Ela Lee: “Being mixed-race is the beating heart of my identity”
The author on Korean racial politics, emotional authenticity and asserting her Britishness
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author Ela Lee, who is of mixed Turkish and Korean heritage. Ela is the author of Jaded, a phenomenal debut about a young lawyer, dutiful daughter, beloved girlfriend and loyal friend. But after a terrible incident one night, Jade wonders if she’s really the person she wanted to become, always adapting her identity to whoever she’s with. Jaded draws on Ela’s personal experiences of being mixed, so read on to hear her story below.
How do you define your identity?
I say I'm Korean-Turkish. My mum came from Korea in her late 30s, my dad came over from Turkey when he was in his early 20s. They didn't have family or friends or any network here. For them, building a home in the UK has been a huge exercise of trial and error.
How I describe myself has changed a lot over the years. I was born in the UK but wasn’t given British citizenship for a really long time because neither of my parents were British.
I felt this overwhelming need to prove that I was British, so when I was asked where I was from when I was younger I’d say ‘I’m British’ in a spiky way. As I got older, I started saying ‘I’m half-Korean, half-Turkish.’ I felt like the half was necessary because I didn’t present as overly Asian, nor did I present as Middle Eastern. Now I’m a bit more secure in my identity, I’ll just say I’m Korean-Turkish.
Can you talk to me about those racial politics in Korea?
I had a rude awakening to this. My mother never once let on that I wouldn’t be accepted as full Korean. My mum and I speak exclusively in Korean together and always have done. Korean is my first language, so I never understood when I was younger that I wouldn't be accepted as a Korean person. As I got older, I started to go to Korea without my mum and that’s when I realised I wouldn’t be considered Korean at all.
I think Korea is over 97% monoracial. There is very little racial and ethnic diversity. I go there and speak Korean and have my mother’s regional accent – people get really confused. Strangers will be like ‘how do you speak Korean when you're obviously not Korean?’ When I tell them my mother’s Korean, it doesn’t compute until I say that my dad isn’t.
There’s this concept of minjok which is this idea of one singular Korean race, it’s essentially the notion that there is a ‘pure’ Korean bloodline. In the English language I think it sounds scary to talk about pure bloodlines, but mixed-race Koreans have historically (following the Korean War, in particular) fallen into a societal grey area as a result.
It was really jarring for me as a 24-year-old, this was the country I’d aligned with myself my whole life and they don’t see me as one of them. It derives from colonisation and this need to protect yourself and stick together.
It sounds like you had good cultural grounding in both of your heritages growing up.
I think this is actually rooted in a lot of sadness. I think there was so much culture in my house because my parents had nowhere else to explore that. They didn't have access to community. Now, there are so many groups online and so many ways in which you can connect with people. I think they were really struggling and as a result, made our home this hub.
Food-wise, we almost exclusively eat Korean food because my dad's a shocking cook. We didn’t have a UK TV licence so we only watched Korean TV - I wasn’t allowed to watch X Factor. Apparently heaps of Korean dramas get the largest audiences in Turkey, they're just both really dramatic people.
My parents were very committed to me learning the languages and cultures. If I wanted to speak to them, I could only speak in Korean and Turkish. My parents went through this phase of literally ignoring me if I tried to speak English.
They were very active in celebrating national holidays, travelling to both countries, meeting our families, they were very committed to me spending a lot of time with my cousins. I'm very grateful to them, because now I feel anchored in both cultures in a way that I might not have done if they weren't so adamant on it.
For my mum, I think speaking to me in Korean was a manifestation of her not feeling confident in English. I remember her being mocked when I was younger. My ability to speak Korean is a huge privilege but also a little sad because I feel like my mum has never fully felt confident or comfortable speaking in English.
Was it important to you that drew on your own experiences for Jaded? The book represents mixedness so beautifully.
I knew I wanted to write a character who had no sense of who she was. I avoided making her mixed-race for a really long time because I didn’t want people to think I’d just written a book about myself. Then I realised that I spent my whole life not being able to read books about mixed-race people, and for a book like Jaded that handles such difficult topics, it had to feel emotionally honest.
If I'm trying to write somebody who is straddling multiple worlds and cultures, that is such a unifying thing about being mixed-race, learning to adapt, code-switching, feeling like you’re not fully accepted by every single community that you're a part of. There's a lot of my lived experience [in the book.] The actual facts didn’t happen to me but the feelings I had throughout my life have found their way in there.
Have you noticed any stereotypes around mixedness? How do you want the conversation to develop?
The stereotype is that it’s one white parent. My hope is that we can widen our understanding of what it means to be mixed-race and that it’s inherently a very varied experience. No two experiences are going to be the same. Understanding that there are people with no proximity to whiteness at all, which is definitely what I felt. I have two ethnic parents. Neither parent felt at home, both felt really uprooted. So widening that understanding that mixed-race can encompass all of those people as well would be really great to see.
What’s the best thing about being mixed for you?
I see it as a huge privilege that from such a young age I was exposed to multiple cultures, languages, races… as a result, it manifests empathy and compassion towards different types of people and a willingness to understand people who are different from us.
Can you sum up your mixed experience in one word?
Complex. That's neither a good thing or a bad thing. Being mixed-race is by far the most enriching part of my life. It's the beating heart of my identity. But it's also been a source of heartache and confusion. It's just fluid and it changes every day.
Get Jaded here. Next week, I’ll be speaking to actor Ayoola Smart. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (by way of East Africa) and my dad is white British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.