'I've never been fully anything. But recently, I've come to terms with the fact that I am fully Calista.'
Calista's charisma and sharp wit strikes stealthily through her calm, soothing voice. I think of her as a literary alchemist, whose chief goal is to translate pain and confusion into powerful, poignant poetry. As is true of most, if not all, writers, she has a firm grasp of who she is and is not afraid to show it. I greatly admire they way Calista unapologetically embraces herself but I especially adore her kind desire for others to do the same. Read on to experience Calista's beautiful alchemy.
Where did you grow up? Which cultures do you identify with?
"I grew up in Seoul, South Korea, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, and Maryland, USA. I identify with each of those cultures fully. My mom is vietnamese, my dad is Korean, and I was born in Washington, D.C. My dad had to move every three years due to his job. He works for the U.S. embassy."
How do you answer the question: “Where are you from?”
"This is a very difficult question for me to answer. The easiest answer I give to people is a quick summary that goes something like: 'I’m Korean Vietnamese but I’ve lived overseas all my life.'”
Which country is ‘home’ to you currently?
"Currently, I wouldn’t actually say I have a place that I call home. But I guess it would be Maryland because that’s where my parents are at the moment."
What do people find most surprising about you?
"The most surprising thing is… obviously they always ask me, 'How do you speak English so well?' and when I tell them that I lived and graduated from high school in Korea, they ask me, 'well, why don’t you have a Korean accent?' And then when I go into the whole story of ‘I went to an international high school in Seoul,' they will ask me ‘they don’t speak Korean at the international school?’ So, it's a series of surprises."
When did you start identifying as a third culture kid?
"I started identifying as a TCK around late junior year of high school. I was riding the bus from the Yongsan U.S. Army Base to my international high school and on the bus were a whole bunch of other diplomat kids. It hit me then that this is a unique experience that most kids don’t have. And I found myself being comfortable in that community of third culture kids at school. That’s how I started thinking, ‘Oh, I think I am a third culture kid, too.'"
What has been the most difficult part about being a third culture individual and how did you cope with that?
"I feel like when you tell people your story of being a third culture kid and you tell them your whole background and where you’ve come from and where you were born and which language you speak and the experiences you’ve had overseas, it almost takes up your entire identity. It’s as if you don’t have any room for anything else. People only know me by my cultural identity; there’s nothing else about me that they know. They only know where I am from and that’s the only fascinating thing to them. There’s actually so much more to me and so many layers to my personality, to my character. The most difficult part is being solely defined as a TCK.
I want others to know how I identify with more than one community. For example, I identify within the LGBT community, within the poetry community heavily, and I am also involved in communities related to my major as Public Health. I am really passionate about giving back to the community with respect to Health. So I wish that people would recognize there’s more to my character than where I am from.
When I first came to University of Maryland, Baltimore County, I used to get angry at micro-aggressive questions about my cultural identity. But couple months into college, I started to embrace these questions and I changed my attitude. No one I meet ever knows what third culture kid is. I always have to explain it. But it is amazing that I get to teach people about it now rather than get angry about it."
"People only know me by my cultural identity; there’s nothing else about me that they know. They only know where I am from and that’s the only fascinating thing to them. There’s actually so much more to me and so many layers to my personality, to my character. The most difficult part [about being a Third Culture Kid] is being solely defined as a TCK."
How has your identity changed since your move to the U.S.?
"I think it’s changed in the way that I really have taken care to understand myself more. When I was in Korea (don’t get me wrong, I loved it and I was a part of a great TCK community, had great education and friends but) I was stuck in a bubble of third culture kids that I didn’t know what it would feel like to be outside of that circle.
When I started college in the U.S., I said to myself ‘hey, there is no one else here who is like you.’ And that’s when I really started to change and my poetry took a huge shift in what I was writing. I began writing a totally different style of poetry than the ones I wrote in Korea. Once I stepped out of that TCK bubble, I started really questioning who I was and where I came from."
How did you discover the world of poetry?
"I started writing poetry in my sophomore year of high school when I first moved to Korea from Ho Chi Minh city of Vietnam. During this time, my grandmother had recently passed away and I turned to writing. I first started with rhyming poetry and then went into performance poetry. It came to me during high school when I most needed it, during a time of grief."
"Poetry has always been my best friend, no matter where I was in the world. I’ve always been able to write."
What role does poetry play in your identity and vice versa?
"I would say that poetry plays a huge part of my identity. I strongly identify as a poet. Poetry has always been my best friend, no matter where I was in the world. I’ve always been able to write.
My identity also plays a role in the development of my poetry. As an Asian woman in today’s society, it’s difficult to deal with people fetishizing your body and having such high beauty standards for yourself. I write a lot about body image issues and mental health because in Korea, my body was shamed for not being light enough or small enough or I didn’t present myself a certain way, and then when I come to America and I get shamed for different things. So I don’t know what society wants from me. It’s hard to answer: 'how do I accept my body for what it is, despite where I am living?'
Poetry also helps me cope with my depression and it connects me to other people even if the other person is not a third culture individual. Poetry connects a whole diverse group of people regardless of where they are from. It’s amazing to see how everyone is different and yet we can all connect through poetry."
Does poetry find you? Or do you go looking for it?
"Yes. Poems come to me in random moments. The best time to write is late at night when I am emotional. But actually, even at my internship, I will have ideas that just find me. But most of the time, I get ideas when I am talking to a friend or when I am at a gathering. If someone says something interesting, I immediately write it down. And then I look at that one-liner and relate it to my own experience."
Do people ever deny you your identity?
"I don’t speak Korean fluently so sometimes my friends will say 'how are you half-Korean and not know Korean?' or they will say 'you don't even know Vietnamese fluently.' I have always been denied to be fully something.
Actually, I've never been fully anything. But recently, I've come to terms with the fact that I am fully Calista. I am unique. I am a TCK. I am a poet. And I am part of the LGBT community. I identify with so much that I came to terms with the fact that I will never be fully one thing. And it’s not fun to be fully one thing, either.
I think it’s a big step to understand that each individual is a unique individual regardless of where they are from. Though I have been patronized by different cultures on my body, poetry reminds me ‘Calista, you're not going to make everyone happy. You’re never going to identify with one place or one community. You can just be Calista, be all of them.’"
Click HERE to listen to this clip of the interview.
Your fifth collection of poetry is being released soon. Please tell us more about it.
"My fifth collection is called ‘A Splash of Yellow.' It’s centered around heartbreak, since I had gone through a heartbreak recently. And it will be centered around the oppression of Asian women specifically. I will talk a lot about what it means to be a woman of color and the stereotypes we must strike down.
I also grapple with the experience of Asian women, on how we are ‘less chosen’ [romantically] because of who we are and how we are Asian. Or that we are solely chosen as a ‘trip’ for other men or women to travel to. I say in my poetry, 'We are not a trip for you to travel to. We are not a cultural thing you can explore and be a tourist for.' There is so much more to us than where we are from and we all have layers to us, talents and hobbies."
What advice do you have for other third culture kids?
"Understand that it’s going to be hard to adjust. Especially since I am pretty sure there isn’t any club called 'Third Culture' that you can just join and befriend people like you. It is so different from say, Korean Student Association or Vietnamese Student Association. And even for me I couldn't even join them because I would be denied my identity in those spaces because I wasn't fully one thing for them.
My biggest advice is to remind other third culture kids that, as a TCK, you are easily adaptable because of your experience and because of the struggles you faced. You can adapt to any place and any community. Utilize that. Be grateful of your experience. Yes, it is frustrating to be questioned about your identity all the time, but it is an opportunity to teach others about third culture and you can befriend anyone. Connecting well with others is something that the TCK community does well."
Listen to this response, here.
Ogburn Family Portrait
You can access 'A Splash of Yellow' on Amazon, Here. For more information about the poet, please visit her website, Here. Thank you!
Thank you, Calista, for this lovely interview. 07.19.19
Interview from Maryland. Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity and/or as points of correction from the interviewee.