Hello readers,

Last Friday my professors from the program that I am enrolled in at UBC called CAP Global Citizens, came together to deliver a joint lecture on what exactly it means to be a ‘global citizen’. At the end of the lecture, a peer of mine asked a question that evoked some provocative later thought from me. To paraphrase, it went along the lines of: “If we are living in a globalized age where there is increasing fluidity of people across national borders, what becomes of national and ethnic identity… more specifically in the case of children born from parents of different ethnic heritages?” This concept correlates back to a question that Professor Luger raised in our first Art Studies (ASTU) lecture: “How are we shaped by and identified with our local, ethnic and national communities?”. Being half Korean and half Anglo-Canadian, I feel that I can personally speak to this issue. I have observed there to be an interesting dichotomy between what I see my national and ethnic identity as being and what others see it as being. Furthermore, others’ ethnic identification of “halfies” (the colloquial term often used for half Asians) differs in different parts of the world; in my case for example, I am identified differently in Canada than I am in South Korea. This has led me to think about not only how globalization has contributed to new mixes of ethnicities, but also how globalization has changed the way people are ethnically identified across the globe.

Having been raised in Canada, a country that prides itself on its current multiculturalism, it may seem that I have not been brought up in a society that has demanded me to struggle with my ethnic identity. Yet, I have personally found at times that being a halfie from a Canadian perspective means being seen as a “whitewashed” Asian person. In the eyes of others, it can mean being a person who has a token element of ethnic diversity while still having been assimilated into “white” culture. For example, in high school I immediately fell under the “sits with the white kids” category of the cafeteria social hierarchy. The worst part of it is that when my peers would point this out to me, they would say it like it was a compliment, as if it was to my advantage to be more white than Asian. If one thinks of the recent controversy over the casting of Emma Stone as a part Asian character in Cameron Crowe’s blockbuster Aloha, one can be rather literally reminded of this whitewashing of half Asian people in North American society.

Yet at home, I do not feel completely white, but actually very Korean. Farhat Shahzad, a scholar whose sociological work we have been discussing in my ASTU class, defines what she calls an “interpretative community” as being a “collectivity of significant ‘others’” (302) whose “memories, world-views, practices, and behaviours can and do have impacts on students’ learning experiences and strategies” (310). Given this definition, I would not hesitate to call my Korean community a highly influential interpretative community in my life. So why is it that in Canada I am constantly told by others that I am more white than anything else?

Now, thinking of this from the perspective of a global citizen, consider how my ethnicity is seen in Korea. Due to the fact that Korea remains a primarily ethnically homogenous nation, halfies are still a bit of an exotic anomaly. This aside, what becomes particularly interesting and relevant to our ASTU class is the influence of globalization on how I am ethnically identified in Korea. Through growing ties with North America (culturally, economically and politically), Western beauty ideals are now considered sacred in South Korea. Consequentially, Korea has become the number one plastic surgery capital in the world (for further information on this phenomenon read this article by Patricia Marx in The New Yorker). Thus, in Korea I have been asked by complete strangers where I got my surgeries to look “more Western” done. So not only am I not Korean in Canada, I am not a white Canadian in Korea but rather it is assumed that I am a Korean under the influence of Western beauty norms; I am plastic, I am not real and my identity is a trend, an aesthetic and a mainstream cultural choice – not an ethnicity.

This, however, is a very contemporary perspective. The importation of the West into Korea through globalization trends has a history much longer than the recent plastic surgery epidemic makes it seem. In fact, the above noted article from The New Yorker attributes the beginnings of plastic surgery in Korea to “the aftermath of the Korean War, triggered by the offer made by the American occupational forces to provide free reconstructive surgery to maimed war victims.” The article continues by explaining that these procedures advanced quickly into the cosmetic realm as they “caught on fast, especially with Korean prostitutes, who wanted to attract American G.I.s”.

Indeed, the Korean War left many strange legacies. In 1983 when my mom returned to Korea for the first time since she emigrated to Canada as a child, and brought along her white boyfriend (my father), she was immediately ostracized for being with a white man due to the fact that Korea has a dark, partially forgotten history regarding interracial relationships. During and after the Korean War, many of the American Soldiers on service in Korea utilized Korean sex workers. Thus the half Korean children from that generation were largely associated with trauma. The sociologist Grace M. Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora investigates this subject. Here is an excerpt from the book’s description: “Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen … Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.”

Not only are halfies a product of the increasing global fluidity of people across the world, but the very way that we are viewed by others has also been dramatically impacted by globalization. Thus, although I am a Canadian national, my ethnic identity remains a sort of grey zone to myself and to others. As discussed in the joint lecture, these are issues that more and more people will encounter as globalization continues to connect the world in a myriad of old and new ways.