How Growing up in America Led Me to Become a Snob

My dad announced one day that he got a promotion and we'll all be moving to America.  I said, "Ok.  Is that where Sesame Street and Land of the Lost come from?"  I don't even remember being sad about moving, losing all my friends, being away from the rest of our family.  My friends weren't sad either.  "Cool!", they all said.  Here's everything I knew about USA as a five year old in Seoul: NYC, Empire State Building, Disney, World Trade Center, Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, the arch in St. Louis, it's a big fucking country.  The only words in english I knew were yes and no.

Our family moved to America on February 26, 1982.  I started kindergarten immediately at Parkway Elementary in Paramus, which supposedly had a reputable ESL program.  I got beat up a couple of times on the bus just for being Asian.  Sometimes, I felt compeled to say something so I'd naturally say it in Korean and have an entire class laugh at me which would, of course, piss me off and make me yell at them in Korean and make them laugh even harder.  Yes, kindergarten sucked.  No wonder why I still hate New Jersey(and it sure doesn't help being the armpit of America).

The more and more I learned english, the insults diminished without ever stopping.  They generally took on subtler forms.  I quickly realized that the root of these insults was the fact that I was different.  I looked different.  I spoke to my parents in a funny language.  If there was anything different about me, it caused more alienation and derision.  I don't believe in God, I'm a Buddhist.  I actually like to read and enjoy doing well in school.  I'm a clumsy kid who sucks at sports - doesn't matter that I loved playing kickball, wiffle ball, and dodge ball - I sucked at it.  Of course these dumbfuck kids come to the conclusion that all this is because "I'm Korean."

Even with all the friends I made and all my parents' efforts in the assimilation process, I always got the sense that I was different and therefore, not wanted.  This problem would come in and out of my life and I just assumed that it was a reality in my life I just needed to accept.  Of course, my parents wanted my brother and I to be as much like everyone else in our class as possible.  My brother soon found out that he was a natural athlete and he had much less problems fitting in than I did. 

Of course, there were certain ideals and values my parents were adamant about us keeping: Our Korean identity, our language, our religion, academics receiving a high level of attention and respect.  I savored these opportunities to assert myself.  This worked out well for me as a strategy for being a Korean growing up in America until mid-high school.  Adolescent years are tough on everyone.  With all that self-doubt and self-consciousness being mixed up with hormones and stuff, all that juvenille shit I dealt with during my first few years here came crashing back.  I didn't expect it.  Nor did my previous strategy work in its entirety.

My life went through an eerily similar cycle as before.  I started to like and think things that most of my peers didn't care for.  They would eventually connect it with the fact that I'm Korean and use my ethnicity as a straw man thereby repairing their fragile egos by reasserting our differences.  I would later learn that the only way to overcome these overt and implicit attacks on my ethnicity was to find myself and that began with embracing these differences. 

This soon led me to make very deliberate choices in life.  Everything(and everyone) I become involved with must be considered very carefully.  If it's something(or someone) I want to involve myself with, I dive right in and throw as much energy as I can in pursuing it.  I really don't care about how others feel about it.  I only want to have experiences that benefit me or someone I care about.  I want experiences that have meaning.  This is how I protect myself and at the same time, assert myself.  If you don't like what I'm into, fuck you, I don't want your opinion.

I won't become friends with someone because other people like them, even if the people who like them are my best friends.  I won't go along with trends just because they are a trend.  I also won't commit the sin of reverse snobbery or follow counter culture blindly.  Those are rather superficial means of asserting someone else's idea of individuality. 

• When my two favorite bands broke up(Jane's Addiction and Living Colour), I gave up on popular music and devoted my attention to classical, jazz, and world music. 
• I read music critics state that Herbert von Karajan is the greatest musician to have ever graced the earth.  I won't listen to them.  I know that HvK sucks and developed this mystique only through PR. 
• I wear the clothes I wear because I never want to look back at myself and laugh,realizing that I owed such lapses in judgement to yielding mindlessly to the whims of fashion that day.  That is against everything I stand for.
• I have the friends that I have because their intelligence, compassion and integrity that demands my respect.
• My strong interest in wines and gastronomy challenges me on a sensual, intellectual, and spiritual level.
• I am a practicing Buddhist who takes spirituality with a healthy helping of gravity that it deserves not only because it has been instrumental in coming to these and other valuable conclusions about life, but because it also has kept me on that path.
• I am a conductor because it is the one profession that I found that demands honest and personal expressions of self every time I engage in it.

I don't view myself as a snob.  Some of the things I'm into kind of puts me into that stereotype.  I am very careful what kinds of influences I allow myself to encounter and engage in.  At first, this was an effective means to combat fallout from racism that I experience daily as a Korean living in America but eventually, it became a way to find myself and as a way of living fruitfully.