Grace Cho: “Shame is often felt, even if it’s not recognised consciously”
The author on the history of biracial children in Korea, embracing the margins of society and finding a place to call her own
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author and professor Grace Cho, who is of Korean-American heritage. Grace’s memoir, Tastes Like War, is an account of food, family and mental health, and will open your mind to the wider historical, political and social context around mixedness – plus the lasting impacts of this on mixed families. My conversation with Grace was so eye-opening and I hope you enjoy it, below.
How do you define your racial identity?
I refer to myself as Korean American, or Korean, or diasporic Korean. If I’m speaking to a Korean American audience, I’ll say I’m biracial Korean American.
Has your sense of self shifted over time?
Growing up, I was one of the very few people of colour in my town. As far as I know, my family was the first Korean family to arrive in the 70s. If I ever specified that I was half-Korean, I’d be met with resistance because everyone just saw me as an ‘other’. Most people had no idea what Korea was, I was called Chinese or Japanese – or slurs. As I got older, I tried to emphasise that I was only half-Korean. As an adult, I realised how much of that was because of my own internalisation of that racism, that I wanted to identify more with my white half.
When I went away to college, I was looking forward to being around other Korean American students. But when I went to my first Korean Students Association meeting, they said “you’re only half, you don’t belong here.”
I came to understand that as a biracial Korean of my generation, I came out of this legacy of US imperialism in Korea. My biracial identity crystallised understanding that I’m a colonised person. If you were born during a certain time period, it often meant that your father was a GI and your mother worked in the service industry for American forces. How my parents met was a secret that was kept from me for my whole life. At 23, I learned that my mother was a sex worker for the US military. She faced a lot of judgement. I think I internalised a lot of that without even knowing the history – shame is something that is often felt, even if it’s not understood or recognised in a conscious way.
Did you ever speak to your family about your mixedness?
The understanding is that I was just American. What that meant in practice is that I had to sacrifice a lot of Korean-ness to grow up in this small, xenophobic, rural American town. My mom made an effort to not speak Korean at home – that’s been a huge loss for me, I wish I could have had access to the language.
It was always assumed that the dominant American culture was the one I was supposed to assimilate to, and that people would eventually see me as American and not racialise me, but of course that never happened. Even my mom probably believed this fantasy of what America was prior to immigrating here. There was, and is, this misconception in South Korea that there is no racism here. That’s what a lot of Korean birth mothers believed, who gave their mixed-race children up for adoption.
You also couldn’t be a South Korean citizen if you were mixed-race, I think. You had to take the citizenship of your father, and it was often a foreign father. Biracial people were and are still socially marginalised. You don’t have access to public school, you can’t do mandatory military service, and if you don’t do that you can’t apply for a lot of jobs. Society is structured to keep biracial people out of mainstream institutions and structures of opportunity.
Younger people now see [being mixed-race] as something desirable because of mixed-race people in pop culture. People my age or older look at me with suspicion and ask if my father is Korean. For older people, there’s a huge stigma against being biracial because the assumption is that your mother was a sex worker. Their biracial children were considered to be the embodiment of US imperialism, and all that anger and resentment is projected onto biracial children and their mothers. I think a lot of older people make those associations, even if consciously, that might not be what's going on. Any possibility of me being able to call myself Korean over there goes out the window.
Did writing Tastes Like War throw up any surprising feelings about being mixed for you?
It allowed me to work through my rejection of Korean identity by mapping out where all the forces were around that. I don't think that anybody rejects their ethnicity or heritage just because they want to, there’s always some external force that creates the shame in the first place.
The book also looks at how the legacy of US imperialism impacts mental health. I did a panel with two other mixed-race Koreans, whose mothers were also probably sex workers for the US military, and both of their mothers also had schizophrenia. We must ask these questions about what structural, historical violence can drive somebody mad.
What’s one of the best things about being mixed for you?
I think the reason I reject Orthodoxy is largely because of being biracial, the experience of being pushed to the margins or told that you’re a misfit made me embrace the margins as a space of radical possibility, which is something I learned from bell hooks. That’s when I started to see that as a source of strength and seek out communities in those marginal spaces. I think it's been very enriching in terms of developing social thought.
Can you sum up your mixed experience in a word?
Multi-perspective. I think I've internalised how white people see me in the rural area where I grew up. As an adult, I've internalised how the Korean American community sees me. I'm aware of all of those perspectives, but the one that I've developed on my own is a critical perspective that I really value. I think being able to see all of these other perspectives allows me an ability to analyse the world in a way I'm very grateful for.
Buy Tastes Like War here. Next week I’ll be talking to author Laila Woozeer. 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.
Loved this. Thank you. Made me think - going to download the sample right now!
What a fascinating interview, Isabella. I found Grace's observation about unwittingly internalizing their mother's shame to be particularly interesting. It speaks to the subliminal nature of inheriting culture and family dynamics. Well done!