I first learned that I was different when I was in kindergarten. My elementary school, neatly placed in the three-mile town of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, was hosting a Halloween parade. “Come in your costumes and we’re gonna march around outside,” my teacher announced with glee.
I told my mom at home in broken Korean English. She dressed me in a hanbok, which is a traditional Korean dress people used to wear in the olden days. Now, tourists from the states parade around Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul wearing rented hanboks to brighten up their Instagram feed. But I digress.
I came to school on Halloween wearing my hanbok. I got loads of compliments, from the staff to my teacher to the other kids who always asked me where I was from. I felt famous. I felt popular. I felt like people were finally paying attention to me. We paraded around the green lawn across the street. Several kids’ parents came. Mine were at work. I remember it being a fun event, a break from reading letters off of chalkboards and sitting cross-legged on colorful carpets.
A few days later my picture was in the local newspaper. I didn’t make the front page, but I was there…in my hanbok. Kids at school told me and I managed to get my hands on a newspaper at school. I was in my bright yellow and pink hanbok which had been watered down to black and white in the photograph. My hanbok was bedazzled with fake pearls and plastic jewels. I was even wearing a headdress. Sylvia Kim, the foreigner.
I didn’t know how to feel. Should I be excited? Should I feel proud? I stared at the image that was supposedly me in the paper and realized I didn’t recognize that kid. Was I really that Asian? People around me were puzzled as to why I wasn’t excited to see myself in the paper. I realize now as a 31-year-old, it was during that moment I first experienced shame.
There I was. The spectacle. The phenomenon. The exotic animal who must have traveled overseas only to parade herself to a town of what must be true Americans. I was five years old and suddenly became famous for being one of the only Asians (and minorities) in a Caucasian small town.
This is the image I was violently thrown into at five years old, and the image I tried to run away from for the next 10 years. I am other. I am less than. I am not white enough to be American nor Korean enough to be Korean. I am a hybrid. A minority. A thing that does not belong. The perpetual foreigner. The home-raised Korean, societally-raised American, who never excelled at Korean but over-excelled in English to people’s dismay. I am white Sylvia without the Korean last name or Ms. Kim who lacks a white identity in a cascading white world. I am not enough to be either. I’m an in-betweener. A first-generation misfit. A woman and a minority. A five foot one Asian who has experienced privilege, poverty, sexism, and racism during one lifetime.
Much more will be said regarding my racial identity on this blog. My shame for being Asian and my racial awakening during summers spent in South Korea. But in due time. For now, I will end my first blog with a message to the reporter who shot my photo and published it in the newspaper without my permission. I forgive you. But I also caution you. We are not zebras at the zoo. We are as American as you probably claim to be. We are an amalgam of our parents’ homelands and the streets of American cities that house memories of our childhood. I am neither American nor Korean. I am both. And that does not make me less than.
Hopeful Song blog 