Currently listening to: Shivers – Ed Sheeran
I wanna be that guy, I wanna kiss your eyesI wanna drink that smile, I wanna feel like I’mLike my soul’s on fire, I wanna stay up all day and all nightYeah, you got me singin’ like
What is your racial and ethnic identity?
My race is East Asian.
Ethnicity is South Korean but also Korean-American.
The first major wave of Korean immigrants arrived in Hawaii in 1903, to work on sugar plantations. This migration was mostly due to labor shortages following the U.S.Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers and created a demand for alternative sources of cheap labor.
Between 1903 and 1905, over 7k Koreans, many of them feeling instability and poverty, made their way to Hawaii under labor contracts. However, Korean immigration was halted by the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially banned all immigration from Asia, except for a very narrow group of students and diplomats.
During this time, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), a period marked by political repression, cultural erasure, and economic hardship. Many Koreans sought asylum abroad or left the peninsula in search of opportunities. A large number of Korean intellectuals and independence activists came to the U.S. to study at Ivy League Universities. One of my ancestors was one of those….
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