Abraham Kim:
This is Abraham Kim, your host of the Korean American Perspectives podcast. This is our eleventh and last episode for this season. It’s been a rich couple months of recording stories and interviews examining numerous topics through the lives of Korean American leaders.

Abraham Kim:
We examined issues ranging from mental health and parent-teenager relations
to non-traditional Asian American career tracks in the arts and music as well as representation in corporate board rooms.

Abraham Kim:
Although our topics have been diverse, the common theme tying together our season is the exploration of tough issues that we as Korean Americans do not often address or have had stigmatism around in our community. But we all recognize the importance of talking about these issues more frequently to find solutions or new thinking.

Abraham Kim:
Today, we aptly bring an end to our second season with this podcast episode to ask the fundamental question: Who Writes Our Stories?

Abraham Kim:
As our country is gripped in a nationwide conversation and struggle around race, identity, justice and oppression, I feel it is an appropriate way to end this rich season of podcasts. This episode examines identity, culture and the power of narratives.

Abraham Kim:
My guest today is Dr. Stephanie Han, a third-generation Korean American award-winning author of Swimming in Hong Kong, a fictional book that explores the personal lives of outsiders struggling to navigate complex societies in Hong Kong, Korea, and the U.S.

Abraham Kim:
In my conversation with Stephanie, we touch upon a wide range of issues — from the art & science of reading and writing to exploring what it means to be a Korean American.

Abraham Kim:
We also discuss what it means to write our own personal stories. When we don’t see ourselves represented in literature or novels, it’s often difficult and intimidating to be the first. But Stephanie reminds us that we have to make that leap, both for ourselves and for others in our communities.

Abraham Kim:
And as we talk about identity and culture, Stephanie also shares the concept of polyculturalism, not to be confused with multiculturalism. This intersectional lens teaches us that our culture and identity communities are living, organic and evolving. We all have a place in the world to shape our identity with our ideas and our art forms. Plus, how are we shaped by people from other cultures and how we in turn shape them as well.

Abraham Kim:
This is an amazing conversation for literary enthusiasts, aspiring writers, parents teaching reading to their kids and any Korean American who is curious about how our identity communities are shaped. Without further ado, let’s get right into this conversation. I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Stephanie Han.

Abraham Kim:
Welcome to the Korean American Perspectives podcast. My name is Abraham Kim. I’m the host for today’s show and I’m really honored to have Dr. Stephanie Hahn from Hawaii. Welcome, Stephanie.

Stephanie Han:
Aloha, thanks for having me.

Abraham Kim:
Let’s start from the beginning of your life. Please share with us about your parents and your immigration experience. Were you born here in the United States or did you immigrate as a young child?

Stephanie Han:
I was actually born in the United States in St. Louis, Missouri. When I was born in the early sixties, there were so few Asian American babies that, actually they used to do racial classification (I was born right after the civil rights act) so I was classified as Brown and my mother petitioned the court and had me changed to Yellow. So this is how rare it was to be an Asian American then in the Midwest. But my family is from the very first group of 3000 immigrants from Korea that came to Hawaii from 1903-05. And some went on from that immigrant group to California. But in terms of my family history, there’s a closesness I have to my maternal line and they’re rooted here in Hawaii.

Abraham Kim:
Hmm. And your father came for education or did he come here for job?

Stephanie Han:
Well my father Tahjoon Yoo, he was a medical doctor in the early twenties. And he won, then it was called basically the Atomic Bomb Scholarship. It was given to one scholar and all of Korea and they could choose and go to basically any graduate program. And he chose to study biophysics at UC Berkeley. He was already a medical doctor and that’s where he met my mother. And so then he stayed in the United States. They were these kind of adventuring post-Hawaii statehood, early pioneers living in places like Iowa and I guess Missouri and Memphis where there’s not actually many Korean Americans. So my father was from Seoul and from that kind of brain drain that Korea experienced in the early sixties. A lot of the scholars and people postwar sought opportunity overseas and then they stayed so that was my father’s side and then my mother’s side was the working class Koreans who for opportunity and to practice their Christianity, their Christian faith. My great, great grandfather was a Christian missionary actually. So that was a kind of a combination of the different immigrant cycles and I feel that that was very profoundly important in terms of my outlook as a Korean American and my experience.

Abraham Kim:
You mentioned you moved around quite a bit when you were growing up as a child. What was your upbringing like at you? You mentioned obviously your father was a, a scholar and your mother also grew up in a more traditional family. And how was your upbringing?

Stephanie Han:
Um, my mother was a very much a career homemaker. She was one of the women obviously. Many stay-at-home mothers, they’re the ones that are often the backbone of a community, you know, running all the teachers and the, you know, organizations and doing these things to build community. And that was my mother. And my father was a medical resident first and then after he got his U.S. green card, he was drafted within weeks. And so he was drafted for the Vietnam war. But what we did was he served on a base in Seoul, in Korea. And so I did live in Korea when I was about five to six and a half or something, you know, as a small child, a year and a half. And then we were in the base in the Presidio. And San Francisco was used to be a base. Now it’s not. And then he went on to the University of Iowa and to Tennessee. So, and then I went east to schools. So, you know, I moved around a lot. I moved every year until I was about eight or nine. And then I continued that pattern I guess because I got so accustomed to it, you know, like a lot of military brats, as they say, do move around.

Abraham Kim:
Was it a lonely experience for you moving around so much?

Stephanie Han:
Um, yeah, actually I think because you get used to moving, which is different skillset than staying, right? You know, in terms of what you develop. But it was difficult for me often to make friends. And also I was, I ended up living in a lot of different areas where there weren’t other Asian American kids. And so, you know, you learn to feel your difference profoundly and you can isolate as a result. And so I remember telling my mom, you know, I don’t have friends, you know, how am I going to make a friend? Which as a mother I think, oh my gosh, that’s like the saddest thing I’d ever hear right from my own child.

Stephanie Han:
But my mom was a 1970s, you know, mom. And so the sort of really practical and you know, so she said, well, if you read a book, you’ll always have a friend in a book. And um, she was right. So we took many trips to the library together and I would check out stacks and stacks of books and the people in the books became my world and my friends when I could find no solace outside of that. And so that’s how my imagination developed. And that’s how I learned to see different aspects of the world and to try to understand thing was really through books. Because sometimes people’s interactions seem more confusing to me, you know, about ideas of race or gender. Of course now I can look back and see, you know, what did it seem like in this neighborhood, you know, this rural Iowan neighborhood, all of a sudden, boom, this Korean American family pops up. I mean, we might as well descended from Mars, you know, so there’s curiosity, but also it’s like slight suspicion and so some children, the way they react, you know, it’s dependent on the family and it could be curiosity, but it’s also trying to understand why people are acting as if you’re a spectacle rather than a human being, right? So it’s not necessarily that people are always cruel, but you know, you’re being observed.

Abraham Kim:
I’m sure. Like you said, they were curious about who you are. And I’m sure for many, I imagine you were the first Asian American they’ve seen in their neighborhood though.

Stephanie Han:
Oh yeah. I mean, in elementary school, it was me and then again, my sister. So they changed, I remember, the school district during the time I was there. And so we moved in and then we were bused to this really rural place. It was like farmer’s kids and working class Iowa families. And I was definitely the first Asian they’d seen. If they came over I’d say, you know, mom, can we not have kimchi? You know, can we just do, can you just boil some potatoes? You know, I was trying to do whatever to fit in, right? I mean this is a, it’s a normal kid thing, right? And I remember my mother would do these things and my father would be supportive of the international fair. We’d bring Korean food and you know, to try to, you know, my parents, I really have a lot of respect for what they tried to do, which was in many ways they pioneered their community.

Stephanie Han:
They were people who love to entertain and they had all different kinds of people, cause my dad had a lab and a very diverse lab would show up in our living room. And it is those kinds of gestures inviting people to share a meal, to have a laugh, to picnic, to barbecue. I mean, that’s how integration of the heart ultimately happens. And that’s how, you know, cultural understanding happens. We can change the laws, we can do these things, but the laws, in order for the laws to change, people have to also know each other, right? It can’t be an abstract concept. So, you know, as an adult who’s not quite as maybe cheery, extroverted, like my, my mother is, you know, always at the drop of a hat willing to have, you know, 15 people over for dinner, you know, with 20 minutes notice. I have a lot of respect for, um, how that kind of energy changes a community and changes minds and changes lives.

Abraham Kim:
Tell me about some of the books that you read growing up and some of the books that had lasting impact on you as you reflect back to your childhood and your growing up in your household.

Stephanie Han:
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting as I can remember, you know, and I still save them. There was a book called “I Can Fly” and that was the very first book I ever had. I think I was two years old and my mother had checked it out from the library. And she said I loved it so much, she went and she ordered it from the publisher and I realized looking at it now, I mean I put crayon all over it, you know, so that’s terrible now but I kept it. Um, that that little girl had black hair. So the picture book has a little girl who actually projects and looks like a little Asian girl doing all these things like swimming, like a fish or I can’t, you know, I can’t fly, so can I, and I thought those kinds of images really stay with you.

Stephanie Han:
You know, it’s important for literature to reflect back in a way who the child is as well as open other doors. And so, you know, from my very early childhood, my mother would read poetry, like Robert Louis Stevenson or children’s books. And then as I got a little older, you know, after, especially when to boarding school, it became very important for me to figure out a cultural identity and who I was. And to be honest, there was a dearth of books at the time. There really weren’t many Asian American writers to read. In fact, I never read one until I was 16 years old in a red Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Woman Warrior”.

Stephanie Han:
What I did read was I read African American writers. And so African American literature profoundly influenced me. And I think it’s because it was the narrative of being an outsider, the narrative of an other that you know, somebody finally putting words on a piece of paper, what it might felt like to be discriminated against. And I didn’t have access necessarily to this. But yeah, the first big book that I remember that really influenced me was Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Woman Warrior”. And I remember being in, you know, I was in board probably really impossible 16 year old girl and reading this book. And I was, all of a sudden I was riveted. And really, I don’t even think it was the entire book, I’ll be honest. It was the very first opening sequence where it’s this girl going through the jungle and you know, she has weapons and she’s just this warrior.

Stephanie Han:
She is a woman warrior. And it was so appealing to me because she was empowered and she was adventuring and she was living out this kind of desire to act in a way that I hadn’t, you know, if I looked around, I didn’t see necessarily Asian Americans running around in the village and in a jungle setting being defiant, right? And so that was very appealing. I tried to look for anything that was Asian American and you know, whether that was on the, you know, brief TV commercials or like a single image of a model who was Asian. I would just like flip the catalog and look and embrace this image. I wanted it reflected back, but I remember I read this book and it, you know, it has its merits.

Stephanie Han:
It’s actually a decent book. It’s Fifth Chinese Daughter or something by Jade Snow Wong. And I liked the book, but you know, she was a little too much of a goody goody. That really wasn’t very fun to read. It was good to read in that. And I still remember how she described making rice, um, and that she was, you know, independent kind of Chinese American daughter, but, you know, she was a little boring. She was doing everything her parents said she should do. So, you know, when I was reading, I wanted to read about people ask questions or maybe they didn’t do the right thing and you know, what happened?

Abraham Kim:
Did you find books served as an escape for you?

Stephanie Han:
Oh yeah, and trying to figure out how if the– if something wasn’t right, and this is why I think literature is important. If there wasn’t something I could figure out in my real life, I tried to go to a book for an answer and there was just not enough of those kinds of stories to reflect back at me. And then as time moved on, obviously, Asian American literature has moved on. There’s way more literature, there’s more African American literature. I started reading Native American stories also, and you know, the classics like Jane Austin, all those people. So I think it’s important to know both canonical works and part of the new canon, American literary canon, to get a good grip on who we are as individuals, as a nation, uh, sort of English speakers in a certain part of the world, right?

Abraham Kim:
Yeah. You once said an interesting quote. I’m paraphrasing here, but “Reading is an act of deep empathy.” What did you mean by that?

Stephanie Han:
Well, reading is, I mean, from writer to reader, it’s a big brain dump if you think about it. So, the writer is in his or her mind or their mind making up stories and images and pictures and putting this down on paper. And you as a reader are entering the mind of this writer. And you must imagine what this writer is thinking because they’re not giving you any photograph. It’s very different than an experience of looking at an image. There’s no direct sound that’s coming through. There’s no touch, there’s no taste. It’s ust a visual. You’re reading the words and then you must imagine in your mind all the sensory feelings and emotions and experiences that go with this. So it requires you to empathize, to have a great deal of empathy with the character and what the character is going through in order to really enter that space. So it requires the writer to create in such a way that the reader is able to experience empathy for that particular character. And you as a reader also have to be open, that you’re willing to trust the writer to give you this experience. So, you know, it’s a bit of a two way street here, but it is an active empathy and it’s an active imagination on the part of the reader. We are not passive recipients. You know, that’s a mistake. Reading actually is an active imagination also. We must imagine.

Abraham Kim:
It sounds like reading is an art form as well as, not only writing. How do you develop that? Is it just reading more literature or is it– how do you develop that art form of reading and having that, as you say, this connection with the writer and almost kind of merging your imagination together. As if they’re painting and you’re receiving in your painting, as well in your mind. As a writer, as well as a reader, how do you develop that muscle as a reader?

Stephanie Han:
I think a lot of that is a matter of practice and I’ll be honest, it’s as time is going on and we’re moving more and more to a society that’s on visuals to cue us for ideas of story, it is more difficult and more challenging for younger people to read in the same way. If you tell many children who are quite young, “okay, you can play a video game for an hour or you can read about an adventure for an hour,” you know, it’s just very hard to compete. So what it requires is an attention to being still and an intention to allowing yourself to, I would say, enter a space of being quiet. And we don’t do that enough in our modern society. We feel the need that we always need to be scheduled, that we have to, you know, be productive 24/7, that we have to do a lot of output. But actually what will develop a skill of reading is being still and being okay with that. And yes, allowing yourself or the child to kind of daydream and be bored and then seek answers in other ways. It’s kind of a matter of overstimulation, right? And another thing, so beyond that, I think it’s just kind of making it part of your routine, you know? Do you read at night before going to bed and we cut that out. All parents now, most I would say sort of middle class parents or parents who kind of aspire for their children on some level, always every night before they would go to bed would read to their child. And it stops when they’re 10, right? or 11? Then all of a sudden the parents like, “Okay, yeah, you’re on your own. You know, thank God I don’t have to do that anymore. I can do whatever, you know, I’ve got stuff to do.” But what happens is you would be shocked and I see this having taught secondary, children just stop reading. Then they just, they won’t read because you’re not either reading alongside them or you’re not requiring that they read it before bed. So it is lifelong, it needs to be continually not enforced, but encouraged, right?

Stephanie Han:
And another thing that people do is they do a lot of like self-flagellation about like, I should have read this book or this book is hard and boring, but I know after four hours it’ll get better. Guess what? Maybe it won’t. And so you should cut yourself some slack. If you’re not interested after four hours, maybe it’s the wrong book for you. In fact, I would reduce four hours to two hours. And I would say if you’re 16 and under, like it’s one hour. If your imagination is not engaged, there are millions of other books to read and pick another book. We do not have to torture ourselves. So reading must become first and foremost entertainment. If it is not entertaining, you will not read. Too many people and I think I see this with a lot of well intentioned parents. Say, you know, reading, it’s like presented as something miserable, right? Reading should be fun. So, when students are much younger, they should never be reading at a difficult level. So to read for entertainment, you’re usually reading one grade level below. So this is important, and I didn’t really know this either. This is important when you’re looking at, you know, books that parents select for children, books that you as a college student or high school student are reading, you know, and you’re thinking, Oh, I should read a harder book. No, it’s a numbers game. It’s fun. Just read. You don’t have to read a hard book. Just read a fun book. That’s all it is. And that fun book, continuously reading fun books and easy books now and then you’ll dip into a harder one and you’ll be surprised. Your studies will change the way you approach reading will change. But there’s no reason why we must torture ourselves with difficult, dry books that we don’t enjoy.

Abraham Kim:
You also have spoken about that there’s an integral connection between reading and writing. I’m wondering if your hunger for reading eventually contributed to your choice to become a writer. Share with me that journey in your life.

Stephanie Han:
Yeah, I think so because reading is connected to writing. You know, I say to my students, if I took two of you and I told one person to read 50 books carefully for one year and don’t write anything, and I told the other student, no, you must do these exercises and do worksheets and do not read for a year. At the end of one year, the student who did absolutely no writing but read will be a far superior writer than the one who practiced writing every single day because you just have sentence patterns and they become something that’s in your body. Vocabulary shifts will come out. It doesn’t matter if you’re saying the word wrong or not, you know. I want to move away from this idea of like reading being miserable, you know, which is like a big conscious — it seems to be , you know, for many people that’s how they associate it, like a miserable task. That’s pretty much it.

Abraham Kim:
But, writing as a profession, I think you also said at another interview that I read that you did not choose to be a writer, but writing chooses you.

Stephanie Han:
Yeah, because I think if you are in the habit often of reading, then you learn to express yourself through words in that way. Okay. So that is the connection, I guess. To add onto your last question about the story, like how is it connected? It’s connected in study, but it also becomes how you communicate, right? And so because it becomes how you communicate, maybe you feel like you have to communicate a lot. So you start to write and you start to tell these stories. I mean, honestly there’s different kinds of ways people write. You know, sometimes everybody, let’s say they write for work. They might write to express themselves privately in a diary or journal. They might be writing letters to win someone’s love. They might be trying to record a family history or they may be a person who wants to write stories or tell stories. Those are all shades of the same kind of — use of text and words. It’s just I think when the person is one of those people who is rather compulsive and wants to feel a need to tell or narrate these stories, that’s something that you don’t really choose because there’s a lot of other much more easy paths to pick in life than to be a person who decides they want to rearrange words on a little piece of paper. I mean it’s a very unnatural act, right? Cause what you’re doing is you’re thinking about a story in your mind. Then you’re using these 26 letters and you’re rearranging them and all kinds of configurations and then you’re putting them on a piece of paper and then you’re telling somebody else, can you read this piece of paper? You know, there’s some shortcuts here we could use. You could use human interaction, talking. We could tell stories. You could draw pictures to tell the story. I mean, there’s different ways. In other words, people narrate, they build a business that’s a narration maybe of a story of what they’re thinking about America. You know, building a business or starting a family, it’s how they’re viewing themselves in the continuum of history. So actually becoming a writer and doing this thing with words on a piece paper and asking another person to read it is actually, if I think about it, very peculiar.

Abraham Kim:
It is a peculiar behavior, but it’s also the tools that you use to create magic, right? You draw, as we mentioned before, you’re drawing a picture in another person’s mind and those word choices and how you, you know, assembled those words, creates different kinds of imagery. And for some the words, it draws nothing. But in some folks, you literally create a movie in someone else’s mind, uh, and you forget you’re reading words and you’re actually seeing images in your mind and as they’re flowing. And I’m wondering, Just from your experience with other writers and just being in the field, what makes a great writer? How do you attain that level where writers literally painting pictures in people’s minds? A movie in someone’s mind?

Stephanie Han:
I think there’s two things. One is the acquisition of skills, which is, you know, it’s a trade. In other words, you have to learn punctuation. I mean, this is what I tell students, these are some fundamental skills that you have to learn in order to sort of break the rules. So there’s the understanding of what are the rules of the particular, let’s say, genre or you want to write, you know, the kind of stories you want to tell. So what are the rules? And then there’s: you have to have something to say. That I cannot control, as I tell students. Having something to say and then having the guts to say it are kind of connected. So some people they write and they have something to say, but they don’t really want to say it all. They can’t turn themselves inside out on the page. So, that’s where that extra thing is that, you know, it’s hard to cultivate that that’s internal and that’s personal and private and like a calling. Where you feel like you must turn yourself inside out on the page. You’re driven on that level. And I think that is sort of, when we think about the writers or the poets that we like to read or that reassure us, it’s because they’re doing that. They’re exposing an intimate human truth, an intimate emotional truth about the human condition on the page. They’re allowing us in and they’re ignoring the barriers of, let’s say, humiliation or shame, or discomfort in order for the rest of us to journey with him or her. So there’s kind of the two and a half parts, right? The skills, something to say, and then the guts to say it.

Abraham Kim:
Does that come with life experience, imagination, tragedy? What often inspires them?

Stephanie Han:
You know, Flannery O’Connor, I think, was a writer who said usually most people by the age of 18 have experienced enough craziness if they kind of look around to really write. But people don’t want to frame themselves in that way necessarily, right. No matter how cheerful, or happy, or whatever your childhood is, it’s your powers of observation. So if you observed enough, in other words, by a pretty early age, if you were sensitive enough and observed enough, you have enough material, right?

Abraham Kim:
What kinds of writers often stimulate that special storytelling aspect that really gets into the human experience? Is it experiences? Is it tragedy?

Stephanie Han:
Yeah. So, you have that rock bottom level of experience, right? That we all have as we come of age and then it’s, I think, it’s a perspective and it’s being open to looking at things and asking questions. Okay. So if you keep asking questions, you can continually evolve intellectually and emotionally and spiritually. And if you take risks with the question, and this is something very uncomfortable that most people do not like to do because our society is held in place by various structures and systems, systems of government, systems of religion, systems of family. And if you start questioning and questioning, what happens is in many ways, you start looking. Particularly I see this with younger people, especially towards university and all of a sudden you’re looking and the structure looks like a mess and you’re thinking “What did I believe? How could I have believed that?” And then you know, as you move past it, you realize every structure has its imperfection, right? But there’s that moment of crisis you have often as a younger adult. And I think the writers we like and admire, they keep asking questions about those systems and how they work and the cost of these systems on communities and on the individual — the individual spirit. Because there’s always exceptions. We cannot all function under one fate and we cannot function always under one government or always under one idea of community because there’s always a few people who are different for whatever reason, and then the system doesn’t really work for them. And so what do we do and how do we show compassion and how do we show understanding and tolerance and welcome people into a community who don’t seem to belong to this community, you know, for whatever reason.

Stephanie Han:
So, I think writers who help expand our experience of the human condition are those who take the risk to keep asking the questions continually is, what do I think about this? You know, you will find more writers than, let’s say, I noticed this, than actors or performers and musicians who questioned religious structures. Okay. And I believe that this is because as a writer there’s a deep understanding of how a text is created, how there are minds behind text and how someone had to write the text. It’s not this mysterious thing that appears from the sky floating on wings. And then we are obedient to this text, right? So a writer is very well aware that someone would have had to craft these texts and what goes into making a text. So what this does, I think for many writers is, you know, the way they’re looking there for. Religious texts for example, is very different, right? You’re looking maybe at a spiritual truth or a particular story, but you won’t necessarily take every single word in the same way as somebody who doesn’t have the power to create a text. You’re going to look at it very differently and versus, let’s say, someone who performs a text; when you sing, you have to take the notes and you riff on them, but you are not creating the music. You are a singer. You sing the song that somebody wrote is the being of a song writer, right? So, I think that every area of art or creation or whether that you be your reader or author, it’s all good. It’s just that there’s going to be different roles and different ways of looking at the human experience depending on what your skill set is and how you navigate society in that way.

Abraham Kim:
Let’s talk about your book, your award-winning book, “Swimming in Hong Kong”. It’s a series of short stories about characters in Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States. We’ve been talking about outsiders and the struggles of outsiders coming into a structure. Tell me the journey of writing this book. How did you as a writer develop these short stories? It seems like just reflecting on your entire life, they are actually places that you’ve lived in the past and I’m imagining it’s somewhat of a reflection of your own life.

Stephanie Han:
Yeah, I formally started writing that book in 1997 when I, after my sojourn, I was in Korea for 20 months, I believe, 18 to 20 months. And, living there, freelance writing and going to the language institute, “Ohakdang” [Study Abroad] there. And I landed back in Los Angeles and I started writing the short story “Languages”, which is one of the short stories in that book. The book itself was pretty much done by 2004-5. And by that time, I had been living in different places. I have a lot of different kinds of experiences. So all of that kind of went into the short story book at which point I was also still kind of in-training as a writer. That’s when I went to my master’s degree programs, my MA and my MFA, and I really kind of learned the craft or hone the craft of writing fiction at that point. And then I shelved it. It got rejected a bunch of times. I took it out, it got rejected more, took it out. You know, each story has been rejected like at least a hundred times, and I’m not exaggerating here. It’s just that what changed the literary landscape for me was the internet, which sounds crazy now because I might as well be talking about, I don’t know, like a horse and buggy or something. But before people could click and see on a screen multiple images of different kinds of people interacting and living in all these different spaces and kind of different configurations of groups and experiences. This didn’t seem real in a way to people. People did not fathom an African American woman talking to an old Chinese man. That just, you know, that might as well been from Mars when I wrote that, you know, I couldn’t — where could I submit it?

Stephanie Han:
Not to an African American journal. I’m not African American for literary journal. I’m Asian American, but I’m writing about like an old Chinese man and a Black woman. This is like really not what Asian American literary journals also were publishing, right? They tend to publish a lot of immigrant narratives at the time and it was not taking place in America. So my experience was, being an outsider in a lot of multiple places geographically and also even within, I think, my own nation, so to speak, because I think it had to do with my immigrant cycle, right? I’m like third generation American already, right? So, the book was simply a long journey of understanding how people need certain kinds of images before they accept things on a certain level. You know, it converges, but this is why there needs to be more different kinds of stories because there’s so many different kinds of experiences. And there isn’t one immigrant narrative. There isn’t one story of our nation. And, you know, it behooves us to support different kinds of storytelling and see that there’s so many different ways we can be as Korean Americans, as Asian Americans, and just to tell those stories.

Abraham Kim:
This actually leads beautifully into my next question. Is it important to have more Korean Americans to become authors and storytellers? And if there’s a young aspiring author out there that’s listening to this podcast, what would you encourage them to do?

Stephanie Han:
Oh yes, of course we need more Korean American stories. We can have many, many more of them, right? Because there is not a singular Korean American experience and our particular Asian American community is quite unique actually, on a global scale and otherwise. And so I would definitely encourage this young person to, first thing is to get those skills in place, right? And these are fostered by, not simply classes, you know, but read, read everyone, read everything in the tape, right? Find someone who can be your friend in the trenches while you’re both struggling and writing, someone who can cheer you on. You only need one or two fans and you can be their fan too. But we all need those because it’s very lonely writing, right? So you need to have a few believers in your dream. And have faith that your story is a worthy one. And also understand even for those people who are not necessarily writing on a page that the Korean American story is a broad one, and that our story is our life. Like as I say, we create the story of our lives. We author who we are and the issue and the problems arise when we don’t know what to author because we’ve never seen an example before us, and have faith that maybe your story, even if you haven’t seen another person live your story, right? Nevermind, write the story, but live your story — that your story, as long as you’re authentic to yourself, is completely worthy. And that, like it or not, maybe you got to anoint yourself a pioneer. That’s just what happens, you know? Know that that’s okay and that there are people who’ve had shades of your experience. Maybe they’re Japanese American, maybe they’re Vietnamese American, maybe they’re Native American, maybe they’re a White American male. They’ve all had different aspects of what you’re now trying to make yourself, right? And so borrow and learn from these examples and have faith that you can author your own narrative and that your narrative really is worthy. It might not look like the narrative that maybe all your parents want you to have, but it’s okay. You have to understand what you can do and the potential of who you are. And so there’s definitely always more room for Korean American stories and that’s very crucial. But it’s also important for Korean Americans to see that there’s so many ways we can author our life. And this is really the task that we write ourselves into existence.

Abraham Kim:
Well, let’s talk about that topic. I mean you’ve spoken on the issues related to identity and the concept of polyculturalism. For those who are not familiar with that concept of polyculturalism, could you tell us what that is and how that’s different from, say, multiculturalism?

Stephanie Han:
Yeah. So, multiculturalism was a word that came to prominence in the ’90s, really ,in the United States. And it was an acknowledgement of how a diverse society functions. That there’s going to be multiple cultures interacting and intersecting with each other and that we should acknowledge their point of origin and should understand how, you know, a “multi” instead of a “mono” cultural society functions in terms of allocation of funds or administrative priority, various kinds of public policy, etc. Sort of fair treatment across the board and across the spectrum of government, private industry work, whatever education. Multiculturalism, however, I feel given the situation of the globe and our acknowledgement now of different issues that are not simply national, but as we can see by the pandemic, actually global, is limited in that it primarily prioritizes the nation state, the interests of the nation state. And so, we need to have this philosophy, and I’m talking about this in philosophical terms, we need to have this philosophy in order to make sure certain people — it functions within a nation state.

Stephanie Han:
Polyculturalism, the word I feel is more 21st century and it can work in conjunction with multiculturalism. But what it suggests is that we can organize ourselves in multiple ways across tribal lines, across regions, across nations, communities, particular identities. So in other words, I am not simply Korean American. I am a Korean American woman. I am not simply a Korean American woman from a first generation family. I’m one also from a fourth generation family. I am also a mother. And so there’s different ways. I’m an educator, I’m a writer, and there’s different ways I might be able to organize. I take hula dancing, I could like join the hula community. Do you see what I’m saying? So there’s different ways that we organize and we claim these kinds of identities. So if we think about the word polycultural, it comes from the musical term polyphony, which is the idea of every one carrying the melody. So Row, Row, Row your boat, everyone singing, “row, row, row your boat” at the same time. And everyone’s kind of the same, singing it. Everyone’s equally important. But I think what we can do is we can expand this definition. So in other words, if we think about an orchestra. An orchestra has the first violin section and then they have the bass and the trombones and then they have that person in the back, you know that person who’s just dinging that triangle like every 25 notes and then it’s dead silent. But that triangle is very crucial. And, this person, in order for the symphony to sound its best, everyone must be playing not simply the melody, but different parts of the symphony. And we have to acknowledge that all of them are important. In order for us to sound our best as a symphony orchestra. That triangle player has a place just like the violinists, just like big nations do and small nations do as we function as a globe. And this I think, is very key for us to acknowledge.

Stephanie Han:
You know, the history of the nation state is quite young, right? It’s hundreds of years. I mean, this is nothing if you think of how civilization has been organizing. So, what does this mean? What are territories, what are nations? How can, you know, global warming or pollution in one area affect something thousands of miles across the Pacific. What you have to organize that across the nation on a national level, nation to nation to address certain problems and policies, but yet it’s going to maybe affect a tribe in this other area. So, in other words, what we have to recognize is we have a situation of a lot of moving parts and that if we only constrict ourselves to a very narrow single idea, we will not hear the voices that must be crucial. And I think of, for example, Hawaii as a state. This very small state, we’re part of the United States. We’re in the middle of the Pacific, yet from this small state, many lessons have been learned. We were one of the first majority-minority states. People here had working healthcare at part-time work before most of the nation did. We were the ones that did not intern Japanese Americans on the same scale. There was a small, I believe, camp here. We have managed, in some level, to kind of acknowledge that an idea of tolerance is a way forward. Okay. This is not to say it’s a perfect society by any means. We did fusion cooking before it became fusion, right? We were doing that like decades before, right? And so, our contribution in terms of how many people are here and everything is very small, but yet there’s a consciousness that we have — that we have, in some ways, led. The first Black president was raised here and a lot of his manner in way of negotiating and dealing was clearly influenced by childhood here, right? So, I think we’re important, even if we are small. So, when we go back then to this idea of polyculturalism, what it means is being open. How everyone can contribute to a narrative on some level and maybe in a significant level if we just take the time to listen.

Abraham Kim:
How do you think polyculturalism is playing out in the Asian American community or the Korean American community?

Stephanie Han:
You know what, I think it’s greatly improved actually. There’s a growing awareness of people’s individuality; the Laotian community, you know, different — the Vietnamese American community is coming over the years, different Southeast Asian, South Asians, all these different kinds of threads of a larger Asian American community have emerged. And this is great and you know, the Asian American identity, actually, is something that was born in the sixties, right? It was a term that was coined by an academic to join in the people of color movement post civil rights of the sixties. So a Pan-Asian, Asian American identity is actually new because historically in Asia, Japanese and Koreans were not friends. Japanese and Chinese were not friends. You know, there was a lot of animosity, historically. It’s only in the United States when all the groups face a kind of difficulty within immigration, understanding of discrimination, that they’ve been able to coalesce. So I think that as we continue on in this way, we can assert more of who we are as an individual thread, as Korean Americans, let’s say, or as you know, as the group increases, Cambodian Americans and this is fantastic, and then we can also raise our voices together and then we can also continue to expand that narrative. We can join with other people who have been systemically marginalized, the African American community, the Native American community. There are ways that when we, in this sense as people of color, can acknowledge how we can together change a narrative of America. This is when we’re ultimately going to be strong.

Abraham Kim:
What would you advise a young person who, you know, a young Korean American student, and you teach a lot of students, as they’re navigating their own self discovery about their own identity in this kind of fluid environment about identity formation in the United States and how it’s going to change over over time.

Stephanie Han:
Now, it’s interesting because for me, I think my identity came through personal journeys back to Korea when I was young and then obviously through my family, but the validity that I saw it from, the organizations, I feel like, you know, I found narratives even more, let’s say within the African American literary community, right? Like the books that were there. So what I would say is the way back to who you are is often being willing to explore beyond what you are, right? And putting yourself and being curious about different things. What you’ll find is that you will then also come be able to enrich your own narrative and come back with further strength into who you are, right? And so I think it’s about being continually open. To be, in other words, more Korean American does not necessarily mean that you’re shutting yourself out more from different kinds of experiences. In fact, what you will find is you will assert how Korean American you are and realize what that is. The more you take the risk to ask questions beyond.

Abraham Kim:
Well you’ve been very generous with your time. I just have one final question for you. If you could reflect back on your life experiences and you were to meet your 19-year-old self, what would you advise your 19-year-old self?

Stephanie Han:
I would tell my 19-year-old self, you must understand process on the acquisition of skills and why, okay? And that this process is significant and worthy and valid. I would also tell my 19-year-old self: have confidence, that even if you’ve never seen it done, and even if you’ve never seen another Korean American do something, to have the courage in your own authenticity, and to be true to yourself and have a little faith in that way. You know, to know that your story, even if you haven’t seen your story before, your story is still possible. That’s what I would say.

Abraham Kim:
To be confident and share your story. Thank you very much. On that note, we’ll be ending our podcast and thank you very much for your time and opening up your life to us. I appreciate it very much, Stephanie.

Stephanie Han:
Mahalo to you. Thank you so much for having me here. Really appreciate it.

Abraham Kim:
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Stephanie Han. If you are an aspiring Korean American writer, or perhaps a parent raising a future writer and reader, I hope you were inspired by Stephanie’s story and are able to see her experiences reflected in your own life stories. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Korean American Perspectives podcast.

Abraham Kim:
As we mark the end of this season, we thank you all for your avid listenership and promise that we will be back soon with many more stories to tell. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or any podcast platform. If you like what you hear, please make sure to give us a five star rating. Plus, visit our website at councilka.org for show notes and any additional resources. Also, please send us new ideas and people you would like us to interview. We need your creative inputs.

Abraham Kim:
Finally, a big thanks to our hardworking producer, Kevin Koo, who week after week cranks out these podcasts and make me sound like an awesome moderator. Also, assisting Kevin is also our staff David Wynn who does the marketing, transcripts, and all the awesome support information for this podcast. Special Thanks to Kevin and David. Thanks!

Abraham Kim:
Well until next time, we hope you are well and healthy in these difficult times. Thank you for your support of the Korean American Perspectives podcast.