"My People"

It is the middle of the night in the middle of the country in a place called Iowa. The night air outside my window is moist and cool, swimming with the frog song of early spring. It's been raining-gushing-for days. Now that it has let up, I can feel the green all around, even at night, dripping and florescent. Out back, the river eases past, fattened and dark, like a huge secret no one gets to know Any day now it will spill its banks, and a few fish will flop around in the pond that was recently a yard until they give up and slide their silver bellies skyward. That's what things looked like last year when we arrived. If, as I suspect, this is a place where one year is pretty much like the next, then farmers will announce that the corn is drowning, water will seep into basements and flood some people's houses, and everyone will just have to wait it out until there's sun. This is home, I suppose. For now. But it isn't where I come from.

My name is Parri Teller, and this is Lance, here, snoring on the sofa in the blue glow of the TV screen, his Bruce Lee movie over. I could say Lance is snoring on the davenport-that's Iowan for sofa. There's even a town called Davenport, home of the original couch potato. Since this is a small apartment, I've learned to study right through anything on television as long as it's not too loud. But with Bruce flipping, kicking, and knuck-lukking his way through East L.A. in the background, a thought occurred to me tonight: Lance has seen every Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan flick, not to mention dozens of lesser-known karate films, but he has probably never had a single Asian friend. Unless I qualify.

I can't watch TV because I have been poring through books for my English Comp term paper. Ever since he found out I'm half Korean, the bearded and earnest Mr. Chen-hyphen-Bollen has been plying me with books about Asian Americans. His wife is Taiwanese (the Chen part of the equation) and they have two Amerasian kids. He is the first person I've ever heard use the term Amerasian. It has a nice flow to it, like anesthesia or euthanasia. Youth in Asia. At any rate, it sounds better than Chen-Bollen.

Mr. Chen-Bollen has his students on the honor system. We are required to write in our notebooks every day, a practice that is supposed to help us with our term papers. But if we don't want him to see what we wrote we can just flip the notebook pages in front of him to prove that there's actually writing on them and still get credit. He says that in the notebooks it doesn't matter what we write or how we write, only that we write. But I have nothing going for my paper so far. I know little about my Korean grandparents and only one or two facts about Haraboji, my grandfather, who died the year I was born. Very early in the century, he sailed to Hawaii from Korea's Pusan Harbor at the age of eighteen because he feared that the Japanese would soon occupy the country. He worked in the sugarcane fields until he could save enough money for passage to the United States. Then in a few years, when the Japanese did occupy his country, he made his way to his new home, California.

Tonight my research turns up an interesting fact. In 1903, Hawaiian cane plantation owners introduced Korean workers into the fields because they wanted to keep the "Jags" from becoming too numerous. They also reasoned that, given the hostility between the two nations, the Koreans and Japanese were unlikely to unite in any attempt to strike. My grandfather must have been one of those workers. I try to picture him earning his living alongside people he saw as the enemy. I don't know how cane is grown or harvested, but I've heard it's backbreaking work. Imagine coming all that way to escape the Japanese only to end up stooping in the fields right beside them.

Bits of family lore surface in my mind as I read about other early Korean immigrants-the migrant fruit pickers, the urban laborers and servants, the handful of students. Mom told me once about Haraboji picking peaches in the Central Valley, when the sun beat down so hot he could fry his supper egg on the Santa Fe Railroad ties. There was another story, too, that many years later when he became an American citizen, he naively and consistently voted "yes" on all ballot propositions regardless of the outcome. He felt, my mother explained, that he was saying yes to the American way.

I try on the idea for size: These are my people. The phrase has always made me squirm. It's reserved for those with a real sense of ethnic pride or identity, not for white girls from Fresno. Once when I was a kid, Mom dressed me up in a little Korean gown made of green shimmering satin with rainbow sleeves and made me smile at the camera from underneath a paper parasol. I felt like an impostor, a sweaty one dressed in fabric that didn't breathe and incongruous white summer sandals from K-Mart. In the photograph, I smile sheepishly, my cheeks apple red from heat and embarrassment. Any real Korean would laugh at my mother's attempt to pass me off as one of them.