I’m not fearing anymore, nor shameful

Apologies

We’re losing our history

You wanted to live where our grandparents fought to leave

I’m losing my history

When I speak with food and love with music, they can’t hear as well

When I want to love and learn each part of what they brought here but still feel shame

I’m losing my history

The boy who takes from the tree can’t be stunned to find there is no root left

The woman who slices chocolate to cut around the almonds I couldn’t eat

I’m scared of breaking our history

Decades of oppressive language and now I can’t even speak yours

I’m growing with your love though

And it felt like we were dancing, even when we never did

I stopped wearing a hanbok to New Year’s, but I still get your envelopes

I’m losing your history

A lone song on the iPad and I want to say hi

I’m losing you

The woman who fearlessly lived and tells me all of it as though I can understand

I can’t

I can hear

I just can’t understand

I’m loving you

Exploration for me means reinstating the desire to learn about my culture, a desire which I felt I needed to suppress to fit in as seamlessly as my differences would allow. It is the process of moving past the feelings of shame that I once felt, which can make for an awkward and challenging self-guided process. In the end, I started embracing my Korean culture.

This exploration comes with the much-needed acknowledgement of the challenges that my family, my parents, and grandparents faced. I am forever grateful for what they have done in order for me to be safe, healthy, and happy. The difficulties I experience are that of a second-generation immigrant, and I will never understand what they have endured. I do understand though, that they met those challenges to let me into the comfortable life they worked for.

I often felt so removed from my Korean culture I was told was “mine” as I had trouble connecting to it. As I grew up, it seemed that I learned I was different at the same time others did. Throughout my life, I became aware of racial micro-aggressions I experienced at the same time that the people who projected them were learning what they were doing. I had no idea that I was different until I realized I was trying to prove I was better than my difference, as though it was something to slowly make up for. I carefully articulated each word that came from my mouth to a stranger. I omitted my middle name from records and mouths. I never wanted to answer questions about it, never wanted to expose myself to potential slander or taunts. However small the action, it was still more effort than what I realized humans should have to do to be treated like a person.

But changes came. It started small and it started at home. Food became a way for me to see the culture and the history of Korea. Each dish was an anecdote from my dad’s childhood or an insight into my mom’s cooking. My dad talked about his grandmother when we ate. It’s still one of the few times she comes up naturally and I love that food can do that for us. It leaves memories in place of taste, and leaves love found in people. I never got to meet her, but I think I love her.

I started losing embarrassment just as fragments of skin wear away, a slow and tenuous process of growing smooth as time proceeds. I commenced associating my identity not with difference but of beauty, rich history, and stories. Through stories, I learned what it was like for South Korea to make its way out of poverty into a larger power internationally. Pride came from the anger too.

I remember distinctly a passionate conversation with my mom who was telling me about Korea’s long history, one that I had not asked of before. I learned what comfort women were, what Korea went through during colonization, and what they were leaving. I found pride in South Korea’s Independence Day, and I learned my grandparents lived under occupation for 35 years. I visited Korea twice. Upon visiting numerous temples, seeing city hotspots, and going on nature hikes, I found beauty in a place I had never imagined as a kid. I’d never known what to imagine at all. The exposure helped me to understand South Korea as a part of me.

The process of familiarizing myself with Korean history made me realize passion can become pride, and society doesn’t limit pride so much as it limits how much passion is appropriate to feel about what is not the majority’s norm. This rigidity may have been why in small moments, I felt conflicted. Like when we had both the Canadian and South Korean flag and I wasn’t sure which one to hold.

I believe beyond this though, it can be hard to feel like a part of something you were never really there for. I’m afraid I may be losing things: parts of the people who raised me.

I think no matter what I do, each step will be the farthest I’ve ever gone, the farthest I’ve ever explored, learned, and embraced. I think there is a possibility though, that it was love that aligns truth with reality. I feel so much towards my family now more than ever, so much warmth and safety and security, and just below that lies a level of sadness. Sadness that I had neglected a rather large part of my identity unattended for the majority of my life. I guess this is a letter to my family.

인선 (Insun)

You protected me from guilt but introduced me to shame.

I never had a country to leave, just a home.

So I never had a language to leave, just your words.

All I wanted was to make you proud

Can’t you see that I inherited everything I could, to make that happen?

And when I use my legs to carry me from home to the people,

I know you know I leave home behind me.

I leave songs and rice and fear and war and family—my name.

Because the only way to live—well,

Is to leave behind what can be used against you.

I leave you.

When the world reveals itself to me as a child-sized table,

Oak, in the corner of the room

I hold your elbow and lead you there,

I want you to see humans as small and good.

I want to bring you to this white-painted oak,

Marked by colours that bled through paper,

Mistakes on the table – small and decorative

Maybe the colours on the table are what make the room a home, the world our home.

I want to show you my drawings

Of what I think the world could be.

You still don’t believe it,

I don’t think you realize just because we have suffered—you have suffered—

Does not mean that others have not

Nor should you be intimidated by those who suffered more than you

(We can love each other while still loving them).

On the corners of drawings, I sign with blue ink,

김인선

I am not fearing anymore,

Nor shameful. The world is better

And I hope you see it.

Perhaps the revelation I have come to is that each step has changed the course of my experience for the better. Western ideology has created an approach to identity which is wonderfully diverse in a national sense, but allows for diversity to be more manufactured than celebrated. Society has a way of exploiting racial identity through mocking or sexualizing it. Even after I became aware of how my identity was formed to fit with the majority, it was hard to identify with these other parts that would either lean into a stereotype or be so far out that I would be trying too hard to fit in. I had to let the idea of being liked go because I realized no matter who I presented, parts of me would always be disliked in some shape or form.

As we grow up and find larger and larger pools to reside in, our exposure to diversity and identity expands as well. This may be why the cliché of college kids having identity crises are so common, but I think it’s more than that. It’s that children are seeing such a large pool of people. It’s not a lack of parental supervision but a perspective beyond that allows for this growth, it is not independence free from the family but the independence that one needs to develop their sense of self and therefore, strengthen their relationship with families and cultures.

Social norms and stereotypes need to be dismantled. The exploration I am on, like many others, may parallel society’s exploration of inclusivity. I think it’s happening; I think change is coming. It is neither overwhelming nor subtle, it comes in steps. I am glad to have gotten here and to have become the person I am. I think it took the steps it needed to get here, but now I am. I think losing history is inevitable over generations, but it is still preventable. And the stories I hear are the stories I will tell, the love I feel is the love I will share, and the pride I feel will build up the part of my identity once neglected, now being nourished.