The biggest setback I struggle with as a half Korean who has been in the US my entire life is not being fluent in the language. My mother was completely fluent as she was born in Seoul and lived there for years before she moved to the US for my white dad. She still spoke Korean when she was talking to herself and her Korean friends/family but for some reason, she spoke English with me and my sister.
The only time she ever really used Korean for us is when she would call us “이쁘다” (pretty), and sometimes she’d ask if we knew what that meant and we’d say yes, because we picked it up easily. She would always look so happy and proud about it. It makes my heart ache. The only other words we knew were really basic ones like “안녕하세요” (hello) and “감사합니다” (thank you).
For years, the only Korean I knew was that, and I didn’t feel the need to learn any more because I didn’t care much about connecting with my Korean side. That changed after I got into Kpop. I’ve been a fan for years now, and it still amazes me how I can see actual living, breathing Korean people singing and dancing and acting and being stars. Because we all know how Koreans are nonexistent in American entertainment.
So, my feelings took a complete turn around. I started to get immense urges to learn Korean. I started with Hangeul, and I got the hang of it much easier and quicker than I thought I would. That was last year, and now I know how to read and write it, and I’m confident about it. I still struggle with the bottom character sounds because they can change from their original sound, (like ㅊ usually has the “ch” sound but sometimes it can be a “t” sound), but other than that, I’m 100% good.
I now know a lot more words than I did in the past. I aim to learn a new one all the time. Sometimes I get discouraged because I know that learning Korean is hard, and that it will take years before I can speak it as good as other Koreans, but I always get motivated again.
My spaces to use Korean are very limited however, as my mother passed away years ago and my sister is also a beginner. My dad knows how to read and write it, but he is only a beginner too. The only time we can be around Korean people in real life is at church, because it’s a Korean church.
I use much more Korean online than I do in real life, because I have a Kpop blog. Sometimes when I comment in the tags, I’ll use Korean instead of English. I’m sure that most of the time, my sentences are terribly disarranged, and that I might be using the wrong words for the specific context, but being able to make simple sentences in Korean makes me so happy. Because it’s a huge difference from my nonexistent Korean when I was younger. It feels like a big accomplishment.
Despite this, I’m still struggling. I’ll see other Korean bloggers talking to each other in Korean, and talking shit about Koreaboos, and I feel left out because I can’t join them. Being a mixed Korean, I feel like they see me as less. I’m scared that they see me as a yankee or not Korean enough because I can’t speak it well. Especially since I’m American and know more about Florida’s weather than I do about Korea’s culture and history.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret not asking my mom to teach me. I always feel desperate about my Korean. I constantly daydream about what it’d be like to be fluent, to be able to engage in conversation with Koreans, to understand what the members of my church are saying. To read the posts Korean bloggers make and laugh with them because some Koreaboo did something hilariously ridiculous.
I can’t deny that I wish I was fluent, or at least know Korean well. There have been, and still are, days when I feel so bad about my Korean that I get really distressed about it and find myself tearing up. That I’ll have actual chest pain because it hurts that much to not know my own language. I can never find others who struggle with learning their language, so it makes it even worse, because I feel so alone. Everyone else seems to know theirs well.
And on top of that, I have to sit here and watch non-Korean people learn my language and become good at it, appropriate my culture, get Korean friends, and go to Korea. It makes me so angry because they have the money to go to my home country but I don’t, and probably never will. The worst of it is when Kpop bloggers are throwing around “oppa”, when they use “selca” and “ㅋㅋㅋㅋ” and claim that it’s not offensive because other cultures use those (???????)
I don’t know my own language, and I have to watch other people use it as a toy. It’s so frustrating.
Being a diasporic, mixed Korean that is nowhere near good at Korean is exhaustingly frustrating.
