Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Lisa S. Lee, J92

By: Lisa S. Lee, J92

With students gathered around me, I introduced them to my topic: Korea. During my talk, I was interrupted several times. One student told me that she recently saw a rainbow. Another said that his uncle spoke Spanish. The teacher asked the students to keep comments to the topic at hand, Korea and its traditions. I'd given many presentations before, but this audience of six-year-olds was my toughest audience to date.

A few years ago, my daughter's kindergarten teacher asked if I would speak to the class about Korea. My partner and I had pulled Ella out of school for two weeks at the beginning of the year so that we could attend her uncle's wedding in Seoul. I saw it as a good opportunity for Ella's classmates to get to know her, so I agreed.

I started my talk by sharing a world map and pointed out the distance between South Korea and Portland, Oregon, where we lived. I taught them how to say, "Ann-yeong-ha-seyo," or "Hello, how are you?" Then I showed them photos of the wedding we had attended, photos of a western-style service and a traditional tea ceremony. Ella explained that her aunt was wearing a hanbok, a beautiful traditional Korean dress. She smiled widely, proud of her Korean culture.

Unlike Ella, I spent most of my childhood denying my Korean heritage, our fate perhaps determined by our very American names. My parents intentionally gave my sisters and me the most popular names at the time of our birth—Julie, Lisa, and Jennifer. At our home on Long Island, we were encouraged to speak English in the house because my parents thought speaking a foreign language would get in the way of our academics. They wanted us to be American.

As children, my sisters and I played with white Fisher-Price figurines and white Barbie dolls—Barbie, Skipper, and Ken. As older kids, we watched “The Brady Bunch,” “Happy Days,” and “The Partridge Family.” We wore Guess jeans and Benetton rugby shirts, listened to Duran Duran, and ate Ellio's pizza and Linden's chocolate chip cookies at the school cafeteria. We grew into full-blooded Americans, hiding our Koreanness from our mostly white classmates.

Despite wanting to raise American kids who spoke perfect English, my parents held on tightly to many Korean traditions. Their closest friends were Korean, so parties at our house became big feasts of sweet, marinated kalbi, chap chae, and at least five types of spicy pickled vegetables. We ate Korean food every day and went to a Korean church on Sundays. We even visited Korea as children, but I only remember the things that felt foreign to me, like using the outhouse at my grandparents’ home and going to the bathhouse to take a bath. Shortly after that trip, my parents sent us to Korean school, perhaps because of our inability to speak to our relatives. But by then, it was too late. We had become too American to want to be Korean.

As teenagers, my sisters and I asked my mother to cook us "American" food, and several times a week, she dutifully complied. She made us spaghetti, meatloaf, and tacos, while she made a separate meal of kimchi jjigae or seolleongtang for my dad. When we complained that the fridge was too smelly—an embarrassment when friends came over and opened the refrigerator to look for a snack—my parents bought a second fridge. My mother moved the glass jars of kimchi and marinated fish heads to a separate fridge in the guest room. Margaret Cho described this phenomenon in an interview, the kimchee fridge a metaphor for hiding our Koreanness to fit into white culture.

After graduating college, I moved out of my parents’ home, and the Korean life that they had built around me was no longer an integral part of my life. Away from the Korean chatter of my childhood home, away from the Korean feasts, I started to feel disconnected from a part of me. It was as if I had bottled up the Korean in me, pushed the jar to the back of the fridge and forgotten about it. To fill this void, I decided to take a Korean language class at a local college, fully aware of the irony of hating Korean school as a child. Soon, I started to yearn to go back to the motherland. When I got into graduate school, I decided that it was a good time to go to Seoul to study Korean.

In Korea, I found myself inescapably surrounded by people who looked like me. At first, it felt bizarre being one of many Asians on the streets, on the subway, and in a store. In the States, at school, my workplace, and the places I frequented, I was often one of the few, if not only, Asians in the room. Slowly, I began to feel comforted by looking into someone's face and not seeing the question form on their lips, "Where are you from?" It wasn't until I opened my mouth and spoke broken Korean that the locals discovered I was a gyopo, an American-born Korean. I didn't mind the label. I was still a Korean.

In Seoul, I saw my parents in the faces around me. The merchants waving away loiterers in front of the stores reminded me of my parents shooing us away from the dinner table as they continued their adult conversation. The ajimas talking in the marketplace felt reminiscent of my mother and my aunts catching up in the kitchen while their husbands ate Korean food in the living room. The drunken businessmen singing at bars reminded me of my dad's gatherings with his friends, sitting around the table drinking beer and eating dried octopus. With each interaction and experience in Korea, I grew to understand my parents better. I grew to appreciate and embrace the culture that I had spent my life trying to suppress.

As a parent, I am trying my best to cultivate my daughter's love of and pride in her Korean heritage. I didn't discover the beauty of my culture until my late twenties. But, I want Ella to grow up embracing, not hiding, her Koreanness. And I'm happy to say that she does just that. Ella proudly uses what few Korean words I have passed on to her. She loves it when I pack bulgogi, dumplings, or kimbap in her lunch box, even though kids have pointed at her food and said, "yuck." She plays with an Asian barbie doll and an RM doll, her favorite BTS performer, and reads books by and about Korean Americans, things that didn't exist when I was growing up.

At the end of my talk at Ella's school, I pulled out a traditional Korean hanbok, which Ella proudly modeled for the class. Growing up, I never had a hanbok, but Ella owns two. Several girls raised their hands and asked if they could wear the dress, so I decided to leave the dress with the class to give them a chance to try it on. It felt good knowing that sharing Ella's culture was met with interest and acceptance. It's something I would never have imagined as a child at her age.

I want my daughter to hold her head up high and embrace all the parts of her culture and identity. And while Ella doesn't like kimchi yet, we keep it handy in our main kitchen fridge (not the one in the basement), so that we can always have it at an arm's reach.

Lisa S. Lee is a writer, speaker and brand strategist. To read more of her writing, visit www.lisaslee.com.

Read other contributions of the personal stories of Tufts alumni informed and inspired by their heritage—and shared in recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.