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.