At Camp Naru, Nobody Is ‘an Outlier’

Jason Trosset, 19, grew up living a double life. In the summer, he would attend camps for members of the Korean diaspora where Jason, who was born in South Korea, experienced a beautiful sense of belonging. But then he would return to reality, with his adopted parents in majority white suburbia, where he felt like “an outlier.”

This past fall, when he got to Franklin & Marshall College, where he was the lone Asian player on the lacrosse team, Jason found himself thinking about the people he’d befriended over the summer as a counselor at Camp Naru, a Korean American youth camp founded last year in the lakefront town of Copake, N.Y. “I felt more connected with them” than with his teammates, he said, despite having been at camp for just one week.

At the beginning of this year, he transferred to Drexel University, where the 2022 incoming first-year class was 25.2 percent Asian. His decision was rooted in his experience at Camp Naru, which is designed to help campers and counselors alike develop and grow confident in their Korean identities.

“It’s hard being the only Asian,” Jason said. But camps like Naru help members of the diaspora — adopted and otherwise — reconnect to their heritage, and with each other.