(pensive instrumental music)
- So my name is Wonhee Anne Joh.
I was born in 1966,
and I immigrated with my family in 1976.
We landed in Las Vegas. (laughs)
So my mother's family was in Las Vegas
and that's how we came,
so we lived there for two years
and then we moved to Chicago in 1978.
I actually have a lot of memories of Korea for some reason,
but I have fond memories of like my paternal grandmother.
I have memories of her in Korea,
like in the winter braiding my hair,
and giving me this persimmon she would whip out
from the, you know, back of the house somewhere,
and I would be having this cold and sweet persimmon
while she would braid my hair.
And then later on, you know, after we immigrated
and we lived in Chicago,
she came to visit us once before she passed away.
She had nine children, and six of them were girls,
and she actually sent them all to school.
And at that time, that was very unusual,
and the stories are that she sold land they had
behind by grandfather's back to send these girls to school.
So the story is from the outside perspective
was that she ruined the family
by sending the girls to school.
But I don't know why,
but ever since I was young hearing those stories,
I was very amazed by her.
Right, so we immigrated to Chicago
'cause one of my mother's brother was here.
So we basically settled down in Chicago after that.
It was very racist, right.
There weren't that many Asian people.
Koreans were really far and scattered.
So, I mean, we're talking about early '80s and late '70s,
where I think Korean immigrants had also internalized
sort of, not self-hatred, but shame about themselves, right.
So in the church this would come out as,
well here are the educated group of people who are doctors,
and, you know, dentists, or lawyers,
or what have you, or engineers.
And then you had people who were the working-class,
you know, janitors and dry-cleaners.
And for me, I noticed a lot of those tensions
within my parents because they were dry-cleaners.
But that kind of tension and shame, you know,
mixed with shame, mixed with self-internalized racism
were all there within the Korean American community,
and I remember one event that has always stayed with me.
You know, my dad's car broke down,
and so we went to the local gas station,
and of course I was translating.
My father's very upset.
And ever since I landed in this country,
you know, I served as his interpreter and translator,
and of course, it's not just the words,
but you have to get the emotions across, right,
for him to feel like he had been translated.
So I was doing this and we saw a church member
come to the gas station,
and he happened to have been a dentist.
And at the gas station I thought he would come over
and ask my father, "Oh, what's going on?
"Can we help you?" or you know.
But here's me as a kid
noticing how he avoided us in that context, right.
And so this kind of disassociation that I experienced,
and another adult doing this, and on the other hand,
I also sensed that my father felt very ashamed
that I actually saw this whole thing.
I look back and I think, what was my dad...
What must he have felt, right,
to know that he was being ignored,
and that his daughter, his young daughter also saw this?
He was already relying on me to translate for him, right.
So I'm interested in those dynamics
and the emotions that get generated from it,
and how those emotions actually come through and manifest
in our social relations.
I think part of the immigrant story
that doesn't resonate with me,
and have always been, you know,
in direct conflict or creating a dissonance
with my experience is the class issue.
You know, that the myth that, you know, all Asian-Americans
are quote-unquote successful,
and the success is measured in a particular way, right,
and modeled into the more you become assimilated
there's a kind of ease
with which you achieve those, you know, successes.
You know, the model minority myth and all that.
I think there's a lot of sense of shame
about the hard times we may have had,
and then to know that others may be
experience similar kind of suffering or difficult times
reminds us of pretty much where we come from in some ways.
And a lot of us would rather not think about that
or to be reminded of it once we move away, right,
because most of our efforts are to move away
from those stories because we think they're ones of shame,
when actually when they're really ones of our strength, too.
You know, with my two boys, I've been very adamant
from the beginning that I don't want them
to experience the pressures of model minority myth.
Their success to me, and I want them to know all the time,
that their success is not about like how much money
they're going to make or what kind of job they have,
but, you know, are they doing something
that they really feel committed to?
And also, are they doing something that impacts
the community or the world around them?
That's the kind of contribution,
in fact if that's a pressure,
that I hope that they will make
is contributing to the wellness of others around them.
I love teaching, and I don't...
My goal is not to force ideas on people,
but to bring people into conversation,
even very difficult conversations, right.
And when we care about each other,
so jeong is important to me, right,
as a teacher.
Or if you want to translate that as love, fine.
Love is becomes very important.
It's the central focus of why I do what I do,
and when we practice love with one another
we cannot be lazy.
Actually, love is very demanding, it's very hard work.
So the classroom becomes a very demanding
and difficult space because if we start with the premise
we love each other, we love one another,
we should be able to tap into
these most difficult conversations.
So for me, I become as vulnerable
as the students do each time.
So it's a journey that we go on for the semester.
So intellectually, it's also demanding and rigorous.
Emotionally just as demanding as rigorous.
I don't think you could separate those two apart.
They go together, and any meaningful transformation
that begins to take place with one another
begins by listening to one another
by being willing, being open to be transformed
by the other, by the demands of the other,
by the pains of other, you know, by their strengths.
My hope is that I do hold that space
as a still a place where we practice love.
In jeong there is no choice.
Jeong just happens.
It's very generative
and it gets generated between relations.
And whether it's one of enemy or friend,
jeong just can happen, right.
It's sort of outside of our control.
It's relations on power to generate an emotion
between the two.
And so, for me, I'm very much interested
in that kind of care and relation of love,
it's a different kind of love.
When we decolonize love, we should be able to just say
there are different forms of love around the world,
and jeong is one particular way of love.
So there's multiple languages of love,
and that's what we need to bring to the fore,
to the front of our attention.
So in some ways, you know, the more practices of love,
different languages of love, ways of love
that we have, I think, the more deeper understanding.
Even the Western notion of love will be
deepened and expanded.
It was difficult.
I mean, I think separations and divorces are never
an easy thing, right.
You reach a point where of no turning back that takes place.
It was really difficult for me.
I had never thought I would be in that situation.
I became very resentful that the church is unable
to account for, you know, children who don't necessarily
live with their mom and their dad.
So that kind of structural stuff that's in place
that's normative is something that I began
to really challenge and question.
It was not easy but I do realize that, you know,
doing these experiences, for me as a woman,
my feminism became even more sharpened.
There's a point in which, you know,
yes, being a mother is very important,
being a daughter is very important,
but I also had to make claims to myself,
right, who I was before I was their mother.
And also, to really see, you know,
it's like patriarchy with its gloves off.
So the difficult part of that process of divorce
wasn't actually divorcing, divorce from Dae,
it was actually the external people around me, right.
The other men who felt that because I was not in relation
with one man, with a husband now, I was husbandless,
and so they felt they could actually behave
whichever way they wanted with me.
So it was quite disappointing.
It was really difficult.
I became very isolated
from the other Korean American communities
because, again, there's still is stigma about that.
And for me, it was really important to sort of stand tall
and do what I do, especially because I'm in theology, right.
It's the more conservative,
and among Korean Christians, right.
It's sort of the divorce sort of discredits me
from being a theologian.
And so, you know, how do I stand tall?
I know this might sound really interesting,
but I absolutely have no fear anymore.
Once you spit on the face of patriarchy,
(interviewer laughs)
and they're done with you, it's like,
"Well, I'm done with you, too."
Right? - Yeah.
- And it's actually been quite liberating.
I'm more and more aware,
as a mother of two Korean American men,
and also, you know, thinking of Dae as well,
in the context of white supremacy,
like in this white culture, this racist culture,
how we are differently racialized,
you know the men from women,
and the kind of, sort of the hetero masculinity,
that the kind of white hetero masculinity
that they have to embody to be considered
quote-unquote real men,
is something that I've had to really work through.
And part of me really hurt for my boys
that they live in this context, right,
where they have to strive so hard to be men,
particular kind of men.
On the other hand, the world is changing
and I'm really glad like there's...
It's changing, right, and they feel much more comfortable
in their skin and in their sexuality.
But I realize sometimes how difficult it must be, you know,
being a Korean-American man in this context.
I went through a real hard time when we were in Oklahoma,
you know, with my older son 'cause it was a new context
for him and all the racism, and what have you,
and, you know, he was going through a hard time.
And there's a metaphor that has always stayed with me,
it occurred to me, you know, one night and it was,
I didn't know how to help my son
who was struggling so hard, right.
But it felt like we were caught in wave after wave
in the ocean and the only thing I could do for him
is not let go of his hand in that ocean, right,
but to ride through the waves with him.
That's all I could do and to me, even today,
that image stays with me about parenting.
When you go through difficult times,
I want them to know that I'm still here.
That's the only thing that I could do, right,
is to let them know I'm here.
You know, just reach out or something.
I can't solve everything but I'm here.
My name is Wonhee Anne Joh
and this is my Korean American story.
(pensive instrumental music)