The first critical mass of third-generation Korean Americans is here, with more being born each day. Now what? This mother of two explores the complexities parents face and choices they make in raising this new crop of Korean America.
By Nina Moon
“Give me a bpo-bpo!” I call out before my 4-year-old son runs off to play with his friends at preschool.
“Bap jeom mugeoyo,” I tell my 2-year-old as I hold a waiting spoon of rice toward his defiantly closed mouth.
“Hajima!” I shout after finding them both illicitly drawing on their toys.
My hard-won, toddler-level Korean vocabulary is embarrassingly sub-par—so much so that my Korean friends laugh when they overhear me. But I persist. I learned Korean in college to claim a part of myself that I felt I had been previously denied, but frankly, I might have given it up a long time ago had it not been for my children.
They are part of the first critical mass of third-generation Korean Americans, the grandchildren of the original post-1965 wave of Korean immigrants. Their generation is in so many ways more removed from the motherland than my own immigrant-reared generation. They are growing up with largely acculturated American parents and sans the linguistic ties that gave most of my generation at least a working familiarity of Korean. They are more and more likely to be the product of mixed-race or inter-ethnic relationships and must subsequently navigate multiple cultural legacies.
They are being raised by parents who are, in large part, culturally American and whose values include such non-traditional concepts as personal fulfillment, individuality and the primacy of the nuclear family. They are as likely to eat meatloaf or spaghetti for dinner as they are to eat kalbi, kimchi and bap.
As a parent, I worry this third generation is in danger of losing all meaningful ties to what it means to be Korean in America. I wonder how I, a second generation, half-Korean without linguistic or cultural fluency, can hope to pass down to my third-generation, three-quarter Korean sons a legitimate sense of their own cultural and ethnic identity. And in this brave new world where our children will cast an unblinking eye toward everything from Asian American cartoon characters (Ni Hao, Kai-lan) to minority presidents to the mainstreaming of taekwondo and learning Mandarin, what will ethnic and racial identity mean for our children?
Identity issues.
They’re complicated.
***
Even the label “third generation” is not altogether straightforward. While European Americans prefer to count the first native-born generation as the “first,” Asian Americans have tended to adopt the Japanese American model with the immigrant generation counted as “first.” And while the Korean American community as we know it exploded in the wake of the post-1965 immigrant wave, Koreans first began immigrating to the United States in the early 1900s on Japanese passports. So while most third-generation Korean Americans are just being born, there are already fourth and fifth generations out there. Ultimate Fighting Champion B.J. Penn of Hawaii, for example, is fourth-generation on his maternal side.
Add the reality of continuing migration from Korea into the present day, and you have a complicated mash-up of several generations of native-born Korean Americans. (See the Q-&-A with scholar Edward Park for more on this topic, pg. 44.)
“I was born in Pasadena, California, and my father was born in Alexandria, Virginia. My mother was born in Seoul, Korea,” says Natalia Jun, a third-grader, who, after doing the math on her own mixed-generation background, came up with third-generation.
“I’m all screwed-up,” jokes Gary Kim, when asked what generation he is. The 48-year-old explained that his paternal grandfather came to the United States in the early 1900s. His U.S.-born father met and married his Korea-born mother while serving in the U.S. Army in South Korea. Kim was born at a U.S. military hospital in Seoul. Some, including his best friend, consider him effectively third-generation.
But Kim, who married a second-generation Korean American, says he and his wife raise their son and daughter like they are third-generation Korean Americans. After all, 12-year-old Everett and 8-year-old Elsa, like other third-generation children, have immigrant grandparents via his own mom and his wife’s parents. “They’re the link to Korean identity and culture,” he says, referring to the grandparents.
“I guess [it] really depends on how you define third generation,” says Grant Sunoo, who is of Korean and Japanese descent. “On my Korean paternal side, my grandfather was an immigrant and my grandmother was born here. I’ve always counted myself as 3.5-generation Korean American. As for my Japanese maternal side, both of my grandparents were born in the U.S., so I’ve always figured that made me fourth-generation. If you average it out, I guess that makes me 3.75-generation Asian American?”
Even labeling my own children, whom my husband Charlie and I consider third-generation, is less straightforward than I choose to make it. Technically, Charlie’s great-grandfather was one of the early Korean immigrants in California and his experiences loom large over their family’s history, but both Charlie’s grandfather and dad were born and raised in Korea. Charlie’s dad came to the United States as a college student and his mother immigrated even later as his new bride. So although Charlie grew up with immigrant parents, is my husband second-generation or fourth?
To add complexity to the complexity, I am biracial. And unlike the intensely culturally Korean upbringings of many of my second-generation Korean American peers, being biracial meant that my childhood was much more typically “American.”
My mother immigrated to the States when she was 16 years old. She, her brother and her two cousins were the only Koreans—the only Asians—at their Los Angeles high school. In homogenous mid-century Korea and as the undisputed foreigner in her adopted country, cultural identity, as her children would later experience it, was not on her radar. She and my father, who is white, simply never even considered the implications of raising second-generation mixed-race children in America in anything other than an idealistic “all you need is love” kind of way.
So my exposure to Korean was limited to overheard phone conversations or infrequent gatherings with her extended family, which were invariably painful exercises in awkwardness. I never knew what to say and to whom, when to bow, where to sit, what to do with my hands, how to peel an apple in one perfect spiral—any of the mundane acts and attitudes which marked one for inclusion in the Korean American community, not to mention I couldn’t understand a lick of Korean.
Even among my friends at school, many of whom were second-generation Korean American like me, I felt perpetually excluded as I tried to follow conversations carried out in Konglish or was openly dismissed as “the white girl.”
Years later my mother would answer my cultural angst with shrugged shoulders.
“Of course, you are Korean.”
Until relatively recently, this sense of effortless entitlement to a cultural identity that I found so elusive frustrated me and left me with a vague sense of resentment for having been denied tangible markers of my cultural heritage.
So I took matters into my own hands.
I took Korean language and literature classes and taught myself how to cook Korean food. I began to call my mother “Eomma” and practiced peeling an apple in that perfect tight spiral. I pushed back when other Korean Americans cast me as the cultural outsider.
Later, I considered my place in the stories my mother had told me about her childhood in Korea, the sense of isolation and culture shock she felt when she moved here, and the consequences Korea’s historical tragedies of occupation and war have had on our family. And I stopped worrying about whether I was Korean enough and simply claimed inclusion in an identity to which I knew deep down I was entitled.
Of course.
For my sons, however, I want it to be different. I don’t want them to have to fight for their cultural identity the way I did. I want them to feel Korean, to feel comfortable in their own skins despite what others—the mainstream media, other Koreans, their extended family—tell them. I want them to understand the history and culture of their family because, ultimately, I think it will help them understand themselves.
***
Tammie Choi is also trying to avoid exactly this kind of resentment and cultural angst.
She and her husband Ricky, both second-generation Korean Americans in their 30s, decided early on that they would fill their two daughters’ lives with their Korean heritage. That has meant talking to Samona, 3, and Elise, 17 months, in Korean, though the adults speak English with each other; learning how to prepare Korean dishes; exposing their daughters to South Korean children’s programs (made easier thanks to the internet); and holding play dates with other Korean American children. Each daughter has a Korean middle name.
The Chois say that both sets of grandparents are fluent English speakers, so teaching their children Korean is not even an issue of communication with halmeoni and harabeoji. Their reasons have more to do with feeding their daughters’ internal needs.
“It’s an identity thing,” explains Tammie. “I’ve heard stories where parents felt like it…[was] more important to learn English and [assimilate] to being American. Later, their child felt very hurt and regretful they never taught them Korean. I don’t want my children to ever say, ‘Why didn’t you teach me Korean when you could have? Why didn’t you give me a piece of my culture?’
“At some point [if they] go through an identity crisis, I’m hoping their being Korean will be something of value, something that will give them confidence and pride.”
Similarly, Theresa Cho of San Francisco hopes her 5-year-old son and 22-month-old daughter will feel like they have the best of both worlds. “Mommy cooks American food and Daddy cooks Korean food,” says Cho, a second-generation Korean American who, like me, felt like her parents didn’t exactly inform her Korean roots. She spent a good chunk of her young adult years traveling between Korea and America, trying to figure out where she belonged. In the end, she concluded she had to redefine what “American” meant.
The 36-year-old hopes her children won’t feel so conflicted. “I think from my 5-year-old’s perspective, he has a very idealistic and utopian view of what it is to be American, which is the freedom to celebrate the uniqueness of who he is; adopting the wonderful things from both cultures and discarding the not so wonderful things; letting both cultures influence him, but not yet define him; having his favorite food be soup and rice as well as macaroni and cheese.”
Even as parents try to infuse our children with a strong sense of ethnic identity, I also realize that for people like Cho and myself, we are in part driven by our own upbringing, the fact that we felt denied a complete identity. And I realize that this longing for inclusion is by no means universal. Indeed, identity issues are not only complex, but deeply personal. We all make our own choices.
“I do think that people will always be identified in a certain way based on how they look,” says Ricky Choi. “Because you’ll be identified that way, for better or worse, there will be a certain kind of expectation that you have a connection to your culture. You may feel an internal desire to have that connection.”
But while the Oakland pediatrician raises his third-generation children informed by that view, he knows many Korean American peers who don’t choose to teach their children the Korean language or feel the need to maintain such strong cultural ties. “I certainly wouldn’t tell [other] people what to do,” Choi says.
For the most part, Michelle Woo, a third-generation Chinese American, was raised with a singularly “American” identity. Instead of memories of piano and violin lessons, as are typical with Asian families, she remembers singing and dancing on cruises as a child performer. Her parents even competed on the popular 1970s TV game show, Family Feud. Aside from a Chinese American church, her parents’ social networks were primarily with Caucasians in a variety of civic and recreational groups.
Looking back, she imagines her own second-generation parents weren’t necessarily brought up with a strong sense of ethnic identity. With her mother’s family having grown up in Nebraska, she assumes it was important to be “as American as possible.”
“I don’t feel like I’m lacking something,” says the 28-year-old, who lives in Torrance, a suburb in Los Angeles County. “In a way, it’d be nice to have that [ethnic cultural knowledge] as well, but I never had language barriers with my parents or cultural barriers [like my second-generation Asian American friends did]. Because my parents are so Americanized, my friends would always say, ‘Your parents are so cool.’”
Her father, who had bit parts as an actor in various films, seemed more concerned about making sure the tent of “America” was diverse and inclusive, and was active in speaking out about representation of Asians in the American mainstream media. Now, Woo finds herself working as online content manager for KoreAm, with a mission to present well-rounded images of ethnic Koreans and Asians. She acknowledges that she is probably in touch with her Asian American identity more than ever before, joking she may even know more about Korean culture than Chinese.
Indeed, Eui-Young Yu, the former director of Korean studies at California State University, Los Angeles, believes that while ethnic identity among Korean Americans will remain strong into the third generation, subsequent generations will identify more and more as part of the larger pan-ethnic Asian American community.
“For a while,” points out Yu, “[the] German, French, Irish [maintained] their own churches … [but] after a while, they all became white people. Asians will probably [do] the same thing.”
Change, he says, is inevitable no matter how hard we work to pass down our cultural heritage. Statistically, more and more Korean Americans are marrying outside their ethnic or racial group, making purely ethnic identifiers perhaps less and less applicable.
“By the fourth generation,” continues Yu, “the Korean community will not be like the first generation, the immigrant community [who] because of language limitations and because they grew up in Korea, they stuck together … in their ethnic confines.”
And yet, we also see another dynamic today: non-Korean parents of multiracial or multiethnic children taking the initiative to nurture cultural roots. Unlike my parents’ generation, many of these parents believe that love is not enough.
For Rachel Nam, who is white and married to a 1.5-generation Korean, the struggle to give her daughter Kate a coherent identity was central in her and her husband’s decision to move their family from Long Beach to Koreatown in Los Angeles, where nearly half her 5-year-old daughter’s classmates will be Korean American.
“The white part is easy. It’s everywhere, but I have to work at the Korean part. I don’t want people to question her and say ‘You’re not Korean,’” Nam says. “I want her to know inside that she’s Korean and have a really secure sense of her own identity.”
For some, like Delia Cheung Hom, a third-generation Chinese American single mother raising her half-Korean 5-year-old daughter Tae in Boston, the process of passing down those cultural and ethnic connections is particularly challenging since Tae’s Korean American father lives in Los Angeles.
“[The culture] becomes a little bit watered down. It’s a lot of food, some language, but I don’t have the ability to pass too much onto her,” Hom says. Still, she hopes her daughter will identify as both Korean and Chinese American, as well as under the larger umbrella of Asian America.
And that is possible. Grant Sunoo credits his parents with instilling in him a strong sense of both his ethnic identities. “Having been born and raised in the United States, I am clearly American,” says the 31-year-old Los Angeles resident. But he adds, “I identify very strongly as both Japanese American and Korean American. Growing up, my parents subtly emphasized the importance of understanding both the Korean American experience as well as the Japanese American experience. We were pretty involved in various aspects of both communities.”
Sunoo spent time in Los Angeles Little Tokyo temples, ate Korean food at home and learned family histories from both sets of grandparents. He also witnessed his father’s involvement with community organizations that served Korean and Japanese Americans. The cultural influences were subtle, but effective, says Sunoo.
“I think that growing up as a person of color in the U.S., it’s almost impossible not to develop some type of ethnic consciousness,” he says. “That said, I think my parents made a deliberate effort to expose me to things and teach me lessons without beating me over the head with it.”
For Sunoo and for many bicultural parents like myself, identity is not an either/or proposition. We all balance multiple identities—national, religious, regional, ethnic, racial—and being Korean American will not make them any less American than it makes me. My hope that my children will identify as Korean-hyphen-American isn’t so much a way of separating themselves from the mainstream as it is ensuring that they remain conscious of what is already a part of them.
Yet perhaps even more than a familiarity with Korean language, food and history, the customs and values that infused everyday life for immigrants and their second-generation children—the academic pressures, the gender roles, the typically authoritarian parent/child relationships, the often total sacrifice of those parents on behalf of their children’s futures—will be indelibly changed for this next generation.
Nevertheless, I hope that my children’s close relationship with my mother and halmeoni, who now lives with my parents, as well as with my husband’s parents and extended family, will be positive reflections of their cultural heritage. I want them to see the way we all defer to my halmeoni because she is Halmeoni, even when she is unreasonable. I want my sons to do “sae bae” and honor their elders on New Year’s Day. I want them to hear the stories my mother once told me. And new stories—my stories—of growing up here, a Korean American.
Because ultimately, this is why I bother. My sons are Korean American.
And our culture—the language, the food, the bonds of family and community, the history of triumph over oppression and adversity, the jeong—belong to them.
No matter how tenuous or incomplete the connection, I want that connection to shape the people they are becoming. One day they may, like I did, decide to pursue the parts that we couldn’t or didn’t give them. Or they may discard or let fall away some of what we are giving them. But they will, I hope, always know that they are Korean American.
