(gentle piano music)
- My name is Kristin Pak in the US,
but my Korean name is (indistinct) and I was born in 1976.
Well, the first record of me is from the (speaking Korean)
I was adopted around seven months old,
I grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut
which is about 70 miles Northeast of New York City.
It was a working class, very mixed community.
And I lived there for 18 years
so in the same house we never moved, which was great.
So growing up, I always had the same neighborhood
and friends, and that was, it was very stable in that way.
My neighborhood was so diverse,
like if I walked just from my house to my school bus stop
I would hear around 10 different languages being spoken.
But that meant, the diversity meant that race
and ethnicity was always front and center.
There was a lot of conflict in our city.
It was one of the cities that had busing
to integrate the schools.
So it was always very much a part of our lives
as far as being Korean.
Even though there were not that many Koreans,
we had a Korean supermarket.
A lot of people I know who were adopted were not
in this kind of situation.
It's a little bit uncommon, I think.
I think I always knew I was Korean
but I didn't know what that meant exactly
because I didn't actually visit Korea
until I was like 22 years old, 23, something like that,
I don't remember.
It's hard to claim something
if you don't have a clear idea what that is.
Because so many of my friends would spend summers
in abroad going to Albania, going to Portugal, Puerto Rico.
I didn't have that, so that lack of clear identity was
really noticeable
because almost no one actually just identified
as just American.
Everyone's like, I'm not American, I'm Portuguese.
So that was something I couldn't say.
When I moved to New York, as far as interacting
with the Korean-American family
and how much a part of it I felt or didn't,
I realized by meeting so many people
in New York city who were Korean-Americans,
second generation,
there are many different ways to be Korean-American.
Some of my friends spoke Korean fluently and
grew up going to church three times a week
in the Korean church.
And some of them also did not speak Korean well,
the only other Koreans they knew were in their family
and interacted with their non-Korean relatives in community.
So I think I'm just part of that continuum.
After coming back from Korea, I felt like I could
kind of enjoying the people I grew up with
who also had very strong ethnic identities
and knew what people were talking about when they said,
oh, my country, things like that.
So that was nice to be able to say, when they were talking
about their trips, like I could say, oh yeah.
When I was in Korea, I did this.
And it was a way to actually, not only connect
with other Koreans, but other first, second generation.
As someone who grew up without a Korean family
and talking to my friends we were joking
that I wasn't 1.5 or, and I couldn't be second generation
'cause I was born here.
So there's like, oh one point X, X, X,
or one point, nine, nine, nine, nine or with the nine
with the bar over it or something like that.
I was teaching English as a second language
to adult immigrants in New York City.
The anti-immigrant sentiment was really ramping up
and that affected the funding
especially at the federal level.
And we were downsizing,
I had just become the assistant director
of my program and had to lay off half of my staff.
And I decided to come to Korea
because I knew I could get a job here.
So I got a job teaching English
at a university down in (speaking Korean).
I was trying to decide between Mexico, Brazil or Korea
but I knew I would have a lot more privileges here.
And the infrastructure to
get set up was much easier.
And I knew people living here already
and all the Brazilians and Mexicans I knew were
living in New York City, but I don't speak Korean,
I speak Portuguese and Spanish
but I don't speak Korean.
The language is very important to me as a linguist,
as a teacher of languages of course
and I think anyone who moves from one society
where one language is dominant and then a different one,
especially if you don't speak one of those,
you think about it a lot.
And I think I'm in the far minority
where I do not believe that language
and culture are inseparable.
I don't think that you need to speak Korean to
be fully Korean.
I don't think that national identity is something
that could be quantified, but I do think
it makes it easier in some cases
to access most things.
It's never a handicap to know the more languages
but I don't think it's so essential.
So I don't know if Seoul has become home yet,
but I haven't, I feel like it,
my neighborhood is my neighborhood.
I recognize people there, I think some people recognize me
well, at least my dog
and I don't think my identity has changed a lot.
I've always considered myself to be Korean-American,
I obviously some details have changed as I got older
as I moved from city to city.
I definitely consider myself to be Korean-American
from about 2016 to 2020,
we might not have been so happy to be American
but it's something you still can't deny.
But I never really thought
that I should be considered a foreigner in Korea
but I've gotten a little more vocal about it in 2018.
I reclaimed my Korean citizenship,
I live in Korea, I assume both of my parents are Korean.
Yeah. There's no reason to,
you can't be a foreigner in a country you're born in
that your parents were born in
and that you hold the citizenship glove.
I would like other people who are adopted from Korea
to also strongly identify as part of the Korean nation.
Especially those who live here in Korea
because if we're asking for recognition
or rights, or services from the Korean government,
we deserve it just as much as any other Korean person.
You know, it comes up a lot with people who live here
but also when we were talking about
the people who are adopted overseas from Korea
who did not get citizenship of their Korean,
of their adoptive countries.
That means they are Korean citizens
and the Korea, South Korean government
has an obligation to take care of their citizens overseas.
If you what you want is to stay in the country, then
the ambassador of South Korea has an obligation
to represent you.
So that's one of the things I think
that is really important as far as Americans and Korea go.
I think we should also try to understand the relationship
between the United States and South Korea.
Today is April 3rd, the 70, almost 75th
not quite 75th anniversary of the Gwangju uprising.
And the United States was complicit in that massacre
and the very unequal relationship between South Korea
and the US, I think we all, and
why people left South Korea was not necessarily a choice.
And I think we need all of that needs to be
spoken out about more.
People say it was a choice to go to the US,
I had no choice to go to the US.
I didn't become American by choice
and people who are not adopted often didn't have a choice.
Either I, people who are kind of fleeing the dictators
or who would have, been pretty dire circumstances
had they stayed, so that's not a choice to leave.
I teach in the Beauty Arts Department.
So I teach undergraduates they're
obligatory English courses.
I hope that I can change a student's idea
of who is a native English speaker.
I'm sure you've seen the advertisements
asking for native English beers, (speaking Korean).
As if those are two separate things
and, or F4's are okay, and F4 for visa
for overseas Koreans could be up to three generations back.
I think by that point,
you might be considered native speaker.
So I hope they understand, or like,
anyone and a native speaker of English
does not mean, in my case, it does.
It doesn't mean, but in other cases
it doesn't mean you don't speak Korean.
The students might have to understand
that it's not either, or a neither, or situation.
Being Korean-American and being Korean,
is, can mean so many different things.
The experiences are so much more, are so much fuller
than we're portrayed in media.
And even sometimes our own self perception.
(gentle piano music)