You’re Korean and American, don’t ever forget that you’re both. Seven-year-old me is sitting at the dining room table, trying to process what it means to be two things at once, neither of which feels quite right. My dad’s clear, articulate English has taken form through his young teenage years spent in balmy Guam, followed by college and grad school here in LA. While his family’s story wasn’t a common immigrant experience in the Korean diaspora, what was shared ground for children of this 1.5 generation growing up in the 90s was this constant inner dialogue around identity, the push and pull of finding who we were, which version of us was accepted, and a wistful longing to bridge what was happening in and outside of our homes.
Thirty years later, I watch my daughters growing up in an entirely different context, where KPop Demon Hunters, K-beauty, Korean dramas, and their cultural foods become global sensations. I love seeing Asian-owned businesses, trends, and cultural icons shifting global economies, grateful that I got a tiny foretaste of what this victory was like in my own mother. A front seat to gritty entrepreneurship and incredible tastemaking, trailblazing in the small corner of the world she was planted.
Girls, you’re Chinese, Korean, and American. Don’t ever forget you’re all three. And yet, and yet. There is still need for conversation, the caveat around contexts that they may never be able to find themselves in, parts of the country that they will not feel safe in.
AAPI month is this for me - holding the tension of immense gratitude for everyday heroes and everyday bravery that have made a different reality possible for today, and the grief of and yet. Both compel me to more connectedness, more togetherness, more beauty right where we are with fervent hope that in another thirty years, we’ll (again) be having a different kind of conversation.
To hoping,
Pat
