“I am both Korean and Irish, but I have so often felt like neither of those things”
Photos and Words by
John Kim Faye
“I’m still very shy when I meet people for the first time - especially in non-musical situations.
Sometimes I still feel this “barrier to entry” to be taken seriously when I have to explain who I am, either as a songwriter and author, or as a mixed-race Asian person. If someone asks ‘what do you do?’ I usually introduce myself as a musician and people either give me a pretty unimpressed ‘oh, cool’ or they give me a ‘yeah, right’ kind of attitude. I guess I still don’t particularly “look the part,” so it often requires me getting onstage and “proving it” before I’m acknowledged in the way I’d like to be. It’s just an ongoing thing that comes with the territory of being me, I suppose. Part of my motivation for writing the memoir is that it shares my struggles and my accomplishments in an honest, vulnerable way. It serves as a refusal to be invisible or erased.
Some families begin very intentionally and some have completely serendipitous origins. I have always been acutely aware that my very existence was so unlikely and was the result of a completely random chance meeting. My mother came from Korea in the 1960’s to take a medical residency in Philadelphia. She was married at that time to a Korean man and, long story short, he cheated on her with a nurse and ran off to Canada. After all this happened, my three half-sisters came over to the states and they all ended up in an apartment in Northeast Philly.
One snowy day, two of my sisters were on the front lawn of the apartment complex trying to build a snowman. The man who would become my father, a retired police officer, just happened to be walking by. Apparently, this snowman was such an abomination that he offered to help my sisters build it and they were so grateful that they invited him to come up to their apartment for hot chocolate, which is when he met my mother. When I was born, my mom was 40 and my dad was 62.
My parents never spoke to me about what it was like being in an interracial marriage at that time. Loving v. Virginia - the US Supreme Court case that deemed laws forbidding interracial marriage unconstitutional - happened in 1967, the year after I was born, but the after-effects of the attitude within those laws certainly remained embedded and lingered for a long time.
As a kid in the 70s, I dealt with a lot of overt, in-your-face racism. I contrasted that with how protected and safe I had felt when my father was alive. I always could count on my dad projecting that “he’s with me, don’t mess with him” aura during the short time we had together. After he was gone, it felt like I had been thrown to the wolves.
My sisters were born in Korea with two Korean parents, but our mother pushed toward Americanizing the girls, so there wasn’t a huge cultural divide between my sisters and me. Mom spoke some Korean at home (mainly when she was yelling at one of us ;) but overall the main difference I felt with my sisters was the fact that they are all older than I am by at least a decade. My middle sister was so popular she won homecoming queen, which I think was probably a first for Newark High School in Delaware, where I grew up.
My sisters were nurturing and kind to me, and took care of me when mom was at work. As we’ve gotten older, my relationship with two of my sisters is still wonderful. (The youngest sister decided to leave the family in the 90’s.) I am still their “little brother” but we have a much closer relationship as adults, especially since our mother died.
My father passed when I was six. This pretty much stamped out any potential connection to my Irish side during my early life. I was baptized in a Catholic Church but never went to another service after he was gone. For the entirety of my childhood, I felt virtually none of my Irish identity, even when I wanted to come off as more “white” for my own protection.
I was generically Asian to most people I encountered. The names I was called on a regular basis would indicate that no one knew or cared about the difference between Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese…
When I was in my late 20’s, my mom gave me the “black bag” of my father’s memorabilia. It opened up a world which allowed me to see him as a young man. It felt so distant. He was born in 1904, had lived through WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam…
How could this person be my dad? But the more I immersed myself in the photos and the newspaper clippings of his days as an semi-professional athlete, I found an unexpected connection between the two of us; We both appeared to crave the spotlight. The performer in me feels like it comes from him.
While I had an appreciation for music from a very young age, I would not say I was born with a natural ability to sing or write. I loved listening to records. They provided a much-needed escape for a kid who had lost his dad, a kid who felt “othered,” who had no sense of self. I led a rich fantasy life immersed in rock ’n’ roll from the time I was roughly eight or nine. I would play records loudly, mime the guitar parts on a tennis racket, and sing along - inaudibly at first, then gradually I became as loud as the records. My first attempts at songwriting consisted of dirty song parodies to make my friends laugh. My sisters found my notebook with all these lyrics and ratted me out to our mom… and that was the unofficial start of my life as a writer. Eventually, I learned how to play guitar and began writing serious songs, but even that was a long process.
I think the song I wrote in my late 20’s about the passing of my father (“The Day That Came And Went”) was my first truly top-shelf song. That’s the point when I found my voice as a songwriter.
I’ve shared the stage with well over sixty national acts, from 90’s contemporaries like Blues Traveler, Collective Soul, Goo Goo Dolls, Jewel, and Bush. I’ve opened for REM, Bon Jovi, played with my teenage heroes like the Ramones and Violent Femmes.
I’d say the most impactful interaction with a famous musician I ever had was at a dinner with Apollonia Kotero, who had co-starred in Prince’s film Purple Rain. Our label rep was considering signing her to a new contract during our time on A&M Records. She was really kind and lovely and I’ll never forget what she said as we were leaving the restaurant: “Remember fellas, there’s plenty of room at the top for all of us.” I took that as her encouraging us to never give up because she knew from her own experience that anything was possible. My definition of “the top” may have been different from hers, but I always saw that statement as incredibly gracious and inspiring.
I have had more than my fair share of “this could only happen to me” moments. It’s led me to ultimately embrace the absurdity of life. The fact that the Caulfields signed a record contract right when we were on the verge of giving up still blows my mind. Without that pivotal moment, I would not be here now with a 15-album career and a memoir about my life. The fact that the elation of this accomplishment was so harshly and quickly tempered with the death of our friend is also a huge part of the story.
Conceiving the Caulfields’ first single at a job as a groundskeeper, getting a backstage visit from a former grand wizard of the KKK in Louisiana, playing a festival in front of 20,000 people and foolishly baiting the crowd into pelting me onstage with water bottles… all crazy moments, but just having had the opportunity to live out my creative dreams is what is truly incredible to me.
My life has been a tapestry of thousands of little experiences and interactions interlaced with moments of jubilation, tragedy, humor, the highest highs and the lowest lows. There’s a reason my book is called ‘The Yin and the Yang of it All.’
There was virtually no Asian American representation in alternative rock at the major label level during that era, and while there were a handful of prominent Asian musicians, I was one of the only lead singers. My experience in that space was often challenging.
During my first few moments of a performance, there’s often a certain feeling that I’m “auditioning” for the audience in a way that a non-Asian person wouldn’t have to. A white guy gets on stage and the general sense is he belongs there, because that’s what rocker dudes look like. To this day, I sometimes walk onstage and I can see in people’s faces that I’m going to have to earn the benefit of the doubt. And I almost always do win people over, but then that leads to dealing with little micro-aggressions like “You know, man… I can’t believe someone who looks like you sounds like that.”
These days, thanks to the proliferation of Korean music and culture, there is so much more representation and I love that. I want things to be way easier for aspiring Korean and mixed-race kids to pursue whatever non-traditional goals they have. I think there’s a certain tenacity I inherited from both my Korean and Irish sides that I appreciate more and more, and want to pass along to younger people.
I revisited so many meaningful moments from my life while writing my memoir. But I would have to say the most impactful ones were those that made me see things differently now that time has passed.
In “Letter to an 8x10,” I talk directly to my late mother. Piecing together a mosaic of small memories about my mom made it all feel so real while I was writing about her and our relationship. Little things like her constant quotations from Lao Tzu, her love of nature, her disposable camera photography, the way she used to rip her junk mail in half and toss it in the trash…
I think about these aspects of who she was almost daily. Even though she’s been gone for over a decade now, she remains present in my life.
As with so many relationships in life, we don’t truly see them for what they are until we examine them in retrospect.
My mom had a stoicism about her that might be considered typical of a Korean person of her generation. I had no idea what she had been through before I came along. She didn’t talk much about anything personal, and that created a certain level of mystery and distance in our relationship. She was the kind of person who preferred to show, not tell. So the quick validation of hearing “I love you” was not part of our dynamic.
But any honest assessment of our relationship over time shows that she quite clearly did love me very much. I think it takes most of us a long way into adulthood to be able to humanize our parents and realize that they are just doing their best, and have their own problems and flaws that we don’t understand as children. As I get older, I realize just how much certain aspects of the way she was live within me.
I got my tattoo in my early 40’s, kind of late in life for a first - and only - tattoo. It’s a large black and green yin and yang symbol positioned prominently on my upper right arm. Instead of the traditional small circles inside the yin and yang, there are shamrocks.
My motivation for getting it was to claim a visual representation of the identity I had struggled to embrace, understand, and accept. In the book I say: “Taken individually, the yin and yang and the shamrock are the visual clichés of each side I inherited, but together, they represent something unique. I am both Korean and Irish, but I have so often felt like neither of those things.
The tattoo is a reminder to myself that even if it feels like I am not accepted by other Korean or Irish people as one of their own, I have a right to claim both of those designations.
I didn’t feel Korean and I certainly didn’t feel Irish. It seemed such an unlikely combination at the time, and kind of still does. I think that’s part of what fuels my inner motivation - the feeling that I’m my own category, that I don’t fit in anywhere, so I have to forge my own ethnicity and my own community. That’s one of the reasons why music is so very important to me.
I am proud of being half Korean. My mother made sure I knew that our lineage dated back to the Silla Dynasty. She wanted me to feel proud of where I came from, and I do. But mostly I’m proud to have been her son.
She, herself, didn’t quite fit in with Korean society. She didn’t see herself in any of the pre-determined lanes set for a woman of her generation. I have to imagine that’s one of the reasons she left to come to the US. As for me, I feel like I’m continuing to evolve into my identity. I certainly no longer try to hide who I am, or de-emphasize one half or the other. I am who I am.”
Read John Kim Faye’s book
“The Yin and Yang of It All: Rock'n'Roll Memories from the Cusp as Told by a Mixed-Up, Mixed-Race Kid”