In Search of Mixed Korean America*

304 Gage Chapter 13 In Search of Mixed Korean America* Sue-Je Lee Gage Borders are policed on both sides. Someone who walks between and in and out of national and institutional borders draws attention to the arbi- trariness of divisions and to the vested interest of gatekeepers. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces (1996) ⸪ Raised in the inner cities of Los Angeles and Indianapolis, my siblings and I were familiar with racism, classism, and sexism from an early age. Our mother, a Korean immigrant and single parent, brought us up in poor, urban, mostly African American communities. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War were still on people’s minds at that time in the early 1970s. The complexi- ties of what it meant to be “American” and “Korean,” not fully one or the other, were difficult for a mixed-race kid. My mother and her experiences—in the Korea she left, the United States she dreamed of, and the Korean American community she desired to be part of—mark my beginnings. We were excluded from the privileges of “white” society not just because we were “Oriental,” but because we were different and not white. Despite the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, most of the people we encountered had never heard of Korea. Koreans shamed us and treated us harshly because we were poor and we were mixed; our mother had violated the rules by mingling with a GI, an American soldier, the biological father we did not know. Nor did our African American neighbors fully accept us; they had reservations because we weren’t black either. Our mother decided only to have children in America, which automatically conferred on us US citizenship. Her stories and our experiences of unpleasant- ness by Koreans in the United States toward our mixed family offered a glimpse of what our lives might have been like had we grown up in Korea. Indeed, in my * This chapter is dedicated to my dear brother whose courage and hope inspire me everyday. Thank you to Shelley Lee and Angie Chung for this opportunity and to mixed Korean Americans for their being. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004335332_014 In Search of Mixed Korean America 305 research in Korea over the years since 1995, I learned about the intense dis- crimination that mixed Korean Americans, known as Korean Amerasians, faced there.1 My mother later remarried a “white” man who mistook her for Chinese because she worked in a Chinese restaurant. Our stepfather, a mixed Native American, had been born and raised on the Cherokee Trail of Tears in south- west Missouri, a part of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the genocide of American Indians. When he and my mother met, he hated Koreans and was biased against blacks as a result of his upbringing in the United States and his experiences in the Korean War, the last war in which the us military was offi- cially segregated. Our stepfather was a proud marine of the First Marine Division under General MacArthur who took part in the famous Incheon Landing on September 15, 1950. As a child I did not understand how people learned to hate others based on perceived differences in “race.” I didn’t have the language to describe racism—or the awareness that it was intimately connected with legal and social structures. I knew none of that, let alone how to change it. But, I felt all of it. I was curious why borders were created to divide people—and so tightly controlled. These early experiences led me to question where I belong and to ask questions of social and legal belonging in the United States and in Korea: how and why race existed and why “mixed-race”2 was structurally invalidated and invisible in both places. As a mixed Korean American who has lived and breathed “between and in and out of national and institutional borders,”3 what I had yet to understand as a child was that these “borders” are always in a state of transition because they socially and politically constructed and therefore highly vulnerable, which is why they are so fiercely guarded.4 These borders can always change because they are permeable and flexible, and more than that, they are not real: they are made and therefore made real. In this chapter, I explore major dimensions of mixed-race experiences among Korean Americans and raise questions for the larger field of Korean American studies: What is Koreanness in the American context? Why are mixed Koreans missing from the literature? Might there be parallels and links 1 Sue-Je Lee Gage, “The Amerasian Problem,” International Relations 21 (2007): 86–102. 2 Here I define “mixed-race” as coterminous with “multiracial” to include any person who is a descendant of two or more culturally constructed ideas of “racial” groups. 3 Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homeland (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996). 4 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). .

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