When she took the stage to perform at Carnegie Hall in front of 107 Korean War veterans, the singer Kim Insoon was thinking of her father, an American soldier stationed in South Korea during the postwar decades whom she had never met or even seen.
“You are my fathers,” she told the soldiers in the audience before singing “Father,” one of her Korean-language hits.
“To me, the United States has always been my father’s country,” Ms. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling that 2010 performance. “It was also the first place where I wanted to show how successful I had become — without him and in spite of him.”
Ms. Kim, born in 1957, is better known as Insooni in South Korea, where she is a household name. For over four decades, she has won fans across generations with her passionate and powerful singing style and genre-crossing performances. Fathered by a Black American soldier, she also broke the racial barrier in a country deeply prejudiced against biracial people, especially those born to Korean women and African-American G.I.s.
Her enduring and pioneering presence in South Korea’s pop scene helped pave the way for future K-pop groups to globalize with multiethnic lineups.
“Insooni overcame racial discrimination to become one of the few singers widely recognized as pop divas in South Korea,” said Kim Youngdae, an ethnomusicologist. “She helped familiarize South Koreans with biracial singers and break down the notion that K-pop was only for Koreans and Korean singers.”
Thousands of biracial children were born as a result of the South Korea-U.S. security alliance. Their fathers were American G.I.s who fought the Korean War in the 1950s or who guarded South Korea against North Korean aggression during the postwar decades.
Most of their mothers worked in bars catering to the soldiers. Although South Korea depended on the dollars the women earned, its society treated them and their biracial children with contempt. Many mothers relinquished their children for adoptions overseas, mostly to the United States.
Those children who remained often struggled, keeping their biracial identity a secret if they could, in a society where, until a decade ago, schools taught children to take pride in South Korea’s racial “purity” and ‘‘homogeneity.”
“Whenever they said that, I felt like being singled out,” Insooni said.
In school, boys pelted her with racist slurs based on her skin color, said Kim Nam-sook, a former schoolmate, “but she was a star during school picnics when she sang and danced.”
Now a self-assured sexagenarian, she has started a Golden Girls K-pop concert tour with three divas in their 50s.
But Insooni’s confidence turned into wariness when she discussed her childhood in Pocheon, a town near the border with North Korea. Topics she still found too sensitive to discuss in detail included her younger half sister, whose father was also an American G.I. When she was young, she said, she hated when people stared at her and asked about her origins, wishing that she were a nun cloistered in a monastery.
She said her mother had not worked in a bar, recalling her as a “strong” woman who grabbed whatever odd work she could find, like collecting firewood in the hills, to feed her family. Virtually all she knew about her father was that he had a name that sounded similar to “Van Duren.”
The mother and daughter never talked about him, she said. Nor did Insooni try to find him, assuming he had his own family in the United States. Her mother, who died in 2005, never married. Because of the stigma attached to having biracial children, she lost contact with many of her relatives. When the young Insooni saw her mother crying, she didn’t ask why.
“If we went there, both of us knew that we would fall apart,” she said. “I figured this out early even as a child: You have to do your best with the card you are dealt, rather than going down the rabbit hole of asking endless whys. You can’t fix bygones.”
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