Being (W)Asian

My largest identity-related fear of mine is that I am secretly a White person who yearns to be Asian in order to not be like “other White people”.

I am mixed race, with my mother being Korean and my father Irish-Polish. In having an Asian mother and a White father my siblings and I are part of a growing community of Wasians (or hapas as some may prefer). However, even among other Wasians I felt different because my mother was adopted by a White American family, which places my mother in a specific club of adoptees: Transracial Korean Adoptees.

Transracial (no, not that one) adoption is when a child of one race is adopted by parent(s) of a different race. This meant that no one in my family is culturally Korean/Korean-American, so by extension I don’t have any historical connection to the culture either. My link to Asian-ness is tenuous at best, if existent.

I taught myself how to cook Korean food as well as attempted to learn Korean for a little bit (I can still read Hangul if I have the time and concentration). I eventually hit a wall in my studies though because I didn’t have anyone to talk to in Korean even if I was to become conversationally fluent. Additionally, it just felt like I was learning these things to prove something to myself and/or others. But there are plenty of Korean-Americans who also don’t know how to speak Korean or cook Korean food, so why did I feel the need to do that?

When trying to seek out more peoples’ experiences in order to understand my own identity, I couldn’t find any direct comparisons to my own situation. The closest thing that I came across was a man whose both parents were transracial Korean adoptees, and he identified as a “second-generation adoptee”. I don’t use this outwardly to describe myself to others, but I have taken it as an important lens of understanding my own identity and relation to Korea.

I think what I am feeling is insecurity around declaring my identity to the world. The links to the different parts of my identity feel contingent and quite fragile, but the fact of the matter is that everyone makes choices about their identity and how they identify. Whether or not the justification is “good” doesn’t really have much importance. As someone who is drawn to philosophy and air-tight arguments, it has been hard to come around to the idea that identity is more self-willed than anything. Identity is just personal narrative, albeit one that can be accepted/rejected by others. However, that rejection or validation only affects you as much as you let it affect you.

I am only Asian because I want to be, and I think that there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel connected to a culture that I have genetic ties to. Really, I am just the product of my own upbringing. I grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, which is a part of a region which was the third largest U.S. home of Korean-Americans, after Los Angeles and the New York-New Jersey area. I think that if I was surrounded by Irish or Polish immigrants, I surely would have adopted more of that part of my identity, but instead I had the immense privilege to grow up around a lot of Korean people and embrace that part of my heritage, an opportunity that was not available to my mother.