by Diane Farr
WHEN SEUNG LEAVES for work in the morning, I take matters into my own hands and call his cousin Charles. Charles is a prolific businessman with an uncanny ability to make art and money come together without compromising each other. He has a mystical quality in his honoring of others’ needs, whether that is advocating for his clients on a deal point or ceaselessly tending to his grandmother whom he shares very little language with.
When I first get him on the phone, Charles has the same shocked, hurt response that Seung does. These men are so respectful, though, there is no anger in their tone toward any of their parents but more bewilderment with a side of sadness. I flat-out ask if he will help me change not only this decision by the family, but also the future of how our whole generation will speak to and honor what being Korean American means for our children. I do not want to repeat this insular cycle that feels put upon me by the elder relatives. I specifically ask if Charles will rewrite “the myth of being Korean” with me for all of our future families.
Nearly ten years ago I taught a class in myth building. I had been teaching acting in a maximum-security men’s prison to juveniles who were incarcerated for long-term sentences but who were not yet ready for the “big house.” This, as fate would have it, was my “pay the rent” job while I was auditioning for acting roles around Los Angeles. After two years at this, I was asked to speak to unwed mothers in South-Central Los Angeles who were between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years old—as they were mostly the “baby mamas” of the incarcerated teens I had worked with. As part of the state-subsidized program that kept these teenage mothers in school, I taught a short seminar called Rewriting the Myth of Life, whose purpose was to try to inspire these young mothers to see what they wanted to teach their children versus the myth their parents taught them.
My classes began with my encouraging the girls to air out everything they did not believe that their parents said were “facts” or “rules.” Like if you had a baby by your fifteenth birthday, you didn’t get to have the big party or wear a white dress at your quinceañera. Or that it was okay to hit children if they were bad. Or that it was okay to throw children out on the street to find work and food by age ten or eleven. Then we would begin to think of what we would prefer to tell their children about what we, as a group, believed was right. By the end of the class, they wrote a collective “mother myth” of what they valued and decided as a group to tell their children about the culture of their home. This was empowering, not only for them but also for me. It was some of the proudest work I have ever done.
And now here I am asking an Ivy League–educated man to make a new myth with me so that we can inform our future families of why the Korean culture is beautiful without any of the boundaries or judgments that were inflicted on the “zero generation” in this family. And this includes people like Seung, who came as a child from Korea, and people like Charles, who were born here—even though both grew up in an entirely Korean house but have led a very American life outside of it.
I also ask Charles to call his mother and ask her to reconsider attending our wedding because if she will, I think the other relatives will also. I then ask Charles to tell his mother that Seung is greatly saddened by this action even though he would never say so. Charles is ready to oblige, but warns that there seem to be issues that, of course, have nothing to do with Seung. I ask him to try anyway, which, as I’m pushing him, I realize probably isn’t the right way to handle this. Charles is earnest, like Seung and all the rest of these fine men I have met in Seung’s generation of his family. My asking him to fix all of this is like asking a priest for absolution on a deathbed. I know he will work tirelessly at it. And I’m sort of asking Charles to question his mother. Suddenly aware of the can of worms I have just opened, I race off the phone and cancel my evening plans in order to confess this call to Seung. Mind you, I haven’t retracted my request. I just want to get away from it now, confess to it, and really hope that it still gets done.
SEUNG HOLLERS AT ME. Which is only the second time I have ever heard him raise his voice. He takes his volume down immediately, but it looks as though his head might pop off.
He understands my intentions but he doesn’t give a shit about them. I am wrong. I crossed a line. I inserted myself in matters of his parents that even Seung is not privy to. If he didn’t have the right to question this mandate in his own family, then I certainly did not have a right to. And I am wrong to have asked Charles to get involved at all, on Seung’s behalf or my own. Seung is not sure what part race is playing in these declines, but he doesn’t care. A second relative, an uncle from New Jersey, accepted the invitation today, and Seung is thrilled to have one aunt and one uncle and almost every cousin flying in from as many as five states to attend. Seung stops short of telling me to never, ever manage his family again, but I get the point. The line in the sand has been drawn, and I am on the other side of it.
I have to look at myself and really wonder what my disappointment was about: Was it just that I wanted to fix Seung’s hurt feelings, or was it a little bit about not wanting to let go of showing off all the Korean language and culture tricks I have spent months learning?
And I could just throw up in disgust with myself because I know there is no separating the two.
CHAPTER 11.
ISRAELI JEWESS LOVES TRINIDADIAN HEATHEN IN WASHINGTON
“No one was walking me down the aisle because I was giving myself to this man.”
—ELLIE GOLD
I AM ON A plane to Seattle because I’m so ashamed of my last action. I am embarrassed for both Seung and myself that I overstepped into his family matters by calling his cousin Charles and asking him to convince his family to attend our wedding. I am so embarrassed that I need to get away from my own house, my own wedding, and my own perspective. I need a safe place to confess my sins and create my own form of penance regarding how to move forward with Seung. Even though he is no longer mad at me, I am mad at me. I don’t like my own desperate behavior, and I’m not entirely positive it won’t happen again. So flying to see Ellie for counsel is a preventive measure.
I met Ellie Gold on a film set nearly ten years ago now. There isn’t anything I don’t feel comfortable confiding in her. Although I am as sure as ever that I want to marry Seung, I need some guidance from someone who’s been at the intersection of love and race for quite some time, because I feel like I’m running in a Korean Habitrail. I’m going around and around, expending a ton of energy for no good reason. I’m not making fans of any of the family members who have shunned me, and now I’m even annoying those who love me. I recognize that it’s my choice to get off this cyclical race to nowhere, and yet ... here I go again. Running to Washington state to do more talking about his heritage and mine, his relatives and our mutual bad behavior now—and to hopefully figure how to stop making race such a consistent theme in my otherwise tranquil path to marriage. So although it may seem like I’m furthering the drama by flying to Seattle and hiding at Ellie’s for the weekend, sequestering myself for fifty hours in a city that always seems to be weeping with rain, might just be the ticket for me to resolve my issues right now.
Ellie was the first of my peers I ever heard openly discuss her fears about entering into an interracial marriage. Her parents took issues with her choice in a partner, but their approval was not the only cause of Ellie’s deliberations. It was many years ago that I sat across from Ellie, during the last days of her single-in-Seattle life, when I found myself speechless as she solemnly confessed to me, “If I marry him, there are only about four cities in America I’d feel comfortable living in, and that frightens me.” This was a shocking statement in 2005—coming from a woman who knew more about the world and all its cultures than most any American I knew. And yet she was unsure if the world was actually ready for her and James.
They had met when they were both working for one of the biggest Internet companies in the world—when most of the planet didn’t even know what a blog was yet. But Ellie and
James were ahead of the curve in many ways. Both writers, he a journalist and she a novelist, they were both trading in their backgrounds to try “journaling on pop culture” for the masses. James had gotten in at the beginning and was now the most senior person on staff, while Ellie was a brand-new copyeditor.
James is vibrant, funny, and well liked by everyone. When he seemed to be flirting with Ellie, it was a no-brainer for her—even though I wouldn’t exactly say he was her type. Ellie had dated black men before, but she is also an Israeli Jew who steadfastly believed she would marry someone from her own religion. And although Jews come in all colors, finding one with dark skin in the Pacific Northwest was somewhere between futile and impossible. But this difference in faith, and the fact that she and James were about to begin a work-based romance, were not the only two things going against them.
James is West Indian, which means so many things that I had to get out a map and a book on their history, and still Ellie had to explain more to me. The West Indies are a collection of islands in the Caribbean. They are south and east of America, but when Christopher Columbus landed there he thought he had reached Asia. Thus “West” of Europe and “Indies” as in India. Since the mid-1700s most of these islands have been dependencies and colonies of many European nations, most notably the British, who retained a large collection of the islands in the archipelago until the 1960s. Therefore, many in the region speak English as a first language, and geopolitically, many of these nations are considered a subregion of North America. For these two reasons, the East Coast of America is home to many West Indian people, who are black in color but a mix of many cultures.
One of James’s grandfathers was a pale Scottish man with red hair, and a great-grandfather was Chinese. This is not uncommon in the makeup of many West Indian families. There is large British, Asian, and Indian influence throughout the islands, but particularly in Trinidad. James’s coloring is dark, but there is also a hint of Asian in his handsome face. He was born in London and raised there until age seven, when his family moved back to Trinidad. James lived in Trinidad for ten years before getting accepted into Columbia University and moving to the United States. There was not one “African” or “American” thing about him when he arrived in New York. Unlike so many immigrants first arriving in this country, though, he was on a fast track for white-collar success, but also slightly unaware of the pitfalls, in love and in work, of what it would feel like to be categorized within an American subculture that was not his.
After college James began an impressive career as a journalist working for some of the biggest newspapers in the United States, and then he began moving west, city by city, before landing in Seattle. By the time he met Ellie, James was more than ready to settle down. Over lunch one afternoon, while the rest of their department was at a meeting, they began the perfect summer romance that James felt responsible to end when September came. He dumped Ellie because he wanted to have children by age forty—only a few months away—and Ellie was thirteen years his junior.
At twenty-six years old, Ellie Gold was not completely against having children, but she didn’t fight James too much over the breakup. They both still had tremendous feelings for each other, but she did not want to waste James’s time, either—because as it turns out, Ellie, too, understood the repercussions of skin shade in her life. As a Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jew, Ellie has one parent, her mother, who is very light-skinned, and another, her father, who is dark. Born and raised in Israel, her father (whose family came from Spain long before) met her mother (a towhead born in South America) when she moved to Israel at an early age. They had no complications in Israel due to color, as they shared so much else in common: They both spoke Spanish, Hebrew, and English; they both had roots in Israeli culture; and they were both Jewish. They came to the United States doing NGO work for the betterment of Israel before Ellie was born. When Ellie’s older brother (by eight years) left for college, they took Ellie, who was a completely Americanized preteen West Coaster by then, on the road. Ellie was interested to see the world and didn’t fight them much. She spent the next six years—her teenage years—in Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
While living in Asia, Ellie attended Baptist schools. Prayer time and the fact that all her classmates but one were white would begin her personal journey into feeling like an outsider in a group—but it was her after-school experiences that would stay with her forever.
Ellie witnessed the prejudice that existed toward dark-skinned, particularly Indian, people in many of these countries during this time. Ellie’s dark-skinned father was often mistaken as Indian, and was sometimes refused service at restaurants. Her family would then leave the establishment and five minutes later Ellie’s lighter-skinned mother would then ask for a table and be granted one immediately.
Ethnocentricity, racism, and the prejudices of shade were all part of Ellie’s elementary and junior high curriculum.
She didn’t discuss any of this intolerance with her dad; rather, he let the lessons speak for themselves. Her parents were moving them around the globe doing their work and her dad was not so caught up in making friends. Their family kept their same cultural practices wherever they lived, and Ellie and her mother were very close and talked about most things. They discussed everything Ellie was feeling at this time, but the memories of the actions Ellie witnessed have stayed with her the most over the years. Therefore, Ellie fully understands the premise of all the questions swirling in my head today.
Ellie didn’t spend much time as an adult examining those childhood feelings, but James’s desire for children opened her eyes to a deep understanding that she wouldn’t want to put her children in the situation she’d experienced—where they would be so different from everyone else. However, she and James were both mad for each other. The love-struck fools continued to go on a platonic date once a week for four months, which officially ended when they attempted to spend a New Year’s Eve together as friends. That night, James finally came to terms with the fact that he didn’t want to spend his life without her. And Ellie felt the same, even while she feared the possible pitfalls of living as a black and olive/Jewish and heathen/Israeli and Trinidadian American couple.
By this time James had left the company they worked for and Ellie witnessed firsthand how much harder James had to work for jobs than even she did, as an olive-skinned female with fewer degrees and less experience. James had completed a master’s degree by this time and still had periods where he was out of work. Stunning statistics were driven home for Ellie during that time. Even during the Clinton-era economic boom, the unemployment rate for young black males was double and, in some parts of the country, triple that of white males.1 After George Bush’s years in office, when America’s unemployment rate rose to near Depression-era levels of almost 10 percent, by many accounts more than one-quarter of that figure was reserved for black males. According to The New York Times, in 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their twenties were jobless, and by 2004, that share had grown to 72 percent—compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. But even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their twenties were jobless in 2004—up from 46 percent in 2000.2
Keep in mind the incredibly high rate of incarceration for black males between twenty and thirty years old—in 1995, 16 percent of black men in their twenties who did not attend college were in jail or prison, and again by 2004, that figure climbed to 21 percent for incarceration, eclipsed only by the fact that by their mid-thirties, six in ten black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. With such statistics, Ellie wondered, who in the black community was actually working? And what would this lack of working males do to this community over many years? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that unemployment in 2009 for blacks, or African Americans, was nearly double that for whites, and there was an even larger discrepancy between blacks and Asians.3 Ellie found that her experience of being the outsider in the many ci
rcles she grew up in couldn’t prepare her for just how difficult things could be for an educated black male in the States. NPR.org states that African American men over the age of twenty lead the country’s jobless surge with an unemployment rate of 17.1 percent today.4
Although Seattle is believed to have the highest interracial couple population in America, Ellie was also concerned about their double minority status, and what this would mean for their children. All of these things furthered Ellie’s feelings that life outside of Seattle was not an option for them—a hard reality for her given how important travel had been in her family growing up.
I sit in her apartment while the rain pours outside the floor-toceiling windows. Ellie chases the tracks of the raindrops against the windows with her fingers as if they were tears streaming down the life she once saw for herself. She loves James with all her heart and feels lucky to have him, but she was sure that Seattle, Brooklyn, D.C., and Los Angeles were the only places they could live—where their being of different races, different religions, and different heritages wouldn’t entirely define every other decision they would make in life.
I feel confused, and moreover a little afraid, when Ellie first pronounces this. I remind her of San Francisco, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, and Chicago. But she has stipulations for each of those locales, and it is clear that she’s already given this a lot of thought. One city divides black and white Americans by water; another lacks a Jewish community; and some, she feels, are more Southern and Midwestern than I was aware. Ellie is way ahead of me on racial tolerance when it comes to love, and I feel unequipped to discourse with someone who is as liberal-minded as I am but more experienced and well read on the subject. Her willingness and bravery to discuss these potentially embarrassing and hot-button issues at all are what makes me think she might just be the most progressive and evolved woman of my generation whom I personally know.