Carrying Home

By Michael Croley
Photographs by Andrew Kung

Andrew Kung is a photographer living and working in New York. His work often centers on contested ideas of place, identity, and belonging. From subverting the male gaze to exploring the absences and omissions in Asian American history, he draws upon personal experiences to present a reimagined cultural citizenship.

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The truth is we had been playing the annual football game for more years than we should have. And even though I was ten years younger than some of the guys, I was starting to feel my hamstrings didn’t have the elasticity they once did. Still, I looked forward to the Turkey Bowl each Thanksgiving and the memories it had offered up to us over the years. Like so much about sports, I loved the ritual around the game. Getting ready in the morning, everyone tumbling out of their cars in the cold, the stretching and subsequent injuries that recurred each year. The banter on the field as we tried to find our younger selves, how our friend Gregg, who we called Hedge, always ended up playing QB for his team and sliced the other team with a weak arm and five-yard completions. But, most of all, I liked being with my older brother, Tim, and his friends. These were the men he had grown up with and that I had watched from the sidelines and in dugouts and in the stands with my parents. All of them, except for Tim and me, still lived in or near our hometown of Corbin, Kentucky, raising kids, building their lives.  

Tim was the only one on the field who had not played high school football, giving up the game in middle school. He had been young for his age and many boys back then were “held back” to repeat eighth grade so they could fill out and mature and our high school could field a team of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds when they were seniors. This meant Tim was two years younger than some of his fellow graduates. And at 4’11” and 85 pounds as a freshman, foregoing football was less a decision than a matter of survival. 

In the years after high school, though, Tim had grown to be among the biggest of this particular group of friends. He was the tallest and in middle age had become one of the strongest. But I imagine all the men on the field that day rarely saw the men in front of them but the boys they had all been at six then twelve and then, most vividly, at eighteen.  

Tim was home from Virginia with his wife and his first son, Cooper. I was in graduate school in Florida and our homecomings had always involved games of some sort with these guys and an extra visit to Hedge’s, who was our chosen brother. There was generational history on the field, all of us having played for the same coaches, all of us having played on the same fields, literally, our entire lives. It made me feel then that Corbin would never change. It would forever remain a small railroad town in the Appalachian Mountains, midway between Lexington, Kentucky, and Knoxville, Tennessee. But all places change, little by little, over time, and our hometown had surely changed in the years in which we left, but these games with these guys made it feel like it was still as my memory remembered, which is to say comforting and familiar. But this was the last time I ever felt comfortable at home. 

It was late in the game. We had been playing for two hours and everyone was winded. I could already feel the soreness setting in and the day was unseasonably warm. Sweatshirts had been shed and the sun shone over the muddy field. Tim was getting ready to take the snap when one of our friends said, “Okay, Jackie Chan, let’s see what you got.”

It was meant as a joke. A playful jibe. Tim was not having it. 

“Fuck you,” he said. “I’ll whip your ass.” He took a step toward our friend. He was held back.

“I was just kidding,” the friend said.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Tim said. “Run your fucking mouth again.” 

Now, everyone stepped in between them. Hedge tried to calm Tim down. “Easy, bro,” he said. “He doesn’t mean anything.” Hedge was the only one who ever really understood how much we were affected by the racial slurs we received growing up. 

I was watching all this in a sort of daze. I had cringed at the Jackie Chan line, too, because it brought up the worst memories of growing up in Corbin, the way things always turned south, often during a game or a practice, when I had gotten the better of someone. But I also knew that our friend had been kidding, that in his heart he had always been kind, had, in his own way, loved our family and respected us. 

How can you always know the line to not cross? Especially among a group of men who from the time they were thirteen called one another by their mother’s first names to indicate they had been sleeping with them? Male culture—guys—are weird and ruthless and juvenile. This sort of kidding is its own messed up form of love. I knew our friend meant nothing by his joke but that didn’t mean I didn’t blush and still didn’t feel all the old feelings of being on the outside and never quite fitting in. The words had been a bomb dropped into the game and my brother’s reaction the detonator. 

The game disbanded. We went to Tim’s car. We sat down and the friend stood outside my window and said, “I’m sorry, Timmy,” which is what these men had always called him. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’ve said worse to you.” Tim responded with silence. “You boys have a good Thanksgiving. Tell your mama I said hello.” I responded for us, telling him thanks and to have a good meal. 

Tim pulled away and when we had been in the car five minutes, I said, “He has said worse to you before.”

“I fucking know it,” he said, both agitated and somewhat remorseful. “But I’ve got this kid now,” he said. “And if we’re going to come home and be here, I don’t want him to hear that shit or have to explain it to him.” 

I didn’t say anything. Of all the things Tim and I shared this was perhaps our strongest tie. We had grown up in that town with our Korean mother and we had, in both collective and individual ways, grown up on guard, distrustful, and ready to strike. 

Hedge called later that day. “Damn, bro,” he said. “You killed the Turkey Bowl.” 

“I know,” Tim said. 

“It’s all right,” Hedge said. “We’re getting too old anyway.” 

• • • •

Sometime before I finished graduate school, and after the Turkey Bowl was finished, I got a call from a radio producer out of Durham, North Carolina, who was working with a reporter on a series of segments for NPR about sundown towns. Corbin was on their list, and they wanted to know what the “fable” was that had been created around Corbin and the reason its African American population had been run off in the 1900s. I called Tim to tell him about this and he got darkly quiet. “You’re not going to talk to them, are you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because our parents still live there, dumbass. You don’t want to put them in danger.”

“You really think they’d be in danger?”

“Yes. You don’t want Mom to put up with that.” It was so obvious to him that this was a real possibility in ways I didn’t see. 

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to them on background.”

“You gotta be smart about that stuff, man.” 

I understood we had both experienced the same type of racism and taunts, but Tim’s childhood had been much harder than mine. My brother took many lumps that I never endured because by the time I came along—in classes and on teams—everyone knew our family. I suppose he had it made it normal for someone like me to exist in a town like Corbin. 

I directed the radio folks to the writer Silas House, who went on the record with them and when the segment ran later that year on NPR, I listened to him tell a version of the story we had always heard growing up, a complete fiction, about a Black man stealing from a white woman, a mob being formed, and all the Black people being marched out of town. There had been no theft. There had been no provocation. In the radio piece, they also interviewed the mayor at the time, a former coach of mine and Tim’s. He had repeated the fable to the producer and, when provided evidence to the contrary, had been surprised—but he didn’t defiantly hold onto the falsehood. 

This was the town where we grew up and as I began to understand in my twenties that my own childhood had been easier because of Tim, I also saw my mother’s experience had been far worse than either of ours and it was always the things that weren’t as overt that bothered her the most. Like the time on the way to one of my basketball games, while riding with another player’s mother, the woman said to her, “I don’t believe in interracial marriage.” 

“Did you ask her what she thinks you are in?” I said when Mom told me the story later.

“She doesn’t mean like your dad and me.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know that but what good would it do to tell her?”

“It might let her know that just because she’s a dumbass doesn’t mean you are.”

“That doesn’t help anyone,” Mom said.

My mother was not a pushover, but she had a sense of which battles to pick. She also believed that when she knew a person’s heart, she could have a grace with them. She tried to pass this on to me, but she also demanded that we stick up for ourselves and each other. Insults and slurs were to be met with force. The world was hard and we had to be hard to survive because that’s how she had survived. 

She was the only person that looked like her in that town for many, many years. Her life was equal parts turning the other cheek and raising the fist. You find your own way to navigate your life in those circumstances and the alternative would have been to be angry at every minute, which is exactly what happened to me without realizing it. 

• • • •

I was visiting with a friend in Cincinnati, and we were at a hotel bar. He was a Division I basketball coach and I was shadowing him for a few days, wanting to write a magazine story about his nomadic life. We had played high school ball together and had been out of touch for many years before reconnecting on this trip. I had remembered, though, that like me he had been a Clinton supporter in high school and leaned left, which in those days really didn’t matter. That was just the beginning of our toxic political culture, but I thought it was informative that he had a certain set of beliefs in a system that exploited Black athletes and, I would find out from him, Black coaches just as much, if not more. My friend was on the phone, on a recruiting call, when the news turned to a picture of President Obama. This was June of 2009. 

One guy at the bar turned to another. “This guy,” he said and shook his head. The other nodded in commiseration. One of them then called the sitting president a “nigger” and then the other, looked over his shoulder left and then right, and said, “I still can’t believe no one has taken a shot at him yet.”

That was it for me. “Hey,” I yelled to them from my spot at the bar. “What’s your problem? You’re calling him that and now you’re saying someone should take a shot at him? Why don’t you shut your mouth?”

I heard my friend say into his phone, “Hey, let me call you right back.”

My adrenaline was up. I was sitting on the edge of my stool.

“Sorry,” the one who invoked murderous treason said, but then he mumbled something after that to the slur thrower.

“What’d you say?” I shouted.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, my ass. If you’re gonna be Billy Badass say it loud enough for me to hear.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he said. 

“Yeah, I bet,” I said, daring him to say one more word, staring at both of them. 

My friend paid for our drinks and we left. 

In the elevator, he said to me, “I think it’s great that you stick up for your principles, but, man, that’s the kind of shit that can get you killed.”

“Fuck those guys,” I said. I was so angry about what they had said, about how their racism justified violence, of how those men thought everyone around them was their ally, which made it all perfectly fine to say. Until it wasn’t.

• • • •

Obama’s first midterm elections are occurring when my mother calls me. I’m on the interstate and it’s dark. It’s either the day after the elections or the week of, and I’m simply calling to check on her when she tells me something happened when she went to vote. It’s a confusing story that is hard to follow, but the gist is this: My mother saw a piece of paper on the ground and picked it up. She offered it to the poll worker, saying, “Is this yours? Did you drop this?” 

The poll worker, for reasons I’ll never know, either mishears or misunderstands my mother—if I’m being generous—or simply sees my mother’s face, her dark skin, the salt and pepper hair, the clearly Asian eyes and soft flat nose we share, and says, “You’re in my country now. You better be good to me.” 

My mother is stunned. She has no idea what this woman is talking about, given the question she asked. Is she responding to what my mother said? Or is she just some emboldened racist? I hear this story and I grip the wheel tighter. I see the dead grass at the edge of the highway lit up by headlights, the ground starting to brown and molder from fall. Old feelings creep into my shoulders of anger and resentment, the same way I felt when I was in the second grade and a boy called me Japanese with an affected accent and tugged at the corner of his eyes. To this day, nearly forty years later, I can see him do it, see his dumb little boy’s face, his plain ignorance, and I cannot give him the benefit of the doubt. I cannot look past how he made me feel, how it seemed I never stopped feeling after that day, always waiting for the next comment, the next remark, the next slur.

“Are you okay?” I ask. Mom says she is angry but that she’ll be okay.

I consider getting off at the next exit and driving three hours south to my hometown to find this woman, but then what? What will I do? Will I slash her tires? Will I find some way to hurt her physically or emotionally? What, exactly, am I going to do? What exactly will I change? How much of my anger is my own lifetime of frustration projected onto my mother’s pain? 

I call Tim, who now lives in Maryland, a full twelve-hour drive from home and the first thing he says is, “I’m going to get in the car and go home.” Tim’s revenge fantasy is more vivid and detailed than my own and while I know it is mostly bluster, the pain behind it is real. It is a pain we never discussed with our mother growing up. Or, at least, I didn’t. I never told her what people said. Never told her how it felt. The three of us just seemed to absorb our differences and the awful things people said to us in silent acknowledgment as that’s how things were in Corbin, but this incident on Election Day changes the temperature in the family. 

My father springs to action in a way he never has before. He is at the county offices the next day, threatening legal action, telling the woman in charge, “I’ll spend every penny I have to make sure that woman never works another election for the rest of her life.” Apologies are offered. I draft a letter with my mother over the phone and she has to relive the whole experience all over and that means, in many ways, reliving every awful encounter in our little town all over again. 

My mother discovers the woman who has spoken to her this way is new to Corbin. She’s been in town maybe six months. My mother has spent, at this point, forty years in southeastern Kentucky, where she raised two sons, went to college, paid taxes, served her church. She has done all this, in many ways, carrying the weight of her differences on her own, listening to her friends tell her year after year, “I only see you. I don’t see you as a Korean.” Which I will come to understand means that don’t really see her at all. As we finish drafting the letter, I can hear in her voice the idea that no matter how long she lives in our hometown she will never be part of it. 

She is invisible and in light of this, I start to examine all of my own stings and slights from when I was a boy. I think of all the times we forgave, when I did what my mom said and tried to see ignorance as just that, but I’m not in a forgiving mood anymore. Instead of hitting my thirties and mellowing, I’m getting angrier and more resentful. 

Part of this anger comes from a naïve belief that I thought things might have been getting better for my mom, that she was such a part of the fabric of her town and her church that she was able to live in relative peace in her invisibleness, but this has been untrue.

She has been running the gift shop at our local hospital, which is the most advanced medical facility in the region. Men and women from places more rural and isolated come to the hospital for treatment and with accents as thick as the seams of coal that have been ripped from the hills, they tell her they cannot understand her. They try to take advantage of her in the store, thinking she’s not as smart as she is, which never works out well for them. Our cousin is on the police force in Corbin and sometimes she calls him in to deal with a customer or a shoplifter, which, again, always surprises them. 

It is hard, under the weight of this evidence, under the burden of my upbringing in this place, to see the innate goodness in my fellow humans, in our ability to transcend our flawed nature. I do not know how you are to deal with the people you love and the people you don’t when both seem to treat you the exact same way. Am I always a stranger to everyone except my family? 

• • • •

The first story I ever wrote in college was based off of our friend Hedge’s family. His oldest brother, Burley, had been Tim’s football coach and then mine. When I was five, the boys played in a football tournament in Florida. No one flew. It was a caravan of cars to Florida and Burley took a liking to me. In those pre-child-seat days, I rode mostly in his lap on the way back from Florida to Kentucky. I always loved Burley. My parents loved Burley. The only political sign we ever had in our yard was for Burley when he ran for county magistrate. 

In my story, I used Burley’s life as a hopping off point. He had gone to college and in his first semester his father died. Burley dropped out of school and got a job as a truck driver to help take care of his family. Clearly smart and sharp, he drove a truck for years and in a story that seems impossible in today’s America, rose to the ranks of an executive from driving his truck. He would later leave that company to start his own, rising in class with each move, earning more than enough money in his lifetime to be a success. 

I admired Burley’s life, the choices he made. I was interested in his hardscrabble background because while we had many physicians, attorneys, and pharmacists as well as executives like Burley and my own father, we were surrounded by laborers. Men, who just as easily, could have been Burley or my father, had one thing or another not gone a different way. I was trying to honor those types of men and those lives when I started writing fiction. I was interested in the men I worked with when cutting grass or loading trucks at the vinyl siding facility where Hedge worked and would get me on in the summers. 

I was interested in the “boys in the warehouse” my father chatted with each Monday morning during basketball season to talk about UK’s chances and how he told me once that being a truck driver was a difficult and hard job but “a hell of a lot better than working on a farm your whole damn life.” 

My father had escaped a brutal and crushing poverty in Appalachia and my mother’s father had faltered at many things in Korea, his work unsteady, and they, too, had grown up with extreme poverty. So, while we were solidly middle class, my parents reminded us to remember how difficult a life could be, of what they had escaped, and I was surrounded by admirable men and women who were living examples of how much struggle a life can hold. 

But then I started to fall out of love with my memories of home. Until Tim snapped at the Turkey Bowl, I don’t think I had really processed how much what I experienced growing up in Corbin had affected me. I had allowed myself to feel warmly about the town, but now I started to try to discern how growing up there changed me, wondering how many times I had, over the course of my life there, shrugged off the insults believing things could always be worse and therefore not worth my own worry. 

By the time the woman insulted my mother on Election Day, I had fully rejected any love I had for my hometown, which is not an easy thing to admit. I had once found so much relief when I came down I-75 and saw the the little mountains of home coming into view on the horizon, just as I crossed the Rockcastle River. 

When I had finally moved away from Corbin and Kentucky, I could still be called a chink and a gook and an Asian rat. Of course, racism lives everywhere, but it began, for me, in Corbin. Perhaps because I grew up there and admired so many people there, I could not see how difficult—and different—living there had been. And because most of my life had always been lived in the South, I did not think I was entitled to my own feelings of inferiority and racism. After all, I wasn’t Black. I had a Southern accent, and I was a big dude, and I did not fear traveling through the South on my own. I had much to feel privileged about, but I learned there is always someone around the corner waiting to tell you that you aren’t privileged and that much of my life has been trying to navigate slights and determining whether they are intended or unintended and that in both instances, an exhaustion sets in. You can’t fight everyone. You can’t be angry all the time, but there is a damage that is left over from that kind of childhood and because I’m not just Korean American but also Appalachian and because I am a man from Appalachia of a certain age, it is hard for me to use a term like psychic damage without feeling like it overstates the whole experience too much. 

When I get going about Corbin, about my distaste for it, my mother will stop me. “There were many people that were good to you. Not everyone was bad.” 

This is true, but as I’ve become a man, an adult, I remember that it was people the same age as me that made me feel small and silly and out of place. Grown men with what they thought were just jokes. 

Without watching, this anger can turn to fear and after Tim had a second son and the boys were very young, I saw how this manifested itself into aggression. He was determined they never suffer in any of the ways he had and like all anger, even that which is justified, it blinded him, and I saw it could blind me, too.  

This has not been easy in the years since 2016, especially when I looked upon my young daughter that night of Trump’s victory and told my wife, with tears in my eyes, I thought we needed to buy a gun. All I saw was that my child, with my Korean features, would suffer in this world for not being purely white. This is what Tim knew when he unloaded on our friend, when he yelled at me and warned me not to talk to NPR about the racist history of our hometown. He carried the visceral pain he felt as a boy, a very small boy at that, dealing with the kind of taunts you cannot outgrow. 

I had hoped my forties would bring different feelings, less fear, but then Covid occurred, Asian hate crimes soared, and now we face another election in which nothing has softened. It would be a lie to say I live on edge or I feel targeted but that does not mean I’m not aware and on the lookout. 

I do not hang onto these feelings for the sake of identity, some desire to feel besieged. I hang onto them because I don’t know how to let them go. I temper my reactions, as I’ve done since I was a boy. And though I left my hometown many years ago and have not returned, and don’t intend to, you carry places with you. No matter how far I go or how many years pass, Corbin will never leave me.

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