What is your name, age, and place of birth?

JH: My name is Ju Hui Judy Han. I am 51 years old, and I was born in Seoul, Korea.

JC: My name is Jennifer Jihye Chun. I am 50 years old, and I was also born in Seoul, Korea.

How do you identify by generation, race, ethnicity, gender, or preferred pronouns?

JH: I go by she/they, and I generally identify as a 1.5 bilingual and bicultural Korean/American. Sometimes I put a “slash” between the Korean/American just because I can’t decide.

JC: I go by she/her, and I mainly identify as Korean American. I also identify as a woman of color.

Where did you grow up?

JH: I grew up — this is a challenging question — I first grew up in Seoul, Korea, and emigrated when I was 12 years old. I came of age and did most of my schooling in California and then in Northern California. I think I’m still growing up, but [I grew up] mostly in California and Seoul.

JC: I grew up in a southwest suburb of Chicago, and I pretty much lived and was raised and educated in Chicago my whole life. I was born in Seoul, Korea, but my parents emigrated right after my baek-il, my 100-day birthday. Then I went to college on the East Coast, came to grad school in California, and, with Judy, made a whole circle up from the Bay Area over to Vancouver and Toronto and then back to Los Angeles.

Where do you consider your hometown?

JH: That gets even more complicated. I’m not sure. It’s mainly where we live — that’s “home” to me, and we’ve lived in a lot of different places.

How many family members did you have, and what were your parents’ occupations?

JH: There were five of us growing up. I’m the eldest of three and have a younger sister and a younger brother. My dad was trained as an optician for a long time. He fitted eyeglasses when I was growing up and later after we emigrated, he worked as a house painter for a time. My mom did a lot of things, actually. She was a general contractor in Korea and built houses. I have memories of seeing my mom managing construction projects, supervising brick layers and carpenters. After we immigrated to the U.S., both of my parents worked in liquor stores and at a clothing swap meet. Retail, in short.

JC: Like Judy, there are five of us. I have an older sister and a younger brother. My dad is a psychiatrist, and my mom mainly raised us. She is also a musician. At some point, probably after I was in college — I guess she always worked as a church organist — but she had her first paid job working as a church organist for several years. 

Can you describe some of the feelings that you had about your childhood?

JH: As a child, I have to say I was pretty nerdy. I loved school, and I loved reading; and I was good at it. What I didn’t like was physical education or any sports-related things. I also didn’t enjoy a lot of the social things, to be honest. A lot of my childhood, I remember either being alone, like reading alone or studying alone, or wanting to be left alone. I have a lot of memories of dodging family gatherings and finding a corner to be by myself or avoiding my younger brother and sister and trying to be by myself. I’m a little embarrassed that I was such an antisocial kid, but that’s who I was.

What were you reading?

JH: A lot of comics! Abridged versions of classic literature and some things I probably shouldn’t have been reading as a kid. But I was also reading a lot of newspapers. After we immigrated to the U.S. I was hungry to read anything in Korean that I could get my hands on. Things like Korean-language newspapers, women’s magazines, things that you see lying around at markets and restaurants. I read everything.

Jennifer, what was your childhood like?

JC: Probably the exact opposite of Judy. I was really social. I loved hanging out with my friends. I was really good in school, but I was always hiding it. That’s probably a product of the fact that I grew up in a primarily white community. There was so much stigma and stereotypes around Asians being the model minority, that I pretended that I wasn’t good in school. I loved sports and parties and got in trouble all the time from my parents for wanting to go out. But I never really did anything bad. We got caught a few times taking out the car or things like that. I don’t have a lot of memories of my childhood, to tell you the truth. I always feel a little hesitant when people ask me, and it could just be that I have a terrible memory. But I have such scattered memories, and maybe I blocked things out. I mostly remember superficial things like hanging out with friends, going to parties, and just spending my whole summers outside.

Do you remember having a particular dream or aspiration as a child?

JC: In looking back, I had internalized so much racism that I wanted to be sort of everything. I thought I had to be good at everything. I spent my whole childhood seeing myself through other people’s eyes and thought that I wanted to be the best hair stylist or a nuclear scientist — there was no rhyme or reason to what I wanted to be. Looking back, it’s probably because I had no sense of self. I had spent so much of my childhood seeing myself through other people’s eyes that it was like a big hole I had to climb out of.

Did you have particular dreams?

JH: Aside from wanting to be left alone, I’m not sure I had a specific career aspiration. But as I listened to Jenny talk, the most vivid memory of my childhood was occasionally running errands for my mom. I would deliver food that she had made for a relative across town, in Seoul. If I think about it, I was probably no more than 10 or 11 years old. Taking the bus or subway took about two hours to get there, I think. Once I arrived, I would be fed and stuff, and then, I would take public transit back. I remember those journeys as being a lot of fun. I appreciated the responsibility, the solo adventure. I really liked being taken seriously by my parents. My parents would have supported anything I wanted to do; I knew I had that support.

JC: I also remember wanting to be really rich. That was my dream when I was little [laughs]. My mom has asked me what ever happened to that dream.

Can you give some examples of how you were aware of your ethnicity or culture?

JC: For me, it was all on a superficial level. One of the things I remember about being different was that I was incredibly pale and could never get a proper tan [laughs]. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything these days with so much more consciousness [around] staying safe from the sun, but when I [was growing] up, everyone was going to tanning beds. The summer was all about going to the beach. But I would break out in hives and I could never get a tan. It’s just little mundane things like that that I remember. I got teased for it, and I was, you know, probably too sensitive about these things. But that was one way that I remember feeling like I could never do things that other kids did with ease.

JH: I probably didn’t know anything about race or racial differences until I arrived in the U.S. One of the first ways I encountered race was by seeing how the teachers treated me differently from the other kids in ESL classes. I didn’t speak a word of English so I was in English as a Second Language classes throughout middle school. Only two or three of us were Asian American; the rest were mostly Spanish-speaking Latinx students. And I remember the kind of attention or respect the teachers directed toward Asian American students wasn’t the same for the rest of the class. So I intuited that there’s a hierarchy and that I fit in somewhere in this hierarchy. The next lesson in race and racial hierarchy was when I encountered Korean Americans — U.S.-born Korean Americans, like Jenny a little bit — and saw the way they treated FOBs (fresh off the boat) like me. The new immigrants from Korea, not speaking English, and not knowing cultural references — we were just not cool in any way whatsoever.

Judy, can you tell me about your career path and how you landed in geography and moved to protest culture?

JH: After I immigrated to the U.S. and became more acculturated as a Korean American person and as an immigrant in the United States, especially in the L.A. area, I realized early on how important the Korean American churches were to community life and political life. No matter what I tried to do, in terms of community organizing, social justice organizing, or just trying to create safe spaces for LGBTQ folks, the churches were always there — and mostly, they were in the way. When I started thinking about graduate programs, I knew that I wanted to study churches, partly because I recognized their importance — not because I value their importance or value their significance — but because I wanted to make sure that we understand them and how they work. And I wanted to change them. When I applied to graduate school and looked at graduate programs, Jenny was [there] — actually, we joked that Jenny had a policy of not dating a graduate student. But I became one after [emphasis added] we started dating. So, when looking at graduate programs, I looked at different disciplines. It was after meeting an abolitionist feminist geographer who worked on prisons that I realized I could probably do the research that I wanted to do on churches in geography. That’s sort of how I ended up in geography. That was seven years after I graduated from undergrad. During that time, I had worked in different nonprofit and social justice organizations.

Jenny, what catalyzed your interest in gender and labor?

JC: My route into graduate school is synonymous with my experience of becoming politicized as a Korean American, Asian American, and person of color. When I went to college, I went to a small New England college; it was like a picture-perfect college town. I wasn’t very political and probably had aspirations like everyone else there to go into corporate America. I had no sense of how the world worked or what my voice was or could be. [During] my second year — my sophomore year — I think it was April of 1992, and I’ll never forget, like so many of us in our generation, walking across the green and seeing protesters with signs saying “Burn Koreatown Burn!” and not having any idea what was happening. One thing I do remember is that I was taking a class on education about the Watts rebellion in the ’60s. It was at that moment that I realized, What was I actually learning in college? Nothing about urban inequality, racial inequality, class inequality, and certainly nothing about Koreans, Korean Americans, or Black rebellion.

From there, I did a total 180, met up with other Korean Americans, trying to understand even the most basic things. Like, there’s a Korean American community in Los Angeles — I actually had no idea because my whole world growing up was a very, very small and insular Korean American community. We were pretty much the kids of professionals — doctors and nurses — and then dry cleaners. I had no sense of the larger Korean American community in the U.S., and certainly not L.A. From there, I turned to Asian American studies and wrote a thesis on the construction of Korean American identities by Korean American women. When I met Judy, I interviewed her for my senior thesis because I took my Asian American studies classes at Berkeley.

When I started graduate school, one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to organize with a Korean American organization that wasn’t just service-oriented. For me, having a social-justice, racial-justice critique was really important to my journey and my sense of awakening.

The only Korean American organization in the Bay Area doing grassroots organizing was Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in San Jose. They had a grassroots, popular education approach to organizing low-income Asian immigrant women workers. Down in Silicon Valley, I started teaching workplace literacy classes to Korean immigrant women who mainly worked in the electronics industry. From there, my interest in gender and labor got ensconced in the lives of mostly Korean immigrant women who were electronics assembly workers. I recruited Judy to help, actually. We started teaching — well, not me because I don’t know how to teach computer classes — but Judy taught computer literacy classes. Then, I started to think about the importance of what was happening in Korea. The more I started to understand the intersections of race, gender, and class, the more I realized that there was this incredibly vibrant and militant labor movement in Korea that I knew nothing about. But I didn’t have access to that because I didn’t grow up in Korea. I was monolingual; [I knew] maybe a few words [of Korean] here and there. So I went to Korea [and] learned about the labor movement, and here I am studying Korean workers for the past 20 years.

JH: The computer literacy classes that Jenny was talking about, they were for electronic assembly workers who knew everything about how to put together and build computer hardware, like soldering parts and processors. But at home, they said, their kids would give them a hard time, like, ‘Mom, don’t touch my computer.’ These women were terrified of these expensive computers they bought for their kids. They didn’t know how to use them. They were constantly told not to break them and to be careful around them, like they were precious. So my pedagogical innovation in teaching computer literacy classes was that on the first day, I had everybody literally kick the computer. Just kick it, with their foot, and nothing happens! And guess what? If you just turn it off instead of properly shutting it down, oh my god, nothing blows up. It’s ok! Then I had them open up the cases to look at the parts inside. Because they were electronics workers, they recognized that they [were] just memory chips and motherboards. And then they were no longer intimidated by computers.

JC: They produced and assembled those boards.

JH: For sure! They were like, ‘Ah, this old stuff.’

What perspectives have you gained from going back and forth [between South Korea and the U.S.], and how has that shaped your career? How has it enriched you?

JH: I came to the United States as an immigrant in 1984. I didn’t go back — the first time I went back was in 1990, and then ’93. And then ’96. There were big gaps, and those gaps meant a lot to me. Every time I went back, there was a very specific reason why I had to go back or wanted to go back. In more recent years, because of the research that I’m able to do, I have gone back quite a lot. I didn’t always have legal status, but now I do, and I have a U.S. passport, which I do not take for granted because it is a privilege.

I’ve become interested in transnational connections and why people travel and why people sometimes have to travel, as in forced migration or deportation. There are so many different ways people go back and forth that it’s easy to take it for granted. It’s not always by choice, and it’s not always about individual choice. I find that interesting for my work with LGBTQ activism, too.

JC: Research took me to Korea for the first time to learn the language and learn more about history and politics. I initially went when I was in grad school; I got a small scholarship to go. I thought, Oh, I’ll go for the summer. And then in the summer, I realized, Okay, there’s no way I’m going to learn Korean, even at the most basic level, for a summer, so I ended up staying for 15 months.

Growing up, my dad worked all the time, so I didn’t grow up in a family that went back and forth to Korea. Both my parents come from big families, but we didn’t have any relatives [in the United States]. So, I grew up without any sense of a big family. That’s what’s particular to me: [having grown up with] no relatives, just our nuclear family. When I went back to Korea, I think the research is all — you know, I could go into what I learned about the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions or what I learned about organized labor and precarious workers, which I wrote a lot about in my academic scholarship. In terms of what that experience did to change me, most importantly, it gave me a different way of understanding my identity, my relationship with my parents and family, and my relationship with other Korean Americans.

Judy often makes fun of me and also other Korean Americans. She calls us “Born Again Koreans” because a lot of Korean Americans who grew up without speaking the language have a very difficult relationship [to being Korean especially]  in terms of communication with our parents; the only understanding of what Korea or Korean is comes from our immediate experience. We’d say things like, “Well, Koreans [are] very competitive about their children.” Judy would say, ‘That’s not Koreans. That’s a specific group of Korean Americans.’ We would often generalize. I often found myself generalizing as if I knew what Koreans or Korean Americans were like, just based on my own very small, cut-off world from Korea.

When I went to Korea, I realized, “Okay, I have a huge family,” even though I was meeting them for the first time. They didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them, but they knew my parents. Just being able to have a sense of history or grounding beyond life after my parents moved to the U.S. started to unmoor so many weird assumptions that I had.

Learning the language was also painful. It’s all still very hard, but for me, it's freeing in a way because I stopped worrying so much about whether or not I spoke [Korean] with a certain accent. I just use it to open [up] my understanding of my parents or the news. It [shifted] my sense of what [it meant to be] Korean. Korea is where I, for the first time, befriended so many Korean Americans. There are so many expats there. We are all searching for something. That’s where I made friends that are still a part of my life and are committed to building community, trying to organize in ways that connect our sense of justice with who we are and what matters.

That journey goes in multiple directions back and forth and [in] really complex ways. I don’t think that Korean Americans return to Korea to recover something that has been lost. I don’t think that’s the only way one travels. We often think of Koreans returning to Korea as part of a diaspora returning to a homeland [that has not changed or that should not change], but that [tends to evoke] a kind of feminist, anti-nationalist politics [that] makes me cringe. Because what are we returning to? When you are committed to social justice and social change, we’re trying to remake and reimagine society in ways that are most just and liberatory. 

Pretty shortly after we started dating, when we were living in Oakland, part of what we started to do was take advantage of South Koreans who were coming to the United States at the invitation of film festivals or trade unions. They would go to our schools or universities to give talks. We would wiggle our way into their itinerary because we didn’t have the money or anything to invite them or pay for their airfare or lodging. But if we found out there was somebody from Korea giving a talk to the local trade union somewhere or at the university, we would try to take advantage of that visit to convene a Korean American community space so that we can have a dialogue and conversations. It was taking advantage of those, in some ways, accidental encounters in the diaspora that influenced our politics as part of a transnational experience.

How does being Korean American affect your sense of identity and gender?

JC: My grappling with what it means to be Korean American came quite later in life. That’s not necessarily how I think about my identity formation. I [have] always really identified with being a girl. That’s probably about the racialization of Asian girls or Korean girls. Gender socialization was part of how I understood who I was and how I was disciplined in different ways. I grew up without any queer community, without any language around what it might be to be queer. There was just no discussion. So one of the things that I remember when talking to my high school friends about the fact that I was in a relationship with Judy is that I would hear things that we said when we were in high school, [like], ‘Oh, that’s so gay.’ It seems so funny to say now because it’s so not part of my world, but that was just a regular thing that we said all the time. And then I have to say, “I don’t think you should say that.” But even for me, how do I tell my sister or my friends that that’s offensive?

For me, part of being a queer Korean American woman was to go back and encounter how homophobic my upbringing was. [It was] homophobic in a way that people just thought it was part of the common sense. In a way, being Korean American and being identified with a progressive identity of being Korean American did compel me to go back and rethink a lot of relationships I had with people growing up, with my own family, with high school friends, and things like that.

JH: I think it’s complicated for me. It’s tricky to sort out what’s Korean and Korean American and what’s gender or sexual identity for me because they’ve always been so enmeshed. For some reason, I keep thinking about when I was in college. Walking through campus, different student groups were tabling for their events. It would be interesting. I remember distinctly whenever I approached a Korean student group to see what they were up to and to pick up their literature — and being fluent in Korean, being very recently from Korea, craving information about Korea — as soon as I would approach the tables, they would sort of take one look at me and start saying, ‘Oh, this is all in Korean. Sorry, we don’t have anything in English.’ There was a way that they immediately distanced themselves or saw me as somebody who’s not Korean, which I felt was odd, to be honest. I mean, I have blue hair now, but it’s not like it was because of the way I looked or anything. There was something about being queer; there was something about being a strong woman or being feminist, or being tall, or Butch, I don’t know. Maybe all those things made a lot of Korean spaces tense up with my presence, in my proximity. I sensed that in my family [and] in my community spaces. I could see that I disrupted things just by being there, by being close to it. I can’t say I enjoy it every time, right? I don’t want to make people feel tense and uncomfortable every time I come near them. At some point, I also realized, You know what? They’re just going to have to put up with it. And then I started not to care. For me, that’s what happens at that intersection. Especially being queer and being Korean, there are tensions that arise by accident, not necessarily by intention or by plan. That can also result in some change — discomfort — but hopefully change after that.