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Nancy L
Professor Ingram
UWRT 1101
2 December 2014
Hallyu
When I started kindergarten was when I realized that I was part of other cultures that
were not American. From that point on until my early teenage years, I tried very hard to distance
myself from French, Korean, and Vietnamese culture as much as possible and try to be more
American. Throughout elementary and part of middle school, students and teachers alike would
constantly poke fun at aspects of my culture. From speaking in gibberish in what they assumed
my language sounded like to mockingly bowing down to me, it made me feel that my culture
was degrading and inferior. There was even a point in elementary school where my classmates
and even my teacher didnt refer to me by my first name but called me Vietnam instead.
However, the main thing that made me want to be more American was that the majority
of the people that would be racist against my culture were non-Americans. I felt like they
particularly made fun of my culture, but all these non-Americans also did the same thing to other
cultures that they were not a part of. It made me have this mentality that the only culture worth
anything was American culture because nobody demeaned any aspects of American culture.
Every single country around the world paid attention to American culture, but hardly any paid
attention to another country. This attitude led me to forego French and Korean which were two
of the three languages that I spoke fluently prior to English. I couldnt avoid speaking
Vietnamese because that was the only language my parents could comprehend. I would never
watch a movie or show that was not American, and the only type of music I would listen to had

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to be in English. It was to the point where the only aspect of my culture that I retained was the
food. However, I hardly knew anything about my culture besides the food and language. Five
years old was too young to really know the culture and that was when I started to feel
embarrassed about my culture, so I did not bother to know more about it. Not only did my
ignorance and revulsion made me despise my own culture, but it made me feel indifferent to
other cultures. Even though I did not detest cultures that I did not belong to, I still felt like
American culture was superior, so regardless, it was still a very racist outlook.
It was not until 8th grade that I met someone in school who was so open about their own
culture. Jieun and I sat next to each other on the first day of math class because we were the only
two in there who did not know anyone else. She was born and raised in South Korea, but she is
of South African and Thai descent. In addition to English, she could speak Korean, Thai, and
Afrikaans. It was pretty common to hear her speak in one of her tongues in public to other
students who could speak it in the class. She liked that her first name sounded very foreign and
the fact that she was part of so many different cultures. I actually thought it was interesting that
she was so diverse, but at the same time, I was not curious about her culture nor did I want to
know more about it. During that class period, she kept on complaining about how my iPod was
filled with nothing but American music and that I should listen to something else. You should
try Korean music. Its getting so popular around the world. Or even some German and French,
she kept on saying. Foreign music was something that never crossed my mind, and it didnt
sound appealing to me at all. Id never listened to anything but American music my whole life,
so I did want to listen to at least one foreign song just to hear what it sounded like.
I browsed through Jieuns YouTube channel when I got home from school to look
through her favorites and see what type of music she listened to. About eighty percent of the

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videos were Korean music videos which Id never watched before in my life. I randomly clicked
on one called Tell Me by Wonder Girls. Because of the title, I assumed that the song would be
sung in English, but there was only one line in English in the chorus which was obviously tell
me. It sounded like a modern pop song with a fast tempo, and the dance choreography was
interesting with an innocent cutesy schoolgirl and Wonder Woman concept to it. It didnt sound
like anything I expected it to be, and I was even more surprised when one of the girls actually
rapped. For some reason, I thought rapping was something that only American singers did. It
bothered me that I could not understand a word that was sung because I used to be able to
fluently speak this language, but I ended up replaying the music video four more times anyway. I
ended up watching other K-Pop groups as well, such as Girls Generation (), Super
Junior (), and Big Bang (), and I loved every single song that I heard. Even
though I couldnt comprehend anything, the beats were so catchy that I couldnt get it out of my
head. Every single music video had a dance choreography which made it more entertaining. I
was still stunned that I genuinely liked something from my culture that was not food.
The next school day, I ended up in Jieuns language arts class because my science teacher
was absent that day. I had to choose another classroom to stay in during the duration of that class
period. I was in the middle of telling Jieun about all the K-Pop I was exposed to the other day
when Mr. Cafarelli suddenly started talking in front of the classroom and wishing everyone a
good morning. We are going to have a free day today, but everyone has to be working on an
assignment, and it can be for any class, he announced. I could feel the atmosphere in the
classroom shift as everyone knew that they were getting a free class period since no one really
had any work to do. Mr. Cafarelli was not a strict teacher, so the students knew that he would not
care if no one was actually doing any type of schoolwork. The conversations in the classroom

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slowly started back up again after Mr. Cafarelli started walking towards the projector. His
computer screen was projected to the front wall of the classroom, so everyone could see what he
was doing on his laptop. He was in the middle of typing YouTube when I turned towards Jieun
again.
Jieun was looking feverishly through her binder to find a picture of her favorite K-Pop
singer, G-Dragon, which I thought was such a ridiculous stage name. As Jieun was searching for
a picture of this so called G-Dragon, I heard a song starting to play though the speakers in the
front of the class. It sounded like some pop song that Id never heard of, but I assumed that it was
Chris Brown. Then the singing started, and it was in a foreign language that I did not recognize
at first. I turned my head to the left to look at the screen, and it was some Asian boy band. Mr.
Cafarelli did not make it full screen yet, so I looked down at the title underneath the video, and
the first thing I noticed was . The characters were made up of straight lines and
circles, so I identified it as Korean characters right away even though I had no idea what it
meant. I watched so many Wonder Girls videos the other night that I was able to distinguish
what Korean characters look like. I remembered thinking Mr. Cafarelli knows what K-Pop is? I
thought hes Italian. Oh my god, why is he playing this in front of the whole class? Please turn it
off!
Hey, hes playing DBSK, Jieun said surprisingly, and some random Korean chick with
blonde highlights replied with, Yeah, I know. Kai and I were showing him some K-Pop after
school last week. Jieun and the random Korean girl looked eager that Mr. Cafarelli was
showing a K-Pop video, but I could feel myself just cringing on the inside. Yesterday was the
first time that Ive heard of my own cultures music, and even though I loved it, I didnt want to
show it off to others who are not Korean. The class got very quiet when one of the members of

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DBSK started singing as everyone turned towards the screen. I could feel sweat starting to
accumulate on my body, and I could literally feel my body temperature starting to go up. I
started to feel very nauseated and light headed because I felt like it was going to be like
elementary school all over again.
I was just waiting for the laughter to start because I was expecting that my non-Korean
classmates would start making fun of how the language sounded. Hey, what the hell is this? I
turned slightly towards the left to look at who the speaker was, and it turned out to be a blond
guy that Ive never seen before. I was trying to discern the look on his face, but I couldnt tell
what it was. Oh god. I turned away from him and slightly covered the left side of my face. In that
moment, I wished that I could just somehow disappear from that classroom. I knew that he
would eventually look in my direction because the three of us were the only Koreans in the
room.
I dont understand a word theyre saying, but its really catchy. I wish Bosnian music
sounded like this. I felt shocked that he actually complimented it and even more so when I
started hearing murmurs of agreement from the other students. Another thing that registered was
that he mentioned Bosnian music. Ive never even heard of Bosnia before, but I assumed that it
was somewhere in Europe because hes Caucasian. I know, I dont understand anything either,
but I really like it. This is the first time Ive heard of something thats not American or Liberian,
said Frances, an African American girl whom I would sometimes talk to. Again, Ive never heard
of Liberia either. In the front of the classroom, a red haired Caucasian girl named Nadia
commented on how she lived in South Korea for two years because of her and her parents love
for K-Pop as well as other aspects of the culture. She even said that DBSK is in the Guinness
Book of World Records as being a musical group or artist with the biggest fandom in the world.

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As everyone in the class starting saying how much they liked the DBSK video, it led to
Mr. Cafarelli showing other K-Pop videos as well. People would compare it to their own culture
while we were all watching the videos, and it turned out that out of about thirty students in there,
only ten of them had grandparents that were born in America. Everyone else considered
themselves to be part of another culture or country. In addition to Bosnia and Liberia, there were
students from Croatia, Malaysia, Taiwan, El Salvador, Chile, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, etc. It was in
that moment that I realized how out of tune I was with not only my culture but other cultures as
well. I didnt know more than half of the countries that my classmates were from. Even if I had
heard of the country, I was ignorant about it. Hearing how all these people around me were from
so many different cultures was what enabled me to want to go out of my way to learn about a
culture besides American.
In addition, it helped me learn about my own as well. If the students and Mr. Cafarelli
could love something about a culture that they were not a part of, why couldnt I love something
that I am a part of? Because of Korean entertainment, I eventually started to learn more about
other aspects of Korean culture that I was ignorant of before such as its history, holidays, and
traditions. I also ended up being able to speak a little bit of Korean as well as writing in Hangul.
Ultimately, I started paying attention to Vietnamese and French culture as well as other cultures.
It was to the point that I had songs in twenty-five different languages on my iPod. Everyone in
my group of friends in high school and college were all of a different ethnicity from each other,
and my roommate for the past two years of college so far is Indian. My most favorite TV events
now involve different countries coming together such as Eurovision and the FIFA World Cup. If
Im really bored one day, I like to learn a random language and learn about a country I dont

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know anything about. Whenever I stayed at my parents house, I would try to cook food of a
different culture every week.
Because I had the mentality that American culture was superior to my culture, it made me
feel the same way about other non-American cultures. If I couldnt respect my own culture, how
can I have respect for other cultures if I felt like American culture was the only one worth
knowing about? My ignorance and racism prevented me from bothering to know about another
culture. I was one of those people who let a few certain individuals completely skew my view of
entire cultures. Ive missed out on so many things that I came to love, and all it took was a music
video from a Korean girl group to change my opinions.