A few years ago, I sat down in a podcast studio with a guest whom I had met just a week before, strangers to each other.
And as you do in a podcast, we started talking, lightly at first.
“where did you grow up? What is your favorite cafe in Seoul?” and then more seriously about culture and the differences we experienced as half-Koreans in Korea.
And though I can’t remember how the topic turned, we began to talk about how important it is to have parents who teach us how to accept ourselves fully, as mixed Koreans.
And she said, “my dad used to blame me for being half-Korean. He would say, a real Korean girl wouldn’t have made these mistakes. A real Korean girl would be a good daughter. And because your other half is so bad and lazy, you’re not keeping up.”
“I think,” my guest told me, “my dad never forgave himself for being with a non-Korean woman.” The sub context is, ‘and having half-Korean daughters.’
I’ll never forget this moment.
Not because what she told me was shocking. In reality, I hear these comments quite a lot when doing my project. Sometimes said in less explicit terms, but we often understand the hidden intentions. I’ll never forget this moment because I suddenly realized how incredibly fragile these stories are, and for some unknowable reason I was given permission to hold it. I felt the weight of immense responsibility. And I asked myself for the first time,
Am I doing the right thing?
In 2019, I posted the first video for The Halfie Project or 혼혈이야기 on YouTube.
It was an interview between myself and a Black and Korean youtuber named Cedric ‘Skycedi.’ We had an open conversation about the nuances of being half-Korean, one of us white, the other black, but sharing the common factor of being Korean, and living in Korea.
It was one of the first times I felt so validated in my experiences. Here was someone who recognized the unspoken feelings I had carried for so long, and inherently understood, no explanation required. It’s a rare occasion when that happens in our lives.
That interview was my first, and then after that I found two incredible teammates through craiglist of all places - I do not always recommend this, but it worked great for me - and they joined me in a whirlwind year of producing interviews, mini documentaries and photo stories with half-Koreans from all over the world. Egypt, France, the U.S., Pakistan, Australia...
Like a magnet, I drew people to me, so eager to hear their stories and share them with the world.
We grew our YouTube channel, then opened a podcast, an instagram, next an instagram account. In those early days, my eyes were set on growing. Finally, it felt like we could tell our own stories, share our own experiences, not through the distorted lens of pop culture, stereotypes or poorly remembered history, but with our own words.
I was championing our truths. This is what it looks like to be mixed Korean, from every corner of the world. I was shining a light on our stories. Stories, that I felt, everyone should hear.
And then she said, “A real Korean girl wouldn’t have made these mistakes.”
And she looked at me with a sort of smiling defiance that didn’t quite hide the pain I saw in her eyes. I wondered, as I looked at the microphone capturing her words and the camera in the corner recording her face, am I doing the right thing?
The microphone and the camera are tools that magnify sound and image. What you say or do becomes 10 times larger than life.
They can turn one simple sentence into a PR disaster. A camera focused at the right moment can capture fleeting beauty and immortalize a moment of pure emotion, but it can also destroy relationships, threaten governments and reveal things we might wish we had never seen.
The camera and microphone magnify our stories and if we’re not careful, unveil ourselves to the public in a way that can get out of control very quickly.
I don’t need to tell you that virality is the aim of the game when it comes to social media. Social media has stripped away the previously high barrier between the ordinary and the ‘famous’.
We all hold these two powerful tools - the microphone and the camera - right in our pocket.
Now everything and everyone can reach the whole world. And we do - through silly moments caught on camera, emotional punches pulled in 6 seconds, dramatic retellings or elusive glimpses into another person’s life. We have clever tricks and ways to hook an audience so that our reach grows and our platform gets bigger, for whatever purpose you might have.
But this is why telling our stories can be so dangerous. Because it opens us up to the scrutiny of strangers. Social media has made that incredibly easy. It’s also easy to forget the power of our stories, because we can now package them so neatly and context-free and reach so many people at once without a second thought.
Stories come in all kinds of shapes and manner. Some are funny, some are sad, some are classic, some are shocking. And despite what social media might promote, not everyone has a right to your story. Especially when you’re collecting the kinds of stories that I do.
Not long after The Halfie Project launched, I got an interview with a young woman who had been part of the Unification Church, or the cult known also as the Moonies.
She had been closely affiliated with the higher ups her whole life, and had gotten married in one of those mass weddings, meeting her new husband for maybe the first or second time ever that day she wore her wedding dress. He was Korean, she was not, and they soon had a child, and ended up living in Korea.
I didn’t expect this interview to take me down a path that I’m still exploring. The idea that there are many mixed Koreans who are the result of the cult’s plan to spread the religion through arranging international marriages. I know it sounds like a big conspiracy theory but we’ll see.
Well, we released the interview and it became our first viral hit, reaching over half a million views in a few months. And we celebrated that. But then the young woman started getting threats from church members and her now ex-husband. I learned that her daughter was being held by the father and his family, as the mother had lost custody because she was a foreigner in Korea, now divorced, working as a teacher and didn’t speak Korean fluently, while the father had a family, Korean citizenship and could express his side quite easily in the local language to the court. And I’m biased I’m sure, but I didn’t feel those reasons were good enough to take a child away from their mother. We ended up taking the video down.
I had chased down this interview with pure intentions, and now come face to face with the reality that putting this story out put this young woman at risk and at odds with her ex-husband.
I wanted to give her a chance to share her side of the story, to talk about her unique situation in Korea, but instead, it revealed the sinister nature of a cult and the plight of single, foreign moms in Korea.
I discovered that telling her story was dangerous, too. I found it alarming that people could react so viciously to someone’s lived experiences. I started wondering if the person walking by me on the street was a cult member out to eliminate anyone spreading so-called-lies about their religion. Once someone said to me in passing, “hail blessed child!” And I said, “blessed by who.” “Oh,” he responded, “I thought you were part of the Unification church. All blessed children look like you.”
Like what? Like half-Koreans?
At the Halfie Project, we make it our priority to give our guests the freedom to share their own stories in as sincere a way as possible. We really work hard to ensure there’s no angle or underlying opinion we are pushing. Then we let people hear and read and see these stories, and the conclusions they draw are far more telling about who they are than who we are.
The reactions to this video made me start asking, why would someone attack you for telling the truth? It also made me see more clearly the dangers of telling a story without full context. The way social media is set up, Tik Tok in particular, is to capture attention in a short frame of time, and you are rewarded if you keep that attention.
For this reason, I really wondered if it would be too risky putting these stories out on Tik Tok or instagram, because it didn’t allow time for the proper context.
I used to be very skeptical of using Tik Tok for The Halfie Project. On one hand, I knew I could reach more people. On the other hand, I was worried that the nature of Tik Tok’s algorithm and short content form would cut my stories in half, eliminate context.
While virality is a great thing as a content creator, it’s also like lighting a match to dry tinder and I couldn’t risk setting these valuable stories on fire in the name of growing an audience
After the Moonies video, the young woman recommended I reach out to some other single, foreigner moms she knew who had half-Korean kids. So I did, and that’s when I learned how marginalized single moms are in Korea.
I learned how little support they receive from the government, how difficult it is without family nearby, and often they’re haunted by a vengeful or resentful ex-husband, and I saw the way Korean society looks down on these women.
The level of social distaste differs depending on where the woman is from. Is she a Westerner? White? Black? Southeast Asian? Pretty? Overweight? Factors that might determine the way the woman was treated. Then I asked, what did some of these women do to support themselves and their children? These questions led me to meeting with single women groups, looking into patrilineal laws in Korea, walking around red light districts, making posts on craigslist pretending to offer high-paying escort jobs and then striking up email conversations with the women who responded and trying to learn about their circumstances and why they applied to the position.
This led me to migrant wives, immigrant workers, women trying to make money to escape abusive situations, and many times with half-Korean kids somewhere along the way.
When we can understand, it inspires empathy and sometimes compassion. Compassion is the key to inspiring action. It takes action to make a change.
The deeper I got into these issues, the angrier I got. And that’s another disturbing reality about pursuing stories. It will shine an unforgiving light on things that you cannot close your eyes to anymore. It’s dangerous being enlightened to injustices happening around you because you can never go back to ignorance. I made a video about my small investigation into these issues, and in return, spent a few months reading some of the most unhinged, hateful comments I’ve gotten to this day. Because how dare I reveal the truth about vulnerable women living on the edge of Korean society! But I still believe that these stories reached someone, somewhere, who was ready to listen.
Stories have a fantastic ability to change people’s minds, without force. They are one of the few things with that power.
Sure, we can always persuade or debate or threaten to get someone to see my point of view. But that doesn’t change minds, not really. Stories grant the listener a snapshot into someone else’s life. They give people the chance to try to understand each other, without judgement. We fear what we can’t understand.
Stories connect us. They hurt us. They heal us. They change our perspectives.
A single witness can sway a jury’s decision from innocent to guilty. Stories are dangerous. This is why they get censored, blocked, deleted, especially when somebody is trying to hide their wrong-doings.
Because we all innately know how powerful stories are. This is why we use social media. This is why Tik Tok is so addictive. We use these platforms to share our stories, and draw an audience to us through their power. And the more truthful they are, the more potent they become.
When I first began The Halfie Project, someone close to me told me very seriously, you shouldn’t do this. ‘The history of mixed Koreans is too painful, too difficult. You’ll get into trouble. People just want to forget.’
I brushed it off because I felt an almost righteous motivation to tell the world about the mixed Korean experience. But this person ended up being correct, in a way that I didn’t really expect. The further I dove into the history of mixed Koreans, I learned more about the aftermaths of war, the shadow of camp towns, adoption, political cover ups, family secrets and shame, things that I thought I was removed far away enough and cool-minded enough to explore without being affected, but it put me on a personal journey that has led me to trouble sometimes.
And the pain that people want to forget? That’s true, too. Sharing these stories is dangerous because it will force you to realize truths that may be unpleasant, truths about your history, your culture, your family, and yourself.
But that same person told me after watching some of our videos, ‘perhaps you are doing the right thing.‘ Telling these stories is dangerous in many ways, like I’ve shared. But it is not wrong to reveal true stories, it’s in how you handle the telling that matters.
I have learned a lot in the art of telling someone’s story over the past few years, and how to shape them according to the platform I am using, whether that is YouTube, through photos or in 30 second snippets on Tik Tok.
The most important thing is respecting the integrity of the story, despite my personal feelings about it. One of the most common things we hear about our work is admiration for the way we present the stories and interviews without prejudice or nationalistic bent, or flashiness. This is something I am very proud of, because it is the result of learning to take myself and my opinions out of my work. It’s hard, but I’ve been learning not to speak for others, but to let the stories speak for themselves.
I mentioned earlier that I avoided using Tik Tok for 혼혈이야기 for a long time because I was afraid of our stories getting truncated for the sake of trendiness, but that was a lot of my own judgmental mind about the platform. Now I’m fascinated by how different comments are depending on the platform we use. It’s reflective of the people we are reaching. Though the actual content we post on Tik Tok is the same as what is found on our YouTube channel or instagram, just shaped according to the platform’s requirements, the responses we get are so different. Our viewers there are younger, oftentimes exhibit more passion, are more easily influenced, which can be a little scary to see, and are seeking connection over just entertainment. I’ve heard a lot that in order to be successful on Tik Tok you have be silly or beautiful or shocking, but ultimately, I believe the algorithm is driven by human nature. What are people to drawn to?
And if it is really stories, especially ones that reveal truths about ourselves, that attract people, then it doesn’t surprise me that The Halfie Project has found an audience on Tik Tok.
My job is to respect the stories and experiences that we share.
Every piece of content that we put out on Tik Tok is an opportunity to reach someone new. Human nature desires connection. Stories connect us. Stories inspire understanding which inspires compassion which inspires action which inspires change. What a dangerous thing it is when we really realize the power to make a difference, whether for good or for bad, is right at our fingertips.
We capture stories with a camera and with a microphone. The camera can shine a light on things long-hidden, reveal secrets, retain memories, and bring people back to life, if it’s for an hour long film or just 30 seconds on a vertical video. Stories have a power of their own and they’ll reach out to the viewer in ways I might never have intended.
I was interviewed by Humans of Seoul about 10 years ago. They happened to meet me on the street as I was wandering around the Yonsei University campus and they asked if they could ask me a few questions and take my photo for their then Facebook page. I was skeptical at first but figured, why not. I remember being very lonely and somebody getting to know me was something I couldn’t resist in my vacuum of human interaction.
This was the first time I publicly talked about being half-Korean and some of the difficulties I had experienced. They took my photo, thanked me and we parted. I remember first feeling a sort of relief for getting those thoughts off my mind, and second feeling of being worried.
How was I going to look to their many followers? Would they judge me? Did I express myself well enough? Fast foward about 5 years later, I met a half-Korean girl from a South American country. She told me that she had come across my photo on Humans of Seoul when she was going through a hard time herself, wondering about her mixed Koreanness and where she fit in, and when she read my story, she felt comforted and inspired by it. She ended up moving to Korea in pursuit of higher education and to explore her Korean roots, where we somehow met, and she somehow remembered me from that picture, and she told me, you story really impacted me.
I had shared a little of my own out of loneliness and difficulty, and in some unexpected way, it resulted in connection and relationship.
I mentioned earlier about our first interview with Cedric Skycedi, the Black and Korean youtuber I met back in 2018. We shared our experiences with each other, captured it on film, put that up on The Halfie Project.
And two weeks ago in Seoul, we got married.
That’s the danger of telling your story. It connects you to others. And, as I can attest, can change your life.
Wedding photos by Lorryn Smit
This essay was originally for a keynote speech I gave at the TikTok Cultures Research Network Conference in Sept 2024. You can watch the full speech here.