On Being Korean American for Palestine
What are the possibilities for an Asian American anti-imperialist solidarity?
Before I knew who Palestinians were or what Israel was, before I had ever heard of Asian American Studies or Edward Said, I first found the poem “My Father and the Fig Tree” by Naomi Shibab Nye.
The speaker writes about her father’s love of the fig tree, weaving it into cameos in all his fireside stories. The speaker as a child has never seen one herself — she eats a dried fig and she has nothing to compare it to, nothing like the fig tree only her father has seen.
At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth —
gift of Allah! — on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)— From “My Father and the Fig Tree” by Naomi Shibab Nye
I too ate my first fig at around 6 years old, a hard and leathery Turkish fig full of seeds from a ring packaged in shrink wrap. It was from Key Food, a New York City supermarket franchise we shopped at with coupons. My father would lament the pale sour strawberries, ripened by chlorophyll while in transit from whatever country they were taken too young from to stock the cold shelves of the supermarket. He would tell us about the melting summer sweetness of a Korean strawberry like a ruby in dark fertile earth, as if to say,You’ve never tasted a real strawberry.
My sister and brother went to Korea on their own in 1990 and returned with glass jars of strawberry jam made by our mother’s mother. I had never seen jam like that; we were a Smuckers and generic brand family and I loved the shivering grape jelly and bright red jams and the pop of their lids when opened. My grandmother’s jam was opaque and with seeds and fibrous lumps, and a grayish pink color that looked like viscera. It tasted strange, sweet on the verge of spoiling, delicious, and I immediately pictured the photos from Korea they developed of my grandmother, tiny and in a trench coat over her house clothes standing in a green garden. I knew I had to record because it was It was, to this day, the only food I’ve tasted that was cooked by my grandmother.
My father went back to Korea exactly once before he died 22 years after leaving for the U.S. That is a whole lifetime, longer than my own at the time he died. He went alone, as we could never afford to go as a whole family, and I don’t know if he was able to taste the strawberries he had missed.
The first two fig trees I ever saw: only the tops of a bunch of overgrown fig trees were visible from the parking lot of the apartment building we moved into after my father’s death. My mother spent the first summer after he died picking bags of figs, quietly and wondering if it counted as stealing or doing the neighbors a favor. The second was in the yard of the house next to the house my father was born in. It was a baby fig tree, how something could look so new and tenuous and still so strong.
Strawberries or figs, I didn’t remember this until I read Naomi Shibab Nye’s poem. It clicked that we learn where we are from and who we are through our parents stories, that these are simply stories, that they, like us, are also “colonial conscripts” (Prashad) across generations and geography, and finally, what violence it was to not have the “right to return”.
When you are second generation, born on a land where our ancestors are not from, the idea of who we are is a figment. As diaspora, sometimes severed for hundreds of years from lands that were colonized (and continue to be), we are our own people, and we are on our own. Early on, I understood that people in the place you are from aren’t thinking about you. If you are lucky enough to know any extended family, cousins might wonder about their U.S. cousins, and you will have hundreds of people to meet when you finally make it over there if you are luck to have them, but then that’s it. Experiences of racism against Asian Americans are constantly reframed, retold, co-opted to make us the victimized justification for greater white supremacy, greater policing, greater surveillance.
We have lost language, food, health, customs, beliefs that quite literally shape our presence in the world. Our origin stories have been refashioned to fit a binary designed to take native land and keep Whites and White institutions in power. We have no real home. We have no ancestors here. We have no visible leaders other than those who organized with Black Americans and became icons that way, elders like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama, two women who lived and organized in the U.S. when Asians were barred from the U.S., and when Asian = Chinese or Japanese, and when the majority of Filipina and Korean women allowed to enter were married to GIs.
I think of Palestine, and I think how popular k-pop is. I think of k-pop as the ultimate evolution of neocolonialism. A mashup legacy of the sounds of U.S. imperialism. American pop culture spread in Asia because of militarization — the Kim sisters, the first K-Pop band recognized, performed for U.S. military personnel to get food and sundries as impoverished little girls. A land that was divided in two during a 5-minute meeting between the U.S. and Russia, one part that we can never return to, and one tiny part that is overrun with more military bases and culture vultures looking for something different.
“The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.”
— Paul Cummings for the History News Network
After European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America (Community Commons), one of the U.S.’ first imperialist genocides where 5 million Koreans, including 2.5 million civilians, were gunned down and bombed with more artillery than all of Europe during WWI combined, dead in less than three years. 90 percent of the military personnel was American (Dunbar-Ortiz). One can see how in less than a year, the U.S. comfortably backs the slaughter of 40,000 Palestinians. We ourselves are from a peninsula soaked in the blood of our families. Macarthur’s genocidal vision of “a sea of radioactive cobalt” was born there.
“MacArthur said he had a plan that would have won the war in 10 days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria.” Then he would have … “spread behind us — from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea — a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North…. My plan was a cinch.”
“Before the Sino-Korean offensive, a committee …had said that atomic bombs might be the decisive factor in cutting off a Chinese advance into Korea…. Congressman Albert Gore, Sr. …suggested ‘something cataclysmic’ to end the war: a radiation belt dividing the Korean peninsula permanently into two.’”
Asia is a figment for most of us. It is a place where as Asian Americans we also ascribe our fantasies of homecoming, countries that we are displaced from. And in the case of the Palestinians and West Asians who are urgently defining our evolution under the intended anti-imperialist moniker that Asian American was meant to be.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.— From “My Father and the Fig Tree” by Naomi Shibab Nye
