughtful. “Yes,” she said, thinking: “Yes, that would work. About… three years from now, that would be a good time to travel.”
    “No pressure,” Warden quipped, but we’ve been talking about it ever since - everyone from both of our families views it as an inevitability that we’ll marry, and though we joke and pretend it’s only a maybe, we both talk about it the same way, dreaming of our future together. As strange as it feels to me, one day going to Korea has become a possibility again.

    I decided that I needed to take learning the language seriously, and subscribed to a website that taught it (though admittedly I don‘t study as hard as I should). Excited and grateful that all the resources I needed to teach myself the language and the history of Korea were now at my fingertips (not to mention free or very cheap) I also started researching the culture of the country that had led to me, and was shocked by what I found.

Both and Neither (Pt. I)

    I feel like I haven’t posted in an ETERNITY, though it’s only been a month or so. Samhain is coming soon, and personal work/play, school and family has kept me busy. Still no excuse (even if no one actually reads these), so here we are finally putting up something new.

    Today’s post is part one of a two part entry, and a little bit off topic for this blog - but it‘s important nonetheless. It’s about something that’s played a large part in my life over the years. Something that’s affected people’s perceptions of me, and  influenced their reactions to me. It’s resulted in biases (both for and against me), it’s colored the humor and hate in my life, and despite all this, it’s been something I’ve pretty much ignored for most of my existence.

It’s my race.

    As I’ve mentioned before, I’m half-white, half-Korean. I say ‘white’ because, though that bit of my ancestry most likely comes from Germany, not a lot of the history on that side is accessible to me. My father’s side of the family hasn’t gone through a great deal of effort of trace the family tree back very far, and the matter has been made foggier by the numerous divorces and second-marriages that tied in additional blood and history. On my mom’s side, it’s Korean all the way back.

Not that it meant much to me until recently.
  
    Last year, performing in a Stand-up Comedy competition at my school, I made the comment that “I’m about as Korean as Taco Bell.” The routine - which won me first place, by-the-by - mostly focused on my relationship with my Mom, a Korean who came to the states as the wife of a G.I., my father. I didn’t realize until sometime in my preteens that there was a history of Korean women coming to the US in such a way for nearly half a century. It was something I mistakenly thought that had little to nothing to do with ‘me.’