The Garment Community is a Whole Ecology

Interview by Sarah Jho, Katherine Kim, Rebecca Louie, Cailey Beck, Abigail Eun, and Abbi-Hope Park

What is your full name, and when and where were you born?
My full name is Christina Harriet Moon and my Korean name is Moon Yeon Soo. I was born in Hackensack Hospital in northern New Jersey in 1976. I’m 44 years old. I remember asking my parents why I have Harriet as my middle name. My older brother’s name is Kenneth Edward. They said they had been looking through an American telephone book for our names and found the most regal-sounding ones.

Was your Korean name chosen by your parents?
My Korean name was chosen by my paternal grandfather. I believe it means “lotus flower on a lily pad.” My father has also given my children Korean names, so that’s an open and important practice.

The reason I told you the year I was born is because it relates to Cathy Park Hong, Min Jin Lee, Lee Isaac Chung, and all these folks from the diaspora. They are making such fascinating work and were also born in the ’60s and ’70s. We are considered the first “second generation,” because our parents were born in Korea.

It’s an important thing for me to remember. We have parents who have memories of both the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea and the Korean War. So I think it makes us growing up here in the U.S. very particular because most of us are the children of people who survived the occupation and war. They were really fleeing many things and dreaming very big things when they came to this country.

Now, we are middle-aged and having our own children. We are the same age as our parents. This has just been something that’s been swirling around my head lately: why I’m writing what I’m writing, and researching what I’m researching, and thinking about what I’m thinking. I think it has a lot to do with a sense of time, and where we are in our lives — understanding what these gener-ational dynamics mean and why we’re here in this country. There is a sense of inheritance.

Did you grow up with both of your parents?
I grew up with both of my parents. My parents met each other in New York City in the late 1960s and they married after only knowing each other for a couple of months. So, they didn’t really know each other and they’re from dramatically different socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the driving force and reason for why they never went back. In Korea, this would never work.

Could you tell me more about each of your parents’ lives before they immigrated to the United States?
My mom is eight years younger than my father. My mom was born in 1944. My dad was born in 1936. My mom grew up in Seoul, and she grew up in a wealthy family. She was somebody who doesn’t really have a memory of her father ever working. I think her grandfather was like a Hanyak (한약 — traditional Korean medicine) doctor. She grew up in a family of many highly educated women. All the women in our family went to college, which was extremely uncommon for the time.

My mom’s aunt, who is my great-aunt, was the first to come to the U.S. and that was in the 1950s. She was a chemist, but she was really an artist and a poet. She went to school in Japan and Paris, and then ended up in New York City. She was the sponsor for my mom to come to New York. My mom, a young 20-something-year-old woman, wanted to come to New York to study to become a painter.

I asked my mom how the women in her family had been supported in their pursuit of education, but it’s hard to get a lot of information out of her. One thing I do have that I think could be the key to unlocking all this is my great-aunt. She passed away in the 1990s and lived in Greenwich Village and the West Village for her whole life. When she passed away, she had this little studio apartment where she saved everything she’d ever written. So, I now have a whole basement of letters that date back as early as the 1920s of her time in Japan, Paris, and New York. I feel like I know very little of my family history. I only wish she was alive now because she would have readily told me all of this, but I was too young when she passed away to be interested. But it’s all written; she’s kept diaries, letters, and photographs.

The women were all educated on that side of the family. There are photographs in the 1930s of the women in her family wearing Western dresses among other women wearing hanbok (한복 — traditional Korean attire). So, I would say that they were very modern, very educated, and very feminist.

My father’s family is the exact opposite. My father grew up in poverty. My father had members of his family who died in the Korean War. His father was able to make some money by becoming the caretaker of an American missionary. But once the Japanese kicked out the American missionaries, it was back to not having any food. My dad really doesn’t speak a lot about it. He’s very shameful of that history — to be so impoverished growing up, to not have food, to have nothing. For him, it translates into shame. But at the end of the day, that American missionary was the one who funded my father’s education. Among his siblings, I think he might have been the only one who went to college in Korea, and then from there, the American missionary funded for him to go get a master’s degree in the U.S. in the late 1960s. So, that’s how he was able to find his way to the U.S.

But when my parents married each other, it was a real big shock for my mother’s family to drive out to the little village that he’s from, and find out the kinds of conditions in which he is from. It was only when I was an adult that my aunt told me that for [my mother’s family], it was as if my mother had passed and that they had grieved for her.

My mom is a really, extremely strong feminist, and she was not going to move back to Korea in order to serve her father’s family. She wanted to work in the U.S. And so they remained and spent their early years in New York City and in northern New Jersey, where their friends were people who either had come here illegally or were able to come because immigration laws changed at the time. The Korean immigrants from this period of the late 1960s were very educated — skilled workers like nurses or students.

They were the early pioneers of developing that northern New Jersey community. My father founded the first Korean church in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which still stands to this day with a large Korean population. All of their friends pooled their money together to have their friend purchase a building on 32nd Street that became the first Korean restaurant in Manhattan. So, through the church and their community, my parents were part of a very early community of Koreans living in New York at the time.

Could you tell me more about your father’s decision to open a church?
These are questions I need to ask my father. My father told me it was quite unusual in their village that his family was Christian. They were Protestant and Presbyterian Christians because his father was the caretaker of the house of the American missionary that was living there at the time. I’m actually reading Min Jin Lee’s book, “Pachinko,” right now, and it talks about the origins of Protestantism and Presbyterianism. She talks about the Presbyterian church that was basically in Pyongyang, on the border. My dad has also spoken of the American missionary having ties to that very same church that she’s writing about and has fictionalized in her novel.

He remembers the village shaman and the Buddhists, but [to be Christian] was, I think, pretty unusual. It was kind of a modern thing that his family was Christian. My father has always felt incredibly indebted towards these missionaries who gave his family food, a livelihood, and a means toward an education. It has developed his faith.

So when I think of him coming to the U.S. and establishing that church, it was both an expression of gratitude to the Christian missionaries and also about establishing a place to build a community. The church has always been a very big anchor and center of their whole lives. My mother, who grew up wealthy in Korea, was raised as a Catholic, and later converted to Protestantism.

What was your community like outside of your family when you were growing up in northern New Jersey?
Up until I went to school, I don’t ever remember seeing white people other than the neighborhood kids. I only saw Korean people, I only heard the Korean language, and I only ate Korean food. It really wasn’t until I went to school that I realized that something existed beyond the Korean community. Koreatown is like this in L.A.

Every single person in your life is Korean: your pediatrician, your dentist, the guy who fixes your car, the lady you buy flowers from, the dry cleaners. The church was the very center of our lives in everything that we did. But of course, that changed when I started school. Northern New Jersey is very Italian and Irish American. The biggest influence for me was that my two best friends growing up, who lived down the street, had a deeply Italian American family. Between my parents’ house, church, and school — if there was any other place that I was spending time, I was at their house. They were one of six children, so it was a very busy household. I loved being a part of it.

What was your schooling like in New Jersey? For example, I wonder if you ever attended a bilingual program?
I went to a typical northern New Jersey public school from kindergarten through 12th grade that I always remember as being very white. I’ve been going back through yearbooks, and I realized it was way more diverse than I ever remembered it to be. I think there were a couple of kids that came from Korea to school, but I don’t think that I was friends with them. There was also a brand new hangul hakgyo (한글학교 — Korean language school) that had opened in a wealthier neighborhood than the neighborhood I grew up in. I only spent a couple of years in hangul hakgyo. I put up a fight. I didn’t want to spend my Saturdays there. After I stopped, my Korean fell off the planet.

What were your parents’ occupations when you were growing up?
My parents struggled quite a bit with their different businesses. They have done so many different things. In the beginning, they were factory workers painting jewelry in a factory in the New York Garment District. At some later point, they opened up their own small factory in their basement. They had their friends from the church or from the neighborhood come paint the jewelry too. All of that folded when it became cheaper to make abroad. At one point, they thought they would open a candy store, stationery store, dry cleaners, or flower shop. All these things were failed businesses. And the thing that stuck was [when] they found a small hardware store, which they did for nearly 30 years.

I want to say that I was 13 or 14 when they landed on the hardware store, which brought them financial stability. But here’s the thing: they worked every single day, except for one day, Christmas day. There was no other day. They worked from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day. On Sundays, they went to gyohwe (교회 — church) in the morning, and then opened the store by the afternoon. I don’t actually have memories of them meeting up with people. If they did [meet up with people], it was through the church. They had very little free time in their lives. They are two people who worked so hard their whole lives. My dad retired at 72.

How have your ideas, reflections, or emotions about labor and what it means to live a “fulfilling life” changed?
I gotta take a gulp of water for this because it almost brings me to tears thinking about it because it’s such a tough topic. I think kids who have parents who have had to work so hard grow up with an enormous sense of self-expectation. We have parents who were never home, so we didn’t necessarily always get the validation we needed because there was nobody at home to validate you. They were always working and their minds were always worried and stressed about money and keeping things going.

It was very confusing to me because I actually grew up in a really nice house in a very suburban area of northern New Jersey. All around me, I saw green grass. It would have been very ideal, and the public school provided an amazing education. Yet, I have these parents that travel half an hour south to a super working-class neighborhood, where their hardware store is, and they’re there all of the time. They spent most of their lives in a different context, and that context provided my brother and me with this very ideal context of a nice school, clothes, and piano lessons.

I think watching your parents work like that causes you to grow up with this deep sense that you have to do well because you don’t know where they’re from, but you do know that they have left so much and that they have left their whole families. I don’t know about your students, but with my family, I had my great-aunt, but that was it. We didn’t have any other support system other than the church. So, you see them work all the time, and you know that all that hard work is for you to be able to succeed.

But it’s hard to understand as a child, because you don’t even know where they’re from. You know nothing about their history. Here’s a common theme: my parents never talked about their past history. They didn’t want to go there with us and connect with us in that way. Then, you become a teenager, and you start feeling resentful. As a teen, you feel that you need a connection, emotional support, and affection. You want intimacy.

It was very confusing to me because I actually grew up in a really nice house in a very suburban area of northern New Jersey. All around me, I saw green grass. It would have been very ideal, and the public school provided an amazing education. Yet, I have these parents that travel half an hour south to a super working-class neighborhood, where their hardware store is, and they’re there all of the time. They spent most of their lives in a different context, and that context provided my brother and me with this very ideal context of a nice school, clothes, and piano lessons.

I think watching your parents work like that causes you to grow up with this deep sense that you have to do well because you don’t know where they’re from, but you do know that they have left so much and that they have left their whole families. I don’t know about your students, but with my family, I had my great-aunt, but that was it. We didn’t have any other support system other than the church. So, you see them work all the time, and you know that all that hard work is for you to be able to succeed.

But it’s hard to understand as a child, because you don’t even know where they’re from. You know nothing about their history. Here’s a common theme: my parents never talked about their past history. They didn’t want to go there with us and connect with us in that way. Then, you become a teenager, and you start feeling resentful. As a teen, you feel that you need a connection, emotional support, and affection. You want intimacy.

It was very confusing for me — all throughout my teens and into my 20s — and it wasn’t until I got older that I gained some perspective. It wasn’t until I became a working person myself that I could understand what they went through, and what they had to go through — what they had to sacrifice, really — in order for my brother and me to pursue our very creative lives. We’re not the stereotype. We didn’t become doctors and lawyers. We don’t have these extremely traditional professions. I’m so grateful for the job that I have. I actually have free time. I can be the one that takes my kids to camp and pick them up, do this and do that, and take time off.

There’s not a single day that goes by where I don’t think about how I have this easygoing life because they had really sacrificed so much. I hope that doesn’t sound like a trope. But because they had really given up so much of their [lives], I could have the foundation and set of privileges that I’ve been able to have, and a kind of rooted- ness for me to be able to freely pursue creative work.

I was listening to the podcast you had done with The Fashion Education Podcast, and something that you talked about there was your graduate education at Yale. You men tioned that you felt compelled to explore the garment industry in New York — only a train ride away — while many of your fellow stu dents opted in to conduct field research in 40 faraway countries. How did you pinpoint the garment industry as your area of scholarship?
I think when you have parents who’ve come from another place to this country — at least for me, but I think this is universal — you’re always wondering, “What were the lives they lived before they came here? And what was it like before they had you?”

I have always had this interest in fashion. I’ve always had an interest in clothing, textiles, fabric, and color. I was at Yale, and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, nobody here cares about clothes and fashion, and I just miss color and I miss crazy hair.” Not that I look like that, but I love being around that. I love seeing how people express themselves through style, but everybody there seemed a little more sober in their dress. My interest in fashion has always been entangled in knowing the personal history of my parents. Their first work in the U.S. was painting jewelry in the Garment District. I had a lot of memories as a kid being in and out of that neighborhood, and loving it. A lot of their friends worked in that neighborhood. They were fabric store owners. They sold buttons, imported or exported toys, or sold flowers. That whole area was a wholesale market.

When I was at Yale, especially in those early years, it felt very alienating to me. It was a real cultural shift and cultural shock for me. It was such a huge cultural shock and displacement. I came from such a different world. I wasn’t sure I was good enough to be there. I felt like a fraud being there. I felt like everybody else deserved to be there, but that I must have gotten in by some fluke. Sitting in class, I could feel everything that I’m reading and studying, transforming my mind in a way that maybe I didn’t like. Intellectualizing and analyzing things in a way that was different from the way that I naturally think about and experience life.

I was told, “Here’s the anthropology canon.” I knew I had to read about Bronislaw Malinowski, Marx, Durkheim, and other European intellectuals. I remember thinking I needed to preserve what was happening there — learning a history that is not my history. I can learn something from this, and I can spit it back out. I can analyze it, use it, and perform it. But this isn’t the writing and the history that moves me, connects with me, and shapes me in the way that I want.

Going to the Garment District to do a project was a search for something familiar, and a search for comfort in a cultural environment that felt so foreign to be around. It was wanting to be back in this neighborhood that is very entangled in my childhood memories and felt very inspiring. First of all, to be around Asian faces and bodies. So you know, when I was at Yale, the majority of the students were white. Most of the friends I made there were not, but everybody else was. To even hear Korean on the street was something that I loved. I couldn’t go home to my parents because I didn’t want them to worry. Had I told them what I was going through in school, they would have just been worried. I didn’t want to worry them, so I needed to find another space, and the garment industry was that space.

Of course, I discovered a different place there [in the garment industry]. There were so many different kinds of people working there, so many different kinds of workers who were all entangled and interconnected. The many different histories that weave in and out of that Garment District were fascinating to me.

When you were a child, what kinds of clothes were you wearing and where did you buy those clothes?
When I was a child, my mother and I went to Korea just one time and she wanted to show me of. She bought three or four sets of a top and a short skirt — frilly and girly, exactly what I hated. I wanted to dress exactly like my brother in a baseball t-shirt, baseball cap, terry cloth short pants, socks up to my knees, and sneakers. I wanted to look like a boy. But to my mom’s credit, I dressed myself in middle and high school. And what I really appreciate about her is that she never cared what I looked like or how I dressed. So I spent all of my free time in middle school and high school in thrift stores because everything was so cheap. I could just buy anything there and rip it up and turn it into something else. Basically, everything I wore in junior high and high school was thrift. If it were up to my mom, it would be like a Ralph Lauren polo shirt or something very girly like a dress.

In graduate school, I was the only person at that time wearing a bright orange winter coat that went from my neck all the way down to my ankle, like, bright orange in the dead of winter. And I wore a lot of thrift store clothes at the time too. I had a boyfriend that was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where it felt like the center of fashion at the time, so I was there every weekend. I needed that. I needed to be around people who were and who looked different.

You mentioned educators that made you feel welcome and encouraged you to continue thinking about history and knowledge from different sources that are not part of the “traditional” European canon. Are there particular educators that still stand out for you from that time?
I almost think of them as my parents. That was something amazing that happened at Yale because I was incredibly insecure. I felt like I was from a different class background. Everybody’s parents were from a professional class — hedge fund people, doctors, and lawyers. I spent my undergraduate years at a state school, and most of everybody I knew at Yale had either gone to Harvard or Cornell as an undergraduate student, so it felt different. I felt different.

But my teachers really saved me, because they were the ones who I could really be honest with, and they encouraged me like you would not believe. They were Yale professors who just encouraged me every day that I was there. David Graeber from the Anthropology Department. Michael Denning in American Studies. Mary Lui in American Studies. Paul Gilroy in Sociology and African American Studies. Jim Scott was in the Political Science Department.

I remember Jim Scott having this weekly gathering for intellectual debate. I remember I was sitting on the outskirts of a very intimidating, large room. Jim pulled out a seat at the wooden table, where all the professors were, and he said, “Come sit here.”

Even just a gesture like that was very moving to me. They were the ones with whom I could freely assert my opinions when we were analyzing texts or works of art. I could freely associate, and they accepted it. It was all valid information and valid analysis. They were also the 41 ones who told me that I could write, so that really boosted my confidence, for which I’m so grateful.

Then I made a really amazing set of friends there who also were just so accepting of me. I could have turned out badly, but it turned out really well because I was able to stick with it through their encouragement and support. Truly, truly, absolutely. I really think it’s the people who are the sustaining force in all of the turmoil.

Diaspora is something we perhaps all know internally, but only learn about in an academic sense at a later point. Could you tell me about your research in the L.A. garment industry and its relationship to diaspora? When did the concept of diaspora first enter your vocabulary?
In my first job after I finished college, I was kind of burnt out. My dad suggested that I work in Korea because the last time I had gone was when I was six years old. He told me there’s so many gyopos (교포 — ethnic Koreans raised outside of the Korean peninsula) going to Korea to teach English and working there might be a good time for me to figure out what I wanted to do. He said I could go to Korea, meet my relatives and reconnect with them. “Just give yourself a year.” It was really good advice, so I went there.

I was very typical. I was one of so many gyopos coming to teach English. I didn’t know what that word was until I went to Korea. I discovered that I loved to teach. Everybody who taught at that place was Korean and from somewhere else — Korean German, Korean Dutch, Korean Hawaiian, Korean Brazilian — and it was the first time I realized that there were Koreans all over the world. Before that, I had absolutely no idea.

It’s from there that diaspora entered my consciousness. How is it that somebody could grow up in Germany and I could grow up in New Jersey, and yet there are these shared things about our upbringing? That was very interesting for me to discover. I met so many adoptees out here too, so that again led to questions — Why are there so many adoptees here? What is this about my generation? All of this grew my interest in Korea’s history and what this word “diaspora” might mean.

When I got to grad school and I settled on a project, I ended up in L.A. because so many of the kids that I was meeting, who were going to Parsons to study fashion, had come from L.A. They had grown up in Koreatown with L.A. fashion. They didn’t call it the Garment District. They called it “the fashion industry.” That distinction was really interesting to me.

Everybody was raised in that area with a parent who 42 was working in fashion somehow. Then it turns out from my time in Korea, I knew somebody who also grew up in L.A.’s fashion world. She invited me out there and introduced me to basically her parents’ friends. I spent a lot of time with her family, her family’s friends, people working in and out of that area.

That experience was really just so incredibly eye-opening to me. What really interested me is that so many of the families wanted their kids to not go into garment or fashion. They wanted their kids to get degrees and go off and become lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and these white-collar professions, but a lot of those kids ended up studying marketing design. Some of them went to get MBAs or study economics or international law, and were interested in using that in their parents’ businesses.

One of the storylines is that many of the young people I interviewed about fashion got jobs in New York at major corporations like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Donna Karan. But, they felt very limited in how high they could go up the ladder — whether they felt racialized, stereotyped, this and that. They felt like they couldn’t be creative in what they wanted to do.

They were interested in design, color, textiles, and interesting business practices, but they felt like they couldn’t exercise their ideas for various reasons. I think race did play a big role in being able to pursue their dream of designing and making interesting things.

So, their parents’ businesses were one way to return to a familiar space and to work creatively alongside a people and community that they loved and trusted. You’re going back to church, and you’re sitting with your family in the pews. Everybody around you works in the district. It’s a very familiar space. You have the support system of parents who have 30 years of experience of knowing how to make a garment whether in Los Angeles, Brazil, Korea, or China.

You get to be the creative one. You get to bring in design elements. You get to study the trends, and you know what’s happening because you’re living in southern California with its celebrity culture, social media, and marketing. What was so fascinating to me was the creativity that was coming out of this neighborhood.

I know that for many of the people who work in it, it’s such a tough business industry that sometimes they don’t feel that it’s creative work. “Oh, we’re just pushing out styles and having to sell them.” And it can feel that way too. But as an outsider looking in, what I saw happening was wildly creative. I saw not only creativity in terms of design, but also creativity on managing costs, putting a garment together, on making it in a certain way that solves problems in a global supply chain to fit many different types of bodies in different regions of the U.S. that have different demographics of people.

The garment community is a whole ecology. You have different families specializing in different things. This industry is so tough, you can fail so quickly. Every day, there are families that start something and it disappears. They say in the Garment District, a million dollars can come and go.

It’s highly repetitive — and just as dark as that may sound — I also see the other side of it, which is that this can only happen and that this can only exist where the majority of the clothing in the U.S. comes from the Port of Los Angeles. It takes collective knowledge to be able to turn out so many different kinds of interesting styles, and make it affordable for so many different types of bodies to then be quickly sent all around the world, where the clothing is marketed and sold at Macy’s, Nordstrom, or Kohl’s. Even the fact that clothes are sold on digital platforms has to do with the young people who came in and understood these dynamics

When I see that, I’m really very inspired because, for me, this is a collective form of creativity. It takes the whole community and it also takes the church to make it happen.

To put it out there, I’m not actually religious. I grew up going to church, but I don’t go to church anymore. I understand its essential function to this community. There’s both the Catholic dimension because there’s a lot of Korean Brazilians working in the fashion district and the Protestant dimension too. You have to go to church in order to survive and where your next connections can happen.

Churches are a way to solidify these interpersonal bonds; there’s a lot of ways to burn relationships, but they are a place where connections are maintained, and relationships are preserved and nurtured. It’s a leap of faith because the risks people are taking in this industry are so deep and wide.

I think people go to church to maintain the faith that they’re going to survive the next trend, the next pandemic, and whatever other challenges that come their way. To know that there’s a community there that’s going to help them in case things bottom out for them. As generations continue, it’s possible we might see less of that.