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 »
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 »
Sewer grates. Cobblestone streets. Ice slicks. Traversing these urban hazards in a pair of heels isn’t easy. Just the other day, I was walking from the train station to the office along with a steady stream of laptop-carrying workers. I was just minding my own business in a pair of low heels when, wham! My sensible business-casual heel was stuck in a sewer grate and I was doing a one-foot hop to get it back on. Most women who wear heels probably have had a similar mishap so when I read this Time article about Seoul painting parking spots pink so women could cut down on the high heeled commute, I was all for it. However, it seems this pink paint is brushing over larger gender issues. 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 »
We’ve all heard the doom facing mainstream media: the downfall of print, the flawed money-making model of online, and the get-it-free attitude debate over the future of print and the Web. Still, even with today’s financial woes, one part of the journalism business is poised to thrive – ethnic media.
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 »
by Jane Park
Navigating the narrow corridors of her church, Joo Mi Oh greets an elderly woman.
“Hi,” she says in Korean, quickly nodding her head in a small bow. The woman nods in return and walks past her.
Then Oh turns around to warmly hug one of her Sunday school students and ask, “How are you?” This time in English.
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