{"id":755,"date":"2023-05-17T10:42:39","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T14:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/?p=755"},"modified":"2023-05-17T10:42:41","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T14:42:41","slug":"red-thread-%ec%a0%95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/2023\/05\/17\/red-thread-%ec%a0%95\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Thread & \uc815"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Emily, her cousin Lee Tae-Hoon, and his brother as children.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

I had a really up and down journey with my own identity. When I was younger, I thought of myself as no different than cousins, someone removed from their homeland and forced to adapt to a new one. Later on, I unconsciously tried to make myself American, even when understanding that I was not. Even later, I made some sort of peace with the vastly different worlds within me, and claimed both proudly. A couple years ago, I found that I didn\u2019t quite have a place in my family and \u201cmy\u201d country \u2013 either one \u2013 as I thought. Now, I feel like I don\u2019t really belong to any place, people, or culture. The idea of identity, I think, has to be flexible because I myself as one person have had such a fluid relationship with my own, not even accounting for all the other people who have led different lives in different contexts as different humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would like to say that having a conversation with my cousin for this interview has changed the whole nature of our relationship. In honesty, it did not. We are still unfortunately living very different lives in very different countries and very different contexts, and these things will probably never change, even if I do end up moving back to Korea. But this interview did allow me to reconcile the idea of my cousin from the reality of who he is. Growing up in the US and not interacting with my relatives very much, I understood them in a general way; for my cousin, I knew what my mom told me. He is smart, he plays piano, he wants to be a doctor. I assume my cousins knew me in somewhat the same way. While none of this information was incorrect, I feel like I do have a more nuanced understanding of him, like filling in the whites of a coloring book. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though he was the one being interviewed, I feel like I came to understand myself better in addition to him while listening to my cousin answer questions. Though with all the differences in our lives, the minute details stay the same: we are working towards our goals, slowly but surely, against all odds. And doesn\u2019t that connect us in some way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Emily Kwen on her oral history with Lee Tae-Hoon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a really up and down journey with my own identity. When I was younger, I thought of myself as no different than cousins, someone removed from their homeland and forced to adapt to a new one. Later on, I unconsciously tried to make myself American, even when understanding that I was not. Even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11659,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3838],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11659"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":757,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions\/757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}