Jini Park’s social media feed blew up last week with news of Andy Kim’s Senate victory. She had voted for his opponent. Yet, scrolling through articles on her phone, Ms. Park was overcome with pride that a child of Korean immigrants, like her, had reached a pinnacle of power in the United States.
Mr. Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, will be the first Korean American to serve in the Senate when he is sworn in later this month. The milestone comes more than a century after the first wave of immigrants from the Korean Peninsula began arriving in the United States and has vaulted the community to a largely unfamiliar position: the spotlight.
California and New York are home to the greatest number of the country’s 1.8 million Korean Americans.
But nowhere is the community’s imprint more clear than in northern New Jersey, where a half-dozen towns in Bergen County have some of the highest percentages of Korean Americans in the nation.
For decades, Korean Americans have followed a well-trod path from New York City, over the George Washington Bridge, into Fort Lee, Ridgefield and Leonia in search of good schools and cheaper housing in New Jersey.
The epicenter of Korean culture, however, is Palisades Park, N.J., where 52 percent of the 20,000 residents are of Korean heritage, the highest density of any town in the United States.
“You can seriously go directly from Korea to Palisades Park and never have to speak any English at all,” said Ms. Park, a 41-year-old executive assistant, who lives in neighboring Leonia, where one in four residents is of Korean descent.
Day care centers where children are instructed primarily in Korean thrive in Palisades Park. Signs advertising doctors, restaurants and realtors are written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Students travel there from throughout the region to take tutoring classes at so-called cram schools, where SAT scores hang on walls next to tallies of acceptances into Ivy League colleges.
The mayor of Palisades Park, Chong Kim, known as Paul, is the borough’s second Korean American mayor; five of the six council members are also Korean American.
The mayor said Andy Kim’s victory reflects a natural — and welcome — maturation of the immigrant experience. “He’s really broken the ceiling,” the mayor said.
A third-term congressman, Mr. Kim, 42, was raised in South Jersey, 90 miles away from Bergen County, and does not speak Korean well. On weekends, his family drove from their home in Evesham to attend a Korean church in Philadelphia and to shop at a Korean grocery store.
As a child, and early in his career as a foreign policy adviser in Washington, he said he chafed at being seen primarily as Asian. “How do I do foreign policy if my own government treats me like I’m foreign?” he wrote in 2021 about getting a letter years earlier from his employer, the State Department, that banned him from working on Korea issues “just because of my last name.”
“I struggled with my Korean identity a lot,” he said in an interview, adding, “I felt like nothing I can do can ever make me just American.”
In Korean culture, professions likely to lead to financial security, including medicine and law, are held in high regard. Skills typically associated with politics — public speaking, assertiveness — are prioritized less, said Min Choi, a college professor who is raising her two children in Fort Lee.
“Speaking up or speaking out wasn’t really viewed favorably,” said Ms. Choi, 40, who was born in New Jersey but lived in Korea as a child and young adult. “What was actually valued was doing the work.”
Few images better embody that sense of unheralded service than a photo of Mr. Kim on his knees picking up trash in the Capitol hours after rioters had rampaged through its halls on Jan. 6.
The photo became so iconic that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History asked Mr. Kim to donate the suit he was wearing that day to its collection.
Last Tuesday’s vote adds a new dimension to the narrative.
Not only did Mr. Kim beat his Republican opponent, Curtis Bashaw, by a nine-point margin; his campaign also dismantled a key source of power for New Jersey’s party machines. That has elevated him to folk hero status among activists who had been fighting for years to abolish a ballot design that gave Democratic and Republican Party bosses outsize sway in elections.
“Yes, he’s the super nice guy who picked up the garbage,” said Ellen Park, who moved from New York City to Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 15 years ago, and in 2021 was elected to the State Assembly, becoming the first East Asian member of the Legislature.
“But he’s not just that. He’s tough. And he’s going to fight.”
A question pollsters chose to ask in January showed the stereotypes about Asians that Mr. Kim had to face in the election.
As he was locked in a Democratic primary battle with New Jersey’s first lady, Tammy Murphy, an independent poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University asked voters to rank Mr. Kim on a sliding scale of masculinity. He scored a 6.2 — a rating “significantly less masculine” than other male candidates, according to the survey, a factor it concluded was driving down his approval rating.
“These findings are in line with academic research showing that men of East Asian descent are seen as less masculine than members of other racial and ethnic groups,” the FDU Poll concluded.
Mr. Kim said he was intent on combating misconceptions that have contributed to a rise in Asian hate crimes. But he also said he would not allow Koreans to be “treated as some special interest group” focused only on niche issues.
“We have every bit as much right to have our voice heard about health care, the economy and foreign relations,” he said.
Last week, in Miryang, the city where Mr. Kim’s mother grew up in South Korea, a banner was stretched between lampposts to celebrate her son’s Senate victory.
The feat capped decades of concerted effort to build political clout, said Dongchan Kim, president of Korean American Civic Empowerment, or KACE, a community organizing group with offices in New York and New Jersey.
In 1992, after rioters in Los Angeles looted and burned thousands of Korean shops, community leaders mobilized to increase voter registration and political awareness among Korean Americans across the nation.
In 2018, Mr. Kim was the first Korean American from the East Coast to be elected to Congress. Two years later, three more won House seats.
Mr. Kim’s Senate race was the No. 1 story this year for the Korea Times, a Korean-language newspaper based in California, according to Hanseo Seo, a reporter who mainly covers New Jersey. Mr. Seo said he wrote more than 100 stories about the race, and the paper’s decision to endorse Mr. Kim “was so unusual that it drew attention” nationwide.
Still, Mr. Kim did not win unanimous support even in heavily Korean towns, underscoring the complexity of a community where the Republican Party has gained strength, and issues related to pathways to citizenship, particularly for adopted Koreans, remain dominant concerns.
In Palisades Park, of the 4,500 people who voted for Senate, about 34 percent cast ballots for Mr. Kim’s opponent, election records show.
“We’re not voting for him just because he is Korean American,” said Seongwon Kim, program manager for the MinKwon Center for Community Action in Palisades Park.
Many Korean families in New Jersey consider it vital to continue passing down their parents’ and grandparents’ native language, food and customs to younger generations.
Celebrations for a Korean child’s first birthday remain cultural extravaganzas. And weekly Korean language classes for older children are common.
Jini Park grew up in Kansas and said she and her husband speak Korean fairly well. But Ms. Park said she hoped that their children’s command of the language will be even stronger so that they can have meaningful conversations with elders.
When her 2-year-old daughter returns from day care, Ms. Park continues to speak to her in Korean. When watching Netflix shows, her two older sons are required to switch the language to Korean.
The popularity of K-pop, Korean TV hits like “Squid Game” and the movie “Parasite,” the first non-English-language film to win an Academy Award for best picture, has boosted the culture’s prominence. This year, Lunar New Year was officially recognized for the first time in New Jersey, and Assemblywoman Park also pressed to establish Nov. 22 as Kimchi Day.
“I never would have imagined that at some point Korean would be cool,” Mr. Kim said.
He said his parents stopped teaching him Korean in part to ensure that he did not speak with an accent.
Ms. Choi, the Fort Lee mother of two, recalled a similar desire to blend in, but said she was encouraged by her children’s growing cultural confidence.
“I never packed a Korean lunch for school because I was embarrassed,” Ms. Choi said. “My kids — they love it.
“When my daughter packs Korean food for lunch, her friends are a bit envious.”
The post What Andy Kim’s Senate Victory Means to a Hub of Korean American Life appeared first on New York Times.
