(Jewish Group) Asian Jews are suffering. We need you to listen.
Over the years, I’ve dealt with a lot of reactions to the fact that I am Korean and Jewish. They’ve ranged from the absurd (Are you sure?) to the angry (That’s not possible!) to the utterly exhausting (Wow, so, are you adopted?). But when confronted with the story of my identity, the through line for most people — especially those within the Jewish community — is disbelief. It’s like one look at my Korean face tells them all they need to know about my Judaism, which they cannot conceive to be as real or as good or as valuable as theirs.
For a long time there’s been a single story of what it means to be Jewish — a single story of our shared experience, our shared faith, our shared oppression. And despite what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says about the danger of a single story, in the Jewish community there is simply no room for anyone who challenges that established narrative. My presence in Jewish spaces is seen as a threat, as if I am taking the place of a “real” Jewish person. My very existence is seen as a maelstrom of chance and error, like the Judaism my father was born into precludes his ability to procreate with anyone who was not also born into this religion. My story is treated like a fairy tale — and not the “they lived happily ever after” kind, but the “please use dark magic to explain away something that shouldn’t exist” kind.
But I do exist, and my story is very real, and I’m going to share part of it here in the hopes that it will change even one person’s view of the supposed single story of the Jewish experience. To be honest, I wasn’t sure where to start (because really, where do you start in the face of so much hate?) but eventually I realized that my story, as many second-generation Asian daughters can tell you, begins with my mom.
In my earliest memory I’m 4 years old. My mom tried to pick me up from JCC preschool, only to have the teacher refuse to let her take me home, as no one had called ahead to tell her “the maid” would be coming to get me. At 11, I earned a full scholarship to my city’s Jewish day school and my mom, bursting with pride, spent the weekend making kimchi (a feat of strength, endurance and pure love) for my first day — only to be called into the principal’s office and shamed when other students accused me of eating “baby embryos” in the cafeteria. At 13, my mom — who had worked three jobs for months to afford my custom-made dress and a luncheon for me and all my friends — was denied a seat on the bimah during my bat mitzvah while my father, a white man who had abandoned me for most of my life in all the ways a parent can abandon a child and who also happened to have been born Orthodox Jewish, waltzed into temple and took a place of honor alongside me, no questions asked.
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