The Young Korean-Americans at the Chicago Korean Catholic Church

What they were: Birkenstocks, iPhones, The North Face fleeces, Abercrombie shirts and jeans. Sleek and shiny long hair, mostly natural but sometimes with highlights. No makeup, or no-makeup makeup. Perfect white teeth, or braces. Glasses, often. Casualness. Casual annoyance countered only by casual interest. Casual materialism. Polished American English –“omg!” and such *affect* for exaggerated *feeling* with *unmistakable uptalk.* Kelly Clarkson. Cars. Cars that they would drive to our Catholic church and the Chicago Korean street festival and Lollapalooza, each from their own secluded and secure suburban dwellings. (1)

Judgment. Something hidden under a cloak of anxiety.

It would take me a while to register that they were mostly from different wealthy suburban schools; they seemed to me somehow all so strangely uniform, not just in how they dressed and what they did, but in the manner that they expressed their individuality and in how they related to one another, in what seemed to be some commonly understood acceptable range of behavior.

They were always so together. Particularly among the girls, there seemed always to be so much that had to be told in confidence, so much reason to go to the bathroom together. These second-generation Korean-Americans grew up playing together regularly at church and their homes through strongly-knit bonds created by their parents decades ago. There was clearly not much there that I shared in, but what stumped me was how they formed groups to talk secretively from each other. I would come to learn that there is a word for this --“cliques.” I had just never seen cliques where I was born and grew up, in Paraguay. (2)

They were just so new and strange to me.

The Korean Martyrs Catholic Church, Chicago’s only Korean Catholic church, formed my Korean immigrant family’s communal entry to America since we migrated from Paraguay when I was 10, in 2001. It was a small church, generally led by several families who had migrated as early as the 70’s or 80’s and been a part of its foundation. I would be introduced to the millennial Korean-American children of these families first through Sunday masses in Korean with my family. Then, I would get to know them a little more myself through some English catechism classes in 8th grade, and then for just about the first year of high school as part of the Korean Catholic Youth Club (KCYC), through 2006.

While integrating to US society through my Chicago public schools and diverse North Park neighborhood would mostly feel like a smooth continuation of and growth from a childhood of play and academic achievements, my introduction to the Koreans in America would feel much rather like being abruptly thrown into cold new waters.

It would involve a long process, culminating now at 31, for me to figure out what they were to me and in relation to me, and why any of it even mattered. After 16 years of illegality as an immigrant, during which I gained a much more thorough understanding of this country’s bloody and oppressive legacy left by its formation, I would secure my own legal status, and come to a better understanding of my place within it, as well as theirs.

At the very early beginnings, they were my understanding of Americans. Even though they were clearly a Korean-Catholic sort of Americans, for the fresh immigrant that I was, to me, Korean-Catholics were nothing new. It was the American part that was new, so they were the Americans. And American Korean-Catholics were vastly different than Paraguayan Korean-Catholics (the Paraguayans were so much more loving, giving, and convivial), so there was much to learn and catch-up to. But as I would begin school, I would come to know quickly that there are a lot of different ethnic kinds of Americans. (3) Hence, they could not stand for all Americans.

Instead, I decided to think of them as the Korean-community part of my life. In my family, Korean life was grounded in church. And even though there were the select few Koreans at my public Chicago middle school that I was friends with, we were not part of a Korean community together. So, the church Koreans were the Korean-community-part.

Some time passed, and all the while I would be shocked at how different the Koreans in the US were from the Koreans in Paraguay. (4) For one, the US Koreans were divided into two vastly different camps: Koreans and Korean-Americans. This was most frustrating, of course, because it not only meant that I am not Korean, but also that I am part of neither camps, since I am not American. The group that I was led to was the group of young Korean-Americans. (5) So I began to think of them as the Korean-American group in my life.

It was all turning rather complicated and exhausting, to figure out who they are and whether I am, or am supposed to be, one of them or not. With my peers in my Paraguayan Korean Catholic church, it had never been a question whether I belonged. We were all one of the same kind. My parents would seem to expect that I should belong here with the Korean-Americans (did my parents have any idea that these Koreans are not the sort of Koreans that they thought?), but this church group seemed to hold entirely different intentions.

I could not have a grasp of their motives. I wondered, “but aren’t you burning with a need to prove and be seen as good Koreans, whether in the Catholic sense or otherwise??” I would have tried a thousand times to get to know them, and to figure out what it must be that I, the foreigner, was misunderstanding, only to find them responding with disinterest. They seemed to be acting out of their own personal motives, simply listening to their own intuitions and interests. "How self-centered and materialistic they are!" I would think. They clearly did not get the message of what we are supposed to be about.

This sense of frustration would only grow when observing them as Catholics. During Friday night bible study discussions or Sunday mass, they did not seem present or engaged. Small discussion groups were the worst –clearly just a joke to them. They were wasting everyone’s time with their incessant complaints, gossip, and fussing with one another. My genuine eagerness to do good would feel wasted in this company.

They seemed slacking not only as Catholics, but also as Koreans. That responsibility we Koreans of the world might feel to represent Koreans, by now well commented on by many a Korean-American literati, they did not seem to possess it. They barely spoke Korean (and what little they did was mostly in jest), and simply embodied a greater preoccupation to reflect their white suburban culture. They hid so much behind their jokes.

I stopped seeing them as the Korean-Americans in my life. For a while, they were simply cold, hurtful, and judgmental people.

Despite my own personal and God-fearing need to live up to the ideal of a good Korean person (who, naturally, belongs to a Korean community) being a most powerful driver in me, I would leave. The alienation and confusion would become unbearable. I would not know why I would continue to subject myself to such humiliation from them, to continue to try to get along with them. What did belonging as a Korean matter for? And besides, maybe I just needed to accept that these church Korean-Americans are not the Koreans, nor the Korean Catholics, that my family thought they were.

Many years later, I would come to find through immigrant rights activism the group of Korean-Americans that finally felt like they were my kind, like I belonged. It would happen right after I graduated university, after having visited various churches (Korean and not) and having met various kinds of Korean-Americans in different settings. The ones in this group were all from different generations, genders, backgrounds, levels of education, religions, immigrant statuses. All of their radically different walks of life had led them to this activism group because they had come to similar realizations about our shared reality in this country as I had. And they understood me in a way that I never felt with any other group of Korean-Americans at church or school.

Through that group, I would come to understand the political machinations that shape or divide our lives, all of us different kinds of Korean-Americans. I would learn how those of us who were undocumented and denied basic rights and opportunities were not only many, but also the unlucky victims of well-known flaws in an unjust immigration system. The politically-driven artifice of legal status would drive parents like mine to provide my sisters and I a vastly different life than the Korean-Americans at church.

Thus, I was equipped with the political lens, which finally allowed me to understand with crystal clarity what this group at church had been all along.

They, those who dominated and most strongly defined the group, were upper middle-class or rich suburban normative teenagers. Their college-educated and business-owning Korean parents had fully bought into the American Dream, and raised them in overwhelmingly rich and white neighborhoods. The ones who were not these were either quiet or vocally wished to be like them. That they were all US citizens was a given. All of these facts in conjunction formed the overwhelming explanation of my experience of them as Korean-Americans. They were the substantive factors that made me an extreme other to them.

Whenever I would think back to leaving that church, it was as if the bare shrubs by the walkways reflected the distinct coldness and conservatism that seemed to emanate from and surround that church. I would conclude that private property, legality, and establishment ruled in America and this church, and it had no place for someone like me.

But now I feel that there are different qualities to the way that these young adults were that adds poignancy to the memory of them.

They were also, simply, well-meaning children of sacrificial Korean immigrants who were under extreme pressure to excel. They were representing Koreans at their schools, in the way that they could, while feeling the laser heat of the endless white gaze that surrounded them. And, perhaps, when they would use the few Korean words they did in their dramatized American accents, they did it –as with so much of their jokes—as a way of making fun of their own selves. Perhaps they were confused at how it came to be that they should be in a Korean church for yet another Friday evening, wearing whiteness as they did on their Korean bodies, while not speaking any more Korean.

I could not know what it must have been like to be them. But I imagined how immense and unbearable the pressure must be to fit in at their schools and neighborhoods, how much richer and more influential their white suburban peers must be. What else could explain how they all seemed so much preoccupied and needing to constantly reflect these people?

When I think of them as individual people, I remember how some of them would notice me and say something nice once in a while. They were also plenty different from one another, of course. In forming my assessment of them, I would unwittingly be putting on a certain Korean expectation of them to view themselves and behave responsibly as a group. It would take many years to realize that Americans do not think of themselves this way, as a part of a greater unit that they are held responsible to. A better cultural understanding of America would lead me to realize that while some (or many) of them were ill-behaved in discussion groups, the fact that no one took on the responsibility to take a stance to speak out against this behavior should not have been a reflection of the group.

It was true that I was so far outside of them that I did not know what to make of these Korean-Americans that wore their Abercrombie logos on their purchased clothes, and, insofar as they took any notice of me, they probably did not know what in the world to make of the oddity of me, either. They were all conforming to a certain strong American force, while I did not care much for conforming with them.

As an immigrant rights activist, I would come to revile most those who could and therefore would choose nothing but to follow, then lead and uphold, the safe path of establishment in order to attain their own security and prove their capacity as individuals. People who grew up in and then led establishments this way would never have to consider those who never had the chance to do the same. And when I would make phone calls for Asian-Americans to get out the vote, they would be the ones who would think that people like my family should have "gotten in line" when we migrated, because they were both lucky and wealthy enough to have passed through the socially acceptable established paths of a white supremacist country.

These Korean-Americans were, without a doubt, safely walking within the well-trodden paths of one establishment after another. But the establishments were ruthless and exacting, and they had to work very hard –much harder than their white peers-- for every spot that they earned. The establishments were controlled by a figure as innocent, insecure, and powerful as an American teeny bopper white girl, one that they might have met in youth and perhaps haunted them in every step.

This is how I have come to view them, anyway. (6)

As to why it all mattered –I would come to realize that they, this group of young Korean-American Catholics in America, and all the conditions that surrounded my meeting them, my own subjective experience of them and all, marked the beginning of a long journey that I had set off on to find something.

My parents brought my family to this country with a dream for us. I grew up in this country believing in their dream, living for it as they did. But things went so wrongly, so not according to plan, so many times, and I found at multiple times to be almost losing myself to this dream (and sometimes actually losing myself). By the time that I finally obtained citizenship in this country (less than one year ago), I was left in deep and utter confusion as to where I even stand in relation to that dream that my parents had held for me. Once, the dream had been everything. Now, its value had cheapened and crumbled, and I myself had become so crushed underneath it, to the point of scarce recognition.

I was secure now, and in the basest of ways, I was wondering how and why I should be living in this country, and what I might occupy myself with while living in it, particularly in order to have made all of our losses worthwhile. When I think about what all I have experienced so as to best determine how to apply myself going forward, the question of who I am and what to do with myself seems somehow inextricably tied to my relationship to this country. That is, it feels that the essence with which I fill my existence will either be created in a certain way that is dependent on and integral to living as a citizen of this country, or it will not be created at all. The answer seems to be somehow tied to finding my people in this country, to finding my heritage in it, to thereby find myself in it.

So, it is with the hopes of finding these that I set off to share the story of my search for Korean-American identity, as I myself transformed within it.

Endnotes

(1) I never went to Lollapalooza. The renowned Chicago music festival, and its American performers, were never even on my radar, until I would come to learn late in high school that that’s what the rich kids went to, one of the ways that they would meet up in the summer. This would be the festival that these Korean-American suburban teens would drive into with their cars. I never felt a burning passion to attend, because I have never been very caught up in music, but Lollapalooza was interestingly one of the ways that these two worlds seemed to have found a way to connect, with me outside of it.

As for the Korean street festival on Bryn Mawr Ave., it would take place a half-block away from the apartment that my family lived in. Later, when we moved and as it slowly died, it would be on the street that we lived on. These church teens would drive in with their cars from the suburbs to get their fun little taste of their heritage, while my family remained in that old Koreatown street so that we could go to the Korean market, walk to our public schools, and take public transport to our commuter college and university. Their parents would greet us –us girls and our halmeoni—and send us with some foods from the festival while my parents moved to Los Angeles as undocumented workers. The right Korean should be thankful for such consideration for life, but I'm not exactly Korean, am I?

(2) Girls would certainly get catty in Paraguay. But altogether I was extremely happy getting along with everyone, and everyone else seemed contented that way, too. Everyone played together all sorts of games with everyone during recess or in the bus after-school or on the street in the neighborhood. This was the case certainly among the Paraguayans, and still among the Korean-Paraguayans of my age group, at least.

(3) And thank goodness for these other ethnicities. At Mary Gage Peterson Middle School, I was close friends with Koreans, a Bulgarian, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and Chinese classmates, while in class with kids from tens of other ethnicities. Towards the end of high school, I would increasingly find greater comfort and refuge in my Hispanic friends more than any other as the reality of undocumentedness loomed closer every day, and my Korean-American or Asian-American friends handled this fact about me with careless disregard to leave me feeling shameful, lesser, and exposed.

Ethnicity was integral to my consciousness, whereas race entered it subconsciously and over a long time. Even as I became president of Asian Club in high school, I was still learning the difference between "Asian" and "Asian-American," mostly observing how the coolest Asian-Americans showed that they were attuned to American culture in a certain way. I would come to learn the word for this: "wit." I would not really ever come to think of "race" as fully and closely to what it actually is until I'd find the activism group later.

(4) Korean adolescents in the US were much closer to adulthood than those in Paraguay. In middle school, I still mostly just wanted to play outside while doing well by my duties. The other girls seemed to start wearing short skirts, and have obsessions over boy bands and gel pens, and would have had confirmation in the 8th grade, rather than in high school like they did in Paraguay, so that I missed my chance.

Tangentially, I still remember when my best Korean-American friend at school showed me her iPod for the first time, and asked if we wanted to listen to Korean music together. I was surprised how she, who had the same age as me, owned her own digital music device (and here I thought I was *so* cool for owning my sleek Sony CD player!), at this culture of listening to music together (rather than playing games!), and how she was so much in some ways like the people at church (I didn’t know anyone else at school that had an iPod).

(5) There were not many Koreans from Korea at that church, as far as I knew, and they attended the adults’ Korean-language mass. Now as I try to recall who was part of the church outside of the youth club (KCYC), I wonder how there might have potentially been an alternative experience for me if I tried to seek out the Koreans from Korea, or accepted a kind invite from the odd individual to join another group.

There was one second-generation Korean-American unni who once gave me a ride home and lent me her Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing CD. She was very kind, and I realized only too late that she seemed to intimate that KCYC is not a good group to be a part of for someone like me. If she were ever to read this, I would say a tremendous and heartfelt thank you to her, for having shared that warm ride, and for having provided so much to me and my mother in that CD. And I am so sorry for having never returned it; I would buy her a copy in a heartbeat.

(6) Last year, I would reach out to invite a select few of them to the healing and reflection discussion groups for Koreans and Korean-Americans that I would host and facilitate, to be met with painful encounters. One of them shared with me her own painful experience with that group, the reason she was virtually never there. I learned of intense toxicity and drama that I had been completely oblivious to. And when it came to me, she also said, to her recollection, simply, that I was never even in the picture. Fair, albeit painful. That’s as far as I am willing to go in trying to understand who they really were, or are.

Written with editing help from Erik Henning Thiede, who is rather like an underpaid and overworked freelance contract worker in reading over my drafts and giving me helpful comments.