Jamie Issuh

Could you start with your name, age, and where you were born?

My name is Jamie Issuh. I am 32 years old and was born in Champaign, Illinois. 

Could you tell me a little bit about your childhood there? 

I was born in ’91, so I grew up in the ’90s. I only lived there until I was around 6 or 7 years old. Because of that period, I had a very happy childhood. I don’t really remember having perceptions about race or belonging. I think that happened later in life. I lived in Korea for a year and lived in this small town called Tullahoma, Tennessee, for two years. After that, I primarily grew up in Irvine, starting in fourth grade.

Were you part of an Asian community in Tennessee?

No, when I was growing up in Tennessee, I was maybe one of two Asian families in the entire school that I knew of, so I think it was during that time that I really started having a perception about my race and identity in a primarily white and black neighborhood. That was the first time I recognized feeling like I didn’t really belong [somewhere] and [thinking that] something is a little different about me. 

Moving to Irvine, which is predominantly occupied by the Asian community, how did the move feel?

I think because of my experience growing up in primarily white and black neighborhoods, mostly white neighborhoods, and also growing up watching a lot of TV and media where it was predominantly white characters, I grew up really not wanting to be Asian, let alone Korean. So I think, for most of my childhood, all the way up until probably early adulthood, I did not connect with being Asian and did not want to be identified as Asian or Korean.

With my experience at Irvine, I recognized that there was a lot more Asian community around there, but I still wanted to mostly be identified closer to whiteness and sought out white friendships more so than Asian friendships, which I have a lot of regrets about now. At the time, I was just trying to fit in.

How do you identify now?

I now identify with my Instagram profile bio. I identify as a queer Korean American Renaissance woman. And by that, I mean I’m queer and Korean American, but “Renaissance woman” really means a person of many, many talents and interests. And I primarily identify as an artist and a creative director, [in terms of] what I do in the world. I dance, I play music. I like to explore everything. That’s how I identify. 

What catalyzed all the movements in different states from Korea to Orange County?

That’s a really good question. My parents moved a lot when my older sister and I were kids because of my dad — he’s an engineer. But I think he was never happy in any of his [workplaces]. I think he wanted to be an artist, but his parents told him, ‘If you’re an artist, you’re going starve and be poor.’ And so he chose the profession of engineering to provide for his family. Therefore, I think he was never happy.

I don’t know the full extent to which he experienced racism, and he experienced hardships because I’m sure things were hard back then. But I think that catalyzed him to continue moving around and moving the family around. I also think that’s a pretty common immigrant experience. Once you leave the homeland, you kind of never feel settled. And so you continue to move around.

Did you always find yourself having an affinity for art? Was your father supportive of your creative passions?

Yeah, I’ve always been attracted to drawing; I’ve been drawing and painting my whole life. It was more so when I was younger; it was the thing that got me a lot of praise and attention that I felt, Oh, I must be good at this. That praise and attention felt really good. As far as my parents go, supporting me being an artist, when I was a kid, they never made me feel bad about pursuing my creative interests. I think they felt bad that they weren’t able to afford to send me to art school and stuff like that. But as long as I was a kid, they encouraged my creativity. It was a different story, though, when I was like, “I want to pursue this as a career.”

Did you think you wanted to pursue art? What was your initial goal for a career?

I always wanted to do something in the arts. It was really in high school, though, [when] I saw the movie “Finding Nemo.” There’s a scene where the little fishes pop their heads out, and they see the Sydney Opera House, and it was just the most beautiful scene I’ve ever seen. It was in that moment that I was like, I want to be an artist. I wanted to be an animator for Pixar. That was the initial dream. Yeah, that was when I [decided] I wanted to apply to animation school. That was one that was very quickly shut down by my parents.

Was art something that helped you begin to identify more with your Asian identity, or was that catalyzed by something else? 

I think it’s really in the last couple of years that my art has really been a key component in helping me identify with my “Koreanness” and my queerness and all the “overlappingness” of my identities. I think specifically about my “Koreanness” and “Asianess,” that’s really something that I have stepped more into during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

I work as a creative director for live concerts. This is an ambition I pursued during college. I had worked in this industry for 10 years before the pandemic happened. It’s the concert industry. It is a very straight, white, male-dominated industry. There were many rooms where I was one of two women in a room of all men, usually the only non-white person. Again, because of that childhood of growing up watching mostly white media, I was very detached from being proud of being Asian and Korean because I was just trying to fit in and survive.

When the pandemic happened, and that was the first time I was really pausing from my career and my work, which had been very fast and furious — I’m sure [this is a] very common narrative [for the] Korean Asian American narrative. [I was] overachieving and overworking in my career. When we paused, and I was witnessing not just my own burnout from my work and my career, but also the Black Lives Matter protests, which opened my eyes to what my experience in this country has really been. I felt a real sadness and [detachment] from my [creativity] and alienness because of my desire to assimilate my whole life. So it was really during that period that I began researching Korean history, connecting with other Asian groups and activists, and learning my history. So in the last couple of years, I’ve gone headfirst and hard into reconnecting with my “Koreanness” and “Asianess” in several different ways because I felt like I had missed out on so much when I was younger. 

Did you have this sort of revelation with your identity in one moment in your life parts, such as your “Koreanness” and queerness, or did they each happen in unique moments?

I realized my queer identity earlier in life. As far as that goes, having crushes on people, I think it’s usually how you realize your queerness. To be honest, I felt it was kind of late in life that I realized my queerness. I realized I was queer, probably in college, around when I was 20, 21. It was such an interesting experience because I have always been a big ally to the LGBTQ community. But I was really surprised by how hard it was for me to accept my own queerness despite the fact that I could accept it for other people.

Yeah, it was in college where I had the thought, It’s kind of weird that I like don’t have a crush on anyone very often. [And I began thinking], there are not a lot of guys I’ve had crushes on or that I can think of. I was like, What if you had crushes on girls? Then I was like, Oh, no. I knew exactly who I was in love with, and I could identify exactly who I’d had crushes on [throughout] my entire life.

I had to grapple with that for several years. I think it was actually impossible to grapple with my queerness and “Koreanness” at the same time because I had never seen them coexist in the same room and accept each other. For me, my queerness was kind of all of my 20s of really stepping into that, but mostly through chosen family and through community spaces that weren’t Asian or Korean identifying really at all.

One of those community spaces that you helped create for yourself was the Queer Asian Social Club. How did that come about? Can you tell us a little more about that? 

My friend Maya had founded this organization called Queer Asian Social Club. And I had found this organization through Instagram, literally just Googling the hashtag “gaysian.” Again, due to my work environment, I did not have a lot of Asian communities around me, let alone queer Asian communities at all. I felt this yearning to see people who [looked] like me and identified like me, and not just to have friends who understood me, but also to see other queer Asians who [were] happy and thriving in the world, because that’s the importance of representation. If you don’t see someone who looks like you and identifies with you, out in the world, happy, in love, succeeding, and fulfilled, you don’t know if that’s possible for yourself. That’s the significance of representation.

I contacted the organization through Instagram, and Maya was super welcoming. Back then, it was kind of a smaller collective. They made shirts and stuff, but they didn’t really do many events at the time. But I was really interested in cultivating and creating spaces and events for the queer Asian community to meet and find each other.

I started throwing these events and parties in L.A. I think my involvement in the organization also increased over the pandemic, starting with doing online panels and group sessions. Once things started to open up again, people were so ready and desperate. There were a lot of people who also discovered their queerness during the pandemic.

In the last couple of years, we’ve done screenings of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and we did a queer party. We did a pride party this year, and we [tried] to be very different than just [presenting it as] a queer Asian party because part of what I’m discovering, what my work in the world is, is asking the question, “How do we make spaces for a community to find each other in ways that go beyond a party and some alcohol and [then you just] lose your inhibitions and bump into each other on a dance floor?” That’s how you make friends; it can work to some degree, but people are really starving for a genuine, deep, lasting community connection.

We tried to make events with interactive art installations, and at our pride party, we had stickers with different identities, like pronouns, but also “baby gay” and “passenger princess.” [We tried to provide] ways to spark conversation and connections between people, and that’s really important to me in the work that I do with Queer Asian Social Club.

How do you think the Queer Asian Social Club affected or is affecting your community?

Yeah, I feel so grateful for the experience; I feel so grateful to be able to experience Queer Asian Social Club through the eyes of my community. I put so much of my heart and soul into this organization because of my desire to find a queer Asian community for myself. It’s been really, really amazing to see folks come out to events and to witness the ways in which they can’t believe they’re in a space surrounded by other queer Asian people. It’s a really profound experience when you go about the world feeling like you are the only person who identifies the way that you do. Now, to be in a room of 250 people who identify like you and are looking to make friends with people like you [is such an intense emotion to experience].

I’ve made a lot of friends in the organization. I’ve heard from a lot of people who make friends and continue to hang out after coming to our events, or who have even gone on dates and found love and relationships from [attending] our events. I feel so proud and fulfilled by that because the whole point is to help people feel less alone in the world, and I can see it happening in front of my eyes. 

At what age do you think you were first cognizant of your gender identity and orientation?

I was first cognizant of my queerness around the age of 20. Probably a little bit before, maybe [in my] senior year of high school. Yeah, I really began to recognize my queerness. I told the story before, but I think my first like question marks happened when I saw the show “Glee.” There’s a queer relationship in the show, but it’s with a very feminine-identifying lesbian. I had never seen a feminine identifying lesbian before because my internalized homophobia my whole life saw that the typical representation of a queer woman was such an image. I was like, I’m definitely not that. Also, there was that internalized homophobia, that kind of natural disgust towards it. I think what I saw was the feminine representation of a lesbian on the show, and I was really invested in the storyline. I was suspicious, but yeah.

When did you decide to come out to your family, or rather, if you did or did not?

Yeah, that’s the real question. So I came out to my family when I was 23 or 24. I was in my first relationship at that time. I didn’t recognize this at that time because — this is very common in the queer experience — there was this scarcity mindset about finding somebody who will love you, and it being someone you’re attracted to and they’re also attracted to you. You don’t recognize a lot of the ways in which a relationship is problematic or traumatic. I think it’s a very common experience in the queer community.

Yeah, my first relationship was very bad. But one of the things that she did [express] was that she felt invalidated because I wasn’t out to my parents. Which, again, in retrospect, that’s kind of messed up. You should take your time and come out when you want to, but I really came out because of the person I was in a relationship with. I was not ready to come out to my parents.

I came out to them together. My older sister who knew was there. But I never even said the words “I’m gay” or “I have a girlfriend,” I never even said those words. I just told them I have something to tell you, and then I was really, really nervous. And that was making my mom really nervous. Then I was like, “So you know, that friend that I live with?” My mom was like, ‘Are you telling me that you like that friend?’ And I was like, “Yes.” And then my mom was like, ‘That happens sometimes.’ I was like, “Wait, what?” At the same time, my mom in particular was like, ‘You’ve been living on your own for too long. I think you need to come back home.’ [Inferring that she did not] accept [me] coming out. I think she also just couldn’t really process it. My dad didn’t really say anything about it.