Korean vs. Korean American community on campus

On behalf of Yeji Jung

One nuance of my experience on campus as a Korean American is that I have very little community with specifically Korean Americans here. I’m a “1.5 generation” immigrant: I was born in South Korea but my parents moved to the U.S. when I was a baby, so I grew up here and am solidly Korean American. Part of the reason I don’t have a lot of Korean-specific community is that many of the Korean students here are Korean-Korean, not Korean-American—that is, they are international students from Korea. The culture gap is huge between Koreans and Korean Americans, and I feel pretty alienated when I’m with Koreans. (A lot of international students have to be wealthy to go here since there’s so little financial aid for international students, so that’s another aspect of it.) I feel a lot more affinity with Asian Americans in general than with Korean-Koreans. I strongly identify as Asian American especially here at Stanford, and a lot of that has to do with the timing and process of my being politicized once I got here. I was radically welcomed into a community gathered around a shared Asian American political identity. As has played out throughout the history of Asian American activism in the country, there is a tension between the power found in the unifying aspect of the pan-Asian American identity, and the simultaneous potential for erasure and flattening of the rich multiplicity within “Asian America.” So, in the context of the differential power dynamics within Asian America, I’ve learned a lot about my specific positioning and privilege as a light-skinned East Asian American, but have a lot more unpacking to do around the specifics of Korean-American-ness.