01. Epigraph
There was no way back.
There never had been.
From now on I would just live places.
-Caroline Kim, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories
There was no way back.
There never had been.
From now on I would just live places.
-Caroline Kim, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories
One day, when my brother was in preschool, he kept asking for gam at snack time. “Gam,” he said, over and over again, “I want gam!” Eventually, he started crying because his teacher could not understand him and therefore could not fulfill this request.
Later that day, his teacher called my mom and explained what had happened at snack time. My mom laughed and easily replied, “Oh, he was asking for persimmons in Korean!” My family usually speaks English at home, but we use Korean words for certain foods. I didn’t even know what the English word for gam was until after this .
Even now, as I explain this microcosm of my family’s linguistic and cultural tendencies, I – like my brother at three years old – yearn to be understood. As a Korean American person, I have lived my whole life in a culturally liminal space. There are so many gifts that come with being bicultural, but yearning for a place of full belonging is an endless ache.
Before my grandma passed away, I spent as much time with her as I could. When I cooked with her, I didn’t speak much. Instead, I watched and I listened. I did this for two reasons: my ears can understand Korean much better than my mouth can speak it, and I wanted to learn from her wisdom.
To fellow members of the Body who haven’t wrestled through multiple cultural identities: would you listen to me in the same way that I listened to my grandma? Have ears to hear? Listen and reckon with not speaking the language of multiple cultures, with never learning and living in that in-between. Please don’t presume unity with difference as a fun, optional topping. Trust the multicultural people around you to contribute something valuable and unique. Let them remind you of where God overflows.
As the apostle Paul says: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’”
I know I’m a part of the Body; what I don’t know is how to explain who I am to the other parts.
In the past five years, I’ve spent countless hours pondering the perfect metaphor for my ethnicity, for my biculturalism, for my liminal identity. Does it work like a sliding scale, with being fully Korean on one end and being fully American at the other? Does it work like a Venn diagram, with Korean culture in one circle and American culture in the other, creating Korean American culture in the overlap?
It’s both and neither of those things. It eludes simple visualization.
In college, I asked my mom if being Korean American is being Korean in one moment and being American in the next, like turning a switch on and off, or if it’s being Korean American, a distinct entity that is created by the combination of two unlike things, like combining blue and yellow into green. She said it’s the latter, that being Korean American is its own ethnicity.
Although I don’t believe that every Korean American would agree with this conclusion, it’s the closest my family has gotten to defining our experience.
I don’t know of a neat, tidy way to describe how I’m seen and how I see myself, but I do know that I’ve been perceived as a foreigner, an outsider, in both the U.S. and Korea. I most acutely feel my Koreanness when I’m in the U.S.; I most acutely feel my Americanness when I’m in Korea.
There are very, very few places where I experience full belonging.
This is what Tim Keller would call a “wound of grace” – like Christ’s dislocating touch on Jacob’s hip, I see now how both pain and God’s presence can meet in blinding color.
Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his life. With every step, he was reminded that he saw God face to face.
I am frequently reminded that my truest place of belonging has not yet come; it will only arrive when Love Himself returns in His full glory.
In the meantime, I wait. I wait, and I look to what He has already done.
One of the greatest gifts the Father has ever given me is time with my grandma. She was a talented cook, a sharp organizer, and a fourth generation Christian. She taught me about how the women in our family have anticipated their full belonging in faith, even amidst war, famine, abuse, persecution, and isolation.
My bloodline works like this: if a family name was passed down through the sons born into our family, then Christianity is passed down through the daughters who married into our family. Attempting to piece together the lineage of my foremothers was an act of recovery. Like a secondhand jigsaw puzzle, some fragments of their stories were difficult to find, some were hard to make sense of and place correctly, and others still were permanently lost. The women who were never identified in family books as anything other than wives or mothers were the women who imparted the most invaluable inheritance of all.
The women who never had any family name of their own, only their fathers’ and then their husbands’, spoke the language of the Gospel.
The Gospel is a mother tongue – one that I have not lost.
To fellow members of the Body who have wrestled through multiple cultural identities: we are blessed. Not in a materialistic or easy way, but we are blessed to contribute our incomplete belonging to God’s work on this Earth. Please remember that your maturing does not lie in shedding your identity, even if that path looks less burdensome. I pray for your sustenance, for your daily bread. I long with you for Jesus’s return, when our in-betweenness will be made right. I long with you for God’s kingdom, where we will be whole, wholly understood, wholly loved. Holy. Sacred.
May you be blessed as you bless others. Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
Karis Cho served as a Spiritual Formation Coordinator her junior year at Westmont College (graduating in 2021), which irrevocably deepened her love & understanding of God. She now works as the Events Communication Coordinator at Moms in Prayer International, privately tutors students in writing, and mentors teen girls at her church.