Disclaimer: The following entails my own personal experiences and I cannot and do not speak on everyone’s behalf. I am also not saying that one group has it harder than the other. This is purely to shed light on how struggles vary across demographics.

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When you live in the United States, race plays such a big role in almost every aspect of your life. I was born and raised in the U.S. and grew up in an area heavily populated by Koreans. I struggled with my identity; I felt like I didn’t belong in either group. The last few years of my life was spent trying to be a complete 50/50 balance of both. I’ve only just realized that I don’t have to be half American and half Korean—I can be exactly 100% of both.

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My experience as Korean in the United States is very different from a Korean who was born and raised in Korea. Here in the United States, we are the minority. And although we are not at the bottom of the social pyramid, we are often oppressed by the model minority myth. Growing up without any representation in the media definitely shapes you as a young child. Feeling like no one else looks like you forces you to conform to beauty standards that were never meant to include you.

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Being in a “melting pot” country means you understand race in a unique way. Every questionnaire (from surveys to college applications) asks for your race almost like an established standard. As a minority, being asked “No, where are you really from?” has become normalized. You quickly realize the difference between nationality and ethnicity while the majority race will never quite learn or remember.

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Asian names are belittled to “ching chong” and “ling ling”. Asian traditions are ridiculed and called weird. Asian foods are called “gross” and “smelly”. Asian features are called ugly and plastic. This is why I believe that Asian Americans perceive cultural appropriation more seriously than Asians in their home country. For years, our culture was mocked but suddenly, at the convenience of non-Asians, our culture has been diminished to nothing but a passing trend. It’s not people taking a genuine interest in the culture. It’s people ignorantly picking and choosing what they like about an entire culture.

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On top of cultural appropriation, Asian fetishization (which often excludes non East Asians) is also an issue. After decades of portraying Asians as “evil” (especially in the United States) and as “the other,” people began to fetishize us. An entire continent of diverse ethnicities was diminished to a docile stereotype. Asians are seen as “exotic” (a term used to describe food and animals) and Asian women in particular are desired for their “submissiveness”. This stereotype is something I have also personally experienced and it is not flattering at all. Asian fetishization now often stems from the delusion of expecting real life people to be like anime characters and K-pop idols.

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Politics in the United States are so racially divided. Since the inauguration of Trump, especially, the liberal left and conservative right have become extremely polarized. In a country that once proudly listed immigration as its strength, immigrants had been demonized. Because of the model minority myth, I have observed that some Asian Americans feel like they are the exception. Within my own Korean American community, I have seen Dreamers (people who entered the United States as a minor) fear deportation. I have seen Korean green card holders separate themselves from and act pretentious over these Dreamers. In my experience, people don’t care if we are of legal status or not—we are all grouped together if we don’t meet their standards of what it means to look like an American. It explains why we are identified as “Asian American”. You may have heard the terms “African American,” “Latin American,” and even “Native American”. But have you ever heard of “European American”? In the two decades I’ve spent in the United States, I have never heard of that term. This is because “European Americans” look like they “belong” in the country.

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This is why I’ve always felt like a foreigner in my own country. I thought that it would be different in South Korea. When I visited my motherland for the first time at the (international) age of 17, I was disappointed to realize that I was a foreigner in Korea as well. I felt like an imposter hovering around the line between a Korean and an American.

Recent events regarding the Black Lives Matter movement have made me notice that not every country is split demographically in the way the United States is. A lot of black and brown voters feel like they literally cannot be right-leaning because they believe conservative policies threaten their lives and rights. It came as a surprise to me when I learned that the definition of “conservative” varies throughout countries. Although I am a Korean, I am not well-versed in the politics of Korea so I know that I can’t fully comprehend the experiences of someone who spent their entire life in Korea. When it comes to Korean issues, I can’t speak on the behalf of Korean mainlands. The same goes the other way as well. This enlightenment is something I wanted to share with others.

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Disclaimer: I am a student who received Korean public education up until my first year of high school. This is my story, and does not claim to tell everyone else's. This is my experience, and can contain information that is not resonant with or claimed by others. 

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As someone who grew up in a society where seeing foreigners who looked different from me was only really possible when I went to Itaewon or Gangnam, I grew up surrounded by “descendants of Dangun” Koreans. The only foreigner who I was able to see on a regular basis was our school’s native speaker language teacher. Maybe that is why there was no reason, or need, to think deeply about other races. Of course, we knew that racism was bad, and we are all the same people, but not of the specific issues that the rest of the world seemed concerned with. Issues like “cultural appropriation” or “blackface” were unfamiliar words to me.

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Racism seemed like a faraway form of discrimination only manifesting through foreign news networks, one that was difficult to see in the everyday. The primary focus was on alleviating gender discrimination and generational conflicts, which were more easily seen in Korean society. This was also true of schools as well – I don’t personally remember receiving anti-racism education in school, and even if I had, it was not emphasized enough to the point where I could remember today. On the other hand, I do remember learning repeatedly and comprehensively about gender discrimination and sex-ed, disability discrimination and other types of discrimination. We never had to racially identify ourselves on surveys. As a society where not liking kimchi means “are you Korean?” is the automatic response, I felt that the concept of race was important but not pertinent to everyday life. 

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Instead, I feel that gender discrimination and student’s rights are improving at a rapid rate. For example, when I went into middle school the school strictly regulated hairstyles (keeping hair length at the chin or above, if below had to tie with black hair ties) and clothing, not letting their female students wear pants etc.. By the time I graduated, most of these regulations were revised to only ban makeup or piercings. At my school, students were at the forefront of these changes. Scenes inside the classroom changed as well. For those of you who are as old as I am or are older, you would remember that we were called by our attendance numbers (출석번호) and that female students were designated later numbers, so in the 30s or 50s. This was another change made during my middle school years, when the teacher announced that numbers would be designated on a rotating schedule instead. I was surprised that my locker was at the front, and not the back. Being witness to these steady social changes happening in the last ten years, I have been able to directly feel society changing.

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