Cold War feelings, diasporic self-image

Studies of Asian American communities have conventionally relied on the framework of identity politics that arose from the Civil Rights movement, a framework that advocates minority political agency in the context of US liberal democracy. A number of scholars have pointed out that despite the obvious gains, this has had the effect of rendering ‘Asian American’ as a different-and-transparent identity, an Other with an ‘inside’.Footnote ⁴ Some critics have turned to diaspora as an analytical framework that reveals more powerfully the ‘experiences of hybridity, difference, displacement, and transgression’.Footnote ⁵ An important component of this turn has been an increased recognition of the ways in which the immigrants’ memories of and experiences in their home country influence how they navigate their lives in the United States. For studies of the Korean diaspora in the United States, this has meant taking seriously how its members ‘engage both the US ideological landscape and the South Korean memoryscape’.Footnote ⁶

Diaspora is also a more appropriate concept for ‘Korean America’ as this group did not overlap meaningfully with the Asian American movement, part of the broader Civil Rights movement. Given its connotations of crisis and dispersion, the use of ‘diaspora’ instead underscores the degree to which the South Korean migration to the United States was powered by shifting geopolitics between the two countries during the Cold War era. Between 1950 and 1965, approximately 15,000 South Koreans migrated to the United States. Primarily, they included people whose identities were interwoven with the emergent unequal alliance between the two countries, such as the so-called ‘Korean war brides’ married to American GIs, adopted children from Korea, and students on Korean or American scholarships.

Starting in 1965, in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act, large-scale immigration from South Korea to the United States began. From 1976 to 1990, immigrants from Korea made up the third largest group to move to the United States.Footnote ⁷ Historians such as Jodi Kim have demonstrated that the post-1965 immigration pathways were also bound up with the US hegemony in the Pacific, reinforced through the involvement of the United States in the Korean War (1950–53) and the Vietnam War (1955–75).Footnote ⁸ Similarly, Ji-Yeon Yuh has emphasized the need to re-conceptualize this immigration wave as trajectories ‘seeking refuge from the consequences of the Korean War’, whether they arrived between 1950 and 1965 or after 1965.Footnote ⁹ The impact of Cold War/Korean War displacement is further suggested by the fact that a disproportionately large immigrant group was made up of Christians who had moved to South Korea to flee communist North Korea before or during the Korean War.Footnote ¹⁰ They did not have strong roots in South Korea, and their religious and political (anti-communist) backgrounds drew them to the United States.

A consideration of the self-image of this diaspora may begin with an examination of the US presence in South Korea during and after the Korean War, a presence that would have been experienced by prospective immigrants. At this time, the United States was perceived as the twofold liberator in South Korea's public imagination: the liberator of Korea from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, and ‘a protector of democracy against the Soviet and North Korean threat’ during the Korean War.Footnote ¹¹ After the Korean War to at least through the 1960s, the power and wealth linked to the United States were lived through the experiences of the body. Not only were American media contents consumed as sensuous images of modernity, but also the US military had significant control of the ‘alimentary channel’ in a society ravaged by one of the deadliest wars of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹² The association of the US military with food was evidently so strong that the figure of the saviour-like American GI became a trope in popular culture and literature: in fiction and songs, American GIs gave away ‘candies, chocolate, and chewing gum’ to poverty-stricken Korean children and distributed ‘grain … under the P.L. 49 food aid program’.Footnote ¹³

Other than food, US military and industrial equipment and developmental aid given to South Korea were components of the ‘shock of material plenty’ ascribed to the United States.Footnote ¹⁴ A statement by Mark Clark, a US general in South Korea in the 1950s, imparted both the condescending attitude held by some overseas American military personnel as well as the desire for all things American among many South Koreans:

The stark contrast in power was evident in all forms of transactions, including sexual labour involving so-called ‘camptown women’. As historian Grace M. Cho argued in Haunting the Korea Diaspora, Korean women who engaged in sex work for the US military workers embodied the contradiction that marked South Korea's ‘indebtedness’ to the United States: the sex worker ‘simultaneously provokes her compatriots’ hatred because of her complicity with Korea's subordination and inspires their envy because she is within arm's reach of the American Dream … the dutiful daughter who works to support the very same family that shuns her’.Footnote ¹⁶

These humiliating conditions of inequality appear to underwrite the desire to transcend, forget, or silence a traumatic past within the South Korean diaspora in the United States, whose very formation derived from such inequality. As a number of Asian American cultural theorists have argued, this diaspora's desire to forget is rooted in the ambivalence of the United States as both the ‘protector’ and the ‘aggressor’ within US–South Korea relations. Grace M. Cho writes: ‘The acknowledgement of a traumatic past is systematically disavowed by a matrix of silence, the major components of which include the institutions of US global hegemony and social scientific knowledge production.’Footnote ¹⁷ Jodi Kim identifies similar structures of amnesia in her study of Cold War-era Korean American fiction. She argues that this body of work demonstrates an ‘inability to narrate what really happened’ during the Korean War and stresses the impossibility of Korean War narratives being anything other than a ‘Cold War knowledge project’.Footnote ¹⁸

Importantly, while there are clear challenges to seeing Cold War-era immigrants as a monolithic group even in light of powerful structuring factors, the abject memories of US–South Korea inequality have tended to predispose many of them to hegemonic notions of race, social mobility, and assimilation in the United States. Not only were such notions already known in South Korea through US institutions and media texts, but also Cold War-era migrations from Asia to the United States were mediated powerfully by the discourse of the ‘model minority’.Footnote ¹⁹ The model minority discourse singled out Asian Americans as a minority group possessing the ‘aptitude for conforming to dominant models of “proper” American citizenly values and practices’,Footnote ²⁰ and as such it served as an ideological rationale for the inclusion of Asian Americans in the US national body. Karen Shimakawa notes that the model minority discourse reverberated particularly strongly with Korean and Vietnamese Americans as their arrival to the United States was accompanied by memories of the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Both wars triggered salient emotions in the mainstream US imaginary, such as guilt, pity, and vengeance.Footnote ²¹

The patterns of desires and pressures I have sketched so far seem to explain the paradoxical self-positioning of this diaspora vis-à-vis the ‘mainstream’. On the one hand, there has been a strong aspiration to transcend racialization within the diaspora. As noted by Rebecca Kim in her study of Korean American Christian groups on university campuses, this understanding of racialization was specifically premised on an assumed equivalence of ethnicity with class in the diasporic imagination: ‘Ethnicity is viewed largely as a working-class phenomenon – something that immigrants and their descendants need and want to shed as they acculturate, obtain economic mobility, and incorporate into the dominant society.’Footnote ²² On the other hand, there has also been an inclination towards preserving and reproducing the language, values, and particular ritual practices associated with South Korea, not only among the first generation (born in Korea, ilse) but to some degree also among the subsequent generations (ise and even samse), who are typically more comfortable with the English language.

Given this bifurcation, the diasporic affinity towards Protestant Christianity should come as no surprise. Christian faith, as a touchstone of social respectability in the US context, has had the effect of conferring a claim to sameness with the perceived dominant culture of the new country.Footnote ²³ But becoming or being Christian did not mean dissolving into some kind of mainstream. In reality, the immigrant churches became privileged sites of Korean-language socialization. Much more than places for religious worship, they have provided resources and networks for surviving and thriving in the new country, offered Korean language classes for children of immigrant families, celebrated traditional Korean holidays (e.g., the Lunar New Year) and US national holidays (e.g., Thanksgiving) through communal meals, and presented opportunities of fellowship not least through the Sunday communal lunches of Korean food.Footnote ²⁴ This ethnicization of religious practice is not exclusive to the first generation but has continued into subsequent generations to some extent. For some people in the latter category, a desire to maintain a separate space is motivated by intergenerationally inherited memories, values, and ideologies, as well as shared experiences surrounding race, language, and identity in the United States, even if their emotional attachment to the Korean language or traditions is weaker.Footnote ²⁵

Curiously, within the churches (particularly those serving the first generation), cultural artefacts such as food and language have not been treated as potentially problematic indices of ethnicity, but others, such as traditional music and rituals linked with Buddhism or shamanism, have been perceived as a threat. In the case of traditional vocal music, I suggest that the main objection has to do with the fact that for the practitioners, the aesthetics of suffering found in some genres of traditional vocal music has the effect of recalling a sad past that is associated with war, poverty, and subordination. Because of this, many church choir members whom I met abhorred the integration of traditional Korean singing styles into what might otherwise be spaces of safe ethnic cultivation, as I will demonstrate next.

In the following, I turn to a church choir in Southern California, a region that is home to the largest number of ethnic Koreans outside of Korea. There were over 600,000 self-identified ethnic Koreans in Southern California in 2010, and many of them lived in Los Angeles, Buena Park, Garden Grove, and Anaheim, among others. The ideologies and practice of singing in this heavily Christian diaspora are the subjects of the next section.

An ethnography of a church choir

The church I played piano for from 2008 to 2010 is located in Westminster, one of the commercial and cultural centres for Vietnamese and Korean Americans in Orange County. I refer to this church pseudonymously as ‘KC’. KC belongs to a Protestant denomination characterized by a conservative theology similar to Presbyterianism. Since it was founded in 1978, it has catered primarily to immigrants whose first language is Korean. During the time I worked with the church, it had approximately 450 members and offered two services every Sunday. The morning service, attended by approximately 350, was primarily for people who had come to the United States sometime between the 1960s and the early 1990s. The choir I accompanied sang during this service. The afternoon service attracted younger members who had come to the United States in the last ten years. Unlike some of the other churches of comparable profile and size, KC had not successfully developed an English ministry for the second generation. KC members’ children usually attended other churches in Southern California, some of which were megachurches with membership numbering in the thousands.

KC was a classic post-1965 Korean diasporic church in that its history and practices were strongly inflected by themes, ideologies, and trajectories associated with the Cold War. It was established by a group of Koreans who had fled North Korea during the Korean War. Many members had experienced the catastrophes of the Korean War and South Korea's poverty in the 1950s and 1960s. The elderly members of the church were eager to talk to me about this time whenever I sat with them during the one-dollar post-service lunch. Nevertheless, their anecdotes were always general and vague: ‘back then Korea was so poor’, ‘there was nothing to eat during the war’, ‘you would not know this because you are young, but it was really hard to make money back then’, and so on. They would then express gratitude for having been able to come to the United States and would conclude with stories of their children's success in ‘mainstream’ US society.

The pastor's sermons and the occasional special events at the church also conveyed the Cold War orientation of the church. The pastor mentioned the Korean War regularly during his sermons, paying tribute to the American missionaries’ humanitarian work during the war years. He also demonstrated an ongoing interest in North Korean refugees and in North Korea, which was the hub of Christian activities during the colonial period under Japanese rule (1910–45), before Kim Il Sung's communist takeover. For many members of the church, North Korea thus stood for a Korean Protestantism ‘lost’ to communism. In addition to regularly visiting these topics during the sermons, the pastor invited the North Korean woman I mentioned in the introduction and her all-refugee performance group to KC for a special Sunday evening event. Again, the performers’ singing style was controversial, but their long testimonies were well received. They gave gripping accounts of their previous life in North Korea, escape, and conversion, outlining a salvific trajectory that was strongly inflected by memories of hunger in North Korea and gratefulness for the abundance of food in South Korea and the United States.

Another noteworthy event was a fundraising concert by the Sŏnmyŏnghoe Children's Choir, a world-touring South Korean children's choir. Their concert at KC began with a publicity video that traced the choir's origin to a Korean War orphans’ choir formed in 1960 with funding from the World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization founded by a Baptist minister in mid-century United States. This presentation highlighted this choir's transformation from a pitiable product of the Korean War to a prestigious choir in Seoul that currently recruits some of the most talented young singers from well-to-do families in South Korea.

While I met many church members during my time at KC, my main interaction was with the church choir. There were approximately thirty members, and most of them were in their fifties or sixties. About two-thirds of the choir were heterosexual married couples. I accompanied the choir during rehearsals, services, and occasional external festivals, and I also socialized with various groups of singers in coffee shops and restaurants. The conductor, a recent immigrant, also joined many of these social occasions. He and I became good friends because we were close in age. We were also the only two people who lived in Los Angeles and the only ones who were paid by the church.

The choir was as much a space for socialization as it was a singing body. I could see that the members had sung together for a long time – perhaps decades – because many of them called one another by their given names without any formal title. In Korean language, this form of address is used only among individuals who became friends in early adulthood. I came to know a great deal about many of the singers (especially the sopranos, who sat next to the piano) because they chatted constantly throughout the rehearsal, making references to personal histories of illnesses, deaths in the family, stories of their children, inside jokes, business developments, and so on.

The convivial atmosphere of the rehearsals disappeared only under one circumstance: when the singers found the musical style of the selected choral piece questionable. This shift in the rehearsal environment was palpable because the singers would cease their habitual chitchat and pay an unusual amount of attention to the music. Almost always, this change in mood was prompted by a neotraditional choral piece. Neotraditional pieces were chosen only rarely: of the 107 pieces that I accompanied over two years, only seven belonged to this style (6.5 per cent of the total performed pieces). All other pieces were ‘unmarked’ Euro-American Protestant vocal music with Korean lyrics. These encompassed extended choral settings of hymns and gospel songs, excerpts from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European sacred music, and the so-called ‘praise and worship’ music that showed the influence of popular music.

The seven neotraditional pieces in question exhibited aesthetics associated with a modality of suffering known as han. Han refers to feelings of sorrow from unresolved victimization. In the history of twentieth-century Korea, this term was appropriated by different political interests as a kind of theory of Korean identity. For some Japanese intellectuals during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, han was the core of the ‘Beauty of Sorrow’ thesis that shaped colonial exotica.Footnote ²⁶ In the radically different context of the people's movement (minjung undong) in postcolonial South Korea, which cut across various causes, activists used the aesthetics and images of suffering in strategic ways to invoke victimization caused by imperial and neocolonial violence, capitalist modernity, and dictatorship.Footnote ²⁷ These colonial and postcolonial discourses often imagined han as an audible attribute that appears in particular genres of traditional Korean vocal music, such as p‘ansori (musical storytelling) and minyo (folk song).Footnote ²⁸

Neotraditional Christian choral music mimics the traditional aesthetics linked to han within the frame of modern Western choral music. This means that han aesthetics are refigured and expressed in ways that are intelligible in that frame, through the use of elements such as slow tempo, slow harmonic rhythm, the minor pentatonic scale, and short descending figures that express sadness. These musical markers deviate from the set of normative patterns – for example, major diatonic scale, conventional melodic contours, and moderate to fast tempi. These patterns, in conjunction with the vocal timbre of European-style classical singing (Harkness's ‘clean voice’), assert qualities of joy and triumph as the hallmarks of the post-Korean War Christian choral repertory.Footnote ²⁹ Neotraditional pieces can thus be understood as intervening moments of deliberate ‘Korean-ness’ in the broader choral repertory.

Whenever the choir practised neotraditional pieces, the familiar camaraderie stopped. The singers became perceptibly dissatisfied or uncomfortable with the selected piece although none of them made open objections to the conductor during the rehearsal. In what follows, I describe a rehearsal during which a neotraditional Christian choral piece was practised.

Rehearsing neotraditional music

The singers came into the rehearsal room in threes and fours after partaking in the communal post-service lunch. They collected the sheet music from the conductor and walked to their seats. Sitting on the piano bench, I leafed through ‘Hoegae wa ch‘anyang’ (‘Penitence and Praise’) to check if I had played it before.Footnote ³⁰ I did not recall playing it, but I could see that it was a neotraditional piece from the use of the minor pentatonic scale in the key of F minor.

As usual, the sopranos practised first. They tried to sight-sing bars 12 to 14, with the lyrics ‘my soul cries tears of joy and my mind becomes humble’ (see Example 1). But they could not get past bar 13 because they were confused about the grace notes affixed to E♭ and B♭, which were evidently a cue for the singers to imitate crying. It was clear that they did not know how to realize these descending ornaments as this figuration was not a regular feature of the choral repertory. The predominance of whole-tone intervals in bar 13 also alienated the singers, who were used to the diatonic scale. Per the conductor's request, I played bar 13 several times although I was also uncertain how best to realize it.

Example 1

Hanjun Kim, ‘Hoegae wa ch‘anyang’ (‘Penitence and Praise’), bb. 8–15 ‘When my soul opens door and repents deeply, it cries tears of joy and my mind becomes humble’.

The sopranos gave it another try after my demonstration, but the conductor interrupted them. He said, ‘You have to sound sadder than you are singing right now. Let's do it again.’ The singers tried again, but the conductor cut them almost immediately, saying that they were not singing in the way that the phrase was meant to be sung. After some thinking, he used descriptive language to explain the function of the grace notes: ‘You have to sound like you are lamenting. Sing as if you are crying. Don't just sing.’ The sopranos tried again, but to no avail. The conductor intervened, ‘Try to feel like you are singing p‘ansori.’ Some sopranos winced at this suggestion; others raised their eyebrows. The conductor interrupted the sopranos yet again and made a reference to han: ‘It is said that we are a people of han. We've had people invade our country. The Japanese. Our ancestors suffered a lot from the Japanese invasion. Now let's think about han on a personal level. Imagine that you have been wronged, terribly wronged. You are at a point in life where you cannot even express your sorrow in words because you have been wronged.’ He then sang bar 13 a couple of times (to me, his demonstration was no more convincing than the sopranos’ attempts).

In the course of this uncomfortable interaction, the rest of the choir grew quiet. The basses and tenors, who were seated facing me, looked angry, disapproving, or anxious as the sopranos grudgingly rehearsed the rest of ‘Penitence and Praise’, which included two other similar descending figures. Deacon Pak, endearingly known among the choristers as the ‘ill-behaving bass’, staged a thinly veiled mockery of the proceedings, faintly laughing through his nose. We all knew that this was his way of complaining about the conductor's choices. The basses and tenors engaged only half-heartedly when it was their turn to practise. I could also hear the sopranos whisper: ‘What is wrong with him [the conductor]?’, ‘What does he want?’, and ‘I don't understand why he wants to do this song.’

During the doughnut break, Mrs Yi, an alto who brought me packaged home-cooked food every Sunday, approached me and asked what I thought about the piece. She said: ‘I am not fond of this song. It's too dark. I wish the conductor wouldn't put us through songs like this. We don't know how to do it.’ Another one chimed in: ‘Yeah, I don't know what he is trying to achieve.’ I did not give any definite response because I did not want to appear to challenge the conductor, who was in the difficult position of directing a group of Koreans older than himself in an age-conscious environment. I was also aware that neotraditional choral music was more beloved by conductors than by singers, from my ten-year experience as a church choir accompanist (perhaps conductors tend to like it because it is more original than normative pieces). But I was not an enthusiast. I did not appreciate the harmonization of the minor pentatonic melody, which never failed to confuse the singers. In the case of ‘Penitence and Praise’, the piano accompaniment in bar 15 (refer to Example 1) also felt out of place. The right-hand melody called to my mind t‘ŭrotŭ, a type of sentimental popular music performed with ‘an abundance of vocal inflections’.Footnote ³¹ A genre broadly influenced by traditional vocal techniques, tŭrotŭ has been popular among older people in rural South Korea and among working-class elders and evokes an image of alterity in urban, aspirational spaces.Footnote ³²

The rehearsals of all other neotraditional pieces were marked by a similar lack of enthusiasm. ‘Minjok ŭl wihan kido’ (‘A Prayer for the Korean People’) deserves a special mention. The conductor selected this piece close to the national independence day of Korea (15 August). Not only did this piece mobilize all the usual attributes of the neotraditional style, but it also made the singers repeatedly enunciate the word minjok, a term that refers to Koreans as an ethnonational collectivity, similar to the concept of ethnicity. As such, it positioned the singers explicitly as Korean people rather than universal Christian subjects. Of all the pieces I rehearsed with the KC choir, this one was the most grudgingly rehearsed.

Interviews

The unwillingness of the singers to perform han-infused neotraditional pieces suggests not only that listening and singing are historically shaped but also that the ears and the voice are tuned to a particular understanding of history. As Nicholas Harkness put eloquently in his work on the semiotics of voice via a study of Korean Christian singing: ‘Th[e] voice is treated as a qualitative emblem of a broader cultural transformation from a suffering, war-torn nation to one that has received “God's grace.”’Footnote ³³ In a space marked by memories of the Korean War, to voice han is to personify an alterity that conjures up a sad past, the time ‘before’ the attainment of salvation, progress, and prosperity. For singers in this space, Euro-American Christian and Christian-identified music – hymns and kagok (equivalent to Western art songs), most importantly – not only make up a total package that defines a modernized person, but they are also understood as practices that helped them transcend sufferings in the past, within a trajectory of salvation that merges personal history, Christian eschatology, and national/world history (see interviews in the following).

Second, it should be noted that in discussing the choristers’ unwillingness to sing neotraditional music, one must consider the issue of vocal training, rather than framing musical judgement purely as a matter of choice. Vocal inflections such as the ones called for in ‘Penitence and Praise’ cannot be performed convincingly by people who have been practising European-style classical music for decades. As Nina Eidsheim reminded us, singing is an action mediated through recurring physical training rather than ‘a medium that communicates “truths” about a singer's identity’.Footnote ³⁴ This facet of singing, it seems, is not always appreciated by the creators and the promoters of neotraditional Christian music (e.g., composers and conductors).

During the last several months I worked with the choir, I interviewed nine singers in order to explore more fully how their musical dispositions and judgements formed. I asked the singers to address any topics from the following list: musical background, training, and experience; favourite music in and outside the church; memories of South Korea; life in the United States. I also brought up the North Korean performer whom the singers had seen in the church in Chino Valley and at KC, given the heated response. I used this topic to discuss the question of whether there are more or less appropriate music styles in Christian worship. A number of common themes emerged from the interviews. Many (but not all) of the interviewed singers connected their musical preferences to the experience of overcoming personal and collective suffering while living in South Korea. Also, many of them said that some styles are more appropriate than others for the purpose of Christian worship. In the following I discuss three noteworthy interviews in detail.

My interview with Mr Ryu (b. 1954) was done in a small bible study room at the KC. The choir's bass soloist, Mr Ryu was one of the most genial members of the choir. After the service, he always thanked me for my accompaniment and offered to pay for my one-dollar lunch at the communal dining hall. Mr Ryu studied theology and choral conducting in Seoul in the 1970s. He conducted children's choirs and worked in a Christian press for about fifteen years before moving to Buena Park, California in 1989 to work as an assistant pastor at a diasporic church. But soon he changed course, taking on landscape maintenance work. He described his job as ‘hard on the body but still more high-paying than many office jobs in Korea, but not as high-paying as the kinds of jobs that white people have’.

When I asked him to talk about his favourite Christian music, he said, ‘choral pieces that are close in style to classic hymns’. He then went on to recount the genealogy of Korean Protestant music, tracing its origin to Christian schools in Pyongyang during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–45). He said that it was at these schools that the first-generation composers of Christian choral music learned to sing North American hymns and studied keyboard with missionary music teachers. It was not surprising to me that he was proud to call these past Pyongyang-based composers his predecessors (sŏnbae). As I have written elsewhere, Christian schools in colonial-period Pyongyang formed a ‘fugitive public’, where Korean students created secular and Christian music in Korean language, within a colonial environment increasingly hostile to the Korean-language public sphere.Footnote ³⁵

Mr Ryu then talked about how simple and plain hymns helped him, his family, and other Koreans when life was difficult in the aftermath of the Korean War:

When asked about the issue of style in Christian choral music, Mr Ryu said that he only approves of music that uses the European classical singing voice. He considered the North Korean woman's singing that both of us had seen as an example of an ‘unnatural’ style. He tried to imitate her vocal timbre for a moment and stated that it was ‘too emotional’ and ‘almost unnatural’.

For Dr Kim (b. 1948), a soprano and a former sociology professor, Christian vocal music was also interwoven with her memories of difficulties in South Korea. When I asked if I could interview her, she said that we can do this at her home and added that we will have a nice home-cooked meal before the interview. When I arrived, her husband was also present and said that he would like to participate as well although he was not a choir member. Dr Park (b. 1943) was a revered figure in the church: he is a Korean War exile from North Korea who moved to Boston in the 1960s. He had a distinguished career as a professor of engineering at a university in the Midwest.

Dr Kim said that she and her husband lived most of their married life in a city in the Midwest, where ‘the Korean population is so small that it is basically insignificant’. There, they attended a predominantly white church. But they also attended a Korean diasporic church during the summers, when they were in Orange County to visit their sons. They retired a few years ago and moved permanently to Orange County. This background seemed to explain why they constantly positioned themselves as both insiders and outsiders of the diasporic community during the interview (this was also the only bilingually conducted interview).

Dr Kim said that her favourite music included Christian hymns, kagok, and ‘choral music that sounds like a hymn or kagok’. She was socialized into these vocal music genres when she lived in Seoul. She remembered them as songs that her communities sung and listened to in a time of collective and personal struggles.

Dr Park chimed in, summoning up earlier struggles during Korea's colonial period. For him, Christian praying and singing were rituals that helped many Koreans stay ‘awake’ during this time of oppression.

Dr Park's story suggests that Christian vocal practices caused a kind of collective effervescence among the churchgoers in a time of national oppression – or at least, this is how singing and praying are remembered in Korean Christian lore. He marvelled at how the dawn prayer meetings have continued on in postcolonial South Korea and even in its diasporas, and remarked that he chose to attend KC because it offered them every day.

Dr Kim and Dr Pak were the only people among the interviewed singers who demonstrated an ironic, humorous attitude towards ‘Korean’ singing aesthetics rather than dismissing it. This became evident when we chatted about their musical backgrounds.

It seemed to me that they had no qualms caricaturing ‘Korean’-style singing because they felt they were distant from Korean culture. From their life stories, it seemed that for two decades their contact with the Korean diasporic community was minimal due to where they were based. Also, Dr Pak said that they did not teach Korean to their children because they wanted them to assimilate to the United States as much as possible.

Mrs Shin (b. 1952) met with me in the church kitchen on a Saturday afternoon. She had just finished making the broth for the lunch that would be served to the congregation the next day. Mrs Shin had studied vocal performance in Salzburg and New York City in the early 1980s. Befitting these credentials, she sang spectacularly well and was something of a star in the church. When I asked about her favourite music, she said: ‘classical, classical, and only classical. I can't help it’. She cited Handel's Messiah as her all-time favourite sacred music and hummed several melodies from it.

Mrs Shin was the only interviewee who did not refer to the presence of personal or collective hardships in the past. She was more interested in talking about Christian music through decontextualized terms of judgement. She asserted that European classical music was the only appropriate style for Christian music and was quick to dismiss the vocal techniques of the North Korean performer:

I moved onto the topic of bi-national, multicultural experiences and asked if she had any thoughts on the differences and similarities between South Korea and the United States. This led her to make a rigid distinction between Christian and non-Christian cultures. Her view was predicated on a doctrine of Christian conversion in which true conversion requires the renunciation of ‘customs’ and ‘superstitions’. She said:

It was unfortunate just how much of her comments illustrated components of Euro-American settler colonial discourse, such as teleological historicism, cultural–racial hierarchy, and Christian superiority: non-Western cultures (‘knives thrust into the walls’, ‘shamans’, ‘Buddhist monks’) were described as heathen ‘customs’, and the persistence of ‘customs’ was thought to be an impediment to entering a universally valid domain of existence. Given this view, it was not a surprise that she did not like the term ‘minority’ (sosu minjok) when I used it at one point to describe the KC community. She stopped me to say that she does not consider herself a minority because she is living happily in the United States. While this caught me off guard (and while I disagreed with her views expressed during the interview), on some level, I could see why she would object to the term. As another female Asian body living in the United States, I knew how exhausting it is to be othered and minoritized – that is, to be read with reference to particular stereotypes of Asian women or, in other instances, to be read as of a figure of resistance and opposition (what Rey Chow termed ‘the protestant ethnic’Footnote ³⁶).