I AM KOREAN AMERICAN

Own Words

I guess I’m a bit different from most of the KA profiles here. I am a native Korean. I moved to the United States right after college. I lived in Los Angeles for 6 years. I worked as a community organizer at the Asian American Drug Abuse Program in South LA. In those 6 years, I met many great people, encountered great amount of diversity and food, food, food… During my first couple of years in the US, I didn’t have much access to “Korean” stuff or Koreans, so I was forced to adopt its culture and language very quickly. After my 2nd year in the US, people easily spotted me as a “kyopo” when I went back to Korea for vacation.

I recently left LA (September 2010) for a postgraduate program in the University of Manchester, UK. Here, people ask me the same question at least once a day, “are you from the States?”, with frustration on their face, trying to figure out where my American accent is from. I tell them that I was originally from South Korea, but that I lived in LA for a while.

Now that I’m here, a place that isn’t Korea or the US, I’ve learned that I feel familiar with both Korean students and American students. At the same time, I’m a bit different from Koreans and also a bit different from Americans, based on what my friends have said. When my former co-workers back in LA told me that I became a KA, I denied it ’cause I didn’t think I was, and I didn’t want to be labeled with something I wasn’t sure about. Now, I am both South Korean and Korean American. If I end up staying in the UK long enough to adopt its culture (and their accent), I guess I will turn into a Korean British as well.