Tess of Hemet, California November 24, 2010

While we’ve been staying in California, my mom and I spend every afternoon walking around my aunt and uncle’s retirement development. It’s a sprawling development, set up against some steep and rocky hills that are so dry and barren there aren’t any trees on them. It’s a stark contrast to where the properties begin, since the whole development is nicely watered, sprawling golf course included. From the topmost part of the course, you can see the low, wide valley covered in lights and houses, and the bare hills, and far off in the distance some incredibly high, snowy mountains. It’s been cold and rainy during our stay, so the mountains are often cut off by clouds, but that late in the day, light that misses us often cuts through and hits those mountains and hills and slices them up with orange.

My mom describes herself as ‘more analytical’, so it makes sense that when I see her read, she’s always poring through scientific papers for her work. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her read a book for pleasure. But during one of these walks, when we were up high and enjoying the view of the mountains and valley, she told me about a book she read in high school, ‘Tess’ by Thomas Hardy, and how she liked it so much she read it twice. She said that she went up the mountain right by their village to see if she could imagine what it was like in the book, but that the scene she saw in Korea wasn’t anywhere near as beautiful as she imagined it in her head. Then when she watched the movie version of ‘Tess’ (it took me awhile to figure out that she was talking about ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’), she wanted to stop watching because it messed with the version she’d imagined in her head. She said that the scene we saw in Hemet, of an impossibly wide valley, far away mountains, huge sky above, was more like what she imagined.

And what was nicest about all this was that I’ve read and loved books my whole life, and spend a lot of time dreaming around, imagining scenes in books. I’d never thought of my mom as the sort of person to read a book twice, to climb a mountain to imagine what it might be like in the book, and then there she was.

Notice Me!! November 21, 2010

The floor in my uncle’s house is super slippery, and I really, REALLY like sliding across it in my socks. My mom was standing at one end of the room watching the TV, so I ran and slid as fast as I can towards her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Mom, you missed it!”

“I saw it, I saw it. You don’t need to repeat. You were quite successful.”

White Noise November 21, 2010

Being in my aunt and uncle’s house brings back a major part of my experience in Seoul, the sense that I’m in a very loud space that’s also strangely blank. And that has almost entirely to do with language.

I’m a compulsive reader. I read everything, all the time. It’s comforting for me to be reading something, even if it’s just the ingredients on the back of a shampoo bottle. Yesterday during lunch I stared at a sticker on the corner of my uncle’s window, and couldn’t concentrate on anything else until I’d deciphered what it was trying to say, backwards. Only when I got close enough could I switch the letters enough to read it: ‘We REPORT all suspicious persons…’ I kept reading ‘regort, coqert’.

It’s also incredibly comforting to me to be in a decipherable world, to be able to read street signs, instructions, magazine covers, mail idly sitting on the coffee table. Korean is such a different language and alphabet that none of it comes naturally to me. I can’t just idly skim a piece of paper. I have to concentrate on each letter, and even then, most of them are lost on me. The effect is one of incredible, bewildering quiet, even when my aunt, uncle, grandmother, and mother are all talking at once and very loudly. (I thought my mom and grandmother talked loudly on the phone based on how far away they perceived the other person to be, but now I’m realizing that they just talk LOUDLY, regardless of whether the person is in Korea, Mississippi, or just two feet away).

In some ways, it was kind of nice to be in a quiet world in Seoul. I could just sit somewhere, or ride the train, rather than always being distracted by the words around me. But when I came back, it was such a relief to have all those words crowding in, everywhere and all the time, snippets of conversation and advertisements and signs. I’m realizing that all those words form a cushion of white noise that I can rest in, be myself in, be sure of where I am in the world.

Repetition, Repetition November 21, 2010

A month ago, I took a weekend road trip to Maine with my friend and her fourteen month old daughter, C. N was attending a wedding in her hometown, and since the drive from DC was upwards of twelve hours, she asked for my company to help take care of her daughter during the drive. Since C was no longer really a baby and more of a toddler, she was Not At All Delighted to spend hours and hours strapped into her car seat instead of running around tasting things, climbing things, or dancing. We sang to her, played with stuffed animals with her, handed her toys and snacks. And we talked with her. When she wanted water, she would say ‘wa, wa’, and we would repeat, ‘water? C, do you want some water? water?’ When she wanted her stuffed dog, she would say ‘da’, and we’d say, ‘here you go, here’s your dog’.

This week, I’m visiting my grandmother at my aunt and uncle’s house. It’s been a long time since I’ve practiced my Korean, and on the plane ride here I was feeling panicky about how much I’d forgotten. But it’s all slowly coming back as I hear words I remember and see them in use. They’re almost all words I learned in Korea last year, not necessarily in the class I took but just getting around Seoul and speaking with my relatives. As a result, almost all of my vocabulary involves food. But that’s vocabulary that came out of a need and desire to communicate.

Growing up, I spoke only the bare minimum of Korean, just a handful of words and phrases. My grandmother spoke to my sister and I almost exclusively in Korean, and we understood each other through hand gestures, facial expressions, and the few words we shared in each others’ languages. I was always surprised that I didn’t pick up more Korean, since my grandmother had lived with us since before I was born, and my relatives are even more surprised. But speaking with C made me realize how much language is repetition, need, and just sounding out what you hear in your own head. Now, when my relatives speak Korean around me, I do something I never did before that I’m now realizing is essential to learning a language, in that I consciously repeat what I hear in my head, and even quietly to myself. Doing so cements the language in my mouth, instead of just flowing through my ears.

I’m never going to be great at Korean. My brain feels clunky and rigid around new languages, and I think I’m too old now to be truly fluent. My mother has lived in the country for most of her life, and she still has trouble with words, still mixes up ‘he’ and ‘she’. This morning, when we were discussing the pomegranate tree in my uncle’s yard, she had trouble saying the word.

‘Pom, pomegrammy,’ she said.

‘Pomegranate,’ I said.

‘Yes, pomegranite. Pomegramin…’

‘Like pomma-granite. Like granite, like a granite countertop.’

‘Oh, granite. That makes it easy. Pomma-granite.’

And then a few minutes later…

‘Pommy, pomegram…’

Our minds are rigid, but it doesn’t mean language isn’t worth trying. And repetition does make it easier, even if it takes a long time.

A loooooong time.

960 Times September 8, 2010

I love this story, about the South Korean woman who took her driver’s test 960 times.

I told my mom about it, and she said, ‘she should just give up’.

But she passed!

A Well-Focused Light May 2, 2010

Growing up, my grandmother was endlessly patient with my sister and I. She would put up our hair for ballet class even when we complained she was pulling too tight, she would make us rice krispie treats to take to school, she walked us home from the bus stop, she fed us sliced fruit and fresh bread after school and before bed. She was so sweet with us that both of us hold her up as a model of all that’s patient and kind and good.

So it was kind of a surprise to hear that she’s not this nice to everybody.

My grandma went to live with my aunt and uncle, her oldest son, when I was around thirteen. Some years back, my aunt’s niece came to live with them to attend design school for four years. And apparently my grandmother terrorized her, enough that she would often go to her bedroom and cry, and call her mom in Korea and say sad things. A major sticking point was that this girl’s long black hair got everywhere, all over the bathroom sinks and bathtub drain. But C and I are major hair shedders, our hair and mess have gotten everywhere our entire lives, so none of this should have been particularly new.

Turns out, my grandmother is only sweetness and patience to her family.

And I don’t mind that at all. It just makes me feel more special (if, maybe, less nice).

Korean Gagayonce April 12, 2010

Also, K sent me this.

I find it most, most awesome.

Cousins in America April 12, 2010

When I first met my cousin’s two daughters, they were three and five years old, rambunctious and funny and shy. I also didn’t understand a word they were saying. My sister and I communicated with them mainly by making funny faces that they could imitate, which worked well enough, but I still wished I knew what the littlest one was singing while she narrated her life loudly, off-key.

Three years later, they’re well into their first year living in the United States and going to grade school here. They live close enough to me that I see them every few months, including yesterday’s Rittenhouse Square picnic on a most perfect of spring Sundays.

At first the girls were shy, and I talked to them as I always do, slowly and carefully so they would understand me. It wasn’t until we transferred to a nearby playground that I realized how idiotic I must have sounded to them. Their everyday English is nearly perfect, with accents to match. The littlest one ran around saying, ‘oh my god, oh my god, oh my god’ to herself, narrating her journey around the jungle gym, and told ‘jokes’ that went, ‘a hippo wearing underpants kissing a lion on top of an elephant!’ The oldest one is more shy, so her English isn’t as natural as her sister’s, but she still understood everything I said.

This is what their parents wanted, and why they brought them to the States. Being able to speak English fluently is a HUGE deal in Korea, but their methods of learning English make it difficult. Koreans can often read English very well, but they don’t get as much training in speaking and responding. Also, Korean schools are much more difficult than American schools in that they do a lot more rote memorization and less integrative learning. Because entrance exams constitute the bulk of your application to colleges, it’s also not uncommon for students to go from school to another school, where they cram facts into their heads.

It’s clearly good for the girls that they’re here, in a more forgiving educational system. They have a strong Korean community through their church, they’re going to a school that they love, and they’re thriving. The girls have really made me believe in the adaptability of children, their ability to adjust and find happiness in any situation. Already, they’re speaking with better accents and fluidity than their parents, who have studied English all their lives.

Still, I was nervous about the move, because I think these changes can end up being tough on kids. Already, they’re more comfortable here than their parents, both socially and linguistically. And though I knew they had to grow up eventually, there was something beautiful about their life in their village, where everyone knew them and vice versa. They could stomp and play anywhere they wanted, they were daily adored by their parents and grandparents, and things seemed easy. Now, I worry that they’ll take on responsibility for translating the US for their parents, and that they’ll no longer be able to enjoy the village the way they once did.

Then again, it’s hard to beat the fact that they’re happy. And still rambunctious, and silly, and shy.

A Third of the Way to Korea December 12, 2009

It was a short homecoming.

A week after arriving, I got back on a plane to California to visit my grandmother in a smallish town about an hour outside of LA. It’s cold and drippy, and the retirement community is well out of walking distance from any shopping or entertainment, so I’m busying myself with learning to crochet slippers, reading ‘Tess of the D’Ubervilles’, grading papers online, and sliding across the floor in my slippers.

My whole purpose in going to Korea was to speak more easily with my grandmother. It’s not going so great. This is due, in part, to my limited vocabulary; we mostly learned how to give directions, take public transportation, and meet people. Also, I’m very uncertain of my speaking abilities, so I tend to speak very quietly. My grandmother has become hard of hearing, so I think my attempts to speak Korean are poorly worded, improperly pronounced, and too quiet to hear. She mostly looks at me funny.

This morning, I woke up to the sound of my grandmother’s television. I recognized the show just by the sound of it. It’s my cousin’s favorite show, Two Days, One Night. Every week, a bunch of comedians go on some sort of overnight trip to make food, plant rice, harvest crops, and otherwise make fools of themselves. There are a lot of sound effects (boings come to mind) and a female audience saying ‘whooooooooaw!’ in falsetto when something impressive happens. The show was over soon after I joined my grandmother, so we switched to a soap opera that involved unwanted pregnancy, fainting, a dramatic flash back, guilt, and love. Then we switched to a National Geographic documentary on the Inuit, involving some pretty dramatic walrus killings. I concentrated on my crocheting.

Before my aunt and uncle came home today from church, my grandmother tried to tell me what they were bringing home with them. “Keh!” she said. When I gave her a blank look, she put her wrists together and spread out her fingers. “Keh!” I spread my fingers out, too, wondering if this was some sort of command. Eventually, she gave up. It wasn’t until we were sitting at the lunch table with my aunt and uncle that I understood. My grandmother pointed at the huge, split crabs on a tray and said, again, “Keh!”

“Oh!’ I said. “Keh! Neh.”

They cooled very quickly as we snipped the meat out with kitchen shears. My uncle kept piling my plate with crab meat. “Mashisoyo,” I kept saying, it’s delicious! “Mai mogoso!” he said, over and over again, eat a lot of it!

My aunt is always humming or singing, and my uncle is often whistling to himself, very quietly. They combine with the very loud television in my grandmother’s room. It’s very comfortable and homey, especially since my grandmother only watches Korean shows, and the sound reminds me of being in Seoul.

Home! December 3, 2009

Last Thursday, I pushed my bags through the double ‘EXIT’ doors out of customs, and was back in the US. All the signs were in English, people came in all different colors, and I was small again. I had to stop myself from saying ‘kamsahamnida’ and nodding to people when they helped me out. But I was just home in the sense that I was in the US, hanging out with my sister, enjoying the grocery store and traffic laws.

On Tuesday, I arrived in Philadelphia, and I was home in the suburbs again. I slept in my old bed in my pink bedroom and ate my mom’s delicious stir fry. I watched all the American TV shows I couldn’t get in Korea: The Office, Glee, 30 Rock. It was good to be back in the house where I grew up, but I still wasn’t quite home.

On Wednesday night, my dad dropped me off at my apartment. It’s much too clean and bare without any of my things in it, but it’s still home. I got reacquainted with my ceilings, my books, the depth of the kitchen sink. I read all the notes Trevor left, instructing me to kick the heater to make it work, burn the wood he’d put in the fireplace, where to find my favorite jars of honey. It was lovely to be back in my apartment, but I had one more thing to do before I was home.

I walked in the rain to S’s apartment, where he opened his door and gave me a big hug.

I’m home!