(slow piano music)
- My name is Ji-Yeon Yuh,
and I was born in Seoul, Korea in 1965.
And I first came to the US in 1970 at the age of five.
My father was in Chicago, doing a doctorate in theology.
And he was here on a student visa.
It was his second student sojourn in the US,
and my mother was in Korea
finishing up her medical degree.
And so we came to the United States
when my father was already here.
And he was in Chicago, so we came to Chicago.
I spent the summer watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers.
And by the time I started kindergarten in September,
I was conversationally fluent in English,
and I could read and write.
And it totally floored my kindergarten teacher because she
had been told to expect an immigrant child from Korea.
I remember she told me that she had
to look up Korea on the map.
And she expected to just find this child who could not talk.
And instead she got me.
(chuckles)
So this is 1970, and there were really very few
Korean Americans in Chicago area.
Our acquaintances as a family revolved around
the few Korean people in the Korean church
that we were part of, and my father's connections
who were international students at the McCormick Seminary
where he was getting his degree,
basically like missionary-type faculty and Christians.
My father in many ways was already somewhat assimilated.
He had learned English at a young age
and was really good at it.
When he did his required military service,
one of his duties was liaisoning
with the American military personnel.
So he was accustomed to speaking to people
from lots of different countries.
He didn't mind talking to, you know, white Americans,
black Americans, et cetera.
And he was interested in that.
My mother on the other hand, was like,
"Why do I have to associate with white Americans?"
Right, like, "I'll associate with, you know, these
your white professors and et cetera, but that's it."
My English language ability progressed at a rapid rate,
whereas my Korean language ability
did not keep up according to my grade level.
So now I was in third grade.
My mom, I guess must have sensed this and what she did,
now, she was a doctor and she was doing every third night
overnight rotation working, you know, 36 hours straight.
But in the middle of this, what she did was
she purchased different color felt cloth,
made a felt board, and then cut out,
felt Hangul letters, Korean letters,
and put them on the felt board
to teach me the Korean alphabet.
For high school, I went to
an exclusive, elite private school,
The Latin School of Chicago.
It was a completely different world.
My recent immigrant background
was normal in my neighborhood.
The Latin School of Chicago was very wealthy
and either WASPy or wealthy Jewish American.
It was weird.
It was actually the first time that I really recognized
and felt class difference, right?
So in the Korean American community,
my mom's a doctor, my dad's a minister,
and we weren't wealthy, but because of their professions,
we had social status.
And I didn't really understand what that was all about
until I went to The Latin School of Chicago and suddenly,
to my fellow students, I was just an immigrant kid.
That was when I first really began to understand
that in the general scheme of things,
being immigrant was lower class,
and not quite American enough.
And being Asian was even worse.
I would say that my role model
for how to be a woman was really my mom.
My mom was the kind of person who,
even though she had a
really significant and important career as a doctor,
she was also a homemaker and mother.
What that meant was you had two full-time jobs.
I very clearly remember that my mother
always dressed properly to go outside.
Like the American habit of run to the grocery store
in whatever you're wearing, that did not wash.
And I remember she told me very specifically,
"You have to go outside with your makeup done
and your hair done, and properly dressed.
Otherwise those Americans, they'll look down on you."
I think I must have been like
maybe 12 when she was telling me that.
And I remembered it often
after I got married and had children,
because what I noticed was if I went to the Macy's
with my children in tow, especially all three of them,
where like I could stand at the Clinique counter,
for example, talking to my children
and waiting my turn on a busy Saturday,
the Clinique clerk would overlook me
and go to somebody who had just arrived.
Because all she saw was an immigrant Asian woman
speaking some Asian language, talking to a gaggle of kids.
Right, and so probably not a worthwhile customer.
And when that kind of thing happened,
I would think, well, am I being oversensitive?
But I always remember what my mom said about
you have to dress the part,
and I thought that she was right.
In my head, my choices were between going
to Harvard or Yale and going to Stanford.
Really at Stanford, what I did more than anything else
was work at the student paper.
The student paper was an independent entity,
independent corporation, with over
a million dollar a year budget.
Really, once I started working there my sophomore year,
I majored in The Daily more than anything else.
The summer that I was supposed to take the MCATs,
I took a journalism internship
at the San Diego Tribune as a feature writer instead.
That was the summer after my junior year,
and also my junior year, I dropped
a bunch of classes because of The Daily.
Which meant that technically, I was short credits,
and technically I was on academic probation.
My father was so pissed off.
Instead of going to med school,
I went to journalism, and I worked
at Newsday,
at the Omaha World Herald,
where I was their chief agriculture reporter.
And I worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer,
where I was one of their editorial writers
and part of the editorial board.
At that time I was working, I was in the Queens borough
of Newsday, and I was, this was 1989,
and I was covering the aftermath
of the Bensonhurst racial incidents,
and I was covering the Korean-black conflict
as it was unfolding in Brooklyn.
Now my beat was immigrant communities
in Queens, unofficially.
In the fall of 1989, the editor
of the New York edition of Newsday
came into the newsroom in Manhattan,
and he got up on the table and he was holding up
one of our competitor papers,
I forget it was The Post or the Daily News,
and he was saying, "We have to have more sex.
Go get me sex in the news!"
And I was like, "Oh my god,
this is not where the industry should be going.
This is not why I became a journalist."
And I could see that the decline
that's still visible now was already visible then.
This happened in, sometime just before Thanksgiving,
and Thanksgiving I went home to my parents,
and I thought, I've gotta,
I'm just gonna apply to grad school.
What am I gonna apply in?
Well in high school, I really loved history.
Let's apply to history. (laughs)
And I'll apply to study immigration history,
that's what I'll do.
And I got into a couple of different programs,
and the one that was most interesting to me
was the one at Penn, so I went there.
And I left journalism. (laughs)
I graduated from Stanford in 1987.
In 1989, the undergraduates began
to agitate for Asian American Studies.
So I totally missed that, right?
Clayborne Carson was a professor there,
and there's a lot of talk about African American Studies
and its importance to US history and so forth, right?
And I thought, well, but what about Asians in America?
When I was in high school and college,
it was also the first round of culture wars.
And it seemed to me that that was really
an extension of racism, that they were not content
to metaphorically or even literally spit in our faces,
they wanted to make sure that we never got
to hear anything about our past
and we never got to raise our voices
to talk about ourselves and what we thought
about America or what our experiences were.
So one of the things that I did as an editorial writer
at The Philadelphia Inquirer was I wrote about,
I wrote a column, an op-ed column about the culture wars.
So I always had this interest in that,
but I didn't, there wasn't, I wasn't aware
that there was a field called Asian American Studies,
even though I went to school at Stanford,
which was just on the opposite side of the bay
from Berkeley, which was the home of ethnic studies,
and a birthplace for Asian American Studies.
By the 1980s, a lot of that was just erased.
The summer of '98, I moved to Chicago
because I realized that living at home
with a husband and an infant child, and with my parents,
I wasn't going to get any work done.
So I removed our nuclear three-person family,
and we went to Chicago.
And then in September, I started writing my dissertation.
And that fall, I received a letter from Northwestern
saying, "We would like you to apply to this new position
in Asian American Studies."
I was like, "Hmm, okay."
So I applied there and a couple of other places,
and eventually I got the job.
People were sort of like, "Military brides?
What about them?
What's interesting about them?"
So it was not the best intellectual atmosphere
to be on the job market with that particular dissertation.
So it was a little disconcerting.
I wasn't sure that I was gonna get a job.
I wasn't sure that things were gonna work out.
But I have to say that writing the dissertation,
I really wasn't thinking about the job market.
And I wasn't thinking about the dissertation committee.
I wasn't thinking about publishers.
I was thinking about the children
of the women I interviewed.
I did my fieldwork at a Korean military bride church.
Most of the children were young, school children.
And they knew nothing about their mothers.
And they were so sassy.
And to me, growing up in a more traditional kind
of Korean immigrant household,
they were so mean to their moms.
And then the stories they would tell,
the women would tell me about the children,
I thought, this is the group of people
that needs to read this research.
I actually had writer's block for almost two years,
I couldn't write a word.
And the way I got out of it was
I finally realized who I'm writing this for.
It may have more significance than I realize.
A couple times a year, two, three times a year,
I get emails from grown children of military brides.
Some of them are older than me,
who write about somehow having found the book
and what that book means to them
and how it changed their relationship to their mothers.
So in terms of significance that's not personal to me,
that actually might be the most significant.
My name is Ji-Yeon Yuh,
and this is my Korean American story.
(slow piano music)