Roy Choi
speaker
872 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Mar
Roy Choi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's a surgery. Yeah. But there weren't many of them in Korea, I think, at that time. And again, like you're talking about a industrialized country coming off of war, mainly built around textiles, not the most advanced medical equipment and training in the world. They stitched me together. It was all messed up.
But the thing is, because Korea or any country outside of the United States is so homogenous, what happens is if you have anything that is just slightly different, as little as being bowlegged, bucktooth, whatever, you stick out and you can't make it. Yeah, if you're fucked up looking, this is the spot for you.
I forgot. That's why they came back.
Is that? Absolutely. Every couple of years. Because again, when you're an immigrant in this country, the whole folklore or tale of coming with nothing in your pocket is a true story. Yes. It's a real thing.
Yeah, Asians did that with each other, especially Koreans, because no one else would take care of us. We're the forgotten minority in many ways. Big time. Because you're the model minority. Or people think or assume that we're getting benefits that other minorities aren't. Right. But in many cases, we're not. We're just invisible and forgotten.
We're still getting the no's and the closed doors and the racism. It's just coming in ways that aren't so overt.
Absolutely. And just because a certain sector of a certain race or population or culture is successful, that doesn't mean that everyone else is successful or that everyone else has opportunities. If you look statistically, and I know this podcast is about like nerding out and getting the details and info.
If you look at the economics behind a lot of Asian communities within the United States, we rank as probably the poorest.
Absolutely. And every country and every culture is so different from each other, but we all get grouped into one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The food, the culture. I mean, we don't even look the same. But again, it's just the ignorance sometimes of anyone that's not from that part of the world. It's just easier to broad stroke things and put everyone into one box. What's funny is, is that most people that get subjugated to that type of stereotype or that type of broad stroking, we don't think that way about anyone else.
Looking at Matt Damon right now behind you. How would you know? Is that me or is that Matt Damon? I did think it was you when I first walked in. But that was just at a glance.
Maybe the only difference is sometimes why people just take it to the next level.
Yeah, but again, that was only a microcosm, a little sliver that the media blew up and that even professors and teachers and curriculums blew up into representing the whole relationship between the Korean community, the Asian community, the black community.
If you really go down to the streets, if I could take you guys to Watts right now, Compton, South Central, anywhere, we can go all the way back to the 80s and early 90s to now. There's always a Mrs. Lee, a Mr. Park, a Mr. Kim, whoever that runs a store that has great relationships with the neighborhood. And what you mentioned about the cultural differences, yeah, that existed before.
But there was also nonverbal acts of love that were shared amongst each other, whether that was tab systems also being just included in the neighborhood, brought to family picnics and gatherings, stuff like that. I mean, it went both ways, but there were certain cases where people were stubborn against each other.
And so there were times where I hated my family or my culture for treating certain people certain ways. And there were times where I had to stick up for certain things. And there were times where I was caught in the middle of it.
Where I was... doing beer runs or stealing stuff, and then the store owner's Korean. But I'm just an American kid hanging out. You know, you grew up in the Detroit area. I'm just a street kid hanging out in L.A. with a bunch of other knuckleheads. Doing hood rat shit. Doing hood rat shit. That's right. Not even thinking about any connections to your family or anything.
That you're betraying your family. That you're betraying anything, you know. Yeah. Confucius don't mean shit to me, you know. So I'm just going in there grabbing shit, and then I'm running out, and then all of a sudden I see the face of disappointment behind the counter.
The stakes are so different. And then you got to go out the store and then just continue to be a kid. But then you're carrying the weight internally. Especially when you're Asian, you kind of have to maneuver through that where you're carrying a lot of this silent guilt or this silent shame when you're just doing American shit. That's right. Just growing up.
I didn't consciously confront that because I was so immersed within cooking. So sometimes cooking is all we have as families and especially my family and my extended family. So as Asian immigrants, especially in the era that I grew up, we took a lot of shit, man. It was part culture, part language, part just not knowing how to react.
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