Welcome, Ji-Young

Ji-Young, Sesame Street’s first Asian-American character, is here.

Coincidentally, I am a 1.5 generation Asian-American, and my name is Ji-Young. Or, it was.

My grandfather named me Ji-Young, but I only had that name for four years of my life. Four years that aren’t even in my memory. At the age of 4, I followed my parents to New Jersey, and as soon as I started attending the American school system, my parents picked an English name for me: Cindy. While I only officially changed my name to Cindy after getting my American citizenship years later, ‘Cindy’ was the name everyone knew me by.

I still vividly remember - a memory that is undoubtedly shared by most Asian-American students - American teachers going down the attendance list and hesitating to pronounce my name. “Ji-Young Park?” Then they awkwardly look at me, a pause, waiting for me to provide an English name. I hated that pause. I quickly learned to calculate where in the attendance list my name would fall, and yelled out “Cindy!” before the teacher even attempted to pronounce my name in front of the other students.

It’s an insignificant memory. I had been so used to it, so used to accepting that we needed to provide English names in an American classroom. I didn’t think of it has hiding my Korean name. And growing up as ‘Cindy’ for most of my life, I had learned to identify more with my English name. I even had to ask my parents numerous times about the meaning of my name. They replied: ‘Ji’ is for ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Young’ is for ‘Beauty’ (the meaning depends on the specific character that is used).

It was an insignificant memory, until my friends started sharing posts of Ji-Young, the new Sesame Street character. I kept seeing this Ji-Young on social media posts, where people celebrated this big step for Asian-Americans. My friends excitedly told me, “Hey, this is your name!” But was it? It was a strange feeling. This Ji-Young was being celebrated everywhere, but I had spent the last twenty something years of my life pushing her away. I wasn’t Ji-Young. I was Cindy. Cindy to my friends, Cindy on social media, Cindy on my job applications.

And honestly, for many Asian-Americans growing up in the 2000s, Korean culture wasn’t something to be celebrated. Having to worry about causing a smell in the cafeteria if you brought a Korean lunch that day (although you made your mom promise not to), having to worry about your clothes smelling like kimchi or other strong Korean ingredients (even though they were your favorite foods). Buying clothes from Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch and throwing away your ‘Korean-style’ clothes and accessories. Never letting your parents visit your school because the teachers would feel uncomfortable by their accents that were ‘too strong’ (you were always correcting their grammar and being embarrassed, although they were 100% fluent in another language).

Living with two names is constantly balancing two identities. I only let myself be ‘Ji-Young’ at home, but outside, I only let people see ‘Cindy.’

But now, we are (hopefully) in a completely different generation. A different generation for Asian-American kids who are growing up and learning that they can proudly celebrate, and not hide, their culture. For the kids who can see themselves represented in the media.

So welcome, Ji-Young.

I can’t say I see myself in you at all. Rather, I see a completely different version of myself that I would have become had I grown up as a kid in this generation. In you, I see the other Ji-Young’s, the other Asian-Americans who will see themselves in you, and learn to embrace who they are:

Wise, Beautiful, and Courageous.

mom, i will never write for a living

is what I tell my mom, when these days she tells me to work for a publishing company, or write my own book as she has done. She wants me to make a living out of my words.

Words, or rather books, have been important in my life ever since I became an immigrant. When you leave a whole country and a whole language behind, you find yourself lost in an ocean of abstract sounds that carry no meaning. You’re forced to study a language instead of speak it, learning new ways in which words connect with one another. When my family came to the States in 2000, I had no friends, and didn’t know how to make them. So my mom pretty much gave up on my social skills and instead took me to the library. Every single day. (It was mostly because she didn’t know how to drive, and the library was on a straight path that required no turns from our house.)

Come to think of it now, I don’t know how I even learned a whole new language just by reading it. Imagine we could still have that skill when we’re older. But physically seeing words lined up in a book taught me the connection of words and how simply changing the order can drastically change its meaning. Words still affect me strongly—the way in which a friend says something will upset me, when she says she meant nothing at all, and I find myself lost in the beauty of lyrics to a song I hear on the radio.

I loved words, but I hated my own. I could never speak up in class because I thought I would sound stupid and incoherent. I felt incompetent compared to the students who could deliver an A+ speech in a confident voice. In a debate, I could never win. However, it was different when I put words onto paper. From all the books I had read, I knew I could put words in that special order that I had learned to love. I wished to show people, with a printed paper in hand, that I was someone with a voice.

Years later, almost reaching the age of 30, I haven’t found my voice. It’s still stuck deep inside my mind somewhere, but when I try to pull them out they come out jumbled.

But I love them for the way they are. To this day, I would say I am a person that doesn’t trust those with the loud, confident voice that our teachers valued so much in school. My eyes drift instead to the quiet one, as I watch her mouth twitching as she tries to form a coherent sentence, and I see her mind dancing further and further away. She says something, and her face goes red, but I know that she has not said everything she can. She will go back to her room, and at night, she will speak her thoughts out loud in her dreams.

And to this day, I appreciate a heartfelt letter more than someone’s words thrown at me. I know the hours it must have took to put the thoughts onto a sheet of paper that will last forever—and you can’t take them back. If I had to choose, I would want to be someone who could never win that debate, but write you a letter that you keep in a box that you open once in a while and smile a child’s smile.

Why do I write this? It is something we all know and feel. But not everyone writes them out in words. A writer, regardless of whether they are good or bad, is someone who finds purpose in not writing something extraordinary, but something everyone relates to. Sometimes you read something so obvious, yet you don’t know why you didn’t think of it before. And those are moments in which I find beauty. Moments that make me realize the power of words to organize the chaos of emotions we live amongst.

It could be a Mary Oliver poem. It could be lyrics to a Lauv song. But it’s most likely going to be your favorite storybook that made you cry as a child. I take in the specific order of words that this writer chose and am blown away by the new perspective on life it brings. Realizing that, and writing this at the end of the year 2022, I have never felt happier.

I don’t think I could ever write for a living. But I simply write to live this life to the fullest. Not to turn away from the chaos, the heartbreak and loss, but to learn to embrace it. To look back on this small life that I find so ordinary, and realize it was a melody to that old favorite song of mine.

To first loves

I listen to the songs that we grew up on, not of love in general, but of first loves. I listen to how delicate they are, how vulnerable. And I wonder what would scare me more—never having been a first love to someone, or having been without seeing what a delicate thing had fallen into my hands.

library musings

My imagination gets the better of me and I find love in my dreams. I picture a scene like this, two people meet in the library. They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but years later I can’t help but think that looks are the second thing I notice about you. No, it was the way everything was—the way your eyebrows raised when you finally noticed me, the way our fingers flipped the pages in rhythm, the way the air stood still to make room for just the two of us, in the library, on a Sunday afternoon. I don’t know how the scene ends. Maybe I want to keep it that way. Two people meet, and there will never be an ending. So I can flip to that page whenever I want and cherish the things that could have been.

Shapes of love we don't talk about

The way our mothers will watch us eat and say, “just watching you eat makes me full.” That she will say this to us when she is thirty, and when she is eighty. The warmth I see in my dad’s eyes when I ask which of grandma’s dishes was his favorite. The childlike gleam turning into longing in a matter of seconds. The way he cried like a little boy again when she passed. Realizing part of him still is a little boy, looking up at his mother, who is looking down at him, and says, “just watching you eat makes me full.” She still is, still looking down. They never stop looking. She still is looking down, making sure we are full—love, in that strange language of theirs.

sitting with friends at the end of the world

you and me, we sit together, at the end of the world
right before the sun sets for the last time this year
as it begins to set, we lie in our reclined seats, reminiscing
about the days when we talked about flying,
about the ways in which we would change the world,
but we haven’t talked about that in a while.
we sigh at how the time flies, at how old we are—
the sun shines down on our youth, as we watch it fall.
it goes pitch black, now it’s really the end, i say out loud
but you smile at me with a spark in your eyes,
because no, it’s not the end—it’s fireworks that light up our sky
how could i forget? that it’s always been this way
when we are together—no, we’re not flying yet,
but we’re willing to do it over and over and over.
and next year, at this exact time, if the world hasn’t yet fallen apart
we know we will be right back here to watch our sun fall.

falling in love in a museum

people ask how did you know when you fell in love
perhaps it was when you told me my voice is
like a painting, and from that moment I knew what
I wanted to spend my life drawing, or perhaps when
you told me my words have wings and from that moment
I realized I could stop flying

august, on film (2022)

the smell of the air right before it turns cold. twenty-six, eighty-two. my grandma’s skin is softer than my own. she marvels at my youth, i am even more amazed at the years she holds in her hands. it was the heat of july when she came, and now i feel the breeze in the mornings of september. she sits outside in the heat, in the breeze, everywhere in between. she says vitamin d is good for her, because she saw it on a video somewhere. the morning walks that last forever. i get worried she is lost, but she makes it back in the end, somehow. did you worry? she laughs. woori jiyoung, she says, my beautiful girl. when we walk, i am five feet in front, now ten feet in front. i look back and she gets smaller and smaller. is she following me, or guiding me from the back. she is too far away for me to ask. i realize, we are both getting older, together. twenty-six, eighty-two. can we freeze time? some day she will be go out on that walk and never come back. i imagine her smiling, getting that vitamin d. walking behind me, in the shadows where i cannot see her. but right now, i can feel the softness of her hand against mine. she holds it tight. the mornings are briefly cold, but the days are still long.

three, two one, click. it’s my august, on film.

nursing home

there is a moment i will never forget when grandpa and i visited the nursing home to visit grandma and we saw her through the glass, no contact allowed, and she had not been able to speak for months, and she had not been able to recognize us for months, and i could see the light in her eyes fading, the will to live, fading, nothing we could do to grasp onto it, and i wondered what she would live for, laying in bed all day, staring at the ceiling, i wondered if she remembered all the moments of her life, or if her mind was an empty slate, but she saw my grandpa and could not take her eyes off him, she motioned her hands toward him, as if saying please, take my hand, and she could not keep the tears from falling, and in that moment i knew what her last words were, even if she could never speak them out loud, and her last words i will cherish forever:

this is what love is, my child

wings

one day you fell, into my hands
wings too broken to fly
i took a piece off of mine
and watched your eyes sparkle with delight
you whispered beautiful words, and in hindsight
i didn’t see the emptiness behind those eyes
until i had no more of mine left
you took off, with those beautiful wings
i stared down at my hands to see nothing left
and in that moment, all i wished
was to catch a last glimpse of that sparkling smile
the one i had seen, that day
when you fell into my broken hands

growing pains

Last night, my brother woke me up in the middle of the night, crying. He felt a pain in his leg that he could not understand — growing pains. He is fifteen, with a late growth spurt. I could barely open my eyes — it was 2 AM — but when neither my mom or dad got up, I gave in. With an Advil and a heating pad, I tucked him back into bed, and came back to my room. But I could not fall asleep right away.

So I decided to write something about, yes, growing pains. Whether you are an only child, an older or younger sibling, everyone experiences their own growing pains. Small things, moments, that mold you into who you are as a sibling, and as a person. For me, my growing pains are specifically about growing up as an older sister of a brother who is ten years younger, and who is on the spectrum. What I learned about myself through my brother, how the world viewed him, and how I fought back against what I saw as an unfair place.

My growing pains are also about the beautiful moments, moments that would have been undoubtedly different if my brother were not on the spectrum.

These stories are for my brother to read eventually, but also for others to better understand my brother for who he truly is. For those who found it hard to approach him or accept him because of labels, because of the different way he socially interacts with people. Most of all, because my brother deserves someone who knows and appreciates him more than anyone in the world to show the sides of him that others don’t bother to see.

These are my growing pains. The process of growing up. Yes, sometimes crying. But Justin, you’ll one day realize that after those tears, after those long nights of holding back the pain, that’s when you realize you’ve grown just a teeny bit.

two apples

When I heard news of a Sibling entering my life, I had been an only child for my whole life of ten years. Children typically are extremely excited or extremely unhappy/shocked when they hear that their parents are giving birth to another child. I fell under the latter. In fact, I was so unhappy that I told my mom I wished the baby (in her stomach) would die.

It’s not a proud moment. Especially since my mom had two miscarriages after I was born.

She tells me that I had said that in front of the doctor at her OB/GYN appointment. (I was ten, and obviously not very aware of filtering myself in front of others.) Obviously, the doctor did not know how to react.

To be honest, I cannot remember the moment when my mom first broke the news to me. I just remember thinking “Oh. No. This cannot be happening.” Getting a sibling was just something that I had understood was never, ever going to happen to me. I had never, ever told my parents I wanted a sibling. I was content with being a selfish child who got all the attention to herself.

My parents must not have known how to deal with the extent of my emotions. They knew I would be shocked, but they didn’t know I would hate the baby this much. I vented out for the next few months. My whole life was changing, and I definitely did not want to know exactly how this baby had come to existence.

They tried many things to console me, to make me understand that a sibling was not going to change the amount of attention/love I received.

”You see, let’s say that there is an apple that represents how much your dad and I love you. When the baby is born, the apple does not cut in half—instead, it’s doubled, so that there are two apples,” my mom said.

That’s the kind of things that parents will say to console a ten-year-old. It meant nothing to me. The apple metaphor didn’t even make sense. Things were definitely going to change.

I was grumpy and scared for the months leading up to my brother’s birth. Then, as soon as I met him in the hospital, every bad thought melted away. Heck, I’ll even say that an apple grew inside of me. I had been an only child, and I never knew how to love. I don’t know if you can say that children really understand at a young age what it means to love a parent, it’s more that you look up to them and rely on them. But love for a sibling is completely different. It’s almost tangible, like an apple.

I still can’t say that my mom’s story about the apple becoming two makes sense. Having a baby realistically does mean that a lot of attention is taken off the first, older sibling. You can’t tell your child one thing and behave in a way that contradicts what you said. But one thing is true: the moment you meet your new family member, you understand what it means to strive to do anything in the world for their happiness. Even if it’s something as nonsensical, or something as magical, as making one apple into two.

"애시당초 없었으면 괜찮았잖아"

꿈에 그리던 자취를 하게 됐다.
미국에 있는 가족을 떠나 한국에 와서 할머니랑 둘이
1년 넘게 살다가 할머니 집을 나오게 됐다.
그동안 불편했던 점들, 할머니의 코 고는 소리,
침대가 없어서 잤던 딱딱한 바닥,
핸드폰에서 유튜브나 카카오톡 쓰는 방법을 몰라서
날 귀찮게 했던 질문들,
할머니가 끓이던 온갖 이상한 음식의 냄새들,
새벽 6시에 나를 깨우던 밥솥 소리.

익숙해졌던 점들, 아침에 일어나면 풍기던 따뜻한 밥 냄새,
할머니 혼자 핸드폰으로 영상을 보며 웃던 소리,
밤 늦게 들어가도 코 골며 누워있던 할머니의 모습.

익숙해진다는 것이 얼마나 무서운 건지 깨달았다.

내가 떠나는 날 할머니는 내게 말했다:
”애시당초 없었으면 괜찮았잖아, 애시당초 안 왔으면..”
할머니의 눈에 눈물이 고였다.