I timidly enter the store, gently closing the wooden door behind me. Instinctively, I bow my head at the Korean 아저씨 at the cash register. I browse through the frozen meats, picking up some pork belly and wandering over to the ramen selection. When I return to check out, he’s standing with his glasses lowered, a hint of a smile on his face. “You know how I knew you were Korean?” he asks in the language I hear so rarely now. “How?” I respond, a little taken aback by his question. “It’s the bow,” he answers knowingly. “Only the Koreans bow in greeting.”
In the tiny Korean market in the Czech Republic, a country that is home to only 3,000 Koreans, the recognition of my ethnicity is strangely welcoming and sweet. It doesn’t feel like that back home in the States, and it hasn’t for a while. Both my high school and university have a population of not just Koreans, but other East Asian students, big enough to create their own sort of mini-society, complete with its own niches, stereotypes and dynamics. Despite my vaguely scarring experience of being the only person of color in my small middle school, once I was given the chance to blend in inconspicuously into a group of people that looked like me, I welcomed it gratefully and never really looked back.
But community and comfort are not the only things associated with the Asian American label. America allegedly celebrates a melting pot of cultures, and yet it considers any Asian ethnicity the same flavor. The presence of this abstract “Asian American” label in and of itself erases the complexity of the cultures of which it is composed. Asian Americans who want to speak about their experience find it hard to incorporate nuances such as ethnicity or economic status into each unique story, resulting in one-dimensional narratives like the lunchbox moment. This overdone trope, in an attempt to make the Asian American experience palatable to a white audience, is infamous for flattening a complex multitude of narratives in attempts to create a presentable shared struggle. My “lunchbox moment,” for example, was perpetuated by another Asian kid’s misdirected curiosity, and therefore probably has nothing to do with my racial identity. My partner, on the other hand, recalls a more wholesome “reverse lunchbox moment” of sharing his tteokbokki with white friends.
In “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” Cathy Park Hong writes, “Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the ‘we’ in Asian America. Do I mean Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Pacific Islander, queer and straight, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich and poor? Are all Asians self-hating? What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem? ‘Koreans are self-hating,’ a Filipino friend corrected me over drinks. ‘Filipinos, not so much.’”
The book is a vulnerable and honest reflection about her Asian American experience. What I noticed most while reading is that Park Hong doesn’t write to be relatable, but to be authentic. In doing so, she strikes a deeper chord than any overdone lunchbox trope could. The experiences she writes about are, refreshingly, not intended to create any narrative. The lines I’ve quoted acknowledge a sentiment I had related to deeply but never expected to see articulated so accurately, especially from a published author. The last line in particular playfully nods to the relationships between the ethnicities in this community with dry humor. Even while understanding that the Asian American label was created to simplify a plethora of cultures and people, there’s a comfort in knowing there’s so many groups of people going through the same thing. And yet, the complexities of it all made me question where my race ended and my ethnicity started.
A little over a year ago, I applied to work at an Asian noodle restaurant on campus, mainly because it seemed popular enough to make me a steady income. When I showed up for my interview, I was unwittingly placed at its Korean barbecue counterpart. Too hesitant to speak up about the mix-up, I spent the next year changing grills, interpreting Korean dishes spoken in American accents and learning about the difference between cross-cut and regular short ribs. I don’t think I would have ever taken the initiative to work at a Korean restaurant if it weren’t for the circumstances. When I seated a Korean family, I would be faced with the decision to consciously speak Korean or stick with my more comfortable English. I had Asian American coworkers and customers, of course, but the restaurant emphasized my ethnicity to me in a way I wasn’t used to.
The simple question “Have you been here before?” became a loaded one. What I really meant was, “Have you been to a Korean restaurant before?” and a “No,” would mean bracing for impact — to try my very best to not view curiosity and interest as ignorance, to not interpret clumsy attempts at the grill and inquiries about the menu as disrespect, to try to swallow what felt like bitter unfairness that some people had never had their culture’s food questioned. Once I caught a table trying to heat 냉면, a cold noodle summer dish, on the grill, and just about lost it.
I knew that my hypothetical employment at the noodle bar next door wouldn’t evoke such a visceral reaction from me. Having to explain this food to white people felt a little too close to explaining my culture, my identity, to America. But within this indignation came a feeling of closeness to my culture that I hadn’t felt in a while. I had accidentally come across an infallible definition for culture in between the fermented layers of cabbage kimchi and in the countless bowls of rice I filled: food. I had anecdotes and stories I could recount to my grandparents when the call started to go quiet, take out boxes of food reminiscent of my mother’s (if I got lucky) and the subtle but distinct feeling of content at the expression of relief from my older Korean tables at the first “안녕하세요.”
When I went to study abroad, leaving behind the restaurant, I strangely felt less Asian American and more just, American. The orientation lectures on culture emphasized American stereotypes — too friendly, too smiley, too loud on public transportation — stereotypes that were supposed to apply to me. The irony of feeling more American than I ever did in the states dawns on me. Here, the Asian — or rather, Korean, in Korean American is revealed to me in smaller, sweeter moments: a foreign language I can actually understand on the metro; finding kimchi at the grocery store; a small but meaningful bow.
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