In Search of My America ~ By Jid Lee
(Austin MaCauley Publishers, 2024, ISBN #979-8-8869-3561-5)
Review by Bill Drucker (Spring 2024)
In this memoir, the racism, gender warfare, academic politics, and cultural collisions are not just social and historical explorations. For author Jid Lee, these issues are profound personal experiences, and a significant part of her chronicle of life in America.
Lee refers to the “banality of racism,” which encompasses the daily occurrences, the small but frequent acts and events that indicate to her that she is often seen by others as a racial stereotype. She observes racism as a pervasive, day-to-day experience, often unchecked and unchallenged. It persists despite hard-won civil rights laws and social support of tolerance. The excuse that racism is an irrational, non-human force doesn’t hold true. Lee describes it as an ingrained human characteristic, and to dismiss or deny it is to deny our humanness.
Lee was born in 1955, and while she was still in her parents’ home, a fruit peddler came to the door and offered to sell the leftover produce for half price. The peddler noted how pretty Lee was and made a psychic prediction. She has four knives in her head, the peddler said; not to kill anyone, but to be decisive, and to boldly cut down the barriers that lay in front of her.
Her home in Korea was very traditional. Her family felt that education was a virtue. That family value helped Lee get through college and graduate studies. In line with traditional values, Lee’s older brother received all the rights of the firstborn son. It was expected that he should be the next head of the family. The family arranged a good marriage. Their father had the prospective wife investigated to find out her academic achievement, family, health and character. In fairness, the bride’s father, too, investigated the groom. The new couple was expected to fulfill family duties, and be given every opportunity to succeed financially and academically. Her brother went to Harvard and lived with other Koreans in an academic community. While there, he and his wife were tethered to his Korean family.
As a graduate student in the U.S., Lee’s behavior, inexperience, and gender and social gaffes caused trouble. At one social occasion when she joined her brother and other Korean men at Harvard, she blundered into a conversation uninvited. Her brother pulled her aside to remind her about the gender segregation. While the men sat in one table discussing academics, politics, and world affairs, the women were supposed to congregate at another table, and talk about domestic matters and children. In this scripted scenario, Lee crossed boundaries, broke social taboos, and ostracized herself.
Even in kinder moments of concern from members of the Korean American community, she heard condescending comments. Well-intentioned people offered pointed advice. “You’d better get married before you get too old. I’d love to introduce you to a man, but I don’t know any.” Although the comment may be intended out of compassion and respect, the flood of cultural clichés felt to Lee like verbal assaults.
As an educated woman with a strong, rebellious mind, Lee needed to hone her instincts; the knives that the fruit peddler mentioned. She had problems in overstepping with her brother and his wife, and also in her relationships with American men. Her encounters with men were often emotional, and filled with minefields of racism and sexism.
Before moving to Kansas for her Ph,D., Lee’s brother made pointed comments about her partner, Jonathan. He called him a total loser and a bum, and advised her to dump him. He was right, but her rebellious nature got the better of her.
Her Kansas academic career was also characterized by racism, gender inequality, and campus politics. In the second year of her Ph.D. program, she hoped that her professors would recommend her for a teaching position. Teaching English 101 to the freshmen class would provide experience in her field of English language, and provide a stable income. She was rejected with a scripted speech. Was it racism when a less-accomplished white woman candidate Ph.D. got the job? European student candidates were given priority for the same position.
Lee refused to swallow her pride. Those knives came out. She took the case to Affirmative Action (AA) and threatened to file a complaint. After that, her professors granted the teaching position. It was a small battle won. Lee realized that they did not see her as a Ph.D. candidate, but an Asian immigrant woman, a foreigner who spoke in accented English.
Lee wanted equal opportunity. At the very least, she wanted valid reasons for why she was denied. She could not accept any arbitrary decisions or tolerate the campus status quo. Lee could not step down or accept rejection without a good reason. Failure was not an option.
As an academic, Lee worked hard. Along the way, Lee had an awakening when she encountered other writers who wrote of similar immigrant experiences, gender, race and struggles with two cultures. Maxine Hong Kingston was one of Lee’s influences.
While she focused all her energy on earning her Ph.D., Lee suffered physical and mental health issues. The years of studies, racist battles, stress of being passed over by less-qualified candidates, living and eating badly, the damage of bad relationships, and the innate fears of failing caught up with her. She went to the campus health facility for treatment and was prescribed heavy-duty drugs for depression.
Lee was honored in Kansas for her academic publications. She produced two critical works on the topic of women of Korea and America, one of which was printed in a prestigious journal. Thinking she was riding high, she submitted the other article to another journal and got rejected by them. Lee tracked down the editors and heard the rationale of why her article was bypassed in favor of another Asian American woman author. The editors didn’t want to publish two articles written by two different Asian American women in the same issue. So obviously, they were being racist because they never hesitated to publish two different articles by two different white women in the same issue.
From Kansas, Lee moved to another university in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The institution boasted idealism, free thinking, and tolerance of diversity, but in that region of the U.S., the Ku Klux Klan was still active. She acknowledges that college towns are not free of racism, but they are at least a place where critical analysis on the subject is tolerated. Racism occurring in the academic universe can at least be examined, questioned and corrected.
American idealism always preaches a good game, but Lee discovers that it still refuses to acknowledge the systemic racial prejudice permanently baked into the culture.
This starkly honest memoir is an insightful, and at times, painful journey of one very uncompromising woman. Leaving Korea and its traditional trappings, she tells a story of making her way in a new culture, with all its pitfalls and difficulties. In the process, Lee finds her own identity as an educated woman, writer, and a free and independent person.
Lee’s memoir resonates at many levels: She writes engagingly about academic pursuits and her drive to succeed, her decoding of American social dynamics, and her relationships with men and women. Living her formative years in America, Lee comes to terms, and could even joke, “I’m a peasant from Korea. I’m not a civilized American like you.” She also came to terms with how she would always be perceived, even with all her credentials, as a Korean professor of English, not just an English professor.
Lee is confident and articulate in her writing, laying down persuasive and insightful narratives, addressing hard issues with blunt candor. With a first-person voice, she speaks of the significance and consequences of the unequal social dynamics found in both a small university campus and in the larger American landscape. Lee can be strident. She confronts the micro-aggressions of racial profiling and gender stereotyping and cannot un-see them. However unwelcoming or conspiratorial, however, Lee continues to embrace her “husband country” as home.
Lee has now lived in the U.S. for over forty years, starting when she was an international student. She earned her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in English. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1989. She is currently an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University. In addition to In Search of My America (2024), Lee has also published To Kill A Tiger (2010), and From The Promised Land to Home (1998), all in English.
