Both, half and none

I grew up in a home where I could talk to my Korean mother in Korean, converse with my Caucasian-American father in English and never notice that I had switched languages. Back then, I was blissfully unaware that I was unusual. I was half-Korean, half-American, I would announce to my friends with conviction.

This naivete lasted until I moved to a new state in seventh grade. When I got to my new school, the kids made it clear that I was different. They learned my middle name was Jinju — a Korean word meaning pearl — and they used it to mock me. "Jinjuuu!" they would call out sneeringly. I didn't tell my parents and just waited it out, struggling to laugh it off while wanting to cry. Finally, pressured and miserable, I looked at my skin color and saw that it was light enough. I could pass for white and blend in with the majority of the kids at our school. I could ignore my Korean background, if I wanted.

Yet the day that I realized that I looked white enough to pass, I made a conscious choice to refuse to be ashamed of my heritage, even in the face of what I only later recognized as racism. Though I can't explain it, I think I knew subconsciously that if I bent to this type of peer pressure, there would be other kinds of pressure in the future that I wouldn't be able to face. I couldn't set this precedent.

Instead, I chose to show off my Korean half as a badge of honor. Soon, the attitudes around me began to change, but not in the ways I had hoped. Rather than being mocked, my Korean side was being ignored. "Oh, you're not really Korean," people would tell me. "You're just a white girl." Other comments showed me that some of my friends referred to me as Korean only so that they could use me as their ticket to being open-minded and accepting — I became proof of their tolerance.

Furious at the hypocrisy of a world that could change its attitude about race so drastically between middle school and high school, I stood ready to defy everyone around me, to identify myself as only Korean from then on. If blacks who were only one- eighth black could still be black, then I could still be Korean. But I realized something at that point: it was "in" to be nonwhite, it was "in" to be of a different race, it was "in" to be multicultural. And that was when I backed out.

In middle school, it was "in" to be white. I stayed half-Korean and half-white. In high school it was "in" to be nonwhite. But I still viewed myself as half-Korean and half-white and was proud of both sides of my family, no matter what the world said the value of either side should be.

I came to Princeton almost as blithely as I had gone into middle school and found myself confronted by a completely new environment that I had not expected in the slightest. The diversity of the school, so different from my almost all-white high school, overwhelmed me, and I realized slowly that my attempt to be both Korean and white was not working. I wasn't fitting perfectly into either environment.

It was also at Princeton that I met other mixed kids like me, other kids who shared the same struggle in which I had thought I was alone. It was a culture that I was familiar with, a culture in which I could refer to myself as "'half n' half" and then laugh about how it made me sound like milk and cream — and have others around me empathize. It wasn't until I arrived on campus that I realized how desperate I had been for someone to hear my story and be able to tell me with fierce intensity, "I understand."

I'm not a neat compilation of two races. I'm not both Korean and white, and I could never be, since I could never go through each separate experience that either my white American friends or Korean-American friends had. Nor is my life evenly split between the two. I am neither, and yet I'm part of both cultures, each one swirling around within me in indefinable patterns. I am both, I am half, I am neither, I am all three.