Fake It 'Til I Make It

Imagine carrying a bag with different costumes and a set of instructions for each costume. We will call this bag the Discourse bag. Before walking into the school building you open up your Discourse bag and pull out a professional uniform with glasses and an apple. The directions for this costume read: "Take attendance, open computer file for next lesson, teach lesson, eat lunch during break, be kind and respectful to students by valuing their opinions and time, smile." After you finish the school day, you drive over to the bistro and pull out a different outfit from your Discourse bag and change into your all black uniform with directions to serve customers wholeheartedly in order to get tips. According to Gee, with the appropriate costume you can take on a role that others will be able to recognize (Gee 7). At school, students call you "teacher" and at the bistro, customers call you "waitress". Just as Professor Erin addressed in her blog, she wore business attire instead of her normal casual attire when in a different setting performing a different role.

I've had a few moments in life where I had to "fake it 'til I made it". Dress the part, look the part, act the part, speak the part. Not so much be someone I'm not; rather, looking like I know what I am doing because life doesn't slow down for me. When I became an intern at Jewish Family Service, I dressed professionally for my orientation and I am glad that I did because the building and its workers all dressed up business to business-casual. I continued dressing business/business-casual (which is currently the type of attire I normally go for now) whenever I was in the office and presented myself to my clients. My clients were 1st or 2nd generation Holocaust survivors, so they had different forms of trauma whether first-hand or second-hand trauma. The case workers from JFS (Jewish Family Service) conducted professional services with their clients and I tried following this standard as well. While tagging along with the case workers to visit different clients, I tried imitating the way the case workers spoke to the clients. I knew that this was not only to help me learn how to speak to the clients while wearing the hat as the intern, but also because I was representing Jewish Family Service as a whole. The internship was unpaid and I was required to do my internship for 16 hours per week, so it was the matter of focusing on my personal experience and growth to intern at JFS rather than focusing on keeping the job for money.

I had about 3-4 clients I would see on a weekly basis. Since my clients were all much older than me and had lived out their entire lives, I had no clue how to help them with their life problems such as helping them cancel their credit cards used to pay their insurance, compiling a file of dental insurance issues for one client, helping another client with her worker's compensation case that she had been working on for 20 years, helping 2 clients publish their stories, attending court with 2 clients, and sending out a mail (I forgot what to write on an envelope to mail out items because I have only done so once in 3rd grade). I just had to roll with the punches - accept the mission, research what I had to do, and provide my clients with the help they need. It was definitely an interesting semester interning at JFS, not knowing what to do at all; but coming out alright.

Classification Of My Own: "The In-Between"

 

I was born in South Korea, raised in San Diego. I moved to America when I was four years old. Before I moved to the States, I was fluent in Korean and was comfortable with my surroundings. I remember always acting cute in front of my grandparents to get what I wanted, eating my favorite black bean noodles, and getting candy from the chicken lady. When I moved to the States and attended my first day at kindergarten, I was mortified. Everyone around me was different and spoke a language different than I did. Soon enough, I quickly forgot Korean and absorbed the English language like a sponge. I became fluent in speaking English and struggled speaking in Korean. I knew what my parents were saying, but I couldn't speak Korean back to them. I still ate Korean food, practiced Korean etiquette at home, and did gestures only Koreans would do. In the eyes of outsiders, I was Korean. But here's the thing - in the eyes of Koreans, I was American.

The first picture is me wearing a hanbok, a Korean traditional dress. I wore this to a Korean Culture Event, representing the Korean culture by wearing the hanbok. The second picture is my sister and I at the naturalization ceremony to become U.S. citizens.

Actually, growing up I had difficulty finding out who I was. Americans called me Korean; Koreans called me American. Meaning, I was not accepted into either community. In elementary school I hung out with my friends who were predominantly Mexican. However, in middle school my Hispanic friends pushed me away and formed their own group to just hang out with the Mexicans. I was confused and started hanging out with the Asians. I felt comfort in the sense of belonging, but at the same time I didn't feel like I had any close friends. In high school I was even more confused. I hung out with peers of different races but I felt as if I didn't know who I was. Was I acting more Korean? Was I acting more American? I tried to just be myself, which I felt happy with. However, the way I felt had no identity label. It was only till college I realized that I will of course look different in the eyes of different people - whether American or Korean - but there were others who felt the same way growing up as an Asian in America. We made our own classification - and I was okay with that since I finally had a sense of belonging. I am a Korean-American. I am ethnically Korean and my nationality is American. And there are many of us Asian-Americans who will face that same identity crisis growing up. Some may push away the Asian in them, some may push away being American. But I learned that it is important to accept and embrace that it is okay to be "in-between". That is where I stand and an army of us will keep growing.