What Are You Looking At?
The call from my neurologist’s office ended with a casual comment, “You might want to bring a hat.”
During my freshman year of college, I had my first full-blown seizure,though doctors would later tell me that I was probably having lots of little ones in high school. Apparently, getting good grades lets you have long, blank,staring spells that teachers think are daydreams. Sometime in my twenties, the seizures picked up steam and there was talk about surgery to remove them from my brain. So, on the day that I was to be outfitted for a three-day, take-home electroencephalogram (EEG) to pinpoint the source of my seizures, I grabbed a baseball hat.
After the EEG tech finished using the fourth roll of gauze to cover the scratchy electrodes he glued to my scalp, my heart sank as I imagined my pitiful little baseball hat perched on top of my now hot-air-balloon-sized head. With my useless hat clenched in my fist, I hailed a cab doing my best to ignore the sideways looks I was getting from people. My suspicions were confirmed as my reflection took shape in the cab’s window — I looked like the Bride of Frankenstein, but not as fashion forward. Long before this exceptional Glamour “Don’t ” moment confirmed it, I have always wondered if maybe I was an alien. When I was six years old, a girl asked me, “What are you?”
Over the years, I have grown to enjoy the feeling of being on the perimeter of things. It has become familiar and comforting, albeit unsettling at times. And I’ve thought about that girl’s question many times throughout my life. The easiest answer, and the one she was getting at, has to do with race and ethnicity. As a first-generation, Korean American, I would sometimes argue with my parents about the semantics of being Asian American insisting that I’m American first. In college, I started an Asian American literary arts magazine to help dispel the stereotype that Asians are only good at math and science, but also to provide cover to hide the fact that I struggled with both. And in the workplace and among friends, I have often served as an unwitting representative for all of Asia by sharing the customs, traditions, and food of my people (who are from the exotic suburbs of Northeast Ohio).
But all of those experiences helped me navigate the oceans of people in my work as a photographer preparing me to look at others with compassion even when I didn’t understand them. Standing on the periphery, I learned to listen for whispers or peals of laughter that would introduce a gesture. When moving through crowds, I searched for subtle expressions of genuine emotion, moments of real connection, and even flashes of heated conflict. I was most satisfied when I found humor, candor, and tenderness.
I am fascinated by our attempts to communicate with each other, even more so when we fail. Words only tell part of the story. As an intimate observer, like a detective sifting through clues, I use my photographs and films to try to bring order to the chaos so that I might better consider the question — “What are you?”
