Keeping Up with the Koreans: Episode 1
Photo Description: Two mixed Korean femmes sit in a living room. One is seated on a floral patterned couch in the background, smiling. The other is in the foreground, being licked on the face by a brown dog named Charlie.
We thought it important that the first post for Keeping Up with the Koreans touch on what makes Oakland home for the both of us. While we share similarities, our pathways to Oakland are unique and we have written about our experiences separately.
To learn more about us please visit Meet the Koreans. For more information about what we hope to accomplish with our project please visit Meet the Project. Welcome to our world!
I cannot separate my transness from Oakland. For me they are one in the same. I moved to Oakland from New York City, where I had developed a community of friends who felt like family. After nearly five years of living in Brooklyn, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something, everything, needed to change. I couldn’t articulate my specific desires but knew deep in my bones that I had outgrown my present life. I had an emerging desire to understand locked parts of myself and to be seen within my own cultural history. I used graduate school to convince my Korean mom that California was the place that I needed to be, for professional reasons of course. I told my Jewish grandmother of a therapist about this destructive, terrifying need to change. “I’m worried for you,” she said with that perfect therapist head tilt. “I mean do you even know anyone out there? Do you even know for sure that you are a transgender?”
Soon my last month became my last week, and I was devastated to leave my NYC chosen family. That last week, I laid awake at night paralyzed by the enormity of this life change. What the hell I was doing? My NYC family sent me off in true style; one send-off party after the other. My mom drove up from Kentucky in a Ford pick-up truck to Park Slope. I made her a sesame bagel with lox as a parting last respect to Brooklyn, and with a 15 minute turnaround we headed back to Kentucky. There, I finalized a ‘trans-america’ road trip out West with my buddy, Chris, which felt like one giant cliché. From Kentucky, I made the trip to Chicago to meet Chris in my tiny red, twink of a car, ‘Cherry-bomb’. Together we transversed the cornfields of Iowa, the rugged hills of South Dakota, the majestic mountains of Wyoming, the white ass land of Utah, the disorienting and drunk city of Las Vegas, and arrived in Los Angeles just in time for a roof-top pool party. After a short LA stay, I dropped Chris off and headed North to Oakland.
I had a summer sublet in North Oakland with two queer, radical, Asian women. My first summer in Oakland was the answer to my heart’s whisper for change and growth. At my new temporary home, my roommates and I had daily discussions around the kitchen table about privilege, power, race, justice, and queerness. I learned about Oakland’s rich history of resistance, about the terrible, violent nature of gentrification, and how I could be accountable for the impacts of my move on local communities. I learned to feel empowered in my queerness and made deep, new connections in which I felt seen and appreciated in my complexity.
At the beginning of the following year, I decided that I was ready to live openly as a transwoman. As my body and outward presentation became less “androgynous” and more perceived as female, my relationship to Oakland changed. Male harassment and aggressive staring made walking and using public transportation increasingly more challenging. I began to understand how misogyny is interconnected with classism and racism. As a perceived Asian man, I was desexualized. As an Asian woman I became a sexual commodity in a public marketplace. As I entered into Nori, I woke up to pain, not just personal but also community wide. The types of spaces in Oakland that I inhabited continued to change. I was drawn to and felt safe in spaces for and by queer and trans people of color. These new community spaces recharged and protected me in a world that no longer felt safe. Oakland and the communities I adopted weren’t just a new home but became increasingly necessary for my survival.
The following summer, I became connected to my radical, queer Korean community. Building and sharing with other Koreans who hold intersectional, radical politics and queer identity has provided healing and is currently the highest priority in my life. On Sunday’s, I meet with ieumsae, a group of queer and trans, radical Koreans who practice pungmul, folk-style Korean drumming rooted in political resistance. Members of our group began a radical Korean history study group this summer, in which Mika and I attend. This space has been outrageously beautiful. Korean adoptees, immigrants, second-gen folks, and mixed Koreans of all backgrounds come together to not only learn about our history but share feelings of grief and hurt which builds our collective resistance to white imperialism while surviving in diaspora. Just as my transness cannot be separated from Oakland, my transness cannot be separated from my Korean community, which can only exist here in Oakland. The interplay between these entities is now my beautiful home.
Two of my dad’s most distinguishing traits are his stubbornness and his strong work ethic, both of which he passed down to me. With a thirst for self-sufficiency, he started working young. His first job took him into Daly City’s morning fog to deliver newspapers. He’d come home with some cash in his pocket and a sense of independence. Daly City is just south of San Francisco on the peninsula, across the Bay from Alameda, the drastically less gray town in which I grew up. Daly City and Alameda are two dots of many on a map of Bay Area places important to me. Others include my great-grandmother’s San Francisco flat in Japantown, the site of much sushi making and eating, and my grandfather’s taqueria in East Oakland, the very first in Oakland. Each helps me understand the Bay Area and my place in it. They are evidence of my roots here, my reason for being here.
But none of this mattered to me as a teenager. At 17 I was already bent on getting out of the Bay. Thanks to my inherited stubbornness, I did. At 18 I left for college in rural Massachusetts. There I was able to stretch my wings and grow on my own terms; I became politicized and more active in racial, reproductive, and environmental justice work. I also began thinking about how to create and invest in radical, intentional community.
Then, halfway through my four years there, a switch flipped. Perhaps the burden of being “other” in a place that was REALLY WHITE became too heavy. Or maybe I just missed tacos and sushi. Probably both. While I had community in Massachusetts, it began to feel less and less resonant. I started to yearn for my Bay Area roots, for smells, tastes, and sounds from my childhood: eucalyptus trees, ranchera music, and takeout window dim sum. I began to remember what I had once wanted to escape. I wanted to return, and felt excited to interact with my legacies again, and to build new life and community here.
When I moved back in the Spring of 2014, I both breathed a sigh of relief and braced myself. It was going to be hard to reintegrate into a place that had changed so much while I was gone. I looked to my map to guide me, hoping to connect to the sites I had left behind. My reorientation process also meant building new community, dependent on my values and politics. It meant new dots atop my existing map: my Berkeley apartment, the cafe collective down the street, activist spaces, chosen family, and new sights, smells, and sounds. These dots form a guiding constellation that I use everyday as I navigate the Bay Area.
