Pronunciation
Proper pronunciation—or, perhaps more aptly, improper—of her own name becomes the controlling symbol of the essay. It is the recognition of this failure which arrives in the form of being ridiculed by an older Korean woman that prompts her self-analysis of her existence a Korean-American.
Andrew McCarthy
The member of the 1980’s group of young actors known as the Brat Pack is the author’s symbol of her teenage years. Along with the big Homecoming game and talking on the phone, the actor who inexplicably beat out Jon Cryer to win the heart of Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink becomes an iconic incarnation of that period of her youth.
European History
The narrator’s admission that she knows more about Europe than she does about Asia—the continent the ancestors from which she descended called home going back thousands of years—is symbolic of the bias toward western civilization which is taught in the American educational system. This Euro-centric approach to teaching history and the arts reveals a hidden discriminatory bias and racial prejudice against those without traditional European physical features.
Latin
Like European history, the revelation by the narrator that she has been taught by the school system how to speak not just Spanish and German, but a dead language not in practical use for over a thousand years—Latin—also points to a racial bias in the educational system. The implicit statement is here that it is better for students to learn a language once but no longer spoken by millions of white people than it is to learn languages currently being spoken by billions of non-white people.
Single Korean-American Female
The author describes her love life as one lacking passion because of the anxiety she feels over pressures placed upon her by her parents to marry a Korean man in order to produce grandchildren “who look like them.” This state of her love life becomes symbolic of the intrusion into the most personal life choice a person can make—who to love and choose to have children and spend potentially the rest of their lives with—of the element of cultural purity. Although it is not exactly the same thing, the effect is similar to the tradition of “arranged marriages” which is very distinctly considered an un-American thing.
