Getting to Know Korean
Oct 2022
(While My Ex, English, Makes a Toxic Reappearance)
Florence Lee
Korean feels awkward to me. No matter how much vocabulary I know or how natural it is to spew out slang in my Korean tongue, talking with it always leaves a blush on my face. Fiddling with my fingers, I dart my eyes around bashfully. When I speak Korean, when the words tumble from my lips into clusters incoherent even to me, my cheeks flush and my ears turn red. I feel clunky, put on the spot, and ashamed of the awkwardness that freezes me on the spot at words I have been raised to be familiar with since I was little.
But whenever I use English, I pull words from my brain as if on instinct. Letters weave themselves into words when I open my mouth to speak and spill into wavy lines when I put pen tip to paper. I even short-circuit in English, blubbering out “hmm”s and “uhh”s until I strengthen my grasp on the words trying to escape me. I’ve always been more comfortable with English and the ease with which I can process words at a much faster pace. Its same, steady rhythm always comforts me (like inhaling fresh air after holding your breath for a minute too long), and I fall back into the melody of each phrase way too quickly. When I reach to embrace English, it smirks at my Korean in a way that can only be described as infuriatingly superior.
So when I read Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” I was stunned into silence by a particular phrase: “this is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you.” English is the language of the oppressors, yet it is the same language the oppressed and marginalized must use to communicate their pain as people shoved into the corner of the room and left to fend for themselves. I had never thought about it before. The language I was so used to, the language that screamed comfort and expression and poetry and love notes to me, was the same language that had only persisted by oppressing, suppressing, and compressing other people’s languages, other people’s culture, as a way to propel itself further up the ranks of high society. English is the curse of the people who were forced into beholding it. As bell hooks says in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Standard English is “not the speech of exile,” but rather a “mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear.” English is the language of taking. Even hooks, being in “danger of losing [her] relationship to black vernacular speech,” finds herself repressing her mother tongue in “predominantly white settings,” stuck “in complicity with a culture of domination.”
Why is Standard English considered the only acceptable form of English or of language in the US in general? How is it that we must only recognize Standard English as what is familiar, as what is articulate and positive and good? How can I continue to comfortably speak English and overshadow Korean, knowing that I am encouraging the language that has probably attempted to dominate my own culture the way it has dominated others? Questions rush through my head at the simplest nudge of thought. I think of my mother. My mind can’t tell whether or not it wants to quiet or roar louder at her image — my mom, a Korean immigrant who often complained about the way English felt rolling off her lips. To her, it is sand-papery, rough, bashfully awkward in the way Korean is for me, yet I am praised for being better at English than Korean and she is usually condemned for being better at Korean than English. Why is it that our American society celebrates the first over the second? Why is English, in its dark history of domination and power and assimilation, celebrated for doing a job that anyone else’s mother tongue could have done? My mother weeps at nine p.m. on a Thursday for her English straying slightly from the standard and I, a colonized American tongue, weep with her.
Now, every time I bleed English words onto paper or scrape phrases off my tongue, I shudder with the weight they carry. Words, particularly English words, have consequences — in embracing them, I must also fight against their deep-rooted culture of erasure. My fight will not solve the overall problem and we must continue to find solutions to address the corruption of language Standard English has caused. But seeking to recognize its toxicity is the first step to building a worldview that celebrates every language, every dialect, every kind of vernacular, as the standard. This is the oppressor’s language, and we should not be forced to use it to speak to anyone.
And every time I kiss the air with Korean characters and my cheeks flush, I blush with love and respect rather than shame, admiring the poise with which my language has survived in a culture threatening to send it into the gallows with every whisper of a word. It is still awkward between Korean and me, but I hope to get to know it more so that, eventually, the awkwardness fades and Korean becomes the language I turn to on instinct and speak when I stutter or stumble on the thoughts in my ever-racing mind. Maybe the clumsiness of my Korean will cease, and Korean will exceed even the English that used to warm me so much it burned. Gingerly, as I continue college in an institution that English so cockily overrules, I lace my fingers with the Korean I am growing to love — far more than I used to love English. My heart beats to its fresh rhythm and I smile.
Florence Lee is from Seattle, WA and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.