“I was born in 의정부 (Uijeongbu) South Korea in 1964 to a Korean mother and an American soldier father of Scottish, Irish descent.”
Writing and photos from
Cerrissa Kim
Editor of “Mixed Korean: Our Stories”
After my father’s military service was up, he wanted to re-enlist to the army so that he could return to Korea to marry my mother and bring us to the States, but the army wouldn’t allow that unless he committed to a tour of duty in Vietnam. He served there for nine months.
I was 14 months old when Umma and I moved to San Francisco to live with my American grandmother. When my father returned from Vietnam, we moved to Utah, then Texas, and eventually settled in a farming community in California when I was four years old.
In kindergarten, children used to tease me and call me names like “slanty eyes” and sing that awful ditty of “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.”
I never told my Mom because I was too embarrassed that the kids were saying these things about me.
When I started to walk home from school by myself in first grade, some boys began to follow me part of the way home and say those awful things. Eventually they began pushing me and would kick me when I was on the ground.
My Umma figured out what was happening and went to the school to intervene but when the principal didn’t do anything about it, my Umma found out where those boys lived. She went door-to-door, and in her broken English told the parents to make their boys stop bullying me.
She bought me oxfords and told me to kick the boys as hard as I could in the shins if they bothered me. When I told her I didn’t want to hurt anyone, she became angry at me for being too soft.
Having experienced racism and bullying at an early age helped shape me to become an advocate for people and animals who are marginalized in a variety of ways.
Much of my career has been spent working in the nonprofit sector helping minorities, immigrants, and low-income women and children, and I’ve volunteered for a number of animal rescue organizations.
My father was wildly in love with my mother, and though he didn’t have to come back to Korea to get us, he believed it was the right thing to do. He didn’t want to leave his child to grow up without a father. Even though he was young, he had a strong moral compass.
He had dreams of going to college, but after he left the army he worked two jobs to support our family, instead. He was a gas station attendant and a janitor until he started a career as a telephone lineman.
When my sister started kindergarten, my mother told my father she wanted to contribute financially. She went to night school intermittently to learn English, but she had never even had the opportunity to learn to read and write Korean. It’s very hard to learn a second language when you never learned how to read or write even your primary language; in Korea, her family had been too poor to send her to school. Plus, educating the boys was the priority.
She eventually came to work on an assembly line putting together computer processing boards. She was proud that she could contribute to the family income. My parents were both hard workers and good providers.
The only time I heard my mother speak Korean was when she spoke to the few Korean friends she had, women who were also married to former American soldiers. She now regrets that she didn’t teach me and my sister to speak Korean.
There was a lot of racism against mixed kids in Korea when we emigrated and she wanted me to fully assimilate as an American. She was afraid that if she taught me Korean I’d have an accent and that maybe my English wouldn’t be as good.
My father was proud to be married to my mother, but no one taught us about Korean culture or history. What my sister and I learned was through osmosis, by my mother’s actions and her cooking.
My father was a steak and potatoes kind of guy - he didn’t even eat white rice so it was hard for us to celebrate being Korean through food, which was my Umma’s love language. Mom made Korean dishes for us when Dad wasn’t home or as a side dish to whatever American food she made for him.
I would say that my two boys have had much more exposure to Korean culture than I did growing up because my Mom now feels free to embrace and share her culture, something that she was unable to do when she was a new immigrant in the US.
Growing up, I remember watching Flower Drum Song and liking it because there were Asians, plus I loved the costumes and singing. I also watched Love is a Many Splendid Thing many times because the main character was supposed to be half-Asian and I was intrigued that William Holden’s handsome character could find someone of mixed race like me beautiful.
These days I still look for people who look like me. Often when I’m out and about and see people who appear to be mixed Asian, I’ll ask them if they are hapa and what their ethnic background is.
I guess I’m still seeking connection in some ways with other mixed Asians.
Cerrissa and her sons
I started writing stories when I was eight and have never stopped. In my thirties, I finished a solid draft of my novel, a mother-daughter story, but my literary agent found the real story revolved around the mother’s experiences as a young woman in Korea. I started doing research on Korea in the 1960’s and was shocked at what I learned.
My mother hadn’t talked much about her life in Korea. I had no idea how hardscrabble it had been. All I had been told was that she met my father at the military base where she worked in a snack bar, which turned out not to be true at all. It wasn’t until I started doing research for my book that I realized just how desperate those poor girls were, trying to support themselves and their families after the Korean war.
My Mom left home at fourteen to become a maid in Seoul after her father suffered a series of strokes. She was the oldest surviving child out of eleven. She realized she wouldn’t make enough money as a maid to send her brothers to school and pay for her family's expenses. So she chose other ways to make money and one of those things led her to meeting my father.
When I was doing research for my novel, I stumbled upon KoreanAmericanStory.com and reached out to founder HJ Lee, who shared with me that mixed Koreans were the largest growing demographic of Koreans in the US. I cried when I read his email because no one had ever acknowledged me as a Korean.
He told me there was a conference coming up on Korean Camptowns and offered to pay me to write a story about it. At the conference, I saw countless mixed Korean faces for the first time inn my life. It made me happy to my core. For the first time, I felt a sense of belonging.
After that conference, a group of Korean American adoptees started the nonprofit 325KAMRA, to provide DNA testing and resources to help reunite Korean adoptees with their biological parents.
Katherine Kim was spearheading the effort to put together an anthology of mixed Korean stories to be sold to raise funds to support DNA testing, with Thomas Park Clement donating for the publishing. This made ‘Mixed Koreans: Our Stories’ a reality.
I met Katherine at the conference and she asked me to be one of the editors. Working on the book was life changing.
It wasn’t until I became involved with the ‘Mixed-Koreans: Our Stories Anthology’ that I met so many other mixed Koreans. I made fast friends with the writers who submitted stories, as well as those who came to our readings on the book tour.
Many of the people I met have become some of my closest friends whom I now call family. Some are adoptees, others are children of Korean camptown women or those who married US military men and American civilian contractors.
So many of us share common themes of feeling like we didn’t fit in, that we were unattractive, and that we were all alone in our semi-Asianness. Quite a few of us who were raised with our biological mothers have similar stories about how our mothers’ trauma likely impacted the way they parented us and how it took us until adulthood to understand this and come to terms with it.
My Umma is 83 and was recently diagnosed with moderate dementia. We don’t know if there is a family history of dementia because no one else has lived as long as she has.
I have been working on a novel for over ten years now, and though it’s fiction there are echoes of my Mother’s life within the pages. Now that her dementia is getting worse, I feel an urgency to finish my novel and hopefully get it published while she can still comprehend what is happening.
It would make her so happy if people recognized and praised the strength and resilience of the main character who is partly based on her.
I would highly suggest that all children write out a list of questions to ask their parents and then film their parents to create a legacy video. There are so many questions that I wish I had asked my father when he was alive that will go unanswered forever.
