Gina
Gina Kim was born and raised in Koreatown. She is a recent high school graduate and was planning on going to Yale in the fall to study English, but due to COVID-19, has been forced to take a gap year. Her passions include writing, photography, and film. Some of her work can be viewed in her online portfolio at mijin.org.
Interview by Cailey Beck
Where is your hometown?
I was born and raised in Koreatown, Los Angeles. I’ve lived in the same condo in the heart of Koreatown near Madang for my whole life. I’ve seen Koreatown change so much, from when I was a little kid to right now, because I was in the center of it all. And the most pressing matter that has come out of the change is the issue of gentrification. I know that most people are complaining about it, but Koreatown was really dangerous when I was young. I was never allowed to go out after the sun went down because there would be people with guns walking around and stuff. But I’ve never experienced anything big. No one was out there trying to shoot me or holding a knife to my throat. Anyone in a small city anywhere in the world might have experienced the same things I did, like catcalling and feeling weird in dark alleyways.
The Los Angeles riots also play a big part in how I see Koreatown. My dad was actually living here when it was happening, and he was working in a market, so he’s told me stories about how he had to surround the perimeter of the building with carts, rice packets, and stuff. I still see remnants of the riots today. There’s an abandoned sidewalk area near Jamba Juice, right before Madang, and it’s apparently been deserted since the riots. I don’t know how credible that is because my dad told me, but I see those kinds of things every day. But because of the “gentrification,” it’s so much safer and brighter, and there are so many more lights.
I can’t say exactly what growing up in the city was like, because I’ve never grown up in any other environment, so I have nothing to compare it to. But I definitely feel like I grew up more open-minded because, in general, city people are much more eccentric than people you might meet in suburban or rural areas. Also, Los Angeles is home to like one-sixteenth of the nation’s homeless population. That’s so many people without a home. Naturally, I was exposed to homelessness from a young age, so the importance of education was really drilled into me since I was a child, especially because of Asian culture and all of that. That’s not to say that the homeless are uneducated, but in general, they don’t get the same opportunities to move up the ladder, and that’s often due to a lack of opportunities for higher education.
Living in the city and being exposed to all sorts of people, my parents’ words seemed more serious and not just nagging. I’m sounding like a real Asian kid right now, but from a young age, I had a very [goal-oriented] mind. I was honestly just scared to fail. It’s not all like rainbows and sunshine in the city. I think that kids who grew up in the city mature a little bit faster because they are allowed to go out on their own. Even if they’re not allowed to, they go out because there’s so much stuff to do. Navigating the city on your own and learning how to land on your feet is good in the long run.
Do you live or work in Koreatown?
Yes, I live in Koreatown right now, but not for long because I might be leaving Los Angeles soon. I also work in Koreatown at a place called InArt Education, which is like an art portfolio and college-prep academy. I actually started working there just as the COVID pandemic was starting in late February. I worked there part-time at first because I still had school until May, but I’m working full-time now that I’m done with school. My main job is to help students with college essay writing. It was a natural transition to becoming an employee because it was where I made my art portfolio. The head director of the school also knew that I wrote, and she liked my essays. Even while I was a student, she would say things like, “You should work here as an essay teacher. I would hire you right away.” It was basically just connections.
The main reason I work there is that I need money right now. Because of the coronavirus, my dad can’t work anymore, so he takes care of the day-to-day stuff, and I’m in charge of the groceries. That’s why I’m working a lot more.
I actually like working at InArt because I like working with kids, and I’m a writer, too, so I like editing other people’s writing. My love for writing originally stemmed from a love for reading. I went to kindergarten twice because my mom wanted me to help my little sister out. But because I learned everything in the first year, during the second year, the teachers just let me do whatever I wanted. And what else are you going to do at that age than read? It’s not like you can use computers or anything. I read a lot at that time, and then after that, I just kept reading. That naturally led me to want to make my own stories.
I realized I wanted to write pretty early on. It was around fifth grade, so I was 10 years old. Around that time, I was reading a lot of young adult novels, which are mostly cheesy fantasy stories. I feel like all artists kind of start with imitation, whether they like it or not, and writing is a form of art. So I was trying to write spin-offs of what I read, but it was just really cheesy. At that time, I didn’t know you could write about yourself or anything other than fiction because I never read anything like that.
When I started my blog in eighth grade, I wrote about my family for the first time. I was reading a lot of memoirs, and that was when I realized that you could write about yourself. So I started focusing on my family, language, and the actual writing itself. I started studying how words flow and just read instruction booklets and other stuff I found on the Internet. I also tried to read a lot of contemporary literature because I liked the style, which was something I was discovering at the time. I learned that it’s not just about the content but also the delivery. Also, at that time, there was really nothing to do. I wasn’t good at technology or anything like that. I didn’t even discover YouTube until the fifth grade. I wasn’t even a nerd; I just didn’t know what I was doing. Writing was just really fun. For the blog, I had a deadline and made sure to upload every week.
Even if no one was reading, it was an internal deadline I felt I had to meet, so I just kept writing. Because of that, writing didn’t [feel] hard anymore. It almost became a habit. To this day, I still write because of that routine. I’m also still writing about myself because I’m a narcissist at heart. And all writers say this, but writing has become a form of reflection for me. It also helps to package it in a pretty way. Language is pretty and so is writing. Really thinking about how to package and deliver what you want to say makes you think about what happened with more depth. I think a lot more about my daily life because when writing, you need to think a lot.
What are your thoughts on Koreatown?
I actually think about this a lot because Koreatown is kind of a physical manifestation of my being. Koreatown doesn’t have official borders, and so it’s cheesy, but I like to call it a town in limbo. You know, limbo is a place of uncertainty because it is originally a place between heaven and hell in Catholicism. I always refer to it as such because it’s really unlike any other Californian area, even if those areas are ethnic. I also like to say that Koreatown has California skies but Korean air. It’s just a weird place. I feel really at home here because it’s home to a lot of second-generation Korean Americans, and I am one myself. It’s a strange place, but it’s a place that allows me to be unsure of who I am. It’s both American and Korean.
Where is your favorite place in Koreatown?
My favorite place is the food court in Koreatown Plaza. Korean moms are kind of crazy, so when I was little, all of them would gather together with their kids, and we’d all go to the Koreatown Plaza food court and get pho and say hi to the man who ran the restaurant. I think every Korean American knows that ajeossi (아저씨 — middle-aged man). When the kids would finish eating, we would all go to Artbox to get pencils and stuff and run around the fountain.
How has your life changed because of COVID-19?
It’s kind of a lame answer, but it's definitely schooling. I worked pretty hard to get into a good college because I kind of saw it as a way out and a way to make up for all that my parents had poured into me. Before, I never saw a gap year as a part of my plan. But it’s becoming a definite possibility because of COVID, as all schools are potentially going to be online. Even Yale might be online, as it is located in Connecticut, which is a very dangerous area right now because of the pandemic. In the beginning, I was really sad because I was excited to go. I thought that I was finally going to be able to get out of this bubble, but what can you do?
In the long run, this pandemic is giving me the opportunity to look outside of my set “plan” and open up new possibilities for my future. I recently started planning my year out, and the first thing that I’m going to do is do an internship for around a month and a half. I’ve applied to three so far, but the results come out later this month, so I haven’t heard back from them yet. After the internship, though, I’m going to go to Korea because that’s where my mom lives. She has a restaurant there, so I’ll be helping out at night. There’s also an InArt in Korea, so I’ll be teaching essay writing and helping kids with their portfolios during the day.
For Yale, if you want to take a gap year, they make you write a sort of essay. One of my promises was to finish writing a novel by the time I go back. It’s going to be a sort of homage to my apartment because one of the biggest things I was [photographing] and making art about was space. I also did a piece for my portfolio about my apartment unit because while people can hide things, spaces and items cannot. Not only is the energy of the people who live there embedded in spaces, but people also leave things behind, just lying around. Those kinds of things say a lot about people in a strange way. If you look at someone’s space, I think you can really tell who they are. That might be shallow, but I think that it’s kind of vulnerable. It’s more of a memory piece about my home and my writing. The focus seems to be on people rather than the building itself because it’s about my family.
A person’s environment has a huge impact on [where] they end up, so it will also be indirectly about the apartment. There’s going to be a lot of descriptive writing about the space. It will be about the whole apartment because of my neighbors and everything. I’ve lived here all my life. So what I’m basically trying to establish is the idea that it’s too small a space to hold such big memories. I’m trying to explore the effect of space and the physical things that you call home on your idea of home.
As for how it’s affected my day-to-day life, I’m going to be honest, I’m not really good at keeping precautions and following government orders. It’s not because I’m anti-mask or anti-government, it’s just because I just forget that we’re in a pandemic, which is so ignorant to say because people are dying. I mean, I wear a mask and keep the six-feet-apart rule. Like when I’m on the sidewalk and about to pass someone, we both avoid each other at the same time. As for groceries, I definitely don’t go as often and we bulk-buy a lot. I definitely don’t hang out [with friends] as much because, first of all, it’s dangerous, but second of all, there’s nowhere to go even if you wanted to go out. I’m still going out sometimes, and I know it’s so bad, but because I’m young, I feel invisible, even though I know that I’m not. The whole situation feels far away, which is crazy because we’re living it. But it feels like I’m watching it happen from a distance.