I AM KOREAN AMERICAN

Occupation

burrito connoisseur

Own Words

Sometimes I love being of Korean heritage. Particularly when eating cheap Korean street food. Or when watching polite schoolchildren in Seoul streets bow to their elders. Or watching high school kids get up from their seats so grandmothers can sit.

But sometimes I despise my heritage. The way Korea treats it’s mixed-race children. The way Korean leaders so often miss the forest for the trees. The way we’ve pretended trafficked Korean women in China or enslaved children in North Korea do not exist. The way our fathers do not hug their sons. The way we cannot celebrate one another’s success. The way, sometimes, Koreans prey on unsuspecting fellow immigrants.

Last month, KW Lee, one of the greatest Korean Americans we’ve been blessed with, shared a short message based on a very long experience. He said:

“ye whoever enters this world: leave all the illusions behind and refuse to be disappointed in working for any korean causes or you surely will turn into anti-korean. follow dosan’s mantra: be honest, speak the truth, walk with the humblest among us, walk the walk with them, and they will rise to the noblest.”

What I’ve learned in the past few years of this rather confusing journey is this: we are all human, and we all have flaws. Koreans have no more and no fewer frailties than anyone else. They just stand out more to me because they are my family. And who am I to judge? I have more than my fair share of shortcomings.

I’m learning now to be more humble, and to share more confidence and less disappointment, to show more affection and less aggression, to give more love and less judgment. And love at it’s core is sacrifice, compromise, concession. Not just forgiving, but forgetting.

The most that can be asked of us is that we try our hardest with what we have. And the best any of us can hope for is to make a small difference in the lives of those whom fate places around us.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” – George Eliot, “Middlemarch”

My parents, and in many ways, my people, gave their lives and livelihoods so that I could complain, and could have the choice to embrace or reject their traditions and ideas. And despite all of our problems and occasional madness, Koreans love their children more than themselves. They weep for the stories of strangers. Their hearts thump with pride when they see one of their own win a medal or make the papers. In rare, important moments, they truly know how to place the greater good over their own lives. They honor their parents. They somehow simultaneously discipline and spoil their children. And they make really, really good barbeque.

I am blessed to be Korean American.