(piano music)
- My name is Doug Kim.
제 이름은 김덕 in 한국말
I was born in 1956 in St. Paul, Minnesota.
That makes me 62.
I live in the Bay Area.
I've been fortunate to have a beautiful wife
and two great kids.
Up until fourth grade,
I was pretty oblivious to the fact that I was different.
In fourth grade we moved to Munster, Indiana,
which is a bedroom community to Chicago.
When we moved to Munster,
the kids there, as kids will do,
made fun of us mercilessly,
and we got in a lot of fights.
Actually, we lost a lot of fights.
And it got to be so repetitive and so sad
that my father took us to a judo school in Hammond,
and we started learning judo.
The problem was, by that time, the kidding had stopped
and there wasn't much opportunity to defend ourselves,
but the damage psychologically had largely been done.
My parents, God bless 'em,
were extremely proud of being Korean,
but because of their experience growing up
under the Japanese,
there were internalized values and internalized ideas
and perspectives that,
I don't know if it wasn't that they couldn't
or they didn't
or they didn't think to tell us
but the time I got beaten up
and kids were calling me "chink" or "nip,"
I came home to my mom, and she said,
"That's silly, you're Korean,"
but she never explained what that meant.
And it was largely that situation most of my adolescence
and into college.
My parents would say, "You should be proud of being Korean,"
but they never gave us any context to understand
what being proud--
What's there to be proud of?
And to society at large,
we were "chinks," we were "nips,"
and in the Vietnam War era, we were "Ho Chi."
The general public, the general white public,
made no distinction,
and my parents didn't offer any guidance
into what being Korean meant, so it was a black hole,
and until I was 20 or something,
being Korean was the equivalent of having a club--
club foot, a cleft palate and a hunchback, all in one.
Because it was a source of embarrassment with my friends,
and when I was a little kid,
my relatives would come in, they'd go,
아이고 이쁘다!
pick you up by the cheeks and shake you, and all it --
you knew it meant, it was--
It was a source of embarrassment.
Or my parents, my mom would say,
어서 한국말해요
and you'd feel like a performing seal.
So it was difficult, it was embarrassing,
and there were also these values and these things that,
expectations that were not articulated, not explained,
which now I understand, but at the time
seemed like they were unreasonable.
My parents did a wonderful job in many respects,
and I have to say that given the challenges they faced
and given the privation and the--
I can't imagine how difficult it must've been
to grow up in a country occupied by a foreign power
bent on your destruction.
And I have not, enmity is perhaps not a great word,
but I have a lot of negative feelings
because I've studied what the Japanese did
and why the Japanese did it,
and in the larger context of Asian history.
So I could bore you to tears with the differences
between Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture,
but I had to learn that so I could figure out
my place in the world.
When I was growing up, physically and emotionally,
Korean Americans of my age were few and far between.
But even now, people look at me and they're surprised
that I can speak English so well,
because most harabojis (할아버지)
or, you know, ahjussis (아저씨) my age
came here post-1970 and English is a second language.
Matter of fact, my German is better than my Korean,
because I studied German from fourth grade through college.
When I first got to Korea,
I was picked up at the airport by a woman
who didn't speak English.
I didn't speak Korean.
We spoke German, and the ahjussi
thought we were North Korean spies.
There wasn't a large community,
and in many ways I feel like a reluctant trailblazer.
And a lot of these things I've stumbled upon,
I've tried to figure out and also tried to explain
to people further on down the--
younger than me,
a way of looking at, a way of putting it into context.
For example, trying to understand why my parents
were so adamant about us marrying Koreans.
Both my parents were, felt in their bones
that if you don't marry somebody who's Korean,
you are committing a cardinal sin and then some.
When I was young, when I was in high school,
I thought this was racism, this was prejudice,
this was everything un-American,
and in some respects it was, but on a deeper level
I began to understand that they endured the occupation,
where for 36 years the Japanese were trying to eradicate
the language, the culture, the use of names.
My grandfather was put in prison
because he wouldn't take a Japanese surname.
So out of that milieu,
people of my parents' generation felt that,
"We've gotta make sure that Korean people never disappear,"
and the best way to do that is
to have our kids marry Koreans.
My mom, who had the energy of five women,
she and her gang of friends
started a Korean language school
Saejong Hakgyo
in Michigan in the '70s, 1970.
A few years later, they started Sae Jong Camp,
and to be perfectly honest, their--
one of their prime motivations is that, you know,
"If we expect to have
hanguk myeonulis (한국 며느리)
"we've gotta give our kids a place to meet"
"and fall in love."
And that was a big motivation for Sae Jong Camp,
which has been going on now--
This'll be its 44th year.
There've been a lot of ancillary benefits from that,
not the least of which is that we get kids who are
jaemi gyopo (재미교포)
and adopted or even half-Korean, half-American.
Being in that milieu as a 10-year-old,
to have somebody who's 15, it's--
if you're adopted and you're in a white family,
you don't know what you're gonna look like as a teenager.
But to see somebody you can look at
and you can see yourself and that you can resonate with,
that's huge.
That's psychologically important.
It validates you,
and those sorts of things, I didn't have growing up.
I had my parents, but they were so far ahead
that I couldn't relate to them,
I couldn't see myself in them in quite the same way.
Becoming a father, becoming a parent,
made me reflect upon the way I was raised.
And some of the things I remember most about being
in high school are that
academics were the only measure of success,
and everything else I did or wanted to do
was considered valueless.
I was sophomore class president,
senior class president,
editor-in-chief of the newspaper,
I was in the marching band for four years.
I was selected by the faculty to go to Boys State.
My parents told me many times,
"This is all bullshit.
"You haven't got straight A's.
"Anything else that you do until you get straight A's
"is worthless."
I understand now why they were telling me this,
but it took its toll.
It took its toll.
And I have to say that,
academic intelligence and academic excellent is important,
and knowing what they had to do,
taking their gray report cards to the immigration office
every semester to renew their visas,
I understand that.
And I also understand, coming from Asian Confucian tradition
that academics are paramount.
But my point is this.
One, I think there's a more enlightened approach
that there are many intelligences that we need to cultivate
as parents with our kids.
Secondly, that it left a scar on me.
That I felt my talents and my abilities, my affinities,
were denigrated and devalued in large part.
When I went off to school at Michigan,
I felt personally
very negative towards being Korean American.
I felt it was a curse,
and I had no information to the contrary.
Like all good Korean sons and daughters,
I started off pre-med.
And my father was a very accomplished physician,
and in all fairness to his way of thinking,
and he told me, too,
"Look, as an Asian, nobody's gonna accept you.
"If you're a doctor, they'll accept you."
So it was, it was a practical,
it was consistent with the heritage,
and it was something that he felt very strongly about,
and so I went off to pre-med,
but I was not very good at sciences.
I had the good fortune, serendipitously,
to take this course in East Asian studies
'cause I needed a breadth requirement.
The professor wrote the Chinese character
"ren" on the board.
"Ren" is human-heartedness.
It's the second canon of Confucianism.
It's the quality that separates man from animal.
It's also the name that
my Confucian-educated father gave me.
When the professor wrote that on the board,
I (gasps) sat upright, and I looked, and I said,
"Amazing."
It was, it was just--
It was a revelation.
Here was this guy from Texas, Charles Hucker,
specialist in three dynasties China,
telling me something about who I was,
and that was my first fix.
By the end of the semester, I was hooked.
Learning about China, Korea, Japan,
learning Confucianism, learning Daoism,
understanding the history
told me so much about myself.
It informed me that I wasn't an oddball.
I wasn't ugly.
Far from it.
I was part of a much bigger tradition,
a much richer tradition,
with many things to be proud of.
To know where we come from,
to know the adversity that our ancestors faced,
that that blood flows in us,
that's a huge source of strength.
I went to Korea after graduating from Michigan,
and I lived with a wonderful Korean family
that my parents had set me up with.
I did, practiced tae kwon do six days a week,
and I taught English to make pocket money.
Living in Korea was huge.
It was a watershed event,
and I learned so many things,
so many nuances between Korean culture, American culture.
So I got back from Korea,
and I got an MBA from Cal-Berkeley.
I started getting involved with the camp
that my mom had founded, Sae Jong Camp.
My mother was the director for the first four years.
I was the director for the subsequent 10 years,
and then as time came, I took my kids back,
and currently I'm the director.
I've been the director for seven years.
Ten years ago, I had the opportunity
to teach Korean American studies at San Francisco State.
That got me, it forced me into learning and then teaching
the academic history, Korean immigration.
Having had the opportunity to teach Korean American studies
at SF State was a big watershed for me
because I then had a context to put things in,
and when I teach that course,
it's called "Koreans in America,"
but the enrollment invariably winds up to be
children of immigrants from many different nationalities,
so I try to use that experience of the Korean Americans
to talk about the immigrant experience,
to talk about commonalities.
How children wind up being interpreters
for their parents in government documents.
To talk about the generation gaps, communication.
To talk about issues like love languages.
When your mother says to you, "Did you eat enough today?"
"Put your sweater on," you know,
"Eat more."
She's saying "I love you."
Tom Brokaw talks about the Greatest Generation.
He talks about children whose parents
grew up in the Depression and who went into World War II
and saved the free world against the Nazis
and against the Japanese expansion.
And he's absolutely true.
That was white America's greatest generation.
I would submit to you that our parents
are the greatest generation from Korea.
They are self-selected starters who left what was familiar,
left what was comfortable,
came to a foreign country, to a foreign language,
to foreign customs, and they not only survived,
but they exceeded, and they excelled.
They gave us an opportunity,
whatever they did wrong,
whatever they didn't do as well as,
they gave us that base
for which we should be grateful
and knowledgeable about.
My name is Doug Kim,
and this is my Korean American story.
(piano music)