It all started with my birthday.

As a child, I could barely go a day without someone reminding that I shared a birthday with Malcolm X. And in 1990s gang-torn “South Central” Los Angeles, that was a good thing. Older neighbors would tell me all these stories they ever heard or experienced. He was praised so much, alongside Rev. Dr. King and a host of other black people in history, that I grew up wanting to know more.

All the while, I was growing up in the most ethnically and culturally diverse experience of my life. I’m an Angelino, but my mother made it her duty to place me in groups, schools and churches that were multiethnic and multicultural. My godfather was Cuban, my friends and their families hailed from all over the globe. I fell in love with languages and people and it did not stop. I studied Japanese for 8 years and dreamed of being a translator. Unfortunately, my college class schedule did not allow me to continue nor study abroad. So I comforted myself with my music, dancing, and k-drama binges. It sufficed even though my heart was yearning for more.

Not too long after, Korea called my name. It was a whisper at first—from people I encountered in life and that old drama on channel 18 that I watched as a child, all the k-drama and k-pop I had in college—and then it became loud and focused.

Then I had a conversation. I met a very sweet harabeoji (할아버지, word for grandfather) the first time I stepped into his family restaurant in K-town to order, specifically, kimchi kimbap. He spoke only a little English and I, at the time, knew nothing more than a few words in Korean. Yet, somehow, the two of us talked for 20 minutes about kimchi and why I love it. Needless to say, Kimbap Paradise is still my absolute favorite place for kimbap and kimchi fried rice.

This conversation was one of many that made me realize just how much we don’t remember or know about our own intercultural interactions: Paul Robeson and the many Black Americans who spoke out for Korea’s independence, W.E.B. DuBois and Mao Zedong, Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama, the Black Panther Party with the Brown Berets and Yellow Peril, and so many more.

I started this blog to show that there is more research to be done in Korea aside from surface-level K-pop related content or straight-forward capitalism via globalization (*shrug* I guess that’s all that’s interesting about people). I also started it for global Afro peoples and global Asians because I am tired of us having our histories rewritten or out-written by others and even our own denying us the truth.

This is a space for growth, learning, remembering, and reconciliation.

I welcome you to the conversation. Join in.