Tag: mudang

Mudang Sung Park (he/him) was born in Seoul, Korea, and immigrated to the Ridgewood/Bushwick area with his family when he was young. Growing up, they were the only Korean family—or East Asian family, for that matter—for blocks around, and although Sung tried his best to reproduce the joys of his Korean childhood from within New York, his new environment slowly changed aspects of his personality. Encountering racism as a child, he became withdrawn, and was disappointed that the racism followed him into college, where he was battered with microaggressions ranging from compliments to his English, to students touching his soft hair.

Sung always knew that he was born in the wrong body, but being “queer” was something he attributed to whiteness. And there was another complication to his gender: like many Korean Americans, Sung grew up in the church, and came from a family of ministers. After college, he went to seminary, where he obtained a divinity degree, and was under care at a church to be ordained when his father suddenly passed. He wanted to honor him, but because his family had stopped practicing traditional rites long ago, didn’t know how to, and left ministry, having grown resentful of the ways in which the church prohibited indigenous practices in Korea. Wanting to relearn the practices of his spiritual heritage, he sought out a mudang to mentor him in musok, and was surprised to learn that he came from a lineage of not only ministers, but mudangs as well. He doesn’t know of other trans men who are mudang, and isn’t sure if there’s a significance to his gender and his spirituality, but he feels that there must be one, as coming into the musok tradition has felt like a second homecoming into the queer Korean American community.

Seo Hee Kelleher grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1991 at the age of 15. She currently works as a Korean American shaman, using her spiritual gifts to help others heal in a way that is authentic to her cultural identity. However, during the process of studying the spiritual world, she realized that much of traditional Korean spiritual knowledge was inaccessible to non-Korean speakers. In this special series, Seo reflects on the struggles of assimilation and her passion to publish spiritual wisdom books for non-Korean speakers.