...FROM YOU! I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU

Sunday, October 06, 2002

 
bd sue had to write a 250 word essay for her writing class at uc irvine. she had to write a literary self-potrait or something like that. being the nice guy i am, i wrote it for her in 15 minutes. it sounds so 'high-school' though. i realized now i even mispelled some words. but oh well, it was 243 words and she seemed happy with it.

Self potrait exaggerating my mongloid features

A friend once asked me if I ever noticed how Koreans in America look different from Koreans in Korea. He said that some scholars said it was because the different languages people speak affect the way their face develops as they grow up. Different languages require different facial muscles to be used. If this is indeed true, the eight odd years I spent in Korea, five in Hong Kong and the last eight years I spent here in California must have changed my face in all sorts of different ways.

Maybe that’s why people are always telling me I don’t look Korean. In fact most of the time people think I look Chinese. It makes me wonder if I would have looked different had I stayed in Korea where I was born and lived there my whole life. I sure wouldn’t have my California tan. But would I look more “Korean”? Do I look Chinese because I lived in Hong Kong for 5 years as a kid? Would I look different if I had moved to New York instead of California?

The different places I’ve lived in my life no doubt has made me the person I am today. And maybe that’s reflected on the way I look. So when people tell me I don’t look Korean it’s because I am not completely just “Korean”. I am Korean American, with an emphasis in Californian and a little bit of Hong Kong mixed in.