Man, I didn't expect myself to relate so much to this. I grew up in towns where I was bullied by all kinds of kids: white, black, and even other Koreans for not being "Korean" enough. I got into fights and in most cases, the teachers turned a blind eye. When I was in Catholic school, my principal actually participated in slinging racist jokes at me.
But like Eugene, I never had a self-loathing phase. I was never ashamed of being Korean American. If anything, it just emboldened me. I was mad because people hated me for being me.
The bullying, the profound respect for women (I'm an unabashed feminist and I attribute that to my greatest and most formative mentors being women), the development of AA media...
My dream of dreams is to become a professional fiction writer and every month, I ask myself if it's worth it applying to grad school and refining my craft. I've never been interested in writing "Asian American" stories. I enjoy them myself but it's always made me uncomfortable that minority writers always get their big break with a "minority" story. Junot Diaz (Jersey REPRESENT!) talked about this: White people always expect POC novelists to write stories that take them on a sort of cultural safari, so they can oooo and aahhh and how different and exotic we are.
I don't want to write stories like that, but I do want to write stories that happen to have Asian Americans in them. It's one of the reason I loved Starship Troopers so much as a kid. The protagonist Johnnie Rico is actually Filipino. Back in 1959, it was a total mindfuck to readers, because this whole time they pictured a typical white dude until Johnnie casually mentions that he grew up speaking Tagalog at home. Of course, you'd never be able to tell from the movie adaptation cause they casted Johnnie with the blondest, blue eyedest dude ever.
And I really, really love being Korean American, and I dig that Eugene's proud of being KA, too. That grit your teeth and get shit done mentality is something I've seen in all first generation immigrants. It can be frustrating, it can be heavy-handed, and sometimes it can be downright stupid, but as a child of that culture that's much more likely to think of some clever way to circumvent the laboring, I still have to admire it. It's something passed down in my cultural toolbox that I can tap into when the going gets really tough.
Basically, the anger that Eugene is talking about is han, and he articulated it pretty well. It's not anger over yourself or even other people, it's anger about injustice. The Korean solution isn't to let the anger to or bury it -- it's to seek revenge, right the wrongs, no matter how long it takes. That's where the dogged determination of the Korean spirit comes from.
And when he talks about his family, that's jeong. Jeong's hard to define. It's like a love that's so strong that individuality ceases to exist. Very powerful, sentimental feelings are an integral part of love but the overarching factors are loyalty, respect, and trust. It's a relationship based upon self sacrifice and affirmation, so if I develop jeong with a lover, all her dreams become my dreams and all my dreams become her dreams. If her dream is to open up her own restaurant, then I do everything I can to make that dream happen and when she achieves that dream, I am just as happy for her if not happier than she is. If my dream is to publish a book and win a Booker Award, then she does everything she can to make that dream happen and if I ever hit that mark, she's just as happy for me if not happier. If either of us fail, then the other is there to pick up the pieces.
Being Korean is very emotionally tiring. But awesome.
