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.
“This is what it means?” I asked myself, mortified. “This is what it means to people, when I tell them I’m half Korean?” I flew through virtual page upon page, littered with images, personal accounts, and videos. I was blown away by a mixture of sorrow, anger and shame - not just because of what I was encountering, but because I had never known about it. No one had told me, taught me, all of the things - horrifying and incredible - that had happened to Korea and its people, people who had led to my mother’s existence, and so my own.
It was a history stretching thousands of years back, fraught with struggle. There have been over 900 invasions into the Korean peninsula and nation by various other nations over the past 2000 years, but one that, especially in the past hundred years or so, had been filled with sorrow, heart break and devastation. A memory of the blip-on-the-timeline day or two long lesson we’d been taught in elementary school on the Korean War both saddened and enraged me as I dug deeper and deeper. I learned that in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt had intentionally handed Korea to Japan, an action that on the surface was in order to stop the Japanese fighting with Russia. He incorrectly assumed that encouraging imperialism but limiting Japan to Korea would not result in further Japanese expansion - and eventually, Pearl Harbor.
His actions permitted a savage wave of colonization during which the Korean culture was made illegal in Korea, with the express intent of wiping out Korean culture and ethnic identity. Essentially, being Korean - speaking the language, having a Korean name, singing traditional songs, wearing traditional clothing, everything - became brutally punishable under occupational law. Just speaking Korean was punishable by death. It was a cultural genocide that included cutting down and burning the trees bearing the national flower (Mugunghwa - known in English as “The Rose of Sharon”) in an effort to wipe out all traces of the Korean cultural identity. Even so, there were resistance groups - and it was through the brave efforts of such people that Korean culture and language survived.
Roosevelt, thought of as one of our greatest presidents, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for sacrificing Korea, for allowing these atrocities to happen, in order to stop the Russo-Japanese war. This man, whom I’d grown up knowing as an American Hero, cut all ties to Korea, going as far as deleting ‘Korea’ from the Department of State’s records and placing all relevant information under the heading of ‘Japan.‘ One would think that after all this the then-leader of our nation would be sympathetic to Koreans fleeing Japanese oppression - but this was not so.
Around the same time, from about 1903 to 1905, the first significant group of Koreans to ever come to the United States arrived in Hawaii - then only a territory and not a state - as plantation workers.
In fact, most of the early Koreans that came to the states came as immigrant labor: underpaid, over worked, and denied every attempt at citizenship. The attitude towards them was very much “Do our labor, then get out of our country” and they were lumped in with other Asians who received much of the same treatment.
I learned for the first time about the monstrous concept of ‘Comfort Women,’ military sex-slaves - or, as they were sometimes called by the Japanese Soldiers, ‘Public toilets.’ Though the women used and abused came from all over Asia, a majority of them were Korean women who were tricked into leaving their homes by being told they were going to work in factories (or other similar jobs) or outright kidnapped and forced into camps called ‘comfort stations.‘
Girls as young as 10 or 11 years old had their names and identities stripped from them (given instead the names of Japanese flowers) and dealt with as many as 50, 60 or even - depending on your source - 70 rapes in a single day, with men waiting to ‘use‘ them around the clock. If a woman resisted, she was beaten - even stabbed - or tied to the bed, and the line kept moving. Many of these women, only about 25% of which survived the ordeal, were forced to be nurses for the same men who submitted them to daily torture. They were raped, beaten, and forced to miscarry or suffer crude abortions - so many times that survivors were often incapable of bearing children later on. It was an endless series of hellish suffering that ended when they either became too sick or weak to survive and were either killed or tossed aside and left to die. I was saddened to read that even after WWII and Japan was no longer in control of Korea, the troubles did not end. I was reminded of how Korea was split because of the communist policies of the North and the American occupation of the South. I was reminded of the Korean War. I learned for the first time that South Korea was involved in the Vietnam War - that’s ‘War,‘ with guns, death, and a nation devastated and a generation across the world reminded of how despicable humans can be: not a ‘conflict’ as we were taught to refer to it in high school.
I learned that in the time between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the 1980’s, the South Korean government had been overthrown, taken over by the military, put under Martial Law, and overthrown AGAIN - a turbulent government at best that with the last overthrow became democratic in ’87, with the Olympic Games held in Seoul only a year later in ’88.
I learned that, despite the monstrous treatment of Koreans under Japanese occupation, the fact that US soldiers had fought to protect South Korea, the fact that South Korea had aided the US in Vietnam, and the South Korean alliance with America, Koreans in America faced hatred from every level of American citizens. Effective war-time propaganda had taught Americans to hate Asians - and because, to the majority of other Americans Koreans resembled both the Japanese and the Vietnamese, they were treated as the enemy. Hatred tied into both class and ethnicity erupted in hate crimes across the US, most notably in the LA riots that resulted in nearly $400 million in damage to the Korean Community there.
After all of this, all of the cruelty and the hate faced by Koreans around the world, I could not imagine the strength needed to go on. It is a strength evidently possessed by Koreans, nationals and immigrants alike.
Despite all of the tragedy and hardship faced by South Korea in the past, it’s gone from being one of the poorest countries in Asia to one of the richest in the world.
I learned that, despite the cultural devastation faced during Japanese occupation, Korean language, food and culture in general has spread and flourishes world wide - with Korean students ranking amongst the top in the world.
I learned that, despite the horrors faced by Korea as a people, over 50% have managed to claim some sort of faith for themselves - with Korean Christians placing 2nd in the world for the number of missionaries sent out. The number one country? The US.
I learned how, with hard work and a strong commitment to education and technological development, Korean immigrants have become one of the heartiest and successful international communities with populations in all sorts of places - The US, Australia and Brazil to name a few.
Korean and Korean Immigrant history is one of struggle, strife, pride, and hard work. It is one of holding onto familial ties across thousands of miles and countless generations. It is one of resolve, of determination, and in many places, of great triumph. Though the quality of life for Korean immigrants and their descendents remains dismal in some places (for instance, 1 in 3 elderly Koreans in New York lives in poverty) in others, such as Hawaii, Koreans have become some of the most affluent members of the societies they have entered.
I came across an essay titled "Possibilities Out of an Impossible Position: Myung Mi Kim's Under Flag" by Zhou Xiaojing. The book in question - Under Flag - explores the difficulties of the diasporic experience, especially that of Koreans, when dealing with living in a new culture. The ‘Impossible Position’ Zhou Xiaojing refers to, is the impossible task of trying to find an identity when your heritage comes from two nations, but you belong fully to neither - and it is that which Myung Mi Kim focuses on in her book. After everything I’d come across in such a short period of time, one line in particular from a poem featured in /Under Flag/ struck me as especially meaningful:
“Mostly, we cross bridges we did not see being built.”
-Myung Mi Kim (p.3)
I have enjoyed an excellent quality of life compared to what things would have been for me as a half-white/half-Korean female even as recently as thirty or forty years ago, even here in the US.
Until just recently, I was only vaguely aware of the people who came before me and worked to make my life and the things I enjoy possible. I understand now, in a much deeper way, that much of my life has depended on crossing bridges I didn’t even know had been built for me to cross.
I realize that my path will take me across more - but that there may come times when I have to build some of my own. If and when that time comes, whatever happens, I will not be deterred - though I am still learning who I am, I realized now that I am not - and have never been - alone.
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