The Experience of a Korean Immigrant
[About growing up in Korea:] To this day I’m not sure where I got this information, but we looked at white, white people with a bit of awe and a bit of envy, in contrast to African Americans or Africans—black people. We had this idea pretty early that black people were something “lesser than.”
In my school, a classmate had curly hair and darker skin, and although he didn’t tell any of us, most of us guessed that he probably had a mixed-race parent. He was teased constantly and unbearably.
Generally I did have the sense that I was all right the way I was. I was good. I was whole. There were many people close to me.
[About coming to the United States:] It’s difficult to pinpoint one or two specific incidents (although there are those, too), but after three or four years I generally felt something was wrong with me. And actually not many people made contact with me. I had maybe one or two friends throughout high school. Nobody would sit next to me. That’s probably one thing I could pinpoint. It happened every day, and it happened in a way that I couldn’t phrase as a problem, even to my parents, even to myself. From that I internalized this message: “Maybe there is something wrong with me that they’re not sharing with me.” (I couldn’t figure out what else it might be.) I did accept this message for a while, which is a terrible acceptance.
“How has counseling on racism affected your life and your perspective, and what do you now think is possible?”
It reaffirmed some of the attitudes that I had held when I was living in Korea: I was completely all right being me. There was nothing wrong with me. People are close. It was a great opening (and one I’d been looking for) to work to get those attitudes back.
I know it’s possible to live with, and have many close relationships with, all kinds of people all over the world. That’s a larger perspective than I would have had living in Korea, because of the racism there.
I think it is possible to change people’s mistrust of others and other feelings that have stopped people from getting a chance at treating each other the way they really have wanted to. I don’t know what other changes that will bring about, but I think it is possible to stop all mistreatment of one human being by another. I’ve never had that hope before.
Paekhyon Yim
Chicago, Illinois, USA
From the video “Ending Racism”