Almost American Girl

The last chapter and the Epilogue reckon with what “home” means. When she struggled to become comfortable in the United States in eighth grade, Robin saw Korea as home and wanted to go back. She begins to adopt a new perspective on her new home after she moves to Virginia. This perspective is further complicated when she returns to Korea as an adult and finds it different and more socially unequal than she remembers, revealing Cultural Differences in Prejudice and Social Norms she was previously unaware of.

Robin sees the idea of home through the lens of social bonds. When her mother initially tells her they are not returning to Korea, she is upset at leaving her friends and their shared interests, like comics. When these Korean friends find out she has moved and begin to write to her, Robin feels slightly more at home because her social connections are rekindled. When she builds new friendships in the United States, she begins to feel even more content. The social bonds she forms in their new home of McLean, Virginia make it feel more like a home than Alabama ever did.

Virginia has both the social activities that make Robin feel at home and a diversity of people that make her realize that “normal” is just a social construction. Robin and Jessica go to an anime convention which “was like heaven for us. I felt right at home” (205, emphasis added). Her friendship with Jessica stems from their interests in comics and anime, and the Virginia convention shows Robin how many Americans “liked the same comics as I did” (205). She realizes that her experience in Alabama and the types of people she met there were not representative of America as a whole.

Robin also meets more diverse people at her new high school. She hears people speaking languages other than English in the hallways. The illustrations show people of all races and ethnicities, as opposed to the illustrations of her peers in Alabama, who were predominantly white. Robin realizes that increased diversity destabilizes the idea of what is “normal”: In a heterogenous society where everyone is different, no one sticks out for being different. She also sees herself represented among the authority figures in school. She has “a few Asian teachers” (207) like Dr. Zheng.

Robin saw aspects of herself reflected in Queen’s Quest, and after moving to Virginia, she also sees herself represented among both teachers and peers. Instead of sticking out for not being “normal,” Robin feels “like a mutant teenager from X-Men who had finally found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters” (209). Just like Robin, her new peers are “trying to learn English and getting used to living in this strange land” (209). What made Robin stand out and feel alienated in Alabama is what binds her to people in Virginia.

Even though Robin still sees the United States as a “strange land,” when she returns to Korea in adulthood, she feels like an “alien in my birth country” (227). She is perturbed by both the changes in Seoul’s physical environment and by her own perception of its social environment. When Robin moved to Alabama and told Lena about what she did with her friends in Seoul, she mentions the food stalls and stands they would visit after school. When she returns, “all of my favorite corner stores and street vendors were gone, and fancy malls and high-rise apartments lined the streets” (219). In seven years, her old neighborhood industrialized into something unrecognizable.

Robin also realizes that both she and her old friends have changed. When talking about their futures, her friends talk about getting married and having children. Her friends say she only has the “luxury” of not prioritizing marriage because she lives in the United States. One friend says she “will probably have to marry a doctor” since that is the only type of person her father would approve of (221). Her friends structure their lives around the patriarchal social structure that her mom ran from.

Robin notices that even the Korean friends she made in America adapt to this type of behavior while in Korea. Her friend Jenny fills men’s beer glasses when they run out while the group is out at night. When someone asks Robin to do the same, she brushes him off and tells him he has the hands to do it himself. An illustration accompanying this dialogue shows Robin—who is illustrated more similarly to her mother as she ages—releasing a frustrated huff of air. The men tell her they know she’s from America because of how “wild” she is. Robin does not perceive herself that way, but the comment draws her attention to how differently she behaves in comparison to other Korean women.

Though Robin enjoys seeing her old friends and city, she ultimately feels like “a visitor” there. The way Robin does not totally “fit in” in either Korea or America raises questions as to definitions of “home.” For Robin, the answer ends up being the most stable and strong part of her life: her mother. Parallel comic panels show the right half of her mother’s face and the left half of Robin’s as they talk on the phone: The two have extremely similar hair and features and the only differences are her mother’s faint signs of age and Robin’s eyeliner. On the last page of the memoir as she talks to her mother, Robin tells her, “I am ready to come home” (227, emphasis added). Home is not necessarily a geographical place. Robin does not see herself as either Korean or American. Instead, she sees herself as “Korean American” (228), an identity she forged along with her mother as they found what “home” is together.