Negotiating the Liminal Space: Rememories of Korean Graduate Students at U.S. Universities

• In Event: Re/searching Response-ability in the Wake of Anti-Asian Hate Crime: A Wrestle of Korean American Educators

Abstract

In this paper, we (three female international doctoral students from South Korea) examine our collective memory of swallowing shame. Using the notion of shame, conceptualized by Hong (2020), this paper envisions shame as a political feeling that we bury to survive when we face “social structures for masking domination and oppression” (Hughes, 2008, p. 126) as international students. Hong argues that shame splits “myself into the first and third person” (p. 77). We feel shame when I, as the first person, am being debased, and simultaneously when I, as the third person, see myself as someone who could not protect other beloved Asians from racism in everyday life (Hong, 2020). Grappling with political/historical sentiment toward the United States in our mind (Chen, 2010), we wrestle with our fear, ignorance, and shame when reckoning our embodied knowledge of race and racism in the United States.

To make our stories of shame more visible, we use autoethnography with artistic methods. Moore (2018) argues that autoethnography with creative methods, such as poetic inquiry, provides “a safe space to hang on to as well as access point to gain perspective and deeply consider the complexity of [our] lived experiences” (p. 592). We explore this collaborative autoethnography with our poems, videos, photos, and composite narratives in order to open a safe space for us to make ourselves vulnerable in discussing shame. We hope that our sharing invites others to remember and make connections to their own stories (Rhee, 2021) and pluralize their experience “to challenge ourselves to engage reflexive thoughts and actions” (Hughes, 2008, p. 126).

In this paper, first, we share our experiences with feeling ashamed and ignorant about racism and feeling like an unawakened self/body while finding ourselves in the position of a minority in our daily lives in the United States. Next, we discuss how “foreignness (Chang, 1993) generated a ‘disqualified’ image of [us]” (Jang, 2017, p. 561). As international students who work with U.S. preservice teachers, we are often questioned, and we eventually question ourselves, about the value of our experiences as former early childhood educators in a foreign country. We endeavor to prove our professionalism, often by assimilating dominant norms and practices in U.S. early childhood classrooms and by neglecting and abandoning our “funds of knowledge” (Gonzalez et al., 2005) from what we learned and experienced as educators within our heritage culture. Finally, we share how we negotiate our thoughts and actions in the liminal space and unfold our embodied knowledge of race and racism by engaging with an artistic approach.

Sharing our stories through our rememories (Rhee, 2021), we hope to illuminate lived experiences that have been neglected, misunderstood, silenced, and forgotten. This is not our ending point. Instead, we consider writing and sharing these stories our starting point to position ourselves as developing teacher educators and educational researchers to contribute to promoting the visibility of international students and scholars in academia and challenging biases and unfair treatment toward them.

Authors

• Hyeungok Kang, University of Georgia

• Sungryung Lyu, The Pennsylvania State University

• Sehyun Yun, George Mason University