It all started with a film. And a Facebook search. The quest to find the people who share my name.
In 2005, I screened The Grace Lee Project at the Los Angeles Korean International Film Festival. It’s a quirky documentary through which the filmmaker – her name is Grace Lee – enters the lives of several other Grace Lees. In so doing, she tries to debunk the myths that surround the name and its bearer as the stereotypical Asian-American model minority. Read the rest of this entry »
One quarter, one dime and one nickel – times four.
Every morning my mom took out $1.60 in change from her floral-print cardboard box. Every morning she pressed 40 cents – three coins – into the little palms of her three kid brothers: James, Thomas and David. It was cafeteria lunch money. Read the rest of this entry »
Before the days of the Park family minivan, I rode in the backseat of our Toyota Camry hatchback – between my sister and brother. I was nine; they were four and two, respectively.
One afternoon a stranger peered through the car’s back window – my parents had stopped for gas – and asked if we were triplets. Read the rest of this entry »
Short Girls, author Bich Minh Nguyen’s debut novel, is a tale of two sisters learning to reconcile their childhood with their present lives, which are starkly different from, yet strikingly parallel to, each other’s.
Raised in Michigan by Vietnamese immigrant parents, Van and Linny Luong are different in every visible way, apart from their height and physical Asian traits. Van is the diligent, studious daughter who marries her dream man and becomes an immigration lawyer. Linny is the trendy, arguably frivolous, Americanized younger sister who refuses to be confined by Vietnamese immigrant stereotypes. Read the rest of this entry »
Michele Choe is the youngest of six children in her family. The 34-year-old Chicago-based attorney is baby to her Korean father, Caucasian mother and older siblings Margaret, Laura, Jennifer, Stephen and David. Read the rest of this entry »
The end of August marks a special anniversary for 25-year-old Linda Kye. She will have lived and worked in Korea for one year. It will most likely be the beginning of a few more years of her sojourn in the motherland.
Kye moved to Seoul from her hometown Vienna, Va., after graduating from college and working at World Vision. She needed a change of scene.
“I wanted to live overseas and the job opportunity I had to teach English at a public school offered an ideal living situation,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »
When most kids watched Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs after school, I watched telenovelas in Spanish with my nanny.
Though I couldn’t speak Spanish and Betty spoke little English, we made do with short phrases: Ella es mala, ella es buena. I learned to identify the villains and protagonists and the gist of various plotlines. I was seven, but I liked those soaps better than clichéd, cartoon cat-and-mouse chases. Read the rest of this entry »
Yoonmi Kim is a 28-year-old college student from Los Angeles who is an avid fan of Korean dramas. Adopted at the age of five, Kim says these dramas were a window to her cultural roots. She writes reviews for budding fans here. Read the rest of this entry »
Tom Larsen is a 35-year-old entrepreneur who knows an opportunity when he sees one. After living in Korea for a few years and taking Korean language courses in college, Larsen decided that he wanted to make Korean dramas readily available for Americans. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever been offended by someone’s mispronunciation of your name? A misspelling? Why did the well-loved storybook character Anne Shirley feel she had to introduce herself as Anne with an “e” to everyone she met?
Perhaps because we intuitively associate our name with our identity – and any distortion of our name distorts our identity. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s in a name?
Complicated question, but ask Binghui Huang and the answer is simple: Cultural, social and self-identity.
Sill, asking the 19-year-old, “What’s your name?” raises more questions.
That’s because Huang’s Massachusetts driver’s license and Northwestern University ID card give a first name of Binghui, while she introduces herself to people as Cindy. And that’s not about to change. Read the rest of this entry »
People often correct Anthonia Akitunde when she tells them to call her “Tomi.”
“Don’t you mean Toni, short for Anthonia?” they ask. Perhaps surprisingly, they also question the “h” in Anthonia.
They don’t know that Tomi is short for Oluwatomi, Akitunde’s given, Nigerian first name. And until the fifth grade, she was Tomi, especially to her parents, immigrants who passed their cultural pride on to her. Read the rest of this entry »
Kris Tanoo Merritt is Mike Merritt’s half-brother. They share a Thai mother, who married Kris’ Caucasian father in Thailand before immigrating to the States, and have four other siblings – one of whom is Kris’ twin brother, David. Read the rest of this entry »
What do a Twinkie and a banana have in common? OK, there is the fact that the delectable cake originally boasted a banana-crème filling and both are yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
Like an Asian-American! Read the rest of this entry »
Mike Merritt chuckles that people are often surprised when they meet him in person. It’s not that there’s anything unusual or off-putting about the 41-year-old Texan’s physical features or personality. People just don’t make the name-face connection until their first encounter with him. Read the rest of this entry »
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