By Miranda Park (she/her)

I consider myself so lucky to have been brought up in a multi-generational family. Having been raised by both my mum and Halmeoni (grandmother), I’ve been able to witness firsthand the strong bonds and vast differences in our experiences as first and second-generation immigrants. In our relationships with one another, we have had to navigate cultural divides, language barriers, and reconcile differences in values and opinions borne out of our shared migratory history. To better understand what it has been like for each of us living as Korean-Australian women, I sat down with Halmeoni and mum over a cuppa to listen to their experiences and reflections.

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The story of the bulgogi sandwich is a well-worn anecdote that certain members of my family like to revive whenever they talk about their first memories of moving to Australia. Mum will moan about how embarrassing it was bringing these strange smelling Korean meat sandwiches to school as a kid, when everyone else had plain old vegemite. My Halmeoni – feeling slightly attacked by this jab at her meal preparation skills – will defend herself by claiming ignorance about the Aussie lunch trends, or of only having time to stick lasts night’s dinner between two slices of bread before going to work.

Naturally, when I broached the idea of talking with mum and Halmeoni about this topic, the bulgogi sandwich story was one of the first to be brought up. But unlike the many other times it’s been spoken about (and used as emotional ammunition) by my family, I was able to get some context behind the offending lunch item. While I’d known that Halmeoni became a factory worker after emigrating, I had no idea the kind work-oriented lifestyle she developed. When describing what it was like to live in a Korean diaspora, she said:

I was a housewife in Korea but if you emigrated, you had to work. That was the mentality that yes, we would have to sacrifice the kind of lifestyle where we could spend time just being a homemaker. That role had to be sacrificed as a general principle of migration […] Many Korean women of my generation were either making money by sewing at home or working in factories. Even if you had graduated from university in Korea, because of the language barrier, we couldn’t work in jobs we had studied for.

Such was the all-consuming job of building a new life from scratch, that for Halmeoni and many of her contemporaries, parenting and pursuing careers of their choice were considered luxuries that came a distant second to the imperative of achieving financial stability. No wonder there was only time to make leftover bulgogi sandwiches.

Talking to Halmeoni about her first years in Australia, I also got the sense that there was a profound lack of support networks available to her as a working migrant mother. Yet despite the immense isolation she must have felt in this position, her presiding mantra was always, ‘Whatever I have here is better than whatever I left in Korea’. Now I understand how, even at the ripe age of 86, she still has the kind of fierce determination that can make me break out in a sweat.

Listening to mum’s side of the bulgogi sandwich story was an equally eye-opening, but very different conversation. For mum, it encapsulates the experience of growing up in Australia with the constant feeling of being on the outer. She said:

I think it comes down to this idea of feeling shame towards one’s cultural origin. The bulgogi sandwich is just an example of this embarrassment and self-consciousness I felt, the shame that you can’t neatly fit into the ways of doing things that your peers do, which for them seemed kind of effortless.

While I was surprised to hear that my mum – who avidly watches K-dramas and has declared on multiple occasions that she couldn’t live without kimchi – has felt any kind of shame towards her country of birth, the feeling of shame she conveyed was one I could instantly recognise and relate to. After discussing the concept of shame some more, we both came to the realisation that shame generates a perpetual need to apologise. Thinking back to when I was as a kid, whenever I invited my friends over to our house, I would always apologise for whatever strange cooking smells might be emanating from our kitchen. Even if my friends didn’t so much as bat an eyelid towards the direction of our kitchen, I had probably convinced myself that they’d take one whiff of the soybean soup Halmeoni was cooking and run out of the house screaming.  

It’s not surprising, then, to consider how pride has often stemmed from my ability to assimilate with (white) Australian culture. I recall a moment in primary school, when my friend’s dad said that if a stranger spoke to me over the phone, they would assume I was white. I still remember the overwhelming sense of pride I felt at this backhanded compliment. It was like someone saying to me, ‘You’re more like us than you are like them’. I had that exact same feeling again when I was 14, after my best friend told me I was ‘the whitest Asian’ she knew. Only now do I understand that this pride I felt was the product of my internalised racism, that throughout my childhood and teen years, being able to distance myself from my Korean heritage was the yardstick with which I measured my worth.

But as with most aspects of one’s cultural identity, shame and pride are complex things. Whatever shame mum has felt towards her country of origin, she still claims to feel a greater affinity with Korean culture than she does Australian, despite having lived here since she was five. Perhaps you could attribute this to the connection we make as children to our place of birth, but I think this speaks volumes about the profound sense of displacement felt by many who chose to emigrate, and perhaps even more so for those seeking asylum. How difficult it must have been for her to navigate this strange and often contradictory process of forming an identity as an Australian by law, and a Korean at heart. What allowed me to better understand her predicament was the following comment she made:

We were really struggling just to find our place here. Whereas those who’ve lived here for generations – aside from First Nation peoples, paradoxically – they seem to have this fundamental sense of ease in the culture. And so always having to defer to the ‘better wisdom’ of those people, rather than trying to find it out for myself. It was like ‘oh, don’t know if I really have the local knowledge to be able to make an informed decision’. Even after all these decades of living here, I still feel that. That I don’t really have the local wisdom, the local knowledge. This I attribute to not having that deep connection with the mainstream […] You feel there’s a certain precariousness about your situation, especially as a single parent, that it’s so reliant on the goodwill of other people.

I found it so poignant the way mum articulated this sense of belonging as being such a privileged, hard-won feeling for someone on the cultural periphery. It’s also incredibly telling how our subconscious thoughts can give us away; my Halmeoni proudly calls herself Australian, but even as she was talking about her life here, she kept referring to Australia as 님외 나라 or nam-oe nala (meaning ‘foreign country’). Even as a second-generation immigrant, I still experience moments where my sense of belonging in this country is, as mum puts it, precarious. The most glaring example of this is being asked the classic, ‘But where are you really from?’.

For those who’ve never been asked this question, it usually goes something like this:

Complete stranger: ‘So where are you from?’

Me: ‘I’m from Australia.’

Complete stranger who now looks a little confused: ‘But where are you really from?’ or, ‘I thought you were Chinese…’

I know many can relate to this frustrating experience of having someone basically tell you that your own truth – about who you are and where you come from – is wrong. However, as disempowering as this can be, the way we chose to respond to such racial microaggressions can reveal our strengths. As always, mum reminded me of this with one of her great nuggets of advice:

I think you have to be very careful that you don’t portray a person (including yourself) solely as a victim of racism and someone who’s stuck in that blaming mentality. You need to become aware of how cultural dynamics, family dynamics, all different kinds of dynamics intersect. And those factors are inherent to your personality. All these intersections are inextricably enmeshed with how one subjectively interprets racism. They inform the way you navigate – ‘successfully’ or not so successfully – racism. It’s not just an objective ‘there is racism’. It’s how one interprets it, how one makes sense of it, that’s important.

What I’ve learnt from Halmeoni and mum is that our lives as Korean-Australians are shaped, but certainly not defined by the challenges of racial prejudice and cultural difference we encounter. Our stories are so much more than that. They are also about the resilience we’ve built and the opportunities we’ve taken to embrace those points of difference and celebrate our diversity. My pride now comes from my understanding of how powerful this is.

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