My 7th grade teacher, Mrs. Terlecka, once told me: "No matter where you come from - Poland, Colombia, Africa, or Korea - you are all Canadian." At the time, I brushed off her comment as well-meaning but misinformed. Perhaps it applied to her, a Polish immigrant, but it did not apply to me or any of my classmates who had caused her to make that statement. I would always be Korean and nothing else, I thought. My family and I had come to the West to study, not to settle; and my classmates, a querulous mix of Central and South Americans, Africans, Eastern Europeans, and Anglo/French Canadians, did not appear to be united countrymen to me. Of course, we were all Catholic, spoke English, and dressed in much the same manner, but that was our outside façade. Inside, we were different. Not only did our internal languages not match the ones we spoke at school, we subscribed to different ways of thought; our separate allegiances kept us firmly apart.
I believed I knew what diversity was. I had helped to paint the colorful mural on the wall near the main office, with the national flags representing the different ethnicities of the student body. Yet, whenever I passed by it, my eyes always went first to my flag, the South Korean flag, the one I had painted first and with the greatest care.
Even when I was barely old enough to know that there were two Koreas, I considered myself a patriot. I genuinely enjoyed singing the national anthem, and I quite admired our national flower. I loved the green mountains that surrounded my city, Seoul, and when I looked upon the Han River while being driven to school every day, my heart fairly swelled with pride. In my mind, nothing could surpass the honor of being a citizen of South Korea. My daily life attested to this "fact"; my first elementary school was located near an old palace, and looking carefully, one could find little shards of painted china half-sticking out of the ground. Our history was unbroken; one could not live in Korea and not notice the traces our ancestors had left behind
Foreigners, even Asian ones, were a novelty. The one half-white friend I had, I thought, was one of a kind. The idea of living in a land populated by "diverse" populations was as foreign to me as the shiny president coins I was told to buy my lunch with on the first day of second grade, in a rather diverse public school in New York.
Until I stepped into my new classroom, I had never before seen so many different types of people in one room. I had assumed that "American" was an ethnicity in itself - never did I expect a Chinese girl named after an English queen, a Dutch lady teaching English, or a boy who claimed to be both Irish and Italian at once. The diversity I encountered both amazed and offended me. Coming from a homogeneous nation, I was confused as the how the arrangement worked... did the children speak their "real" languages at home, and speak English in school? But how could they, with such complicated ethnic backgrounds? The idea that they spoke English at home was doubly odd. What was the point, then, I asked, of claiming so many ethnicities? I looked upon my new classmates with a mix of pity and wonder.
By the time I was attending the Catholic school in Ontario, I had grown used to seeing and hearing various ethnicities in one place. The Colombians at our school, for whatever reason, chose to speak loudly in Spanish, even when non-Spanish speakers were around. By the first half of the year, my head snapped up automatically at the first excited cry of "Mire!" and by the second year, I had learned to stop laughing at the sound of the word "guerilla." As time passed, not only did I grow used to them, I began to like them. Working on group projects together, I got to know more about them as individuals rather than just one of the many Latinos in the class.
At the same time, my imagination was crossing new boundaries. As I grew more and more used to English, I began to read more for pleasure than to improve my reading comprehension. Reading in English, I entered different mindsets: while reading 19th century English novels, Victorian England and all its implications seeped into my psyche so deeply that I frequently found myself believing I was there, even after I had finished reading. With reads such as The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia, America in brief intervals became as much of ancestral territory as Korea. Indeed, when I took US History last year, I was intensely fascinated, not simply due to America's unique history as a nation but because I could sympathize and identify with the people who built it. I still remember how, when reading The Killer Angels, my heart almost stopped at the final, fatal charge on Cemetery Hill; the pride and respect I had for these American soldiers was astounding.
Yet I could not claim them as my own. I could not so casually label myself "Asian American" like so many of my immigrant friends did. First of all, there was this permanent sense of being impermanent - I had already spent more than half my life as a transient visitor in foreign lands; I could not picture myself ever calling America home. I also realized that while my Korean identity was permanently embedded, my experience in the west had unhinged my stolid patriotism; I could no longer view the world through the single lens into which I believed I had been born.
That is why in my junior year, I joined the New Global Citizens, a global organization whose mission is to "educate, equip, and mobilize young people to help solve the greatest challenges faced by communities around the world." Within our local chapter at Shaker High School, we work to raise funds for the street children of Belgrade, Serbia. While our mission may sound random or contrived to some, to me, it is as real and important a task as ladling soup for homeless people in our own city or organizing cultural events at the Korean church. As a global citizen, I find it is not enough to feel passionate about just one group of people while shutting the door on everything else. Beyond the superficial, there are no fundamental differences between people of different cultures. Allegiances to specific groups are forged sentiments, not god-given duties.
Yet the title of "global citizen" would have no meaning if not for already existing divisions. I would hate to live in a world where everybody shared the same culture and beliefs, for there would be nothing to be proud of; no astounding array of differences across nations that would cause me to stop and wonder. I believe that a necessary part of what makes our world beautiful is diversity.
My referring to myself as a global citizen does not diminish or cramp my Korean side in any way. In fact, it is all the more meaningful because I am a global citizen. I consciously choose to be Korean; I will never be anything else, ethnicity-wise. What has changed since my arrival in the United States, then, is not my core cultural identity, but how I view it in relation to my interactions with fellow humans. My ethnicity imposes no limits; it is simply part of the circumstances from which I will project my abilities to the outside world.
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