{"id":135679,"date":"2019-04-19T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T15:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135679"},"modified":"2019-06-21T12:47:59","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T16:47:59","slug":"fully-half-korean-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/19\/fully-half-korean-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Fully Half Korean"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

West Virginia, EPA photo by Jack Corn, 1974<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhy all the middle-aged men, Mike?\u201d my writing professor asked me one afternoon during my junior year of college. She was curious (concerned? baffled?) why, in the two semesters we had spent together, my stories were often about white men twice my age. While my peers wrote about college and high school kids doing college and high school things, I veered toward chronicling the failures and half-measures of middle-aged men. My professor asked whether I had ever thought to write about my own life, my unusual background\u2014my mother is Korean and my father is Appalachian. I remember feeling squeamish at the thought. It had occurred to me, but I wasn\u2019t ready to write about it. I told her maybe I would when my parents had passed on, but that wasn\u2019t the only reason. In many ways, I had never fully felt half Korean, which is an odd thing to say, to be fully half of something. But what I mean is, I identified then as mostly white and Appalachian and my being half Korean, though undeniable in my features, seemed secondary. What seems extraordinary about our lives to others is often ordinary to ourselves. I could see why my professor might see the fertile ground in such stories, but they held little appeal to me.<\/p>\n

Around this same time, I came across a short story set in India in a national magazine. I disliked the story and thought that the only reason it had been published was because of its unique setting. It was as if our struggles back home, all the poverty and hardship in Appalachia, were givens, not worth reading about\u2014surely not the stuff of the stories that the New York publishing world seemed to crave. In the late days of the twentieth century, at the small state college I attended in Bowling Green, Kentucky, there was not a lot of talk about agency, representation in literature, or appropriation. I could have been wrong about the exoticism I perceived in that story in the magazine, but I don\u2019t think so. It made me think that if I wrote about my parents, myself, what it had been like to grow up half Korean in a town with an ugly racist past, my stories would be published only for that content and not for their prose. I feared that if that happened, I would be trading on my heritage and exploiting it. So I hunkered down into white male characters and the white male writers who taught me how to write about white men.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is gonna be trouble,\u201d I said to my friend over the phone. \u201cTrouble?\u201d he said. \u201cSo what? Think about the story you\u2019ll write later.\u201d Joanna ran me over\u2014hard. For a long time, I let myself believe that I\u2019d gotten my heart broken for the sake of my fiction. Near the end of it, when I was home visiting my parents, my mother asked what was wrong. She had noticed a stoop in my carriage, my preoccupied thoughts. So I told her, finally, that I\u2019d had a hard year. I\u2019d fallen in love with this woman and it hadn\u2019t worked out. \u201cWhere does she live?\u201d Mom asked. \u201cParis,\u201d I said. \u201cKentucky?\u201d Her voice rose in surprise and alarm when she said it. \u201cNo, Mom. The real Paris,\u201d I told her. \u201cWell,\u201d she said, her voice and features both softening, \u201cit may work out. It did for your dad and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was almost thirty years old and maybe it will seem odd that I had never considered before then what it meant to be a hyphenated American, but I hadn\u2019t. Not until I was working a job that required me to travel up and down both coasts did I realize how odd my person was to strangers: a large, half-Asian man with a thick Southern accent. It didn\u2019t occur to me how strange my childhood seemed from the outside until everyone I met kept asking me about it. Shortly after I returned to Cleveland, where I was then living, I wrote the story \u201cSlope.\u201d It\u2019s still the most autobiographical story I\u2019ve ever written. It begins, \u201cWren Asher is nearing thirty and over the summer, like his father before him, he\u2019s fallen in love with a woman who lives in another country. But that is where all similarities end.\u201d Like most writers, I write to understand my confusion. The breakup with this woman had become a turning point in my life, a moment for me to explore who I was and who I wanted to be. So Wren, a half-Korean boy from a small southeastern Kentucky town, was born, and I explored his fraught relationship with a woman who broke his heart, who exoticized his Appalachian roots and forced him to think hard about the only place he had ever called home.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlope\u201d was the first time I ever tackled head on what it had been like to grow up in Corbin, Kentucky\u2014named Fordyce in the story. Though I had eschewed writing about it, my life had been informed by it. From the time in second grade when a boy pulled down the corners of his eyes and called me Japanese, to a year later, when my mother, dropping me off at school, put the car in park to confront some older kids who had been making mock karate kicks and jabs at us as we pulled up. \u201cYou want me to show you some real karate?\u201d she said to them. I lived my high school years on edge, waiting on a moment to turn, for someone to drop a slur. It didn\u2019t matter that I was a varsity athlete or that I was in the \u201ccool\u201d clique. Someone would find a reason to remind me who I was and what I wasn\u2019t. I might have mostly self-identified as a white Appalachian male, but only mostly. I lived in between cultures.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlope\u201d also forced me to look at Appalachian culture. I had spent so many summer weekends at a cabin my father had built with his brothers. We\u2019d leave the town of Corbin behind and head into the mountains, to an even slower place, blanketed in the ever-present whine of cicadas. There, with my cousins and uncles, I tromped through the forest, learned to fire a rifle before I knew my ABCs, sipped my first beer, shot at squirrels, looked at Playboy<\/em>, and watched the men play cards and drink. When winter came, we still went to the cabin, standing in the cold living room, shoulder to shoulder, man to child, watching Kentucky games on the fuzzy television screen. I was surrounded by men, men who said little except to kid one another, a brother and cousins, who taught me how to hunt and fish, how to mark a path so as not to get lost. I learned that to be a man was to close yourself up as tight as a fist, to bear your pain\u2014physical and emotional\u2014in silence.<\/p>\n

And as I got older, and drifted into the emotional world of fiction, and into the depth of my feelings for all things, I found that I was no longer numb to the racism. There is a moment in Claudia Rankine\u2019s Citizen<\/em> when she describes being in line at a pharmacy and a man cuts in front of her. Realizing his mistake, he says, \u201cI\u2019m sorry. I didn\u2019t see you.\u201d Rankine repeats that last sentence as a refrain. I didn\u2019t see you. I didn\u2019t see you. I didn\u2019t see you. Living in Corbin, it had been easy for me to not see that racism, but when I moved away, I saw with stinging clarity how ignorant\u2014in the truest sense of the word\u2014and damning it was. I saw my mother\u2019s strength in a way I hadn\u2019t before. Some good people I grew up with would say they saw us only as us, they didn\u2019t see our race, but Rankine teaches us that to see someone is to see all of them. I had to learn to see myself.<\/p>\n

When I return now to the mountains of Appalachia, I feel the security of home, of the landscape that marked the sight lines of my boyhood. But I know, now, that I won\u2019t ever move back to that place that shaped me, and I find that I feel homeless. Homeless like my mother does when she thinks about the country she left behind and the one she has claimed. I don\u2019t pretend our similarities go beyond that, but I am reminded that where there is pain there is also love. Those opposing forces forged me into the man I am now.<\/p>\n

I sometimes feel as if I have been cast off into the world and must search my way back to a destination that is a mystery to me. Perhaps this restlessness comes from middle age, but my reading and writing have turned toward the half of myself I ignored for years. Novels and history books on Korea are stacked atop my nightstand. To make sense of the world, I now turn inward, toward my heritage, toward the half of me I\u2019ve finally embraced and yet still must learn to understand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael<\/span>\u00a0Croley<\/span>\u00a0is the author of <\/em>Any Other Place. He teaches creative writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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