My Dream

"What do you really want to do with your life?" was the question I would often get when I expressed my confusion and frustration in graduate school studying classical voice. But I always hesitated to give them a full account of what I had in mind in fear of getting a response like, "Who do you think you are?" or "That would be such a waste of time. Give it up and start doing something more practical." But since about a year ago, I started to make more tangible connections between my dream and ways to accomplish it. And even though I still get raised-eyebrows of disapproval or skepticism from my relatives, I stand immovable in believing that I will achieve my dream. You may even call it destiny.

I have always known that I would lead an artistic life. But it took long, and tortuous detours for my amorphous wishes to finally crystallize into something definite and tangible. There were lots of disappointment, discouragement, tears, resentment, and doubt that accompanied this process and I am pretty sure they will come back to haunt me in the future. Regardless, I feel a sense of surety that this is my destiny, my offering to the alter of that Being whom I call God.

And this is my dream.

I will create, produce and perform works that give breath and life to forgotten history, especially the unrecognized and silenced voice of Korean women. To do that, I am going back to school to study ethnomusicology. I feel indebted to the Korean women of the past, especially my grandmothers, and I want to pay homage to those who paid the price for the privileges and freedom I enjoy today. I want to tell the stories of their quiet resilience and courage of their human spirit. In so doing, I want all of us to dig deep into the roots of our humanity to discover our common vulnerability and understand that with courage and love we can overcome our personal and national tragedies. I want people to feel that we are all the same, that we belong to the same human family however brief the thought may last.

I know this sounds lofty and idealistic but somewhere deep inside my core, I know I will do this. I just know I will.

Footsteps Behind My Shadow: A Story of My Grandmother

My dad’s house was burglarized a earlier this year—the entire house was ransacked. When I came home to California in the summer, I checked my room to see what had been taken. I first checked my jewelry box. I didn’t have much in there and the only thing that was of any worth was the diamond ring that my grandma had given me before she passed away in 2004. And it was gone. Disheartened, I consoled myself that it was just a ring.

A few days ago, I was looking through my jewelry box in my room in Salt Lake City (a different one than the one at home). Among the tangled necklaces and earrings, I saw a thick ring with seven studded diamonds in the shape of a flower. I had found my grandma’s ring! I must have brought it to Salt Lake with me sometime last year. I put it on my right ring finger and stared at it for awhile as my thoughts spiraled to what she might have been like not as a grandma but as a woman.

My grandma or halmuni as her grandchildren used to call her, was born in 1910 as the last bits of monarchial rule of Korea was being swallowed up by Imperial Japan. She grew up in a milieu of national oppression and gender bigotry in an extremely patriarchal society. She received a formal education up to maybe the third grade. She barely knew how to read and write. At age fifteen, she was married off to a man she had never seen before her wedding day. Since that day, she was responsible for drawing and carrying water from a well a mile away every morning at five, making fire to cook rice for her husband, parents-in-law and the field workers. It was her job to deliver lunch on a large pan that she carried on her head to the workers in the rice field. Sometimes she faltered and spilled at which point she ran back to the house to prepare the meal again. She washed, mended and made clothes for the members of her household until the wee hours before she finally went to bed. She labored diligently all of her life as a wife and mother of six children even as she faced pain and humiliation of her husband’s infidelity and domestic violence.

When I was younger, I just assumed this was the stuff of life for Korean women in her days. Only recently, as I looked at her diamond ring she had purchased herself, I realized that she must have had a desire to be seen, heard and be beautiful. Her wedding day was the only day that she wore makeup. Her teenage years were spent working and serving. But she must have had a desire to be educated, to discover and develop her talents, to fall in love, and be loved, to have nice clothes, to be praised for her intelligence and beauty. I wonder what she would have done with her life if she were given the same opportunities as her grand-daughters--what kind of career path she would have taken and what kind of man she would have married. I wish I could get to know her again as a woman to woman.

When she was alive, I remember her sometimes fanning herself furiously saying there was a fire in her chest. I imagine that that was perhaps the fire of anger she was never allowed to voice or channel for the injustices she suffered. She didn’t do anything great in the eyes of the world—she was never allowed to. She may have dismissed her life as a failure especially during her last years as she became increasingly invisible. And yet, she is my hero. She practically raised me and my siblings when my parents divorced. She was the source of warmth and comfort when life got cold and sad. She loved with great love.

I marvel at her story and how she didn’t let a trace of bitterness cloud her love for her children and grandchildren. Her circle of influence may have been small, but she touched everyone she met with kindness and compassion. When I don’t feel loved, I could always think of my halmuni and find an ember of warmth in my heart that she left me while she was alive. Even though she may not know, in my eye, she lived her life humbly, yet magnificently.

As I ponder on my own life, I become acutely aware of the rich blessings of this generation. I have freedom, rights, and opportunities because of the sacrifice of my halmuni and the countless women of yesteryear. They walked the road history allotted them so that I could start much more ahead. As I stand on the threshold of uncertainty, I am infused with a sense of responsibility to live a life much bigger than what I allowed myself to believe in. After all, my life doesn’t stand on its own but as a culmination of history of great, heroic women whose stories will never be told.

Breaking News! Heavenly Mother is in Korea!

For those of you who missed the second coming of Jesus:

The World Mission Society Church in Korea was founded by a man named Ahn Sang-Hong who was baptized in 1948 and subsequently became "translated" into Jesus. Unfortunately for those of you who wanted to fly out and kiss his feet, he died in 1985. But his wife Zang Gil-ja is the female incarnation of God and she is still alive and kicking. The congregation prays to her and her husband. I know you are all dying to see what she looks like. So, here she is:



If you ever doubted the ethnic superiority of Koreans, this will dispel all unbelief. I mean both Jesus and Heavenly Mother are Koreans. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Korea is really Zion.

And get this: 70% of the members of this church is female. When they first join the church, they are told not to tell their husbands. The church requires substantial donations "for the glory of God" and many go into debt to pay their "tithes" so they can go to heaven. One of the main tenets includes the belief that the world will end at the end of 2012, before which they hope to recruit 144,000 members. (And what if 2012 comes along and the world is still rockin'? Does our Heavenly Mother just say "oops" or does the church go on clearance sale?)

A female God and her female underlings. Talk about the irony of feminism and abuse all rolled in one shot.

An Asian Laundry Girl

Today, we had Joshua Selman, a conceptual/intermedia artist on our show. We talked about art and music (he has a M.A. in music composition from Yale) and chatted about this and that. He got his stage makeup done and wanted to change into a different shirt but it needed ironing. So, I got a steam iron and helped him iron it.

I held the shirt and he attempted to iron it very inefficiently. So, I told him to hold the shirt and started ironing it myself. Previously, I would have done it without thinking twice about what I was doing--it's an act of kindness. But after I have been exposed to what white men think of "helpful" Asian women, it got me a little uncomfortable. I didn't want my gesture of kindness to be interpreted as submissiveness or subservience.

It sad that I even have to think about this. I don't know how to be kind without being reduced to a stereotype. Ugh!

Sex and Racism

Western representation of the female gender of the East has often been misrepresented as inferior and cloaked in the mystery of sexual eroticism. With the obsession of chinoiserie and japonisme in Europe in the late 17th and 19th century respectively, Asia, especially Asian women have become a hot commodity for artists and writers to perpetuate this man-made Asiatic fantasy. In America, the Euro-American perception of Asians, specifically the Chinese, was already tainted by the European concoction of Orientalism but they still cast their own Orientalist veil on their perception through which they saw the Chinese and interpreted their culture even before a large group of Chinese people immigrated to the American soil in mid-19th century. This primordial impression of the Chinese undoubtedly contributed to the shaping of American racist attitudes toward Asians and permeated the ethnocentric consciousness of Americans even before the first group of Chinese immigrants arrived.

This is how Asians got their first start in America.

But that was a long time ago. How does this really affect me now? In defense of America, I have to say that America has been very kind to me for the most part. Racist attitudes weren't very apparent to me as an Asian woman and if I detected them, they were very subtle, underhanded and infrequent. (Although my perceived-image associated with racial stereotypes as an Asian woman might be a totally different story.) Racism exists in America but I never felt heavily burdened by its presence.

Ironically, it is in Korea that I see a more pronounced, in-your-face ethnocentric American attitude toward Asian women that makes me want to puke. But I do realize that this idiocy is helped not only by the media's misconstrued portrayal of Asian women (think Lucy Liu, Ziyi Zhang, Sandra Oh, and other Asian actresses on TV--they are all made to exude the image of I-wanna-have-sex-with-you.) but also by the Asian corporations and Asian women themselves.

I recently saw an Asian airline ad in The New York Times with a beautiful Asian flight attendant with the banner "I just want to listen." These Asian corporations are commercializing these "idealized", subservient images of Asian women to target white men, thereby feeding and completing the supply and demand circle.

I think economical, and political strength of a nation reflects the personality of its citizens. I suspect that some Korean women, even with the dizzying speed of Korea's economic growth, feel that by being with an American, they have turned their socio-economic knob up a notch. These women perpetuate the myth that any Asian women will do anything to hook up with an American to get a second chance at life and reinforces the ridiculous idea that white American men are superior and more desirable. Yes, some American men (especially the military ones in Korea) are idiots and sometimes I want to sit them down and yell at them using $50 words to make them feel infinitely stupid and kick them in the balls but there are also Asian women who play the part of an innocent, stupid geisha just like Madame Butterfly. It resurrects the century-old Orientalist view of Asian women. It's a maddening thing.

And I am sure, when these American men go back to the States, they will harbor the same kind of racial superiority when they encounter Asian and Asian-American women. It is sickening that I, along with numerous intelligent, independent, strong women, am numbered among these stereotypical geishas if not consciously, subconsciously.(And I strongly believe that our racist attitudes are much more subconscious than conscious.)

The truth is that Asian fantasy has been created by western men and is perpetuated by both western and eastern cultures alike. And I am helpless in changing it and it frustrates me to no end.