In order to allow myself to be vulnerable, I needed to let my experiences take over. Rather than coming up with strategized sentences and structured paragraphs like I was used to throughout high school, I needed to let my brain take over and write for itself. Otherwise, my writing would sound robotic and lifeless. By letting my experiences take over, I found I was able to creatively express my work through personally curated playlists or visual moodboards. I combined writing with another passion of mine: art. By doing this, writing allowed me to visually or audibly express my experiences if writing wasn’t sufficient enough to do so. Integrating creativity with writing allowed me to better tell my own stories, making writing not feel like a task as I once viewed it years before.
The moodboard below visually represents what my writing projects revolved around: my Korean-American heritage and experiences growing up. Each project centered around a different aspect of my cultural identity that allowed me to unpack a different perspective of myself that I didn’t know existed until I dug deep down. It was my vulnerability and experiences that allowed me to focus on specific parts of my identity and engage with my writing.
Some of the most notable images I included in this moodboard are photographs of Koreatown, the airport, and foods I often ate as a child.
I spent most of my childhood growing up in Koreatown, and I continue to live in a nearby vicinity to the area. It is and will always be my home. Despite cultural disconnections every now and then, as I was not very fluent in Korean when speaking to the people in the area, Koreatown was somewhere I always felt safe. It was, if not, the most important thing that allowed me to stay connected to my heritage, as I was surrounded by traditional Korean cuisine and practices. Some common foods found in K-town include spicy rice cake (떡볶이), fish cake bread (붕어빵), and cold noodles(냉면), which are also featured on the mood board. These are Korean food staples, and they represent a small example of my experience in staying connected to my background.
Another image found in the mood board is the airport. While I do not touch much on my relationship with my family in my writing projects, it is nonetheless important to my overall experience that has been unveiled through my writing, as family is something I greatly value. My family is my support system and how I continue to stay connected with my heritage. The airport was always a place of excitement and devastation, as I would always take my flight to South Korea and later come back to America. Whenever I had a flight back to America after spending time with my family in Korea and being immersed in the rich surrounding culture, the airport quickly became a place I detested.
Despite not discussing much about my relationship with food and family in the writing projects, my experiences conveyed visually through the moodboard allowed me to bring in my own personal background and voice into my writing projects to make it sound authentic and lively. By writing about my own experiences in my writing, I became actively engaged with my background and self, creating a newfound voice I gained through these projects.
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