We were the only Korean family in our town, but my mom never dressed to fall in with the people around her.
In Small Town Midwest, My Mother Refused to Be Invisible
My mother came to America at the age of 21, newly graduated and newly wed, whip-smart with doll-like eyes and good dress sense. Without hesitation, she packed her bags in Seoul and joined my father in Chicago. I arrived three years later.
She was always exquisitely dressed. As a girl, I obsessively pored over the photographs from our years in Chicago, committing each frame to memory. There was the emerald green velvet skirt suit that she chose to attend a work party with my father. The elegant black and white sheath and sun hat she wore on a boat that we took sailing on Lake Michigan. The perfect high-waisted jeans she wore as we ate Korean takeout on a picnic in Lincoln Park. It was there, in those images, that my own love of fashion began.
Eventually we left and settled in a small town to the north, exchanging the high-rise buildings for a neat brick house by the river. My mother brought all her fine clothes with her. I watched her unpack the boxes. I thought she looked a little sad. My mother who grew up in Seoul, my father in L.A., and I in Chicago: From those cities we could not fathom life in middle America, the loneliness of being the only Korean family in so many square miles.
She readied us like a captain outfitting soldiers for battle. Suddenly it mattered more what we wore. She chose crisp suits and collared shirts for my father, scolding him on days he wore the wrong socks. She laid out my clothes as always, my favorite skirts and shirts, always matching. She perhaps hoped that dressing well would compensate for our color. Nice clothes might make us more palatable.
My father accepted without complaint but after my first day of school, I began to fight back. The way everyone had stared at me, in my dainty blue dress, had made my chest hurt. But instead of my yellow face, the only one in the room, I blamed the clothes that looked so fussy alongside the plain shirts and pants worn by the other girls.
“Why are you dressed like that?” they had asked me at recess. “Why are your eyes like that?” they would ask me later. At lunch I snuck off to the bathroom, peeled the tinfoil off of my ham sandwich, and cried, wondering why we’d come to such a horrible place.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Monica Kim
