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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. My next guest has written a memoir/manifesto about growing up in Los Angeles as a child of Korean immigrants, rebellious and ambitious, attending Princeton and Harvard, and contending with a racial identity that she initially sees as neither nor, but comes to view as both hand.

How she gets there and what her view can teach us about moving forward in the fight for racial justice is the story she tells. Julia Lee is a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches Black and Asian American literature, and her book is titled, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. Professor Lee, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us.

Julia Lee: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Do you agree with that characterization memoir/manifesto? Because in a way it's a call to arms for racial justice in addition to your story, would you say?

Julia Lee: Yes, absolutely. I love the term manifesto and I definitely feel like it is in some ways a polemic. It's me talking about my life, my young adulthood, my childhood, but also talking to those of us out there who are much like myself and also young people and calling us to band together and fight back against racial injustice.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to how you get past the Black, white, neither nor dichotomy, let's talk a little bit about what it meant for you to be not only Asian American and neither Black nor white but also neither Chinese nor Japanese, which you say everyone seemed to assume you were one of, as a Korean American, you felt particularly unseen?

Julia Lee: Yes. I talk in the book about how as a kid, one of my first memories when I went to nursery school is coming home and asking my mother, "Are we Chinese or Japanese?" Because a white friend of mine at school had asked me and I didn't know what I was, and I recall my mother telling me, "Oh, actually, we're neither, we're Korean." I asked her, "What is Korean?"

She launched into this story about how Korea is this peninsula and all of this stuff. I just remember thinking, "I can't go back to school and tell my friend I'm a peninsula, [laughs] can you just tell me what I am?" Even from the beginnings, I wasn't an Asian person that was easily labeled as Chinese or Japanese. I felt falling in that gap. Then as I grew older, it became even more clear that I didn't fit into the Black-white racial divide in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can invite you in on this. Any Korean Americans listening right now who want to talk about your own story of feeling you didn't fit into America's Black white racial dichotomy or even Japanese Chinese dichotomy? Are you relating to this already? Who has a question or a story for my guest, Julia Lee? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. I see your book is divided in three parts titled "Rage, shame, and Grace," and growing up the oldest child of parents who had lived through the Korean War and immigrated to this country. Can you talk about the rage that you lived with since that's the first part of the book?

Julia Lee: Yes. It's funny because I feel from, I don't know, when I was a probably seven, eight years old, I started to feel this sense of invisibility and that I couldn't express to people who I was or how they should see me because a lot of people didn't see me. Then when I started to hit adolescence, it began to turn into anger, a rage. Really, it was metastasizing. At the same time, my mother was going through her midlife years and was also consumed with anxiety, anger, rage, persecution. My parents owned a fried chicken restaurant at that time it was called Pioneer Chicken, and it's since been purchased by Popeyes, which I'm sure people are more familiar with.

We were going through a recession and my parents didn't have enough money for even food for us. Here I was at home trying really hard to get straight As at school and yet feeling like I was being marginalized as well. Suddenly, this anger, which I couldn't express and I couldn't vent or couldn't express to other people, felt like it was burning me up inside. I really parallel it with that explosion that happened with the LA uprising, where all of a sudden all of this pent-up frustration, racial anger, marginalization just imploded in the city of Los Angeles.

Brian Lehrer: This is after the Rodney King incident, right?

Julia Lee: Right. That incident, which most people are probably familiar with stemming from the gruesome beating of Rodney King by four white police officers. Then their subsequent they received nothing. They were declared innocent and that led to the LA uprising. There was another incident which readers or which listeners may be less familiar with, which had to do with Soon Ja Du, who was a middle-aged Korean woman, immigrant shop owner who shot and killed Latasha Harlins, who was a 15-year-old Black girl who she accused falsely of stealing a bottle of orange juice.

Soon Ja Du was also let go, given no prison time, given a slap on the wrist, just probation. This also was one of the contributing factors to the LA uprising. I certainly felt at that moment that on the one hand, I knew what it felt to be a racial minority, but on the other hand, I felt complicit in the ways in which white supremacy had protected somebody like Soon Ja Du and bled to the unpunished killing of Latasha Harlins.

Brian Lehrer: You write about a specific type of rage/sorrow called Han. Am I saying it right, Han-

Julia Lee: Yes, that is correct.

Brian Lehrer: -in Korean? Would you describe that concept to our listeners?

Julia Lee: Sure. Han is a term that I actually did not learn until I was about 25 years old because it's not like my parents talked about it. It's a term familiar to many Koreans and Korean Americans, but it expresses this pent-up and inexpressible rage, frustration, depression sense of persecution, and grievance suffered by Koreans. Some people trace it to the history of Japanese colonization, to the history of war, of family separation, and the sense that Korean Americans and Koreans that we're always the victims and that we always get screwed. I remember when I first heard this term, I thought, "Oh, my God, that is exactly how I feel."

I joke about how I can hold a grudge forever, and I experience spectacular shot in Freud, and when something bad happens to somebody, I don't like, [laughs] I feel like a sick joy. I think so much of this, for listeners who have been watching Beef, the New Ali Wong series, I mean the character Steven Yeun, who is a Korean-American son of immigrants and just filled with this boiling rage, that is Han, that is me. I look at that and I recognize the frustration of myself and so many people like me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Eugene in Sunnyside, Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Eugene.

Eugene: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. My question is about I'm adopted from Korea. I have American parents, I relate a lot to-- Not really fitting into either world. I'm really grateful for my AAPI friends who are the ones who are Korean, who helps introduce me to a lot of aspects like learning the [unintelligible 00:08:41] alphabet and learning their basic Korean.

One thing I have noticed and I wanted to ask about is how Asians, in particular Asian American women are normalized in culture now, not as an accessory, but I do see the pairing of Caucasian men with Asian women among my friend group, particularly in New York, that's very normalized, and I see it in commercials too. It's like while we are isolated as an identity by ourselves as a woman in particular, I'm wondering if you've noticed that or you feel we're socially acceptable as long as we're a part of this, Orientalism pairing, I suppose, in the media?

Julia Lee: Yes, that is a great question. I'm married to a white man and I know that this is something I think a lot about because what is the history of this interracial pairing? I talk in the book a lot about the history of Orientalism, which, as you mentioned, is the ways in which it's become normalized for often white men to be seen in some ways hyper-masculine and to be paired with often women of color who come from colonized communities or communities where Americans intervened because of war, because of imperialism, and you cannot escape that history.

It's everywhere. In the book, I talk about how, even if you Google Korean women in the search bar of Google, or Thai women, or Vietnamese women, or Filipino women, the first sites that come up are always mail-order bride sites or porn sites. This is the way the racial imaginary sees us because Google is just a reflection of the digital world, which is a reflection of our world.

Yes, I am extremely cognizant of that and extremely sensitive to that. At the same time, I talk a lot about how this history we need to recognize, but we also need to recognize our identities, we need to come up with a way of coming together that transcends these boundaries of race and ethnicity, without denying the ways in which we are different and we have separate identities.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who else is relating to Julia Lee's story or wants to ask a question? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Julia Lee, professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches Black and Asian American literature, and her own new book is called Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Can you talk about how you positioned yourself against some of the other Korean American girls in your high school who you saw as too American or too Korean? What defined your place in between them?

Julia Lee: Yes, it was an experience that I described as being like Goldilocks and feeling like myself and my friends were the only ones who were "just right," but I really think it's a reflection of what it's like to be a minoritized person in predominantly white spaces, which is that you inadvertently unconsciously compare yourself to the other people of your same identity group.

In my case, it was Asian Americans in my predominantly white school. I went to an all-girls school, so it was Asian American women. Yes, to survive in that kind of world minoritized people, some of them end up trying to assimilate into whiteness, and maybe that means rejecting others of their same minoritized identity and hanging out with the majority culture. For others, it might be just hanging out with people of their own identity and finding solace there, and then for others, it might be navigating the in-between place, which is where I placed myself, but then I would look at these other girls and be like, "Oh, she's so whitewash, she only hangs out with white people."

Then I'd look at the Asian girls who only hung out with other Asian girls, and I thought, "Oh, they're so insular and so backwards because they all go to the same Korean church, and they all go to the same SAT cram school. They're so narrow-minded." Sometimes their politics didn't align with mine.

What I realized is that what I hated the most than them was also the thing that I hated the most in myself, the sense that "Oh, my gosh, am I sell out? Am I trying too hard to assimilate into whiteness? Or am I too Asian? Am I not assimilated enough?" When really these women, it's not their fault. That's what I started to realize is that all of us were just trying to survive in a system of white supremacy, and we were just trying to find community where we could.

Brian Lehrer: How did you come then to the both and realization that if I understand it, as neither Black nor white, you have an understanding of the benefits and costs of being both that it's not a zero-sum game, even in dominant white America?

Julia Lee: Yes. It took a long time. Honestly, it took until I was in my mid-40s. It happened during an anti-racism workshop that I attended online in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, in the murder of George Floyd. I really didn't want to go to this anti-racism workshop, because I really felt like it was full of these white classmates of mine from high school sort of like a voluntary event, and some of them I just thought were so cringy because they wanted to be allies now, and I just thought you guys were some of the worst perpetrators of racial violence when I was in high school. I just sat there feeling really superior and really snotty about it.

Then the moderator who is this Black woman said something that absolutely shook my being, which is that she told all of us that it was foolish to fall into these binaries like Black or white, or racist or anti-racist, or good or bad because the reality is that life is much more complicated and nuanced than that and that all of us at times can be racist, and all of us at times can be anti-racist, and that sometimes we're good, and sometimes we're bad, and that we had to allow for that ambiguity.

When she said this, I turned off my video and I just burst into tears. I was ugly crying because what I realized is that I had been doing the same thing to myself just saying, "I'm not Black, I'm not white, I am nothing. I am nor." What she was saying is no, that we need to move from that to a sense of both. Yes, sometimes I am racially privileged, absolutely. I enjoy proximity to whiteness, I enjoy some of the privileges of the model minority myth, which allows me into certain spaces, and yet, I'm also racially disadvantaged because I know what it's like to be the recipient of anti-Asian hate.

I know what it's like to be the butt of a joke in a classroom. Instead of that being a space of impoverishment or powerlessness, it's actually a superpower of mine, because I know what it's like to be in both those spaces. I can speak to both those experiences. That's a position of abundance, it's not one of deprivation.

Brian Lehrer: Sonny in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sonny.

Sonny: Hi. I feel like my spiritual twin or soul sister is talking because I relate to everything she's talking about. When I moved to America, when I was seven to a very small town in Ohio, when I told somebody I was from South Korea, they said, "Oh, is that in Japan, or is that in China?" That was my experience growing up, I totally get that. Then whenever I would go back to Korea, I felt lost because I didn't feel like I belonged visiting Korea, but I never quite felt like I belonged in America. I feel more like I belong because I live in New York City.

I have to say, I also do a lot of or try to be non-racist work. The issues are very complicated, and every time I feel like I speak up about the anti-Blackness in the Asian community, I'm seen as not Asian enough. That's a real issue. What I wanted to ask you is that one of the things that I found so surprising is that all of a sudden, South Korea is like K-pop drama.

It's really weird to me in how much South Korea went from like nobody even knew it existed, just like how it went from being a third-world country to a first-world country in one generation to everybody knowing about it. I'm not sure that I'm completely comfortable with what I think, I just haven't like wrap my head around that. I was wondering what your thoughts were about that.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Yes, all the cool kids like K-pop no matter where they come from, right?

Julia Lee: Yes, it is so weird. I have a 13-year-old daughter, and she's obsessed with K-pop. On the one hand, I'm so happy for her because God knows, when I was growing up, there were no models. Nothing. There was nothing cool about being Korean, and now suddenly, it seems to be really cool and almost trendy.

Then you see all these honestly weirdos who are trying to get plastic surgery to make themselves look like K-pop stars, which I think contributes to this kind of fetishization or civilization of Asian bodies. The thing that makes me very uncomfortable about it, because I completely understand where you're coming from, is that it's like it's cool to be Korean until it's not cool to be Korean. Yes, it's cool to be Korean when you're thinking about K-pop, when you're thinking about these bands and the cultural global reach of it, but then it's not cool to be Korean when you're getting harassed on the street, and somebody's trying to kill you because your face is Asian.

I think that's something that really I think makes me anxious about this obsession with K-pop that doesn't look at the fullness of racialized identity, that sees it only as a costume to put on, like a trend, like a Halloween costume, and that people who appreciate it in that superficial way, are still also not seeing the fullness of that racial identity of being Asian. We can't take it off. We can't take off identity like a wig or a costume.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller in here before we run out of time. Jung Soo in East Harlem, I think wants to relate to that concept you were talking about earlier of Han, that sort of combination of sorrow and rage. Jung Soo, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Jung Soo: Hi, good morning. I love the discussion. I just wanted to say I grew up in New York in the US 50 years, and my parents are still alive. What makes it hit home is that I feel so bad for my parents. It ties into with your K-pop thing. Had they not come to the US and had such hard lives in the US but the people like their contemporaries who stayed in Korea, I went back to Korea a couple of years ago and the standard of living is so high there. The medical care is so good. I just want to say for the past 10 years, immigration from Korea to the US is virtually non. People are not choosing to come to the US.

There's actually a wave of reverse immigration, where elderly Koreans who've been in the US 40 years they go back to Korea just to enjoy their few remaining years. The thing about being Korean being cool until it's not, I have kids and for college, I think going to Korea for college is a real option for them. Whereas when I was a kid or a young person, I wanted nothing to do with Korea. It was not even an option. For my two kids, going to Korea and being an English-speaking Asian person in Korea could be a real option.

Brian Lehrer: Jung Soo, thank you so much. Thank you for your call. Professor Lee, we've only got about a minute left in the segment, but are things turning on their head from where they were a generation ago like he describes?

Julia Lee: A little bit. My parents are in their 80s and they also got dual citizenship in Korea, because the health care system is better there and they don't want to bankrupt my sister and me if they need long-term care. That is a thing. The other thing is that I have relatives in Korea who did not emigrate and who did not enjoy the economic renaissance in Korea, because there's a huge divide between the rich and the poor in Korea, just like there is here in the United States. Despite the prosperity in Korea, there are people like those in parasite who are in the underbelly of the economic system there. Yes, it's glamorous, it's cool, but it's also a place of great social, economic inequality.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think briefly that as a professor of African American and Asian American Literature at the college level that you're able to make a difference to students who come to college like you did or with various other identity issues coming from multiple backgrounds?

Julia Lee: I hope so. Otherwise, I would just lie down and die because I feel like as a teacher, you need to have that idealism in order to get up and go to work every day. My students really are the ones that give me hope, even when I feel distraught or that it's not worth it. They're the ones that keep me up and keep me going.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Lee, writer, scholar, teacher, at Loyola Marymount, and author now of Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Julia Lee: Thanks for having me.

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