Reading, Writing & Kim-Chee

Throughout my life I’ve been lucky enough to have happy memories filled with sunny days, wonderful friends and unicorns.  Yet like everybody else I've had my bad moments too, specifically the ones called “culture school” and “church camp”. 

I can already hear you saying “Awesomeness! I would LOVE to sit in a church basement and learn about my culture!” First of all, you’re looking at this as a rational adult. Try to see this as an irrational child with bowl-cut hair. We weren’t sitting around watching the Travel Channel or doing Korean arts and crafts like making Samsung TVs. We were doing things that involved grades. I’ll be honest with you. I failed culture school. I never did the language lessons because I figured I already mastered the important Korean words and phrases like “mom”, “dad”, “hello”, “I’m hungry” and “fart”. 

Then there was church camp. Imagine an overdramatic soap opera with Korean subtitles. Now get God involved and you have a typical Korean church clique. Put a whole bunch of these cliques together and you have a Korean church camp.

I can already hear you saying “Awesomeness! I would LOVE to hang around Korean campers for a week!” Did I mention the creepy counselors and awkward Christian pop sing-alongs where people close their eyes while swaying back and forth? And think about my raging teenage hormones dealing with modestly dressed girls filled with Pat Robertson goodness in their hearts. I guess my parents thought isolating me with other Koreans would complete my reeducation. Oh, how wrong you were Mr. and Mrs. Lee.

To be fair, there’s probably a good number of Asians who got a lot out of their Asian culture school and church camp experiences. Awesomeness! I think all I got was a t-shirt.   

Absolutely Fob-ulous

Sometimes within a society you’ll see members turn on its own. For example, white people have been known to describe other whites as “Ohioans”. The Canadians have “French Canadians”. And in the Asian-American dictionary you’ll find the word “FOB”: an acronym for “Fresh Off the Boat”.

For many, a FOB is any Asian new to the land of Kardashians, Jersey Shore and Perez Hilton. For others like me, however, a FOB is meant to describe those Asian immigrants who have this propensity to perpetuate (at least in our minds) a lot of racial stereotypes. We’re not talking Gwen Stefani’s Japanese Harajuku Girls here. FOBs are ridiculously studious, obedient to their parents, socially clumsy, poor drivers and oblivious to such American customs as body deodorant. The worst part is many of our parents force us (or at least try) to befriend FOBs.

I’m sure a lot of you are shaking your heads right now thinking, “That’s terrible. They don’t use deodorant?” Yes, FOB is a mean-spirited word drizzled with some insecurity/elitist sprinkles. And both bananas and non-bananas are guilty of being haters. But come on. Does every member of a culture really respect every other member of that same culture?

Keep in mind, however, only Asians can use the word FOB. It’s like any other family dynamic: we can be mean to our own brothers and sisters. You can’t. After all, if Asian-Americans can’t make fun of themselves, who can they make fun of? No, seriously. Who as a group can we tease without getting beat up?