- Hi my name is Linda Chen and I am 47 years old.
So my parents came to the United States with two children,
my two sisters.
So my older sister was two and my second sister was one
and I was born five years after my second sister,
after they had come to the United States.
My earliest childhood memory would be growing up
at the back of my mom's grocery store.
So my mother and my father had a grocery store in East LA.
It was called Happy Valley,
and we had this little grocery store
with a room in the back.
I remember being with my father
and my father taking care of me.
My mother is very pragmatic.
So as far as you know, a lot of things growing up,
she's like I said, she's not a very sentimental person.
She's sentimental in her own way
but she said that even with me, when she was pregnant
she said that she - I was born very small
'cause she said that she didn't want to -
they owned a grocery store, I said
so she didn't want to eat or drink too much
and have to go to the bathroom
because then she wouldn't be able to watch the register.
So she said that I was born very small
and that's just how you know, those are the stories.
So my father would look at me when I was growing up
and he would say, "You know, you're so pretty,
"you could have gone for Miss Korea but you're so short."
And I was like well it wasn't like
I was trying to be short, I mean you know,
didn't really,
didn't give proper nutrition you know,
even as an infant (chuckles) so it was kind of hard for
but he didn't say it in a way that was blaming me.
It was more lamenting that I did not,
that I was not born with all of what he would have wanted.
My mother, she only spoke to us in Korean.
So we are fluent in Korean
and it was odd because growing up in the '70s
in America and you know
everybody was either Chinese or Japanese,
no one knew who Koreans were.
It was really hard to have an identity, you know.
When I was really young
I grew up, I told you in East LA
and the school that I went to was predominantly Hispanic.
So from there
I went to a predominantly white school in Arcadia.
In third grade I became a latchkey kid.
So my mom was in East LA working in a store
and I was sent to, I was living in my house in Arcadia
and I was going to school in Arcadia
because my mother didn't want,
she wanted me to have a better education
than the one in East LA
but that required that I did not have
any parental supervision.
So I would walk home from school
and then the moment I got home from school,
I'd have to call my mother
and if I was five minutes late my mom would start calling
'cause that was her way of controlling
and knowing where I was.
So I was not allowed to go to friends' houses,
friends weren't allowed to come to our house
because you know, friends, people would steal from you.
I remember my mother, she would like, she was so good,
I mean that woman was like a detective.
She would like look at the carpet
and she would notice if there was footprints in the carpet
and she would measure the footprints
and she would be like, there was somebody in the house.
Like, she was that good.
So we were, I was basically locked down as a child
and you know, when you're at home
and all that good '70s canned food,
that's what I ate: Chef Boyardee, beef stew
and Dinty Moore beef stew and spam and rice.
So by the time I was in third grade
I was starting to put on weight because I didn't exercise.
I ate really crappy food
and I was not allowed to do anything outside of
waiting for my mother to come home from work.
So putting on weight, not being the cutest girl,
my mother at that point in third grade
because she didn't wanna even brush my hair,
it was just too much.
She cut my hair really short.
So now not only was I chubby,
I was Korean amongst a bunch of white kids,
I had short hair and I looked like a little boy.
So it was not easy growing up.
So having this identity problem
it was very challenging for me
and at some point I don't really know
where it kind of fixed where I was like,
I wanna learn how to read in Korean and how to write
because although I could speak, I couldn't read and write
and I remember teaching myself how to read and write Korean.
So by the time I got into college
I was taking Korean classes at George Washington University.
I was taking Korean all the way up to Han-moon, yeah.
So having this type of feeling
of wanting to know my heritage
and not really getting that from my mother
because my mother was you know,
she's kind of void of all of that you know,
that was kind of nonsense.
It wasn't nonsense, it was more unnecessary for my mother.
And so I, in college, applied to go to Yonsei University
for a summer program.
So I went to Yonsei, I just called my mom and I said,
"Hey Mom, I need $3,000."
She goes, "Why do you need three?"
I'm going to Yonsei.
She never balked, she never said "No, you can't do that."
That's how we grew up.
It was more like, you know okay, I have this opportunity,
I need some money.
Okay fine you can go.
So I went to Korea and that was traumatic.
Traumatic in the sense that it was a wonderful experience
to go to Korea,
it was also very difficult at that time to go to Korea
because being a "gyopo"
and going into Korea and people looking at me and saying,
"You don't look Korean," you know
and they would ask me if my father was a
"oegugsaram" (foreigner) you know which was like,
wow I never thought that you know,
I wouldn't, I mean I'm clearly not white, right?
So my parents are both Korean,
so you would think that I would be accepted in Korea
but they looked at me and I was not Korean.
So that was a little bit of a heartbreak that you know,
I wasn't accepted in Korea
'cause it was like oh, you're too dark
or you're too fat,
why are you so fat?
(chuckles)
And at that time I wasn't even fat.
It was just in their views and like you're too fat.
But in saying and also in Korea,
something very traumatic happened.
I was at Yonsei and I ended up getting raped
and beaten by three of the local men in Korea
and I didn't tell anybody when I was in Korea.
It was very, it was one of those moments
where you realize you are a foreigner
and also you know, back then there wasn't really many,
any rights for women.
You know you can't go around talking about these things.
No one's gonna, they're gonna say what did you do?
You know, what did you do to bring that on?
I mean at the time I was a smoker
and if you walked down the street in Korea
smoking a cigarette, the ajusshis would come over,
grab your cigarette, throw it on the ground and stamp on it.
That's just how Korea was.
So if you have this like misogynistic society,
you think for one moment,
if you came in as a Korean American and said,
this is what happened to me, anybody would listen to you?
So that happened in Korea and I came back to America
and I remember I didn't tell anybody,
I didn't tell my parents or anybody.
I went back to George Washington University.
I went into the health clinic
and the first thing I told the health clinic was I said,
you know, what testing do you do for a rape victim?
And they said, "Oh, we do gonorrhea, syphilis
"dah, dah, dah, dah."
And they just listed it off
and I said "Okay I think I need that testing done."
And that was it.
That's how I handled it.
It caused me a lot of problems
to have that happen to me, I was 20.
Caused me a lot of problems
as far as how I dealt with myself
and the trauma that I went through,
that I didn't realize I had gone through
because I had buried it
but how it's surfaced for me in my twenties is I started to,
do a lot of things that
in retrospect looking at it would be considered like
self hatred.
I was doing drugs,
I was distancing myself from people
and yeah, it was a really difficult time
to get over all of that.
I'm glad I'm over all of that
and when I didn't go to any therapy for that either,
I just kind of dealt with that by myself.
I told my mother, I think maybe
four years after what had happened
but by then I was already like,
I don't know why I even told her,
it was more like I don't know.
I think I was just trying to...
I think at the time I was coming off of something
and I just kind of blurted it out
and I remember she was really angry
but then we never talked about it after that.
It's almost as if it never happened.
She was angry that they had done that to me
and that was enough for me
to know that my mother defended me,
that was enough for me.
We don't speak about it
and that's just how we deal with it.
Even with all of that, that had happened in Korea,
I still identified with being Korean.
I love being Korean American.
I love that I have a culture, you know
and I love that I can pass that culture to my children.
As Koreans, our tendency is to not share things
that are real.
We want everything to be sugarcoated and look nice,
but there's real trauma
and the more that we rip off that band-aid,
and the more we become vulnerable
and the more we expose that we are real people
with the same problems that everybody else goes through,
the more healing that can occur for other people.
Who I was at 20,
with all of these things that happened to me,
who I was at 23, when I was doing all my partying
is not who I am today
and I think that's really important that people understand
that whatever happened to you in the past
does not identify you with who you are today.
You can create anything
and you can become anything you want to be,
and you are not defined by any sort of
box, you know?
And so if you were to look at me today
and you said,
wow that was you, that's it.
You can come out of anything
because we're all strong.
My name is Linda Chen
and this is my Korean American story.