From Korea to Italy by Violin

Video by Stephen Redeker
Article by Caitlin Jacobs, Photos by Christina Green

Jaram Kim sits in the Beethoven classical music listening café in downtown Gwangju, sipping on a cup of plum tea. She has made the long journey back to her home town for her brother’s wedding, and has extended her stay with the hope of getting some rest. This hasn’t happened, however, as word got around that she was in town and many hopeful young musicians began requesting lessons with the top-schooled, internationally experienced violinist. “No more TV dramas for you, Jaram!” she jokes.

But Jaram is no stranger to hard work. As any musician knows, hours and years of practice and rehearsals, sweat and calluses, are required for even moderate success. Jaram has been diligently studying music since she was nearly four years old, and playing the violin since she was six. The now 27-year-old’s dedication has seen her travel to the other side of the world and back, where she now tells Gwangju News about the success and struggle she has seen in her studies, her work, and her personal life.

Teachers and travel

“I don’t remember really falling in love with music,” Jaram muses. As a child, she was interested in many other kinds of art in addition to music. What was it, then, that motivated her to stick with the lessons and practice for so many years? “It was, I think, teachers,” she recalls. “Teachers always really pushed through for me.” Jaram’s teachers recognized her talent and guided her in the right direction. She feels lucky to have met good teachers who kept referring her to better and better teachers rather than trying to keep her within their own studios. They encouraged Jaram to reach for higher goals, apply for increasingly prestigious schools, and attend the best-known music festivals around the world. Though her parents had no musical background themselves, they trusted those teachers and let Jaram do what she needed to do to advance.

Gwangju’s thriving arts community also helped to nurture the young Jaram. She was able to compete in the Honam University Art Competition at the age of ten, and won the gold medal. The opportunity to perform on a real stage is rare for young people, she says, and it gave her a clear goal to work toward in her music lessons.

Not too long after winning the Honam competition, Jaram met Professor Hyo Kang at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. Professor Kang, a Korean musician who was teaching at the Juliard Pre-College in New York, suggested that she apply for the Juliard program. Jaram’s mother asked her if she’d like to live in New York. Jaram was 11 years old at the time and had just changed schools from Seoul to Gwangju. “I was like, I don’t have any friends here, so what’s the difference? I didn’t know that it was miles and miles away in a completely different place,” she says. “I don’t think I knew what America was at all.”

Whether or not she knew how much her life would change, she auditioned and was accepted. Jaram and her mother moved to New York. Jaram is careful to give credit to her mother for all of her support throughout the process. “It was really scary for my mom, too,” she says. Jaram’s mother spoke no English, and had never imagined living thousands of miles away from her husband and son, who remained in Gwangju. Yet she nurtured her daughter through one of the most exciting and difficult periods of her life.

English and jazz

The first major task for Jaram when she began her life in New York was to learn how to communicate with her teachers, classmates, and everyone else around her. Her father expressed concern for his loquacious daughter in a country where she did not speak the language. Would she be happy when she couldn’t talk to anyone? But within just two months, Jaram was chattering away in English to anyone who would listen.
Having no private tutor, Jaram had to learn to speak English on her own. She spent hours in Barnes & Noble book stores, working her way through any book she found she could understand. “I was in 6th grade, but I was reading those baby books with the fuzzy stuff that you can feel,” she laughs. From book to book, she gradually worked her way to the fluent, unaccented English she speaks today.

Jaram believes it’s very important that she learned English in this way — naturally. “It’s like learning jazz,” she says. The rules of jazz music are quite complicated, and Jaram found them to be an obstacle in her own studies. “I started with theory of jazz, but when I had to play it, I got this block because it didn’t come naturally. I know the rules, but it doesn’t come out.” Language is similar, she believes. If a language student begins with grammar, the new language can quickly become overwhelming. The student must want to communicate,  not just memorize vocabulary and rules. “If you start with very easy books and just enjoy speaking with many people, you can do well,” Jaram advises.

She found a similar kind of enjoyment in the vastly different education system she encountered the U.S. “In Korea, it’s very good, organized, methodical teaching, but not creative or inspiring,” she recalls. Students learn by memorization, but have little opportunity to digest the information they are studying. “It’s all in the head, but not so much in the stomach,” she says. Jaram’s schoolteachers in America, by contrast, were very inspiring. She recalls her English literature teacher, from whom she learned to appreciate Shakespeare — not an easy task for any high school student, let alone a non-native English speaker. “Her passion seeped through and we got so inspired,” Jaram says, a little bit of her own passion strengthening her voice.

Identity and culture shock

The biggest challenge in moving abroad, Jaram recalls, wasn’t the language barrier, which she overcame in leaps and bounds. It was finding her identity between two cultures. “I lived with my mom and I ate Korean food every day, and all of those things were very Korean, but then when I stepped out of my household, the rest was another [culture],” she remembers. “So I sort of lived a double identity.” During her teenage years, this was very difficult to handle. Because of the diversity of people living in New York, she never felt like an outsider because of her race, but she struggled constantly with questions about which parts of her would be Korean and which parts would be American. “I sort of get to choose a little bit, since I have both,” she explains.
These days, she describes herself as a Korean American, and seems quite confident and comfortable with this blended identity. Jaram considers America her home, as that is where all of her friends are living and where she spent her formative years. But when she is sick and needs comfort, she still craves Korean food. “There’s nothing else that makes you sweat and opens all your airways!” she advises.

She admits, however, that she has experienced a little bit of culture shock during this visit to Korea, her first in two and a half years. “I’ve romanticized Korean culture,” she says. “It’s something I learned but never lived as an adult.” She feels just slightly out of place in a country that is not quite as she remembered it from childhood. Jaram admires the Confucian ideas of morality and how to treat one’s parents, elders, strangers, and others. “To me, these ideas seem very noble,” she explains. She has found, however, that not all Korean people keep to this system, or that, even more frequently, it is carried out to an extreme. “Of course parents should protect children and children should respect the opinion of parents, but I think it’s overly considered,” she says. Frequently the freedom of young people to make their own decisions and live their own lives can be stunted for fear of angering or upsetting a parent or teacher.

Playing her own tune

Jaram plans to continue embracing her own freedom, however. Though her music has taken her from Korea to the U.S. to her current home in Florence, Italy, and to many other countries in between, she has so much she still wants to accomplish. Jaram doesn’t see herself settling in any one place. “I have the blood of a Gypsy,” she jokes. Although her parents wish she would get married and start a family, she feels she won’t be ready for at least another five years. She wants to open her own violin studio so she can bring her own students to the kinds of festivals that opened so many doors in her career. She also plans to make a recording of solo work within the next two or three years. If even a little bit of her passion and confidence seeps into that recording, it’s sure to be a best-seller.

The Beethoven listening café is located above the new German Bar downtown. They serve traditional Korean beverages and take requests for music played over their sound system. They also occasionally host small concerts and screen movies.

A version of this article appeared in the April 2012 print edition of Gwangju News.