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.
