I first heard the word 교포 (gyopo) to refer to the Korean diaspora from RM of BTS. I can’t remember the context, but I think it was during one of his VLives, back when I was still mainlining all their content in a misguided belief that I could catch up.1
In the years since I became a literal card-carrying member of ARMY, my Korean comprehension has improved significantly, but back when I was dipping my toe in the waters of fandom, my facility with my first language had declined to the point where I still needed subtitles to keep up with the boys. I remember pausing the live when Namjoon started talking about “Koreans abroad,” sliding the progress bar back and back and back until my ears snagged on the word.
교포. Gyopo. Gyo. Po.
It’s funny — until that moment, I hadn’t really considered my Koreanness from a native’s perspective. As far as I — and frankly, my mother — was concerned, our lives began once my mother first arrived in America. As a child, I never thought twice about Korea as any place other than somewhere my ancestors left behind, the way one might discard an old sweater you had outgrown. To us, the past was literally a foreign country, and they did indeed do things differently there. Until that moment, I had never realized that there might be a word for us, those of us who had left. No longer countrymen, but still part of the same blood. The same womb.
A diaspora.
There is no formal word for “diaspora” in Korean — the word 교포 itself comes from the Sino-Korean 僑胞, comprised of the characters 僑 (gyo), or people living abroad, and 胞 (po), or placenta, afterbirth, born of the same parents, womb. Until the moment I learned the word 교포, I had thought of myself as a hyphenated American, an outsider claiming stake in an identity I constantly had to prove. Koreanness was something I was always trying to navigate, mitigate, abdicate in favor of being seen not just as American, but human.
Until Namjoon named me, I had not thought of myself as a wayward member of a family. A kin. A clan. A blood. It shifted my perspective somehow, to consider myself a prodigal child instead of a stranger at the door, forever looking for a home. Suddenly it meant that I belonged, even if I was moving ever further away from the place where I was from.
The word diaspora comes from the Greek διασπορά (scattering, dispersion) from διασπείρω (“I sow”). It was originally used to refer to citizens of a dominant city-state moving into the territories of the lands they conquered to assimilate the people living there, i.e. colonization. The concept of diaspora as being the result of an exile from the homeland comes from when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, when the word was used to refer to the expulsion and forced resettlement of Israelites from the Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE, as well as the expulsion of Judahites from the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE. In this context, a word that had once belonged to the disperser now belongs to the dispersed, with all the attendant connotations of displacement, loss, and longing.
This linguistic history of the word diaspora being an interplay between the colonizer and the colonized is in essence, the very conflict and trauma that lies at the heart of any diasporic person. And the question that is the root of all that conflict and trauma is assimilation. The ancient Greeks forced assimilation upon the citizens of the city-states they conquered, while diasporic Jews faced hatred and prejudice wherever they went for not assimilating to the dominant culture (i.e. converting to Christianity).
For non-white immigrants, and especially the children of non-white immigrants, the question of assimilation is one of survival. Of negotiating a series of minuscule traumas visited upon the psyche over and over again with each racist microaggression, each ignorant question, each reminder of our otherness. How we choose to assimilate — to survive — varies from individual to individual.
I am often called charming, mostly by older white members of society who view my calculated combination of childlike curiosity and self-aware sense of humor with a paternalistic eye. This is by design, of course, because I so often needed these elders to like and pity me in equal measure while I was growing up. I needed them to pity me enough to protect me from harm, and like me enough to not find me threatening. Or foreign. Or alien. I was quite good at playacting charm for white adults; I paid attention to their patterns of speech, their habits, their mannerisms, and mirrored them back.
This is assimilation.
This is survival.
I think about the ways I have chosen to survive. I am not the child of refugees; my mother voluntarily exiled herself from her homeland in search of a better, brighter (more capitalist, more Christian) future. I am, in fact, also the daughter of pioneers, of those who illegally crossed the vast expanses of indigenous land, uprooting themselves over and over again for the promise of a better, brighter (more capitalist, more Christian) future. I come from a restless folk, it seems, for I have been uprooted (and uproot myself) more times than I can count. I’m used to it. I even like it sometimes.
The legacy of that pioneering spirit, I suppose.
By the time I was ten years old, I had moved house six times and enrolled at three different elementary schools, both public and private. By the time I was twenty, I had moved both across the United States and across the Atlantic Ocean. With every upheaval I had to find and create my social circle and my identity from scratch, a palimpsest of personality, charming my way into friendships and relationships before having to leave again. I am both a social chameleon and butterfly; I can get along with anyone, but I can’t get to know anyone.
That is also survival.
If my years constantly uprooting myself and being uprooted has taught me anything, it’s the ability to fit in anywhere. Learn the right words, the right clothes, the right speech patterns, the right jokes, and people will let you sit with them at the cafeteria. I have an easy way with people, a charm cultivated from years of cotillion, country clubs, and code-switching. To fit in is to fade into the fabric of people’s everyday lives.
Fitting in is assimilation. Fitting in is survival.
But fitting in is not the same thing as belonging. Fitting in can be learned or earned; belonging can only be bestowed. There are no words, no fashions, no jokes that will make people embrace you as their own. Own. To be owned by someone, to belong to them.
To be claimed.
In my retrospective on Wintersong, I identified my artistic wound as a fear of being incomprehensible. Lost in translation. I would be remiss if I didn’t think this wound stemmed directly from the fact that I am a member of a diaspora, forever searching for belonging.
All members of a diaspora are orphans of the same womb. Motherless, yet bound by the placenta of a shared blood, a red string of fate that ties us all together. That is how I choose to translate 僑胞. Orphaned and without a home but each other.
Hence the title of this collection of essays. I am an orphan in search of a home, returning to the place not of my birth, but of the red string of fate — of placenta — that binds me there.
I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
사랑해,
Reader, she cannot. There is simply too much.