Tearful Joanna Gaines apologizes to her mother for denying her Asian heritage

In school, Joanna Gaines recalls being bullied as a Korean American.

Joanna Gaines appears to have everything: a loving husband, one of the most popular shows on television, her own TV network and a fan base that appears to love her. But for years, like many Asian Americans, she avoided embracing her racial heritage as a Korean American while growing up in Texas.

Gaines has been a mainstay on television for a decade, but the Fixer Upper star has recently opened up to share her personal journey towards embracing her Korean heritage. Her message is a powerful one.

As a reality TV star, Gaines has given fans a glimpse into her relationship with her husband, Chip, her family life with their five children, and her home renovation secrets. It's part of the appeal of Joanna and Chip as the couple next door. 

The on-air persona Gaines projects, which is not far from her true self, is so personable and likeable that many viewers accept her as a home decorating expert and a Texas mom and overlook her being Korean American. But with her new memoir, The Stories We Tell, Joanna is showing a side of her that she has not discussed on-air -- a more personal and vulnerable side.

In her book, The Stories We Tell, she candidly writes about quickly learning how to conform to the cultural norms in her small Kansas town where she was born and going to school in Texas. Gaines writes about being teased for what she ate for lunch, her eyes, and her mother’s accent. “Eventually, the lunchroom teasing stopped," she writes. "But by then I’d spent nearly 12 years quieting half of who I was in a world I thought wouldn’t accept it, that somewhat subconsciously I’d forgotten it was ever a part of me to begin with.”

Joanna explained that she struggled growing up and was often teased because she was half-Korean, but she never told her mother about it because she was trying to protect her. In a podcast promoting her book, Joanna told her mother, "I never sensed you were not strong enough to carry it, but I just felt like we could have two people hurt here or one, which is why I opted to silence my pain."

She writes in her just released memoir, “I told the other kids my middle name was Anne because it sounded more American than Lee.”

“It was like I couldn’t find my place,” she explained during an appearance in the Today Show. “I remember going to Korean church and feeling like, ‘I don’t look like them,’ because I felt like, you know, I was a ‘halfie.’ And then going to school and being the only girl who looked pretty Asian.”

Gaines added that her family were “literally the only Asians in our entire school. My early memories, a lot of the things that come up are the moments where I switched off and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, I can’t be this,’ or ‘I shouldn’t be this’ or this won’t be approved. Like I won’t get the approval, you know, that you want as a kid.”

Johanna Gaines, right, with her sisters and mother.

It was not until she spent a summer interning in New York City, that she "saw more people that looked like me than ever before," she told People.

"I was 21 the first time I walked through Koreatown. I' just move to NYC and was missing home, and everything about these streets -- the food, the smells, the language -- reminded me of my mom," she posted on Instagram.

"It was the first time I can remember truly feeling connected to a culture I grew up believing I needed to hide. It was beautiful to watch people live out the fullness of their story. Finally I was seeing the beauty of being unique and realize that what made me different was actually best part about me."

"I left really understanding the beauty and uniqueness of Korean culture, and for the first time, I felt whole, like this is fully who I am and I'm proud of it," she told People.

"I had to actually go backwards and say, 'This is the lie I believed for 21 years, and now I have to rewrite that,'" she told People. "When we really take hold of our story and write it down, there's so much healing that can come from that."

While talking about her book in the podcast, all the pent-up emotion overtook the usually unflappable Gaines.

Tears flowed as Joanna tells her mom, "I always wanted to say I was sorry, for living in halfness, and not fully embracing the most beautiful thing about myself which was you, the culture that was half of me as a Korean little girl, as a Korean teenager, as a Korean woman. That I felt that guilt and that regret."

With that guilt lifted off her shoulders, Gaines moves forward in her personal and public life embracing her Korean heritage. On Magnolia Table, one of her network's shows she often cooks Korean dishes that she learned from her mother and teaches her children how to prepare them.

In November, the reality show star turned author brought her two daughters, Emmie Kay 12, and Ella, 15 to New York City's Koreatown, with the intention of exposing them to a more diverse environment missing in Waco, Texas where they are growing up and where the Gaines headquartered their media empire, Magnolia Network.

Gaines shared with Parents that her older kids are reading the book. “I am like, ‘You don't have to read it,’ but they're reading the book. So they actually came to me on that topic of my family.” It took years and it wasn't until she was a young adult before Gaines accepted her Korean heritage. She hopes her children will learn from her experience. “I really wrote it for them to get there quicker than I did,” she says.

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