Not your model minority: A profile of Katie Hong

Katie Hong is no longer compartmentalizing herself.

She started doing it in 1980, when her family arrived in the United States from South Korea.

As they settled in, eight-year-old Katie’s world became bifurcated. She lived in mostly white neighborhoods, because her parents sought out safe areas with good schools. But the family worked long hours in poor communities in the Bay Area, leaving Katie and her two siblings frequently shifting between these worlds.

Katie’s parents, whose college education and social status disappeared upon entering the US, did what many other Korean immigrants did to survive: Bought businesses from other Koreans in poor, underserved neighborhoods. Other avenues weren’t open to them. She said that’s why so many college -educated Korean immigrants own liquor stores, dry cleaners, and convenience stores. The Korean community made its own economy, lending to each other through “gye” — rotating credit associations — because banks were hesitant to lend to new immigrants.

“I was so envious of the white families in my neighborhood because their parents were home on the weekends and had ‘normal’ jobs with vacation and sick leave,” she said. “My parents worked 12-hour days, 365 days a year. We never ate dinner together. One parent missed every important milestone in our lives, including graduations.”

Her parents’ sacrifice did create opportunities for their children. When 18-year-old Katie packed her things for the 30-minute journey to UC Berkeley, she had no idea how transformational the experience would be for her, both as a Korean American and as an Asian-American woman.

“As a kid, white people would always ask me, ‘when did you come here?’, ‘where are you from?’ And say ‘oh, your English is so good!’ I never thought there was anything wrong with that until I went to college.”

At the time, Berkeley’s student body was 30 percent Asian American. It was completely different from Katie’s old life. “I met Koreans who were second and third generation. I met other Asian Americans. People assumed I was born here until I told them otherwise. It was the first time I felt like I belonged.”

It did take a while, however, for the experience to feel like a positive one.

“At first, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that there were so many Asians. I didn’t want people to see me as one of a horde. I wanted to be an individual, not part of a faceless, monolithic group. It was like going through stages of grief. I didn’t realize how many of the harmful stereotypes about Asian Americans I had internalized.”

When she started to study Asian-American history, and the history of other people of color in America, and Katie’s experiences were recontextualized. She felt duped. And it made her angry, but also connected to her fellow Asian-American students in a powerful way.

She laughs and says, “my nickname in college was Katie X.” When she and her then-boyfriend, now husband Harold would get into an argument, she would scream back at him, “ ‘get your boot off my neck!’ I was really angry. No one could make a joke around me.”

But the totality of the experience cemented her feeling of belonging. “It made me feel American. This is my country. I have just as much a right to be here as anyone else. It was a transformational time in my life and a reminder of how much context matters,” she said.

While Katie found the experience of bonding with the Asian-American identity and community in her life to be formative, she understands the complicated feelings many Asian people have about being put under a wide umbrella with a large and diverse group of people, often with little or nothing in common geographically or culturally. “It’s part of the violence we experience. Erasure and invisibility,” she said. She feels distinctly culturally Korean. “My family really drilled into me — you are Korean, you will always be Korean and don’t you ever forget it!” But she identifies politically as Asian American. “It’s a term I embrace for myself because of my shared experience with other Asian Americans.”

Her husband Harold’s family is ethnically Chinese from Myanmar. His family background, immigration experience, and lived experience in the United States was completely different from Katie’s. “As far as my Korean family is concerned, I ‘out-married’ when I married Harold. We have no shared culture, language, or history,” she said. “But the world sees us as an Asian couple. That’s another way we are invisible.”

As Katie moved into professional life, the compartmentalizing of her identity that she thought she had shed in college started to happen again. “I’ve been grappling with these issues ever since I stepped foot in this country. Not being white, you are confronted by this all the time.” But the workplace was uniquely challenging. “I had spaces where I could be myself and then there was the workplace, which was mostly white. I felt I had to minimize myself to belong.”

“This is the violence white supremacy inflicts on Asian Americans. We are the perpetual foreigner, never quite ‘American’. You can ‘belong’ but only if you shed your language, culture, and identity.”

At the same time, she says, Asian-American identity becomes weaponized as a way to perpetuate anti-Blackness through the “model minority” myth. First perpetuated in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement, the narrative that Asian Americans were hard-working, high-achieving, law abiding “good citizens” was perpetuated as a way for the US to attempt to shed its racist image and drive a wedge between Asian and Black communities. And while she doesn’t deny tensions exist between Black and Asian-American communities, she says it’s not hard to understand why. “We see the same images. We read the same books. We live in segregated neighborhoods. Black people and Asian people are all swimming in the same sea as white people. We are all victims of the same white supremacy,” she said.

Now Katie feels like the ground is starting to shift in important ways. “The positioning of Asians as a wedge is not new,” she said. What feels new to her is a more open discussion in her community about “our role as both victims and perpetrators of racism. We have been used to perpetuate anti-Blackness and there is a real understanding that addressing that is critical.” She sees Asian Americans playing a powerful role in a cross-racial movement of liberation for all communities of color. But first, she wants her community to look inward. “There is so much trauma from racism and invisibility in the Asian community. Unless we address that trauma and heal, we will continue to find ourselves weaponized against others.”

This journey has liberated Katie, too. “I have fully integrated all the parts of my identity. I don’t show up with one slice in the workplace, and a different one with my family. I’m tired of it and I don’t want to do it anymore. This is me.”