Your Korean Dad

TikTok Star Nick Cho: Your Korean Dad

MICHELLE MEOW: It’s tradition here that we ask for a coming out story to normalize the idea of being LGBTQIA+ with our allies, if you will. NICK CHO: Coming out story, most definitely. There is that relationship between personal identity and the community, like people in your community acknowledging you and how you see yourself. I’m 47 now; [I will] be 48 later this year. Year of the ox, this is my year. But I took a year off from college back in 1993 and I taught music at a missionary school in Bangladesh.

When I was there, they didn’t understand what a Korean American was. I said, “I’m a Korean American.” They said, “You got to choose one. You can’t be both.” I worked with a group that was from Korea. So for them there I was the American guy, and for everyone else who lived in Bangladesh, the Bangladeshi, for folks there, I was the Chinese guy. For some of the other expats who were there, I was seen as Korean.

I remember spending a lot of time thinking about what it means in terms of your own identity and how that relates to [how] if your whole community around you doesn’t understand what that means, then what is that like? So I’ve tried my best to sort of figure out that right mix of being able to empathize and understand the experience of other people whose experiences are very different from mine, but using the lens or pathway of my own experiences.

That idea of identity, of how that feels, is something I think a lot about. And I see people out there just everyday struggling with that in so many ways, depending on where they are, what their community looks like. Either that’s a relatively easy thing or it’s really hard, you know? JOHN ZIPPERER: So, 2.7 million-plus people know you as “Your Korean Dad.” Was this the first thing you tried to do on TikTok? Did you ever think it would explode, or did you think this would be something [only] you and your cousins would look at? CHO: I have two teenage daughters. They said, “You know, you should really check out TikTok, because you like to make videos.” There’s something about short-form video that is a very intimate experience. And I saw that a lot of people, especially young people, were curling up in their bed watching videos. It’s the kind of thing you might take into the bathroom with you to kind of keep you company.

I just thought to myself, “What could I make that would honor the intimacy of that space?” I think that in a lot of ways where there needs to be more balance in media is that it tends to be very transactional. What if people actually cared deeply in a way that a loved one might, with the health and wellbeing of the people who are seeing this stuff? That’s kind of where I proposed the problem for myself and started working on the solution.

For me it was, “Well, I’m a dad and I’m Korean.” But I always say if there’s a secret sauce in there, it’s really the your part. That idea of, “I’m not just going to present myself, ta-dah, I’m a dad. I’m here, I’m going to do these things for you on the internet.” But offering myself up to the viewer saying, “I’m Your Korean Dad.” And here we are. Now, I’m here at The Commonwealth Club. MEOW: You’ve obviously struck a chord with so many people. Do you think that people are yearning for a dad? Tell us why you think so many people are drawn to you? CHO: I don’t really know. I don’t think I can know. Part of what makes it hard to know is, I mean, 2.7 million-plus, that’s beyond unfathomable. It was unfathomable at 100,000. I try to make different things for different people in every video; understanding that is a little bit of the lingua franca of the [online] world.

That straightforward, very linear sermon type sort of thing tends to be less appealing these days, especially for young people. So I kept thinking, “What are ways of having little subversive moments that point to things that are very intentional, things I want to signal?” Also, things that are just kind of cute and funny and kind of heartwarming. How can I mix all these things up in 30-, 45-second videos? And I guess I’m doing okay. ZIPPERER: Talk a bit about, if you would, did you learn fathering from your father? Are you like him, different from him? What did you learn from him? CHO: You can build trust and you can earn trust. You can’t demand it, but you can break it really easily. When you try to put it back together again, it’s not the same. I really recognized that as an important part of leadership on my end, especially when there are younger people who are looking up to me. When I had children and looked at how I needed to parent them, I realized that it was just that, but the stakes were even higher than they would be otherwise.

My focus has been on never breaking trust, and trying to build trust through different experiences. We all have experiences with our parents or adult figures that you’ll never forget, that was very often painful, sometimes a really happy memory. If you ask the adult, they had no recollection of that interaction. As a parent now, that’s terrifying to me. That discrepancy is really terrifying. In a lot of ways I feel like it’s analogous to life in general. When we talk about being in a position of power and authority, and the impact that we can have on someone else, it can not even have crossed your mind. To me, that becomes

THE STORY OF HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN BE USED

to connect with and help guide young people. From the July 1, 2021, “Michelle Meow Show” program “TikTok Star Nick Cho: Your Korean Dad.” NICK CHO, Creator and Star, “Your Korean Dad,” TikTok; Co-Founder, Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters; Twitter @NickCho; TikTok @yourkoreandad MICHELLE MEOW, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW/KPIX TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; Twitter @msmichellemeow—Co-Host JOHN ZIPPERER, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club; Not Cool Enough to Be on TikTok—Co-Host AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021 17

all about the responsibility of the powerful person to take even more time, more space, more mental energy, emotional energy on double checking, triple, quadruple checking in yourself before you do anything.

The good news is that it gets easier with practice, but it’s never easy easy. It’s just that you get used to it. So that’s been sort of the thing for me. I think that in a lot of ways that comes through [in] the video content and a lot that I put out there. That intentionality and that care and every word [in it], I’m trying to be careful about it. MEOW: Speaking of being intentional and producing content, one thing that popped up in my mind was, Is this who he is as a real dad? Are you really Nick Cho from “Your Korean Dad,” or is it a personality? CHO: I asked my kids, and I’ve asked them multiple times like, “How do you feel about this?” Because people keep asking me this question. Their answer has basically been, “Well, they get the two-dimensional version of you, we get the three-dimensional version. But it is you.” That’s what they tell their friends as well. So, it’s snippets and such, but in a lot of ways yeah, it’s just me being myself. ZIPPERER: It certainly has been a year and more of a lot of Americans realizing there are millions and millions of their fellow Americans who have never had the experiences, rights or opportunities that they have. [Do] you want to talk about that in itself, as well as, how do you then address that? CHO: There’s a lot of value in normalizing these things and having these conversations out in the open. There hasn’t been a conversation around men and the role of men for a long time. A lot of men feel like, “There’s this growing list of all these things I’m not supposed to do, but no change to the things that I should do.”

That’s an opportunity and a challenge in itself. Those are the things I want to talk about when it comes to race and the idea of tolerance. I think that there’s a lot of very human and sort of understandable reasons why people get intolerant. MEOW: Did you talk to your children about anti-Asian racism and violence, especially after the pandemic? Did you talk to them about anti-Blackness that we had witnessed and experienced, especially during this hard year? CHO: We didn’t have to talk about it in a special way this time, because frankly we’ve been talking about it this whole time. When it comes to like the anti-Asian violence, I’m still at this point really confused by a lot of it, just because there is the way that things happen out there and then there’s the ways that the media covers it. Then there’s the ways that we as the consumers, engage with all of that and the way that these things are interrelated. It makes things very confusing and a little bit harder to really get a sense of what’s really going on.

When it came to, for instance, the Atlanta shooting and everything, it brought up a lot about a specific type of racism that’s directed

Photos, this page: Nick Cho on-stage at the Club’s Taube Family Auditorium. Facing page: Cho and co-host Michelle Meow during the program, discussing his collection of sneakers.

“I started getting videos of people, young people, watching [my] video and crying, tears streaming down their face. They were saying things like, ‘Is this what it’s like to have a dad?’”

—NICK CHO

at east-Asian women and Asian American women. Those are things that we’ve been talking about in our household for a while. When it comes to Black Lives Matter and a lot of the anti-Black sentiment and violence and such, that has been this lifelong journey, trying to figure out how I fit into this conversation around race, because race is such an important conversation in America. How do I as a Korean American, cis, het man fit into that? What do I have to offer?

And maybe most important, what are the things that I don’t see modeled out there that I still need to do? That has a lot to do with sort of my calling as a leader in the community. Really bringing up these topics and raising these things that other people aren’t, because we’re social animals and kind of waiting for someone to prompt us like, “Oh yeah, me too. I feel that too. I feel that on Instagram too,” kind of thing. “I’ll use that hashtag too.” There are people who have to come up with that stuff and really help sort of challenge ourselves and each other in terms of how we talk about it.

So that, all said, is a long-winded way of saying, “We’ve been talking about it this whole time.” ZIPPERER: Doing a TikTok video, what they always ask a creator is like, “Where do you get your ideas?” How do you come up with an idea for one? Do people constantly suggest them for you? And how much time do you escape from running the company to do a video? Take us through the creation of a TikTok video. CHO: I have the curse/luxury of being a generally undisciplined person when it comes to time management. So for me it becomes really figuring out ways of kind of letting inspiration just hit me. It’ll be something that I saw online or something that’s happening that will just kind of be that sort of speck of dust that then becomes the snowflake. I’m also a little bit bashful to say that I’m pretty fast at making videos. I don’t try to take too much time. I feel like TikTok is really perfect for me, that it doesn’t necessarily reward a really high production value. I know a few people who are professional filmmakers who struggle to sort of gain traction on TikTok, because for them it’s like they’re trying to get this perfect.

It’s not really part of the culture, because of that intimacy part that I mentioned before. So, from an idea all the way to posting it, I mean, it can be as little as 45 minutes to an hour. The editing can take a few minutes, but again, that’s really fast. And yeah, some of them can take longer than others, but most of the time it doesn’t take that long. I always tell people that TikTok is interesting. If anyone wants to get started on TikTok, you should. It’s an interesting experience making those videos. Because they’re so short, they don’t involve a ton of work, and almost everyone has a phone that you can make a video on.

TikTok is short-form video that’s frontloaded. There has to be something at the beginning that grabs people’s attention that makes them want to keep watching it. I think that we’re going to see in our culture more of an optimization toward that sort of thing in commercials and things like that. When we have more ability to swipe away and go to the next one with a literal flick of the finger, how you get people’s attention is going to be a growing sort of value that is a make-or-break for a lot of people’s work and communication. ZIPPERER: Is there an actual time limit on TikTok, or is it just kind of known that the longer you go on the less people are going to watch it? CHO: Yeah, it used to be one minute. They changed it to three minutes, I think now, but most people don’t make TikToks longer than a minute. It’s just little, it’s like, instead of having a big plate of food, it’s like having little bites. And then you go to the next one and you go to the next one. It’s just a different way. MEOW: Some of your most viewed videos include your fetish for sneakers. And I did notice these awesome sneakers. Jordans, right? CHO: Yes. MEOW: And they’ve got the South Korean flag. CHO: That’s right. I wanted to honor the stage with one of my favorite pairs of sneakers. These are some limited edition Korean flag Jordan 3s.

It brings people together. The number of conversations that have been prompted by a pair of sneakers that I wore, and just those nice sort of moments where people are complimenting each other on their taste, on their choices, people will start to share a story. That’s really special. So to kind of have that through your footwear feels like magic every time. And it really drives my passion for sneakers. ZIPPERER: And how many pairs do you have? CHO: Too many, more pairs of sneakers than I have pairs of feet. ZIPPERER: Again, 2.7 million followers. Do you hear from them? Are they like, “You’re the father I never had,” or “You’re giving me that kind of advice.” Are people criticizing you? What sort of feedback do you get? CHO: One of the features on the TikTok platform is a thing called duets. Someone can make a video that’s like a double screen with your video on the other side, interacting with it in some way. I started getting videos of people, young people watching the video and crying, tears streaming down their face. Looking at the captions and comments, they were saying things like, “Is this what it’s like to have a dad?” That’s when it really struck me that there was a whole dimension that I hadn’t really considered.

Through all of this, I do get a lot of

messages. I get a lot of emails, I get letters, things show up; and it’s its own sort of thing learning how to sort of deal with more correspondence than any single human being can actually respond to or react to. I do try to read everything that comes in. Some are very long and share life stories. A lot of them are sharing very painful stories of trauma, of abuse, of violence, of just some of the stuff that really just took my breath away for the rest of the day, that took a while to recover from. Some that have made me cry—a bunch of them actually.

But that’s where I really try to focus on the idea that I’m so thankful that they have a place to kind of put that and to send it. I try to put out there that I do read everything that comes in, and how to sort of be super human in that way, to be able to have those kind of connections beyond what really makes logical sense. It’s very special. And I try my best to honor that every time. ZIPPERER: Do you know where your audience is? CHO: It’s not in Korea. It’s mostly in the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, English-speaking places. The platform actually has analytics that’ll tell you a little bit. But all over the world, all over the world. Again, it’s hard to wrap your brain around. ZIPPERER: Question from the audience, please? AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Hello, thank you for being here. This is really wonderful to hear. It’s completely new to me, TikTok, number one, and you’re explaining it very well, so thank you. Did you grow up watching, are you at all influenced by Fred Rogers? CHO: Oh, wow. That’s a great, great, great question. Three greats. Yes, Fred Rogers is probably my number one hero of my life. I have a slightly different experience with Mr. Rogers from most people. For most folks he’s seen as being very kind and sweet. I see him as really fierce, really aggressive in all the right ways. He was absolutely uncompromising in terms of his singular focus on the health and wellbeing of children. He didn’t care what was popular, he just cared about what was healthy. That’s radical, and he’s not remembered enough for that sort of radical courage and that vision, for having that focus.

I get compared to him from time to time. And I think that there’s something emotional that maybe is conveyed that we have in common. Maybe it’s a little bit voice, maybe it’s a little bit like just being, looking at the camera and saying things to people that maybe they needed to hear. Taking that time and attention and really trying to craft it the best I can, my messaging. I see that part in common and I do feel like I want to honor that comparison. It’s not really a legacy so much as just a comparison. I said this once on Twitter a week ago when I was thinking about this very topic of Mr. Rogers, “One of the best ways you can honor your heroes is to do the work that they were unable to do, but maybe they would have if they were born when you were born and then they had the opportunities that you did.” I hope I can do a little bit of that. Thanks for the question. AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: And the second one, well, I grew up in the Bay Area, and it has a very rich Asian community. And so this current racism against Asians, do you experience it in the Bay Area? CHO: I experience it in America, and Bay Area is part of America. It’s being discussed recently, but it’s been going on for a long time. Some of my earliest memories are my family and a couple of families getting together, going out to the public park. I grew up in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., in the ’70s and the ’80s. Going to the park for a picnic, and then, I’m sure it wasn’t exactly this, but my memory of it is an entire white family of seven or eight people all joining together in a course of racist taunts from an adjoining picnic area. And it wasn’t once or twice, it was pretty often.

In a lot of ways within the Asian American community the recent news has been an opportunity to kind of revisit a lot of that stuff. Especially some of the memories that maybe we would have suppressed or didn’t want to talk about. It’s still to be determined the outcome of the current discourse and awareness, because very often it really becomes, this terrible thing is mentioned, everyone shakes their heads and tsk-tsks at this terrible thing, and commits to themselves that, “I would never do such a thing.” And then everything just moves on from there.

That’s where we have to do better. We have to graduate from that to a different level where we understand that there is a responsibility when we say that we’re a nation of immigrants. There’s a big responsibility to that claim. And we’re not living up to it right now, but we could. AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Hi, great to have you at the Club. I’m curious, as TikTok kind of takes over social media and young people’s minds these days, what kind of advice do you have for young people? Not even just as a dad,

Photos, previous page: During the program, questions came from audience members in the room, on YouTube, and from the online “Zoom Gallery” of members. This page: Meow, Cho and Zipperer on stage.

“For most folks, [Mr. Rogers is] seen as being very kind and sweet. I see him as really fierce, really aggressive in all the right ways. He was absolutely uncompromising in terms of his singular focus on the health and wellbeing of children.”

—NICK CHO but just advice for young people in general as social media has kind of taken over our world? CHO: When my kids were coming up, I watched a lot of other parents withholding it from them and preventing their kids from accessing it. I thought to myself, “I’d rather figure out how to help them get good at it.” I don’t mean good at it, meaning a lot of followers or whatever. But to have a healthy relationship with it, because it is here, and it’s a thing that’s going to continue to develop.

Sort of a general advice is this idea that what you intend to put out there is not the end of the story of that thing. That the ways that people see it, hear it, experience it, process it, might hit other folks in a way that you didn’t intend. But you have to know that that’s how it goes when you put something out into the world. MEOW: What do you think is the future of “Your Korean Dad”? Do you have some plans that you could share with us? And will you always kind of ride this internet fame until the very end? I don’t know what the end is. CHO: It’s hard to call them plans. It’s more like an exploration of sorts. I have my potential and the opportunities ahead of me, and we’ll see what happens. ZIPPERER: So, what ideas do you reject? What do you think would not work for your particular TikTok videos? CHO: That’s a great question. I get hundreds of thousands of views per video, and sometimes thousands, if not tens of thousands of comments. People will ask things like, “Teach me how to use chopsticks. Or teach me more Korean,” and things like that.

It is dehumanizing. And it does sort of reduce somebody who’s offering themselves out there and sharing. I’m sharing my talents, my gifts, myself with you. And then when people start talking on that like, “Give me this,” “Dance this way for me,” I try to gently remind people about how that’s not a good, healthy place to go. Not for me, not for you, not for everyone. MEOW: [If people said to you,] Dad, we’re getting out of this pandemic. It was really scary. Thank you so much for being there and guiding us and leading us, but I’m still feeling unsure. I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing or what I’m supposed to do, and everything’s changing around me. Can you help me, just guide me? CHO: It’s been a really hard time. I was watching our first in-theater movie a few days ago, and one of those little trailer commercials came on and it was talking about a global pandemic. My brain just went, “Oh my goodness, we’re in a global pandemic. This actually happened.” Being in the theater made it even more just wild and unfathomable, because we’re used to seeing these fictional stories play out and we’ve just been living through a fictional story, but it was real. It’s okay that you don’t know what to do. It’s okay that it was hard, because it is and it was. I think that when you look around, there’s a lot of messaging out there that you’re supposed to be okay, you’re supposed to be happy, smile more. None of that stuff’s fair. You’re doing your best; I see it, and I’m proud of you.