Kim 
Ashley Kim
Visions of Unity
24 January 2022
Inheritance
        My grandma tells me she is rich, from the backseat of my family’s station wagon. She colors her hair and wears lipstick still. Every Christmas, she gives me one hundred dollars, which is proof enough for me.
My mom tells me stories of her childhood, of playing with other children on the grassy mounds of graveyards, of ghost stories on hot summer nights. Fuzzy peaches that shed like lint. Bananas: a rare treat. She tries to explain words without an English equivalent. I wish I could have her tongue, taste what she tastes. Sometimes I wonder if it is cultural appropriation to embrace a culture I am not native to.
        We do not talk so much about the forgotten war. Snatches come to me in dim, fluttering frames: swimming through dusty waters by moonlight, closing arms around a boy before the world goes white. Farewells to faceless friends. My mom tells me about her chicks that froze by morning. She tells me about her stray dog, eaten by starving relatives.
        She did not live through the war, but I have still never lived as she has, never lived an ocean away from home, never struggled to speak English, never moved six times or found no classmates who look like me. She did not grow up thinking about college. Perhaps opportunity drives immigrants to foreign shores, but it does not grant the privilege of future hopes.
        I wear the face of my heritage, and I have lived the Asian-American experience, the odd not-this-but-not-that. I have labored to form microaggressions into angst and much prose, lamented my nonnative Korean as a trite metaphor, identified with the marginalized and the oppressed, the embittered and the homesick. Yet home has always been in reach for me, anchored in the soil of America. I have never been mocked for my accent or afraid to read aloud. I have never truly wondered where is home? because that is a silly question to ask, for I am here, and surely this must be home.
        I have tried to count myself among the destitute, but my life is sheltered from war and famine and occupation. So I have tried to live as one of the privileged. Isn’t that what my mom and grandma wanted when they left Korea? A better future, I mean. A better life. Does that mean climbing tax brackets and university tiers? Does that mean fading into the dull throb of the American dream?
        I don’t think so. Or I choose not to think so. My mom and my grandma did not suffer scorn and sorrow for me to live in comfortable ignorance. They have passed down this Asian-American heritage to me. My children and their children and their children will inherit it too, someday. It is an inheritance of life between hardship and naiveté. It is a keepsake of scars, but old ones. It is an uncomfortable place to live, but only because we blur the lines between us and them.
I am not defined by the degree of suffering I have endured or the level of oppression I have faced. And I am not defined by my socio-economic status or educational attainment. I am Korean-American, and that means many things: speaking Korean with an American accent, making dumplings for New Year’s, cringing at K-dramas, having rice with every meal, failing at taekwondo. Carving out a place for myself here, wherever that might be. Learning that heritage does not define me. I define my heritage.