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A Grasshopper's Journey
By Grass
------longin' for home
my journey to korea began 23 years a go when the rest of my family left
to come to the united states to join my father. he had left in 1974 for
the states a year after i was born. south korea was enduring incredible
economic hardships at that time and many left as "economic refugees" to
places "developed" areas such as the united states.
for the duration of my life, for the past 23 years i had lived in queens new
york. my father had found a job as a superintendent in forest hills for a wealthy
korean landlord. my mother immediately found a job as a seamstress in a proto-sweatshop
for several dollars ( $3?) an hour. they supported three children, two daughters
and a son. economic hardship and serious disagreements around religion fractured
my family life from the onset.
for 23 years, i had lived in the heart of new york city, a perpetual foreigner
to its shores. growing up in the reagan era, i was thoroughly obsessed with
wanting to be "white". the shame that i held for my own foreign tongue
and its culture was too much for me to bear. in 3 short years, by the age of
8, i had forgotten how to read and write my native language as my korean speech
became stunted. even my own parents became foreign to me, a foreigner myself
in this new land.
it has been a long 23 years. by the time bush sr. and the gulf war rolled along,
the contradictions in my life had become too rife for me not to engage them
fully. if i was not part of the solution, i was part of the problem. a radical
rupture occurred in life as some would say. what the conclusions are to that
part of my life has yet to be seen. for certain, my trip to korea is in part
a search for those very same answers and that will be another story. i was
compelled to come back to this country, more than i wanted to. i had to complete
the fateful circle.
so being sent off with the love of friends and comrades in arms, on saturday,
september 29th, i flew for thirteen hours to land on these shores which had
given me my first birth. i was home.
