I AM KOREAN AMERICAN

Own Words

I read on-line recently that Victor Emil Frankl once wrote the following: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” I believe that Frankl’s proposition is accurate, timely, and applies to my personal life and my professional life as an adult Korean adoptee. Personally, I have had no “say” in my “status” of being an adoptee. I was adopted when I was a baby, but as an adult, I feel adamantly that it is my professional obligation to stir the social and educational consciousnesses of those who I meet and teach. This has required that I challenge my own thinking and understanding. Growing up in suburban America, in the household of transracial (white) adoptive parents, it wasn’t until I left for college that I felt that I could change my educational and social situations. This change in social and educational scenery, for want of a better word, helped me to realize that education equaled empowerment. During my K-12 education I never felt empowered. None of my public schools teachers valued my brilliance or even thought that I was insightful and creative. This feeling changed entirely for the better during my baccalaureate and graduate studies. In graduate school I found wonderful mentors who understood the necessity of examining how history intersected with the current problems and injustices that plague our supposed “great nation.”

I am writing this entry while attending the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO. In such milieu, I am constantly reminded that many people who knew me as a youngster would conclude that I am one of the most unlikeable people who would have studied for his Ph.D. in urban education. Those skeptics never saw my human potential, or the rich scholarly blood that runs through my veins (my late grandfather was a well respected scholastic in Korea). The naysayers only saw my “yellow” (read: Asian) body, and perhaps at different times my “honorary whiteness.”

In two very short days I will embark on what has been a 27 year long journey of self-discovery. I will join 19 other Korean adoptees from across the globe (Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Sweden, USA), ranging in ages from 24 (b. 1987) to 53 (b. 1958) in Seoul, South Korea. I am privileged to participate in the fourth annual group, the 2011 First Trip Home Program, run under the auspices of GOA’L. GOA’L stands for the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (see their website at http://goal.or.kr/). The organization has a special place in my heart due to the type of social justice work that it does and the funding they provided me for this trip. Among other things, GOA’L has successfully negotiated the successful acquisition of dual citizenship for many Koreans who have lost their Korean citizenship due to their adoption. I hold no expectations for this trip other than that I hope to change because of the experiences I will gain.

The challenge to change myself is the constant that has run through my short life heretofore. Social and educational activism is the life that I choose, and the life that I am committed to living. This means speaking with, and engaging with, the Korean adoptee community: As a Korean adoptee, I cannot help but notice when I see a little Asian American (mostly Chinese and Korean) boy or girl in the mall, on the street, or in a restaurant, whose parents are white, and who by all indications is oblivious that s/he is not white. Why do I notice? Because when I was younger I used to be a white wannabe. Koreans in the 21st century are always fighting against something, be it the “model minority” stereotype or low self-esteems, as evidenced in medical and surgical beautification procedures that are on the rise for Asian Americans. Research continues to find and report that Asian Americans value the occidental over the oriental, many times electing to undergo medical and surgical procedures for beauty or bodily enhancements. It is time that Asians, like Blacks have before them, to begin to reaffirm and reclaim their own individual and collective self-worth. In addition to Black being beautiful, Asian is beautiful, too. This is who I am: I am an Asian American.