(inspirational music)
- I am Robert Joe.
I've been in Korea for 19 years,
but I grew up in America before that.
I was born in New York
and I spent the majority of my formative years in Texas.
I originally was born in New York
but I spent two years there.
So I have no memories.
And then I spent two to four in Korea.
So my first memories are actually of being
in Korea and my first language was technically Korean,
but then I moved to Texas
at the age of four and assimilated super fast.
And so I actually lost my Korean language,
even though I was in ESL when I first moved
to America and then had to rediscover it later on.
I actually took two years of Korean language classes here
and discovered where all my holes were.
Like, I don't know if this happens a lot
for other Korean Americans,
but you get into this comfort
with a certain level of spoken language.
And then you realize you don't even know the most
basic grammar and you're stuck
in this weird mix of talking
like a child and also knowing random like, high vocab words,
if you learn them in school, in like a college setting.
My family moved over to America in the 70s.
So we were part of that professional migration
that happened in the 70s.
My father at the time worked for Samsung.
I believe it was steel and trade.
They had a home base in New York.
And so my father in the 70s moved over
and that's where my brother was born.
That's where I was born.
And we became,
this immigrant family in New York in Flushing,
which I later realized was this whole Korean enclave.
And then we went back.
We did kind of a, I'm not sure if everyone's familiar
with the migration patterns of having these jobs.
People that are moved over, it's like two years
and then they'll bring you back and then they send you over.
So we went New York, back to Seoul and then Houston.
Around the time I was in third grade
my dad was called back to Samsung, back to Seoul.
And he decided that he wanted us to grow up in America.
And so he did something that was, I think,
unthinkable for extremely Korean salary man.
And he quit this like cush safe job at Samsung
and he tried to set out to do his own thing,
just so that we could stay in America
and grow up as Americans.
I think the idea
of what I wanted to be when I was growing up,
when I was younger.
It was always somewhat vague.
Especially now, when I look back on it.
Obviously very informed by some assumption
that my parents' desires
would be reflected in some way or fashion,
just, you know, the whole
like you're gonna be a lawyer or a doctor.
I don't think there's anything.
That question is almost pointless
because you know, as an Asian American, as a Korean American
your parents wanted you to be a lawyer
or a doctor or an engineer.
I was personally drawn to art.
I thought of myself as this very creative person.
I thought of myself as this good artist.
I was one of the better drawers
in early years until I got frustrated
when I realized other people were much better than me
and like many other things in my life,
I was not willing to do the work to get better.
I just wanted to be naturally better
at everything that I did, but I didn't realize
that always requires an investment in time and money,
which if your parents force you to do it
and you're forced to get better
then obviously that would be helpful.
But at the time my parents weren't forcing me
to get better at art.
Although my mom supported my art interests
as she was a hobby painter.
She was a hobby oil painter.
So I probably got that sensibility from my mom.
And so she sent me to art classes up until the point
where after a while she like, okay, that was enough.
Go, go study more.
My mom was a huge,
I mean she was the most important person in my life.
I definitely see myself as my mom's son.
My personality was a lot more like my mom's personality.
She was more artistic.
She was quieter, more sensitive.
My father was, you know, bit brasher
and my brother very much took after him.
And so there was very clear distinction between
like the sort of like dad and my brother and me
and my mom dynamic.
At the same time, I was really lucky.
Like my mom would actually say
that it was a good thing that I got the best from my dad
and the best from my mom and somehow managed
to avoid the majority of the faults of both.
Obviously I think my mom
was being a little optimistic about that.
My mom was very much
like the sensitive person who paid attention to other people
and really helped.
She was considerate.
She had great Nunchi.
She never really learned English that great, but you know,
smartest person in our family
I would say my mom was a huge part of who I am as a person.
I mean, the hardest moment
in my life was my mother passing away, which was 2020.
So it was very recent.
It was extremely difficult.
It was cancer.
It was pancreatic cancer
which is an aggressive and really ruthless form of cancer.
I was kind of her primary caretaker, kind of not, you know,
my brother moved here from America to help take care of her.
My father was there, but my father's had health problems
for the last three or four years.
He's not fully there.
I wasn't living with him
but I drove my mom back and forth from the hospital.
When she was in the hospital, I was there.
My brother and I would switch out,
maybe be like a week of me
and then a week of him or something.
It was a very Korean experience.
It was a Korean hospital.
There's nursing staff,
but a guardian is expected to be there.
It was very frustrating, very enraging.
The limits of my Korean became very clear
trying to discuss
chemo treatment
and, you know, medical strategy
with a extremely dismissive doctor
who, you know, in a system which is,
I'm so thankful for, for so many ways.
But also it's like 10 minutes with my mom.
This doctor, who's not noticing that
or doesn't seem to care that she can't eat.
She's like starving to death.
Like these are difficult things to have.
And the experience
for me was a lot of anger,
but also a lot of anger like internally.
Like why do I not know the system better?
Like why is my Korean not better?
Why can I not look up on the internet
like dietary information for my mom to save her life?
You know, things like that.
By the end of high school
I got into a decent school.
I got into Berkeley
and then I didn't even go there because I realized, oh
we're actually also not as rich as all these people
who now that I look back on it, we're the sons of doctors
or the daughters of doctors and engineers and lawyers.
And even though my parents were professionals
and they made money
we were still actually quite working class.
Like we were actually a working immigrant family.
I didn't realize.
But luckily by the time I was finishing up high school
I kind of had a sense, oh, I wanna do film.
I wanna do film.
It'll be creative.
It'll be artistic.
My parents were pretty realistic about things.
You know, they weren't like trying to beat us
into pursuing engineering or whatnot.
And so when I got into, you know, our state school
UT, I got into some honors program there
and I knew they had a pretty solid film program
and it was pretty cheap.
I got a fair amount of scholarship money to go
to UT and it, I knew it wouldn't cost my parents that much.
And honestly, I think my parents realized
like, hey, we don't,
we don't really have the money to send you
to Berkeley for four years.
And so when I thought about it,
like what do I really enjoy doing?
Like, I enjoy this collaborative
creative process of making videos or films.
And when I think really tough emotional moments
where I was super depressed,
a good movie could break that like,
like better than, you know, drugs.
When I came to Korea in 2002
I had pretty much zero expectations.
I knew I would watch some World Cup stuff.
I figured it'd be cool to reconnect with cousins.
I had so few expectations.
In fact, I was positive
it would just be a very small trip and I would leave soon.
I just had so much fun.
I came to Korea and my cousins were all around my age.
They were all heavy drinkers and partiers.
It was the World Cup, biggest fucking party on earth.
Korea was having this Cinderella run.
A country that had never I think even scored a goal
in the World Cup
up until that point was finally going
all the way to the semifinals.
We were out in droves at city hall
just crying, just bawling when we won
like against Spain or against, I think Portugal.
it was just like every single game was a fucking miracle.
I was surrounded by like hundreds
of thousands of people all dressed in red.
It was, you know, it was mind blowing.
And I was like, ah, you know, it's kind of fun here.
Maybe I'll stick around.
I've been in Korea for so long.
I've seen so many changes
and seen so many abrupt changes compared to say the rest
of the world that I'm very hopeful
about Korea as a country with a future.
And I say this
because growing up in America, when you're younger,
the sort of assumption that America
is always gonna be the best.
It's gonna be the best country
with the best jobs and the best opportunities
and the best intentions at heart,
is a given.
And I think even until relatively recently
I always assumed I'd go back to America
and work or I'd get some job opportunities elsewhere
or maybe I'd move to Europe or, you know, whatever.
And I think I always had like half my eye abroad
and I witnessed changes here that are very good,
very broad, very fast.
And I see the limitations.
I'm also, I've been in Korea long enough
to see the limitations.
I haven't obsessed about my position in Korea, vis a vis
what Koreans think of me
because I don't think that's important.
The longer I've spent in Korea
the clearer it is that I'm not important here
and I shouldn't be and obsessing
about the ways you should be perceived
or whatnot are an extremely Western
form of entitlement I think.
It's natural to,
as a person moving through a society
to be egotistical and to view things through your lens.
But the longer I've been here, oddly enough,
the less I feel like Korea owes me anything.
And the more I have to question,
what do I have to offer Korea?
I think I was early on somewhat distanced
from this super Koreanness of an experience.
So I grew up naturally Korean American
'cause I am Korean American.
And I had brushes with these very distinctly Korean American
like tropes cliches.
I'm hard pressed to put a label on it.
And because I was in a very, I guess, white area
there was definitely a fair amount
of like pretty typical
identity struggles like, oh, you know, I'm different,
I'm not, I have all these friends,
it's kind of multiracial,
but it's kind of not, it's also super white.
I know I'm not these white people.
I don't think I was.
I don't think my story
of Korean American identity was all that different
from other people.
But I was shielded from an imposed
like preformed Korean American identity
that was formed by a lot of other groups.
And I was obviously not just white football cheerleader
all that stuff.
And so somewhere in the middle,
I grew up until the point where now I'm like well,
luckily your identity is just whatever you end up as.
And so, you know, especially from an artist's perspective
now I distinctly reject this sort
of over obsession with identity.
I feel like in the creative process
it can be extremely limiting.
I think it's by definition imposed upon you by others.
And even though obviously it's important for a lot
of fun things and it's important for motivation sometimes
and it's important to be aware of identity
and to process identity and deal with identity,
I reject the idea that we have to be obsessed with identity.
I hope down the road
that the idea of Korean Americanness
and these sorts of stories are like a fun novelty.
Like, oh, you know, that's cute,
but for it not to be this
gut wrenching battle that people are having
in their lives,
I'm very happy
that I've reached a a sort of peace with my identity.
I really want more pupil to reach that peace.
I really want a lot of discussions in America
amongst Asian Americans, Korean Americans
to center more about things past these very,
I hate to dismiss that these very like rudimentary
like first step feelings and struggles about identity.
Not that they're not important,
but that there are so many other, I think, important battles
and issues and struggles that we all need to take part in.
I hope that everyone who sees this
in the future are like, oh yeah.
Remember when Korean Americans
were just a little too concerned about who they were.
That would be my hope.
My name is Robert Joe and this is my Korean American story.
(inspirational music)