- My name is Deborah Haejin Bang.
I am 23 years old, and I currently live in
Los Angeles, California.
Went to school with mostly Korean folks
in elementary for middle I moved further out to the valley
and then came back to L.A. for high school.
So growing up, I became more and more distant
from the Korean community in K-Town out of choice,
more than anything else.
And I think that had to do a lot with me
distancing myself from my family as well.
I think it started in the church
just being constantly surrounded by Korean families,
Korean kids my age
I felt very jaded by the Korean community
and just the way they treated other folks
not just other Korean folks,
but also like the brown and Black community in Los Angeles.
If I wanted to take care of myself
it wasn't okay for me to be around anymore.
Between like Korean kids, it's translated from
the relationships Korean parents had with each other
and Korean kids learning that
and feeling like they should, they're
it's fine to be bullying other kids.
Or, and that made me realize that the things I cared about
I wouldn't be able to find within these groups of people
and the changes I wanted to see around me
weren't reflected in these groups.
So I think that's when I was like, okay
this isn't healthy for me.
This community isn't healthy for me
so I need to find my answers elsewhere.
My Korean friends in high school
kind of like there was like a divide, I guess in K-Town
there's like the church Koreans
and then like the K-Town Koreans.
I think it was more rooted in my family though,
than anything else.
I knew that I did not want to be the kind of person
or the kind of people my family members were at the time
or like the people surrounding my family members.
And I think that really shaped my values and who
what I cared about, who I wanted to be around.
Are you willing to face certain issues
that you're dealing with
or are you just trying to run away?
And for me, I think a lot of the time it was running away
just because I didn't know what else to do.
And by finding other people outside of the Korean community
who did relate to what I was going through
that helped me, I think realize, okay, this is it.
It was partially like self hatred
but also there are good people in the community
and I didn't realize that,
and I couldn't see that
because I was surrounded by a specific group of Koreans.
So I think growing up in Koreatown
and it just made me realize okay,
I need to try, I wanna see these changes in my community.
Like just made me question a lot of things
that I'm still questioning to this day.
Something that has saved my life is music
and sound in general.
And something that has strongly influenced me recently
was traditional Korean music
and hearing it for the first time
a couple of years back. Went to a pansori concert.
And for some reason
I just broke down in tears
and I hadn't cried for a couple of years.
I think something did really touch me
and I couldn't explain what
and I hadn't felt that way about music in forever I think.
I was very jaded by the notion of music and art
and touching people through that.
And there was something so visceral to me
and it did feel familiar
even though I hadn't heard pansori before.
And that really got it,
it got me started on my journey
with that sort of research
and learning more about traditional Korean music, gugak,
and that pushed me to go to Korea for the first time.
And I think that's led me
to more encounters and meeting more people
and more musicians and learning more about
traditional Korean music.
I am studying it right now.
I think it was originally very hard for me to access
as somebody who wasn't a Korean national
or who wasn't born and raised in Korea,
not just because of the lack of resources here,
but also language barriers
and cultural barriers. As cheesy as it sounds,
I think it has, it feels so familiar to me.
It does really resonate with me and just learning
about like rhythmic patterns,
like jangdan related to pansori
or like other genres of Korean music.
It's felt so much more familiar to me
than learning any other genre of music has.
And I think that really does speak to,
for me at least embodied histories
of being a Korean or diaspora Korean.
And I think there are a lot of movements
just in the U.S. nationwide
of people like using pungmul to protest.
There are a lot of Koreans who are realizing,
okay, Korean music is integral to movement building
and just reclaiming who we are as diaspora Koreans.
And it's not just in the U.S. like it's Japan, Kazakhstan.
It's like all across the world where there are
prominent Korean groups, diaspora groups
music is such an integral part of our community.
Learning more about, I think the histories
of these movements and how
music plays such an important role
in all of them, it's empowering.
I think something that has been on my mind a lot
or has been for a couple of years now is grief.
It's something a lot of Koreans here think about
just like with the 92 riots
or with their friends dying in the 92 riots
but also like something that isn't talked about a lot
in Korean communities is like suicide, mental health.
It's something people are starting to acknowledge.
I think a lot of the people that have,
or a lot of the events
and people that have shaped my life so far
I have lost because of that.
I think grief has to do a huge part of like
what I care about,
like why I'm learning what I'm learning.
They are all threads of grief and tied into grief.
And I think the reason why I care so much
about other marginalized communities is because
I realized all the things I care about
aren't just Korean-American based.
It's just a human based thing.
Like everyone's suffering,
everyone's going through the same things we are.
And something I've been frustrated
with the Korean-American community about is that
they aren't willing to extend that same empathy to others.
And I, that's what I really wanna see in our community
is people realizing that it isn't just about us.
It's about everyone.
My name is Deborah Haejin Bang
and this is my Korean American story.