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“Doesn’t it bother you that they had plastic surgery so they could all look the same?” I asked my teenage daughter. She was watching yet another K-pop video. The gender politics of these videos always made me seethe. In this one, the members of the girl band dressed up as various stereotypes: innocent schoolgirl, Asian beauty, cheerleader, cowgirl (in hot pants).

“No, I can tell them apart,” Allison replied, barely looking up from her iPad.

“Why do they dance like that?” I pressed, barely able to conceal my disgust at the hip thrusts and catwalks.

“Don’t worry, Mom, the boys are objectified just as much.”

My attitude toward my Korean heritage couldn’t have been further from hers. I enjoyed feeling like one of many immigrant Americans, invisible in the diverse crowds of New York City. I had no desire to keep up with Korean culture, which struck me as patriarchal and stifling. Allison’s fascination with Hallyu — the global boom in Korean pop culture — seemed like the perfect adolescent rebellion.

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I feared losing my daughter to the culture I’d fled. I never expected that her teen curiosity would help me reconcile with my homeland.

Racists beat my Chinese grandmother. She knew the police would never care.

When I was born in Seoul in the late 1960s, my paternal grandmother refused to see me, angry with my mother for not giving her firstborn son a firstborn son. We moved to the United States a year later, so my father could pursue a PhD in Christian ethics. Charged with child care while my mother worked for the Chicago Tribune’s circulation department, he tried to instill me with national pride: “Koreans are the smartest,” he’d say, when I told him my elementary school classmates called me “pancake face” or “chink.” I doubted his assertion. If Korea was so great, why did I have to explain to my teachers that I was from neither Japan nor China but the small peninsular country between them?

My doubts about that greatness were confirmed when my father’s love of country led us to move back to Seoul. In 1979, we only got hot water in the mornings and evenings. We made phone calls from the pay phone or from our neighbors’ house, waiting for more than a year before we could get our own line. No one dared complain. Even after the South Korean dictator, Park Chung-hee, was assassinated that year, authoritarian rule continued under another army general, Chun Doo-hwan. At 10, I understood what censorship meant: It was why you never saw a kiss or a gun on TV, let alone heard any criticisms of the government. Our World Book encyclopedias arrived with blacked-out sections. In school, we learned to value unity and patriotism: “Me. You. Us.” were the first words in the national elementary textbook for language. When it was announced that Seoul was to host the Olympics in 1988, we were told that we each had a responsibility to prove to the world that South Korea is a “first world nation.” Students and teachers alike worked hard to do our part to raise the country’s level of academic achievement.

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What bothered me most was the blatant sexism. Every teacher, no matter their gender, made it clear it was girls’ responsibility to protect ourselves from boys, and the curriculum reflected that sentiment. The seventh-grade girls’ home economics book included diagrams of sex organs, but these were nowhere to be found in the boys’ technical skills texts. Though the explanation of human reproduction was minimal, we understood the real lesson: Girls alone bore the responsibility of not getting pregnant.

I learned of these educational disparities only after family friends came over one night. While I was stuck in the kitchen helping the women prepare dinner, the boys freely raided my bookshelves, eager to confirm the rumors about what learning was withheld from them. When I caught them in my room, poring over the diagrams, they left me to put away my books. Their brazen ogling at disembodied female parts wasn’t unfamiliar: On the way home from school, I saw boys and men alike drooling at large posters of a woman’s leg, feeling neither embarrassment nor shame for the desires those pantyhose ads evoked. Meanwhile, I rushed by, pretending not to be bothered and fearing any attention directed at me.

I left the first chance I could. When I was accepted to a college in Illinois, my dad begged me to stay, offering to buy me a car, though he knew that having my own wheels wouldn’t give me the freedom I wanted. (My grandmother, meanwhile, warned me no one would want a wife who studied too much.) After I married a Japanese American, we all understood I would only be welcomed back to my homeland for short visits. Throughout my adulthood, I strove to distance myself from my heritage. I missed my mother’s cooking but refused to learn how to make even my favorite dishes. When my baby started babbling, I answered in English.

Why don’t we treat Asian American history the way we treat Black history?

Then, to my shock, that baby grew up to be a middle-schooler fascinated by Korean dramas. She heard about them through non-Korean friends at school. I figured it was a niche fad among her social circle — until Netflix added the soaps to its library. Since the late 1990s, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism had made sizable investments in the entertainment industry, making Korean culture into a hot global commodity. I saw it as a sinister ploy, benefiting a small number of companies, to export the country’s values around the world. But when I told Allison that the South Korean government was manipulating her, she was unmoved. She considered it a smart calculation for a small country to grow its economic power.

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Shuttered at home in the early days of the pandemic, I agreed to at least try watching some of these shows with her. I’d planned to call out any sexism and pro-Korea propaganda I detected, hoping that I’d eradicate her obsession once and for all. She, savvily, picked “Strong Woman Do Bong Soon,” and “Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo,” clever rom-coms whose heroines navigate thorny gender expectations. I kept watching other series with her, suspicious that these were anomalies, but was pleasantly surprised to see that many shows featured unconventional female characters.

Then, feeling sorry that she couldn’t see her friends, I allowed Allison to purchase tickets to Bang Bang Con, a weekend-long streaming event featuring back-to-back footage of old concerts and public appearances from the band BTS. I still felt the need to chaperone, steeling myself to see the band using female backup dancers as props. But as I watched them perform Allison’s favorite songs, I found myself unexpectedly charmed: Their humble gratitude to their fans never seemed to waver. More than that, they enjoyed defying gender norms. My daughter and I both admired how freely affectionate the bandmates were with one another, and how they sang and rapped to express a range of emotions, all while wearing feminine clothing. “That looks like something Grandma would wear!” Allison joked, pointing at their fringed, floral boucle jackets. By the end of the live stream, I had joined the BTS fan “Army.”

I realized that I had frozen Korea in my mind. Over the 35 years I’d been in the United States, I only recognized changes if they fit my negative beliefs. I could spot plastic surgery clinics sprouting on every block of Gangnam, and cited them as evidence of conformity and consumerism run amok. But I hadn’t noticed that South Korea loosened its censorship laws. Not only was there kissing and violence on TV, but artists were free to criticize Korean culture and politics.

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Exploring Korean culture became a family activity. Watching Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” for example, we talked about the social inequality we witnessed when grocery shopping during our visits to Seoul. Allison recalled the baskets of seafood in East Gate market, dripping with smelly water that drained into the street — and the nicely packaged sashimi at the ritzy Shinsegae Department Store, where uniformed workers carried shoppers’ bags for them out to their cars. When I picked up “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,” a novel that helped spark a wave of feminist protests in South Korea, Allison asked if she could borrow my copy. (One of the BTS band members had publicly recommended it.)

My dismissiveness of all things Korean was just as simplistic as my father’s blind faith — and they’d both been born out of parental protectiveness. He had been trying to shore up my confidence; I’d wanted to shield my daughter from misogyny. Thanks to Allison, I see the imperfections but also feel a new pride. I can appreciate the comforts of being invisible without feeling the need to hide my Koreanness from myself.

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