Mixed Race and the Daughter of Immigrants: What It Means to Be 'Enough'

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I have never felt enough. As a mixed race kid—half-Korean, half-Spaniard—and the daughter of immigrants, I have always been illegible because I don’t fit nicely into the boxes society uses to structure our identities and experiences.

To not be or feel “enough” denotes a sense of inadequacy and deficiency, which oddly in my case stems from my unruly excessiveness. I may not feel enough, but I am also too much.

I have always been too Spanish for my Korean side, too Korean for my Spanish side, and a little too brown for everyone. When I was little, I dreamed of going somewhere and having someone claim me as their own. To hear someone call out to me, “Hey, you are one of us,” and in the moment have a sense of who “us” might be.

When you’re like me — from two different worlds but living in a third new world, the United States — language becomes your calling card and currency. It’s what helps you translate things for your parents and it’s what connects you, like a secret handshake, to the invisible network of communities and cultures underpinning this country.

I know this experience intimately because whenever I get to speak Spanish with someone in the middle of an otherwise English-only day, I feel momentarily whole as we share that fleeting smile of recognition and understanding.

I don’t speak Korean. I can count the number of Korean words and phrases I know on one hand. Perhaps that’s why all my life I have had a difficult time claiming my Asian (-American) identity. I have always felt that I am not Korean enough.

And while I rationally know that language shouldn’t define or police our identities and that we have to instead deconstruct privilege and power, that logic doesn’t really address the pain of feeling erased, of feeling less my father’s daughter. In truth my complicated relationship to what it means to be “enough” is actually a story about my dad.

My father, Kim Dong Ju, was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1946, a year after Hiroshima and four years before the Korean War, which he still remembers in the fragmented flashbacks of a child. He was destined to fight in yet another war, the Vietnam War, but my grandfather didn’t want his first-born son to go to fight (and possibly die) in a war so far from home.

Luckily my grandfather knew a Jesuit priest who knew people that could help my father secure a student visa to get his graduate degree in Spain. This plan took him even farther from home, but it seemed like a step forward in an era defined by its pursuit of progress and modernity.

My grandparents took my father to the airport. In photos, my grandmother dons one of her nicest hanboks while my dad, with a distant look in his eye, sports a modern, slick suit. When he boards the plane to Madrid that day in 1967, he doesn’t yet know that he’s leaving Korea forever, that he will visit but never live there again.

From the unknown violence of the Vietnam War to the conservative reality of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, my father flies straight into his future in Madrid, where he is one of the few Koreans or Asians of any kind in the whole country. Caught in the crosswind of history, he makes the best of things by making some friends, getting into fast cars and sporting the latest mod fashions. It’s only at night that he takes the time to write long letters to his mother and poetry about a homeland that’s increasingly becoming more foreign to him.

He eventually meets my mom, Cristina Rajal, on a blind date. They fall in love, get engaged and my mother’s family tells my dad that he is going to become a Catholic. My dad gets baptized and he becomes who I have always known him as — Javier Kim.

They have my two sisters in Madrid, but spend the next few years traveling around Spain helping local banks set up ATM machines before landing in the up-and-coming Madrid suburb of Majadahonda.

To hear both my parents talk about this time in their lives, it sounds like the golden age of the Kim-Rajal family. But my dad had a dream and he couldn’t shake it even though it meant having to leave their lives in Spain. In 1983 the American dream still felt tangible, when my parents, with my teenage sisters in tow, immigrated to California.

Fast forward to 1986, my parents have their first and only American-born baby: me, Cristina Hyun-Mi Kim. Growing up in California, being Korean wasn’t something we really talked about. It wasn’t like Spain and my Spanish family, which shaped every aspect of my life, or like the Univision news my whole family would watch at night.

Everything Korean about our lives felt muted, hidden or inaccessible. It was my dad talking in hushed tones and me not knowing what he said. It was my dad’s Korean newspaper that only he could read. And it was my dad ordering for all of us and laughing with the Korean waitress in Oakland’s K-Town while we all smiled quietly.

Being Korean was hearing my dad singing “Arirang,” a Korean folk song, quietly in his room. And me walking in and seeing him cry as he listened and me crying with him, but not really knowing why — just crying.

I didn’t go to Korea until I was 25 years old, when I finally got my dad to go with me. Armed with my crappy recorder, I was determined to find myself and connect with him.

There was a part of me that hoped I would get there and instantly feel claimed and at home. I was sad our first night because of course that didn’t happen. No one even thought I was Korean.

In the days that followed, I listened intently as my dad proudly explained the origins of Hangul and showed me the Buddhist temple. We laughed while we ate ddukbboki and navigated the Seoul fish market. We took quiet walks as he showed me his old school. He told me about his friends there and about the ones that would go on to die in Gwangju during the 1980 uprising. We explored and fell in love with the Korea of his memory and the Korea of today that was as foreign to him as it was to me.

One day, in the middle of a busy food market, when I asked my dad for kimchi lavado, which means “washed kimchi” in Spanish, which is what our family has always called mul kimchi, I realized that we hadn’t stopped speaking in Spanish the whole time we had been in Korea.

I was learning all about Korea not in Korean but in Spanish. And that, in fact, speaking Spanish with my dad in Korea is the most authentically me I could ever be, and that telling me all about Korea in Spanish is actually my dad being his most authentic self.

In that moment, it dawned on me that we hadn’t talked a lot about Korea growing up not because he didn’t want to share it with me, but because he too was trying to figure out what it means to be Korean. First as a Korean in Spain and now as both Korean and Spanish in the U.S., where he speaks Spanish at home, English at work and Korean rarely. For him, kimchi lavado is also his way of saying mul kimchi.

Mi papá, the Korean immigrant that went around the world and ended up in California, is just like me. He was Korean, Spanish and even a little American too. He was something in between all three — too much and yet not enough.

It brings me back to the Korean folk song that my dad always listens to and that inexplicably makes us both cry. “Arirang,” the unofficial anthem of Korea—both Koreas—and a resistance song during Japanese occupation, tells the story of two lovers indefinitely separated on different mountain tops and forever longing for each other.

The song perfectly encapsulates the division of Korea, but it also speaks to the beautiful sadness of being an immigrant, like my dad, of longing for a home you once knew, that’s forever out of reach, that you long for even as you make new homes elsewhere.

And in turn it captures my experience too. The fluidity of being mixed and living in the borderlands — that interstitial space in between the two lovers in “Arirang.” The space where both my dad and I belong and are always enough.