Kimchi Mamas

Call for Submissions at KoreanAmericanStory.org

Do you or your family members have stories to share for an anthology devoted to the Korean immigrant experience in the 70's and 80's?  If so, please consider submitting it for publication at KoreanAmericanStory.org.  They are collecting content in a variety of formats, and they will compensate for the stories they select for publication.

Details can be found here.

--Julie

On Blogging

About a year ago, I received a call from my mother around 9pm PST.  She lives on the East Coast, so it was around midnight her time.  I picked up the phone, alarmed that something could have happened to my parents who live alone in a closed-blind suburb of New York.

"Mom, is everything ok?" I asked as soon as I answered.

"Are you writing about our family in a blog?" she asked.

I was too stunned to respond.  I had been keeping a blog for the past few years, and I had written liberally about our family.  But I had not told any members of my family about it. 

"Why are you writing about our family?" she continued.  "And why are you doing it in your name?  Other people blog anonymously.  Why do you have to put your full name on your blog?"

Generational differences in immigration?

This article from Diversity Executive states that different generations of immigrants from Korea had different experiences, largely due to the reasons for the immigration. 

Earlier immigrant waves followed the more traditional "work hard to build a new life" paradigm, dealing with a lot of racism while they were trying to gain a foothold.  Later immigrant waves were more likely to come from wealthier families, seeking a US college education and more opportunity.  Not necessarily looking for a "better life."

My immigration story is adoption into white middle class, but my (white) grandparents' generation maps to the earlier immigrant waves.  Comment below--does your family's experience map to the article?  Or did the author get it wrong?

--Posted by Jomama

Marrying Out

I am the product of an interracial marriage; my dad is white and my mom is Korean. And because of my experience as the biracial child of an interracial couple, I have always felt like race should have no place when it comes to love. Call me naive, but it confuses and offends me to to hear people talk about how they wouldn't date or marry a person of such-and-such race. Of course, attraction and love are tricky, complicated subjects when it comes to race (i.e. when does attraction cross over into fetishism?). But, ultimately, it makes my head explode to consider the idea that I would refuse to fall in love - or refuse to marry somebody I loved - if that person were of a different race than me. The idea is to me - a biracial person - personally hurtful.

Ultimately, however, I married a Korean American man. Being Korean was not on my Future Husband Checklist, but marrying my husband and starting a family with him has connected me more deeply to my Korean American identity. I am both proud and grateful for that. I like that my husband and I share a culture, identity and experience as second generation Korean Americans and I love being able to share that with our kids, but I know also that neither or marital bliss nor our familial strength are based predominately on those commonalities.

These experiences - as a mixed-race person married to a somebody of my own race (sort of) - make the recent report on the rise in interracial marriage by the Pew Research Center endlessly fascinating to me. Even more exciting perhaps is the section of their report on the Millennial Generation (teens and 20-somethings, that would include me) that reports on the near-universal acceptance of interracial dating and marriage among my generation. The first report on interracial marriage claims that 1 in 7 U.S. marriages is interracial or interethnic and this has got a lot of people very excited. As groundbreaking as this might seem, this CNN opinion piece by Cornell professor Daniel T. Litcher suggests that everybody calm down, take a deep breath and realize that the reason we've seen such a rise in the first place is that the baseline was so low to begin with. It was only in 1967, after all, that interracial marriage became legal. In other words, we've come a long way, but only because there were virtually no interracial marriages a couple generations ago.

Guest Post: Raising Your Asian American Teen

By Suzan Song

Suzan Song MD MPH is a Harvard-trained adult psychiatrist and Stanford-trained child/adolescent psychiatrist, currently working at the Asian Americans for Community Involvement mental health clinic in the Bay Area.  She is a former White House Asian Pacific Islander American Initiative fellow, and was a George Soros fellow, working with domestically abused Asian immigrant women in New York City.

* * *

May is both Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and Mental Health Month. Combining these themes into one month, let us look closer at mental health issues specific to Asian American youth and their parents.  May (and the special month festivities) are coming to an end, so now is a good time to focus on what individuals can do – specifically parents – to promote the mental health of their Asian American children.

Asian Americans are not only Asian and American.  We are a sub-culture with unique needs and experiences.  Because of this, we have some mental health needs that are different from other majority or ethnic minority groups.

Silicon Valley Asian American Voices Project: Immigrant Issues Affect Us All No Matter Where We Live

Even if you don't live in Silicon Valley, I'm hoping that as a Kimchi Mamas reader connected to Asian culture you will take a look at the trailer for the Silicon Valley Asian American Voices video project. The documentary follows the stories—the successes, hardships, and hopes—of three Asian American immigrants in Silicon Valley. Despite struggling through language, cultural, and health care barriers, these individuals readily work to shape the local community. This piece explores the strengthening of community through the support of immigrant populations.

These issues reach far beyond Silicon Valley—the policy initiatives associated with the project impact Asian immigrants and their family members across the United States—which is why I share it here.

Please take a moment to watch it--no matter where you live or where you are from, I think you will be able to relate to the stories being told. 

If you are in the Bay Area and would like to come to a screening of the documentary you can find all the info on the Silicon Valley Asian American Voices project website. It also screens at the Asian American Film Festival on March 20.

Please feel free to share the trailer on your blog, Facebook, or on Twitter. (Here's the URL if that's easier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjKBzZv7s7g)

-Stefania Pomponi Butler

DIsclosure: AACI, the organization behind Silicon Valley Asian American Voices is a client of mine.

New York Times Article re KA Suicides

Here is an incredibly sad article about suicides among Korean-Americans in the New York area.  It is a reminder about how isolated some individuals and families can be and how so many people may be devastated in this hard economic time.  Please take extra time to reach out to others in your community and support local Korean businesses. 

- Shinyung

Roots (part 3)

Read parts 1 and 2, here.

Well, as you can probably guess, my youngest gomo (aunt) decided to immigrate to America. I have never ever asked her about this and I don't think she even knows that I know this story so I don't know exactly why she decided to immigrate... but I have some educated guesses. My youngest gomo is pretty driven and she's also very smart. She probably would not have been able to go to college had she stayed in Korea because of the fact that she is a woman and that she is the youngest in the family.

My oldest uncle (kun appa) is the only person in my family that was educated. He was the first son so of course he was bestowed this privilege. Actually, he was educated to become a priest (see Roots part 1 re: my family's Catholic heritage). He's no longer a priest though but that's a different story for a different time. My father, I think, barely went to junior high school or maybe a bit of high school. (My mom didn't graduate from high school either.) My other uncle and other aunts also did not go to college. Education in Korea during those days, and even now, is very expensive. Especially college. So had my youngest aunt stayed in Korea, she would not have been able to pursue her studies... something that she wanted to do very much.

Roots (part 2)

So, last time, we left off with my hal muh ni becoming pregnant long after my hal ah buh ji was gone. I am not sure how this happened. Well, I know the mechanics of it (heh) but I am not quite certain of the circumstances surrounding it.

My oldest cousin told me something that implied that my hal muh ni was raped. Something about how women those days couldn't do anything if a man forced himself on them... But his mom (my oldest gomo) implied at a different time that my hal muh ni had had an affair with a local man. She said something about how my hal muh ni's mom (or her grandma, I'm not sure) was "into men" and how that "bad character trait" lasts 3 generations. Sounded like bologne to me but I'm just reporting here.

Roots (part 1)

This is the story of how I ended up living in the US. I think it's pretty long so thus, I put part 1. And due to its sensitive nature, I've opted to leave this post anonymous. I've told snippets of this story to a lot of my friends but never had time to write it all down. What better place to do it than here on Kimchi Mamas?

It all starts with my grandparents. My hal ah buh ji (grandpa) and hal muh ni (grandma) were apparently pretty well off during the pre-Korean war times. My hal ah buh ji owned a mill and my aunts and uncles told me that if you had a mill during those days, that meant that you were pretty well off. My hal ah buh ji, I was told, was also quite a handsome man. He was totally in love with my hal muh ni and he would even take her on his horse to watch the movies when the movies first came out. He was a community leader and a faithful Catholic. He never turned away a hungry person who knocked on his doors. These are all just stories I heard from my aunts and uncles so I'm not sure how much of it is true but they seem to be truthful...