Irene Chun - Coloring Ivory

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Coloring Ivory

Considerations of the Intersections of Minority Politics, Business, & the Law in Elite Society

Irene Chun

new degree press

copyright 2021 Irene Chun

All rightsreserved.

Coloring Ivory

Considerations of the Intersections of Minority Politics, Business, & the Law in Elite Society

ISBN
978-1-63676-698-0 Paperback
978-1-63730-469-3 Kindle Ebook
978-1-63730-470-9 Digital Ebook

Contents

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Introduction

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In Korea, when a baby turns one year old, they are dressed in traditional garb for an elaborate party, with attendees ranging from parents coworkers to immediate family members or even neighbors. After hours of catching up on daily lives and drinking, the parents will put a line of objects in front of the baby for the final event. It is believed the object or objects the baby chooses will represent their future desires in life or their professional career.

In the case of my first birthday, there was a pile of rice, a microphone, a twenty-dollar bill, a stethoscope, a pencil, and a ball. To the disappointment of my grandfather, I chose the money first, then the pencil, then lastly the microphone. He apparently took the money out of my hands, but I took it back and put it in my mouth. Choosing the money meant I would be financially successful, while the pencil represented intelligence, and the microphone indicated future fame.

It was during my senior year of high school, when the leaves had just begun to fall and the weather wasnt quite humid and no longer required popsicles to provide sanity. I remember it so vividly because it was the first time I had ever looked for pictures of my younger self to decorate my high school dorm room. I had been staring at the one family portrait I had taken when I was eight years old, framed and hung directly below the Cinderella clock, as I liked to call it, that my parents had received as a wedding gift.

There arent many pictures on our houses walls, but I knew there were photo albums somewhere in the house. We dont have an attic or a basement, so I didnt have the moment, like in books, where I come across a dusty box full of relics from my parents past as well as mine, and I come to realize a truth. Instead, I looked below our dinner table, and there they were, three albums in varied sizes: one large purple album, another white one that Michaels would call medium sized, and one that fits in the palms of my hands, covered in pastel balloons and teddy bears.

I opened the largest one first, curious what events could have been so important for my parents that there were edges of documents just peeking over every other laminated page. The first page I flipped to had a document with the handprints and footprints from the day I was born, listed with the script of a doctor, unreadable except to the experienced allergy patient, one such as myself.

As I continued to flip through the pages, I came across small, vibrant Post-its with the tiniest cramped handwriting you could imagineall including the date and time of when a picture was taken of me and an observation of my daily behavior. The first ten pages also had 3D animal stickers pressed onto the right side of each page. Thats when I realized, yes, this was my moms, not my dads work.

The other photo albums were similar. All of the pictures were laminated according to the time, day, month, and year the picture was taken. They all had me as the center of attention, capturing the moments I dont have any recollection of, or may only vaguely remember because it had been a particularly embarrassing day, like the time I had gone to Disneyland for the first time and had not wanted to pose with Captain Hook because he was ugly, or when I had dressed up in my pink jumpsuit and matching cap to go to the park and a pigeon flew by and pooped on me.

Its endearing to look back at photos like these, see my eyes sparkle just a little bit more than now, look at my face without any wrinkles and see myself not caring what people thought of me when I wore my favorite raincoat, covered with cartoon frogs, on a day when there had been no rain.

As I flipped through the albums, a question kept popping into my headwhy only three albums? I wanted so desperately to ask my mom, the person who loves to organize anything and everything.... Why only three? Why these three? I had seen other photo albums, every time we moved because of my dads job. I remember going through boxes every year and laughing at the silly poses I would adopt in order to coerce my parents into giving me an extra piece of candy or letting me stay out a little bit longer past my check-in time, 8 p.m., so I could catch fireflies and lay in the grass, just slightly wet after a midafternoon shower. It bothered me to see that the photos highlighted only my youngest years, never past 2003, and mostly shots of my first birthday party or our first and only family trip to Los Angeles.

So, I asked just once. It was during my first year of college, on a random day I was home for a holiday break and eating lunch with my mom. If there is at least one thing we share, its how we hate eating late because of how much well bloat the next morning. I was expecting a profound answersomething that would trigger me to write a quote down in my diary. Instead, it was a simple, You hate having pictures taken of you, which was true. But that was only in high school. It hadnt been the case in middle school or before. So, I didnt see the logic and still dont. Didnt push on it though, because it was nice not arguing about classes and whether I was being the model college studentone with a perfect balance of extracurriculars, a love life, and career aspirations.

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I dont deny that there is power in being able to select the parts of my life I would like to share with the rest of the world. For the longest time, I disassociated my face and body from all my social media profiles because I didnt want my classmates to know that I was poor or learned all of my vocabulary from renting dusty social science books from the public library. I wanted to hide how my family was broken and how I had been bullied through social media on a number of occasions throughout elementary school and high school. This culture of silence and leading a manicured life certainly was representative of my social media use.

Ive taken advantage of this part of social media and created a rather quiet, mysterious personaone that was highly educated and artistic. It doesnt show the goofy me or the talkative me, but that isnt by mistake. In truth, I didnt begin posting photos of myself or my body until January 2020. It wasnt until continued badgering from friends and family that I posted that first picture of myself on New Years Eve.

I am not alone in having experienced a rather tumultuous childhood that coincided with a radical age of innovation and disruption of age-old conceptions of what it means to be an influential force in politics. With the advent of social media, both Millennials and Generation Z have had to grapple with a shifting definition of what it means to maintain a private life without sacrificing being excluded in public settings for not knowing the latest pop culture trends or not knowing about words like simp.

No one can deny the benefits of the nontraditional modes of communication that have come with the turn of the twenty-first century. However, with unorthodox changes and innovations, there have been just as many proponents of maintaining order as seen fit by generations that did not experience such ardent and public outcries of injustice, as represented by social movements like Black Lives Matter. Older, established institutions will assert their dominance and discomfort toward social radicalism by firing an employee or denying admission. Its enough to cause young political voices to censor themselves, because though social media has created an arena that is difficult to regulate, it can still create misunderstanding and sensationalism.

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