(mellow guitar music) - Hey, everyone, it's your girl Jenn and I am so excited to film
this video for you guys because the month of May is
Asian Pacific Heritage Month and in the spirit of that,
I thought that it would be very timely to do the Asian American tag. I wanted to share with
you guys my experience growing up Asian American
and my friend Amy gave this whole concept structure
and made it very simple by creating questions and so I just wanna dive right into it so let's get started. I am Korean-American. I was born and raised
in Southern California. So my parents immigrated from Korea and they first moved to Chile and that's where my mom had my brother but after my parents got their green card, they were able to come to
America and they had me. And so I would categorize
me and my brother as first-generation because
like, my parents didn't speak any English so we were
truly the first generation to really grow up American here. The first experience when I
realized that I was different from the rest of the kids, was when I was in first or second grade, my
mom packed my favorite food which was kare rice which
is basically just curry with rice and it has vegetables and meat and it's so delicious and I remember being so excited to eat it for lunchtime and when I opened the
Tupperware, I remember a kid looking at it and just being so disgusted and he just called me out, he was like, "Jennifer packed poop for lunch!" and I remember being so
mortified and so embarrassed and I just completely lost my appetite and I don't, I didn't even eat that lunch and when I got home, I told
my Mom that I never wanted her to pack things like this again. I told her that I only wanted
her to pack like Lunchables and sandwiches just like
normal American food so that I would fit in. When I was younger,
there was a period where I was super proud to be Korean. It happened when I was
around like nine years old. My mom took me and my brother to Korea for the entire summer,
and we stayed at my aunt's and it was such an amazing
experience because for once like I realized like that
everyone looked like me and I felt really, just like,
I just felt like I connected with everybody and I
remember always hanging out at this park where all
the kids used to hang out and I made a lot of friends
because everyone was so fascinated at the fact
that I was American. And so I would bring like
chapter books that I'd packed and I'd be like (speaks
in foreign language), and everyone was like so
impressed and it was just, it was just a really great time for me and that's when I was really
just like proud of my culture and when I brought that
back to America, like that, that pride stayed there for a little bit until I went to middle
school and middle school was when everything just
kind of changed for me. I feel like it was a lot
of factors just hitting all when I was like 11. It was puberty, it was the
fact that I was like chubby and then the fact that like
there weren't that many Asians in my school. I remember there was a group of these boys that walked the same route as me home and I remember hating when
we would like cross paths because they would always
say something to me and they would say
something so like racist. They would say things like
"Hey chink do you wanna do my homework?" or "Hey, you dropped
your calculator" and now, I wish that I had the strength
to just clap back at them because at the time, I
just didn't say anything, I was so scared I was, I was genuinely afraid
of my, for, I was afraid for my life and I wish
that I had the courage to just like stand up to them and be like "Hey yes, I did drop my
calculator, thank you. "I'm really, really gonna
need this when I'm just "calculating all my
finances in the future" but unfortunately, I wasn't like that. I think this also crossed at the same path when my parents made me go
to Korean school on Saturday and I was so pissed that they
were making me and my brother go to school an extra day. Like we already had Monday through Friday and now they're adding
like a whole new curriculum for Saturday and like we
also, they also made us go to church every Sunday
so I felt like I had no days off, like ugh! So we had to go to Korean
school and there was this one instance with a teacher
that just really stuck with me. She was telling us that
when people ask us what our ethnicity is, we need to say
that we are Korean-American. The Korean always has to be
first and I remember being very unsettled by it because I
felt like in my heart that I was American so I rose my
hand and I told her my piece and she said, "No, you are
always going to be Korean. "You're Korean-American." And I just said like, "Why
can't I just be American? "I was born here, I speak the
language, I don't understand." I just felt like this big
distance between my culture and what I was brought into. I associated being Korean
as a negative thing because number one, the bullying
sucked and number two, I would see the way people would treat my parents. Like my parents didn't
speak English very well. I would just see the way
people would treat my parents because of their accent. People lose their temper,
people get frustrated, people treat you like you're
an idiot when you have an accent and it just really
frustrated me and my Mom is already kind of a shy,
timid person and I think when she was thrown into
this world in America as like a foreign person, I think that just made her reclusive even more. One stereotype that I absolutely
struggled with growing up was the model minority stereotype. The fact that all Asians are
amazing at crunching numbers and they're just really great
academically blah, blah, blah and I think from an outsider's perspective people might think wow like,
that's actually a really good stereotype, like people
just think you're really smart but it puts a lot of
pressure on you especially when you are not academically smart. Like I, growing up I tried
my best to be a good student. Like I would literally
spend hours and hours doing my homework and all this stuff and it just wouldn't register to me. Like I was always like a B
minus, C student, like one time I got a D and like, in an
Asian household like that is unacceptable, like my B
minuses were such disappointments to my parents and they would
always compare me to like other kids and because I
wasn't the best student, I felt this distance between my
Asian American peers that were very studious so I just found
like a new group of friends. Like friends that I can
connect with artistically and creatively and
obviously like there was Asian Americans there too
but it was like a whole mix and it was really cool like we would, you know burn CDs for each
other, we would go to shows, we'd go thrifting and I felt
really blessed that I was able to have my own community in high school. Yes I can speak Korean. I would probably say I
speak the equivalent of like a seven year old, maybe
a six year old now. Like I know how to get by. I know, you know, how to ask
for directions, order food, have like light conversation
but anything with depth, I'm just like ugh like, I don't know. When I watch the Korean
news, I'm just kinda like, I don't know what they're saying. They have to talk a lot slower. It was a lot better when I
was living with my parents obviously, like I speak
Conglish with my parents so I'll speak Korean
and then I'll just fill in English words where I
don't know the Korean words. I just don't understand like
where did all those years of Korean school go, like,
did I just bury them in a box? Like it's, I don't know but I want to change this desperately
and so I'm just gonna do like an open call now. I'm looking for a Korean
tutor if you are based in the Los Angeles area,
I would love for you to DM me on my Instagram, it's IMJENNIM. I guess you just tell
me your name, your age, what school you go to or
if you did and just like what kind of program would
you put me on for, ya know, my Korean tutoring session. Being Korean-American absolutely
affected my relationship with my parents. There was a lot of
frustration and anger because of all the miscommunication
that would happen. There were so many times
where I would just try to talk to my parents
but there are just words that I just didn't know
and vice versa and we would just have yelling matches. I would scream at them being like, "Why can't you (bleep) learn English" and they would just say like,
"Why don't you know Korean, "like you are Korean." And so it always felt like
this battle and growing up my entire life, I felt
this huge disconnect from my brain and my mouth,
like I felt like I couldn't say exactly what I was feeling
or I couldn't articulate and put into words so writing
was a nightmare for me. I hated writing because I
would just look at the paper and be like, "I just
don't know what to say." I don't know, like maybe was
it because I was juggling two languages, like I don't know. I mean, but I just look at
other people and I see like you grew up with like four
languages and you're fine so I don't know, maybe it's
just like a personal thing but I've always had trouble
communicating and so with my parents with that
language barrier, it was just like an extra level of
just ugh, just fogginess and I just, I was just
very angry growing up and I feel really bad
for my parents because when I was a teenager,
I was not, I mean I was kind of a nightmare so now I wanna chat about the power dynamics
because I feel like that was kind of off with my
parents because when we were at home, obviously my parents
were in charge so we'd listen to them but when we were out
and about, we would always be translating and speaking,
especially for my Mom and it's because my Mom is a
very shy and fearful person and I don't know if she was
always this way because I didn't know her when she
was younger but I think it's because of the judgment that
people would give because something really traumatic happened to her while she was out here so So when I was in preschool, I remembered my Dad picked me up from school and I
knew something was wrong because normally my Mom
picks me up from school so we go home and I go to my
parents' room and I see my Mom just lying on the bed
with a towel on her face and so I asked my Dad
like, "Is everything okay?" and he says, "Oh she's just napping." We found out later that
someone had robbed the store. My parents had a really
small shop that sold women's clothes in El Monte
and someone had a knife and he told her to give her
the money in the register and my Mom refused because
that was all the money we had and so she said no and he sliced her face and
of course he took the money and she was a very fearful,
fearful person after that. She never spoke and I think
it took her a very long time to recover from that and
when she told me that story again when I was older, it
just, it just lit a fire in me, like I, because I never want my parents to
be in a situation like that ever again and the reason why I'm telling you this story
is because I feel like first-generation parents, they
have to do the shitty jobs. They have to work in
the dangerous locations. The have to work at the
salon, the convenience stores and they do this because they
want to give us a better life and so it makes me want to
try so hard and to be able to provide for them and
so that they never have to worry about that again. Every day I'm so grateful
that they chose to move here to give me and my brother
a better life, to give all of us a better life and
whenever I'm feeling unmotivated or I feel like I just can't
do it, I think of that and it just snaps me right back up and it just fuels me to push harder. I feel so proud to be Korean-American now and it definitely took some time. I think it's because the
older I got, the more I just had to accept myself and I
started to embrace my heritage when I was probably like
a senior in high school to a freshman in college. I think that's when I realized
I can't change who I am so I have to accept it and I
really hope that people don't judge me for wanting to
distance myself from my culture because I think it all came
from a place of me just really wanting to fit
in and really wanting for people to like me. I'm here now and I'm so freaking
proud to be Korean-American and I want to specify that I'm both. In America generally people
just see me as an Asian and when I go back to Korea or when people or Asian Americans go
back to their motherland, people categorize us as Americans so we don't fully belong in either. We're in our own category
and I'm not mad about that. I love the fact that I can
have the best of both worlds. It's like the Hannah Montana song. My favorite thing about
being Korean-American is the resilience because I feel
like Korea has gone through so much from Imperialism to
war and now the fact that we are one of the major players
in the economy just fills me with so much pride, like we
are killing it in the cars, the technology, the cosmetics,
entertainment, K-Pop is frickin' nuts and K dramas. So the fact that we were
able to build from nothing in such a short amount of
time makes me so proud. Like I'm just always
cheering on the underdog no matter where you're from,
where your background is, I just love when people realize that it's never too late to evolve. All right guys those were
all the answers to my tag. I would love for you guys
to be able to fill out the questions down below
whether you wanna do it in a comment or even your own video. I wanna know what it was like growing up, whatever ethnicity you were. Just replace the Korean or
Asian to whatever your heritage is and I would love for you
to share your experiences. It's like we live in this
globalized world where we can share our stories, we can
explain what happened so that way we can learn from it. I wanna thank you guys
for finishing this video and listening to me because
it really, really means a lot. So thank you for watching, bye. (mellow guitar music)
