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Trying to Identify

By Jenie Pak

I have one addiction: Korean soap opera videos. I rent them — four for five bucks — from an ahjuhma who owns a video store in the Richmond district. No more American TV for me. No more inane reality shows and family sitcoms that never resemble any family I know. I am in love with the absurdity of all that Korean soap opera drama, with a capital D. (If you think you have drama, check out a Korean soap.) When I find myself crying over reunited sisters, a successful heart transplant, or forbidden love leading to fatal consequences, I laugh a little inside.

Since watching these videos is supposed to make me identify, sympathize and empathize with the characters, I sometimes wonder: What if I were in her shoes? But the thing is, I will never be. Not the demanding mother-in-law, not the girl who’s willing to destroy a fellow sister in order to win the man she loves. Not the coquettish girl who calls her boyfriend in the middle of the night to ask, Opba, opba, nah sahranghae? Not the dutiful daughter who erases her dreams for her parents’ wishes.

I would never be in their shoes because as a lesbian, I am far from the stereotypical, virtuous, heterosexual Korean girl depicted in these soaps. The only references to queerness in these soap operas come in the form of jokes: the ultra-queenie fashion designer as comic relief, the college girls joking about being lesbians (or more accurately, lez). So then should I shut the TV off? Declare never to watch Korean soaps again? Do I throw my set out the window?

The answer is no. But then, the question remains: Why watch? Why sit for hours, eyes glued to the scenes of families huddled around dinner tables eating porkbelly slices in salted shrimp and bean sprout soup? Why sit transfixed while the man and woman walk beneath cherry blossom trees, with petals drifting onto their shoulders?

Because where else do I get to see Koreans on my TV screen eating Korean food and saying Korean things? Where else can I hear the latest Korean pop songs and drool over dukbogee and fried squid served hot on wooden sticks at the pochangmacha outdoor stands? The sense of identity is still needed.

It’s true, we each have our own stories to tell. We can’t expect someone to duplicate the images and whirl of emotions inside of our heads and hearts. That’s why I’m happy that I can find bits and pieces of myself even within a Korean miniseries whose characters are all heterosexual, obsessed with money and social status, and oftentimes depressingly unable to be direct about their true feelings. (OK, so maybe that last one doesn’t hit so far from home.) And strangely enough, watching one of these videos makes me feel far more real than watching any American TV show or movie.

Of course, I still have the lack of queer references, or negative portrayal of queers to contend with. It’s like I’m 80 percent there on a bus in Seoul or singing my lungs out at the noraebang. But sometimes that 80 percent decides to squint at these alien beings, cringe at the violence, constant shouting, crying, long-time suffering and pain. That other 20 percent — watching from outside myself or from the deepest center of me — doesn’t belong anywhere and won’t commit to any kind of space. That’s where I exist most — negotiating the scene, the stillness that sits in the silence of a TV screen among the buzz and noise, captured inside a thousand pixels.

Not too long ago, I attended a queer film festival and saw a film by a queer woman of color. To my dismay, the only Asian in her film was totally stereotypical in the worst way imaginable. Isn’t it bad enough that we’re bombarded with caricatures of Asians on the screen as it is? Among them, the Asian sex goddess, the evil gangster, and the one that infuriates me the most: the asexual, unemotional (in other words, inhuman) Asian brought in as comic relief or as a foil to the great white heterosexual hero. We won’t get into major details here, but if a queer woman of color filmmaker thought it was OK to disrespect Asians in her film (whether she realized it or not), what else does this mean for me, a queer Korean American girl who sometimes feels stuck between not wanting to date any woman (often feeling objectified and exoticized by white women, not wanting to deal with the close-knit drama of the queer APA women’s community, and not having much contact with other non-APA queer women of color) and wanting to be wholly open to all?

To wrap up, I’m working on a script for my own queer Korean American soap opera video. I’ll lose the homophobic, queer-bashing references but keep the queers. I won’t have two women fighting over a man, a father slapping his daughter because she broke curfew, a mother forcing her old maid daughter (only 27 years old!) to meet a potential husband (of course, at a dimly lit restaurant or teahouse with American ’80s music playing in the background). I’ll be sure to throw in a lot of goodies: unrequited love, existential angst, fear of rejection, serendipity, the desire to love and desire itself. Imagine, these asexual Asians in the throes of passion! Imagine these Asian queers staying true to themselves!

So, as they always like to say during a particularly dramatic moment in a Korean soap opera: Let me ask you one thing: When I’m done making my first soap (tentative titles: Dog Dreams or Nobody Loves Me But Me), will you come and watch?

Jenie Pak grew up watching her parents watch Korean videos. Now she has the strange suspicion the videos are watching her and her parents.