Sometimes My Language Partners Make Me Cry

I <3 my language partners.

I never thought that I would have much to say to two guys who are almost 10 years younger than me, but oddly enough I do.

Having a truly equitable language partner relationship that works effectively for both parties is tricky. It requires a close match not only in terms of skill and ability, but also motivation and personality.  Unfortunately, due to my downright shitty beginner knowledge of Korean, our conversations are considerably more lopsided than I would like.  We definitely speak much more in English than in Korean, although we are trying to speak in Korean practically the whole time, if that makes any sense.

Despite the imbalance in our skill level, things usually go really well.  My language partners are a hoot, despite (and sometimes because of) the language barrier — and yes, I appear quite hilarious to them as well.  I help them with that ever-tricky l-r thing, and they never tire of helping me distinguish between ㄱ, ㄲ, and ㅋ.  I explain to them why they can’t refer to their male friends as their “boyfriends,” and that they have to say “guy friends” or “male friends” instead.  They tell me why I need to be very, very careful when saying the word for “eighteen” (you won’t find that little bit o’ wisdom in a textbook!).

They call me 누나 (nuna, or “older sister”), and I love how Korean that makes me feel.

I ask them what their military service was like, what they want to do after they graduate from college (college tends to end later for Korean males due to the aforementioned military service), and about their girlfriends.  They ask me about my job, about LB, and about life in America.  They are impressed that I listen to “their” music and watch “their” movies, and so we talk about things like the 박재범/2PM scandal and 엽기적인 그녀. We really do manage to have a good time.

And yet occasionally, usually when they are talking about their families or what it was like growing up in Korea, I get these HUGE! MASSIVE! specks of dust (dust, I tell you, DUST!!!) in my eyes that make them red and drippy and I have to excuse myself for a moment to go to the ladies’ 화장실.

Intact Korean families will do that to me every time.

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Alone in the restroom, I try and do the kind of deep breathing that is usually not advisable in public restrooms.  I press a damp paper towel to my eyes and remind myself that I do have gains alongside my losses.  That both my gains and my losses are real — deliciously real, achingly real, but real nonetheless.

That although they are real, they cannot be weighed or counted or pitted against each other.

And then I go back to my waiting language partner, who by now is surely wondering about the dangerous air quality here in America, and…

…we talk some more.

Happy Chuseok!

Even though many things have been changed by Korea’s rapid industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, family remains the bedrock of Korean society. Chusok is a celebration of family—both past and present.

- Eun Mee Kim, “Chusok: The Korean Thanksgiving”

These last few years, I’ve wondered how to celebrate a holiday that is almost universally about “family” when the only family I know never bothered to learn that said holiday even exists.  Descriptions of Chuseok in Korea invariably involve the words “family” and “hometown,”  and frequently describe long sojourns back to one’s hometown in order to visit with family…. but what do you do when you have neither?

All I can say is, thank God for the Korean adoptees I know in real life… and, of course, 소주! ^ ^

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For women, Chuseok usually involves days and days of cooking.  I haven’t been cooking much Korean food lately, but the photos in this e-book from Aeri’s Kitchen are almost inspiring me to start again.  If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, click on over — it’s free!

Sonmul! (Part 1)

From my friend:

Congratulations, 이선균!

*dreamy sigh*

More pics here.

Learning A Language

Learning a language is a very messy and fragile process.  Especially for adults who are electively learning a chosen language for the first time, it is easy to get discouraged and give up — and especially if there aren’t many resources out there to begin with.

For myself, I have found it helpful to do the following:

1)  Expect progress to be slow. I tend to be, by nature, a very impatient person.  Learning Korean for me is sometimes fun, but it is also very frustrating how little I can say (or be understood) after all the time that I have put into it thus far.  If can manage to lower my expectations, then I can usually reduce the frustration, enjoy it more, and (ironically) make more progress.  I’ve used the phrase “language journey” on this blog before, but more specifically, it’s like hiking the Appalachian Trail — not sitting back for a fast zip on the Concorde.

2)  Stop looking for the magic bullet. This is related to the first point, in that it has to do with managing expectations.  As I type this, I have behind me a whole shelf full of Korean language materials.  For a while, each time a new textbook or audio tape came out, I bought it with the hope that it would enable me to achieve perfect fluency in record time.  (Of course, this wasn’t helped by products with titles like “Korean in a Flash!” or that promised “You’ll be speaking Korean in 24 hours!”)  The truth is, there is no magic bullet.  There is no single solution.  I have had much better luck in combining all of these books and products, and piecing together my own kind of textbook that is uniquely suited to my learning needs.  Even still, this little home-made “textbook” is only one piece of my overall learning strategy.

3)  Don’t lose the critical thinking skills. As with other areas of my life, when learning Korean I try to read/communicate widely, think critically about everything, and then decide what I want to believe and do.  I think this is especially important when trying to decide what is the best way to learn something.  It should be fairly obvious that we all learn in different ways and styles, and yet I frequently hear and read assessments of various learning methods that are couched as universal generalizations, rather than individual testimonies.  If something worked (or didn’t work) for you, then fine, explain why it worked (or didn’t work) for you.  But if it worked, don’t promise other people unrealistic results.  If it didn’t work, please be considerate and leave the door open for someone else to give it a try.

Critical thinking is still important during the learning process itself — even when learning from native speakers of your chosen language.  I regularly ask myself all sorts of questions about both the teacher and the content before I let something I’ve been told settle too deeply into my brain.  There are many great resources out there, and include both teachers and other learners.  But it’s always important to think not just about about people’s credentials and experience, but also their priorities, goals, potential biases, and — this is important — their limitations.

4)  Seek out other learners and learning communities. This is probably the hardest thing on the list for me to do, for reasons both situational and personal.  But I’m realizing how important it is when learning a language, especially speaking, and so am trying to figure out how I can do more of it.  Online resources such as mailing lists, forums, social networking sites, chat software, video cams, Skype, etc. are breaking down some of the geographical barriers.  Now I’m mostly working on the personal ones.

As I’ve mentioned before, my motivation and drive to study Korean tends to come and go.  It has picked up again fairly recently, and so hopefully I’ll be blogging about it more in future posts.  (Though as longtime readers will know, the act of writing that statement pretty much guarantees that I won’t say anything more about it for a very long time!)

열심히 공부하세요!

Korean Language FAIL

Last night, LB and I went to a Korean restaurant.  One of the 반찬 (side dishes) was 오이 김치 (cucumber kimchi), which happens to be one of my favorites.  I immediately scarfed down the entire dish, and then realized that LB might like to have some too.

So when the waitress came back, I asked her, in exactly these words: “Can we have some more 오이 김치, please?”

And she gave me the blank “am-I-supposed-to-understand-what-you-just-said?” look that I really should be used to by now.

“오이 김치,” I repeated.  But the blank look continued.

“Cucumber,” LB told her helpfully.

“Ah, cucumber,” she responded.  She smiled, and immediately took away the dish to go get more.

(For the record, I knew she spoke Korean because I had heard her speaking fluent Korean to other staff and customers only a few minutes before.  Nope, this little Korean language FAIL is all due to my ultra-crappy pronunciation.)

*sigh*

Seafood Rice Porridge

On my first trip back to Korea, I met an adoptee who had a few fuzzy memories of being in an orphanage.  She didn’t remember much, but distinctly remembered eating 전복죽, or abalone rice porridge, while she was there.  I was too young to have eaten rice porridge at my orphanage, but hearing her connect this food with her past made me want to try it too.

As it turned out, there was actually some abalone rice porridge in one of the many bowls on my breakfast tray during the last day of my first trip back.  (Tthe top row of bowls is occasionally my header photo on this blog.)  Since then I have tried a grocery-store version of it, and made it a point to have it again on my second trip back.  But really, I needed to learn how to make it myself.

Since I haven’t had much luck finding abalone for 전복죽, I decided to try making 해물죽 (seafood rice porridge).  I don’t think I’ve ever seen seafood rice porridge on the menu in a restaurant anywhere, and have never seen an actual recipe for it.  But I figured I would simply made 죽 (rice porridge), add 해물 (seafood), and — tada — seafood rice porridge!

Making 죽 (rice porridge) is really easy, although it does require some planning since you have to soak the rice for a few hours beforehand.  For the seafood I used a frozen seafood mix, which I thawed and then diced so that the baby octopi were no longer identifiable as octopi.  (Yes, I realize that “octopi” is a nonstandard plural.  And I don’t care .)

It was really good, but best eaten all at once since the seafood becomes a little chewy upon reheating.

The Danger of Going Back

One year ago today, I was on a plane en route to Korea.

Today, I am counting the days until I can go back again.

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If you are a Korean adoptee, the biggest danger of going back to visit Korea is that as soon as you come home, you’ll want to go back again.

Even though you were just there, even though your bank account hasn’t yet recovered from the last trip, and even though your time there was a mixed bag of good and bad, shadows and light.

The danger is that despite the mixed feelings, despite being confronted on a daily basis by an alternate reality that might have been yours and now never will be, despite the “culture shock” and the sights-smells-sounds of everything so different, different, different –

Despite it all, the danger is that you will still feel a connection, thin and fragile yet growing ever stronger, to places that will never really be yours, to people that you have never met.

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But despite these dangers, if you have ever had the slightest desire to go back, then I tell you:

Go.

And if you hate every minute of it, if you come home and desire never to step foot in the cursed country again, if you are never overcome with physical yearnings to return, then all I can tell you is this:

Consider yourself very lucky indeed.

The Language Journey of Lex-B

I’m not sure how exactly I found Lex-B’s blog, but when I did find it, there were several posts that resonated with me — some quite deeply.  The blogger, Alexis (Korean name 이윤선), is a Korean adoptee who grew up in Australia.  Currently she is learning Korean, and in her post on the effect of language on identity, she tells this story:

A few weeks ago, I was filling in for a school’s usual Italian teacher. Now, I don’t know any Italian. So I’d just prepared some random literacy lessons to give the kids. Anyway, at recess (while I was on playground duty), a kid came running up to me. He was Asian and I could tell he was at least partly Korean, and I knew he could tell the same for me. His first questions were “do you know any other languages other than Italian?”. I told him I knew no Italian, but I knew a bit of Korean. Well… his face just lit up like a light had gone on inside his head or something. Immediately, he was like “me too! Me too! My Mum’s Korean!!”. Suddenly, we had this little bond… everytime I see him now, he says hello to me in Korean, or if I have his class, he says thankyou to me in Korean when I give out worksheets or something.

This small interaction with a child the exact same age as I was when I began feeling awful about myself, has made me feel something I never really have before. For once, something inside me matches what’s on the outside! Without knowledge of Korean, I usually cringe when people ask me if I’m Korean, because I’m so afraid they’re going to say something to me and I won’t understand, or they’ll ask me to say something and I’ll have to tell them I don’t know anything. And that’s when the influx of old shame and embarrassment comes back to haunt me.

[...]

I know it might seem small, but knowing some Korean has made a huge difference on my life already. I actually like the feeling that part of what’s now inside me matches the outside of me. That I can say to people that I have knowledge of what they can only see of me, instead of wondering, then going home and wishing I was something else entirely. I suppose it’s just a bit sad that it’s come so late in life and I’ve taken this long to stop pretending…

(emphasis added)

Simply put, this is a huge part of the reason why I am trying to learn Korean.  As Alexis points out in the title of her post, language is intricately tied to identity.  And yet, language is frequently ignored or dismissed by adoptive parents as too difficult or unimportant, often in favor of more “fun” things like fan dancing or martial arts.*  Interestingly, on my trips back to Korea, I didn’t walk down a street in Seoul and see people doing fan dances or tae kwon do.  What I did see were lots and lots of people speaking lots and lots of Korean.

As I commented on the original post, my feelings on learning Korean as a Korean adoptee are a mixed bag.  Part of me does feel the connection that she writes about, where what’s inside my head is starting to match my outward appearance.  (This is also helped by a selective but steady diet of K-dramas, K-Pop, and of course, K-food!)

But as Alexis mentioned elsewhere on her blog, Korean adoptees’ interest in Korea goes beyond interest in any random country.  It’s worlds different from people who aren’t Irish but are interested in Ireland and things Irish, or (get ready to gag) manga-obsessed white males who fetishize are fascinated by Japan and all things Japanese.

For us, there is a very real reason to feel connected to Korea:  It’s the country that we would have grown up in save for that tiny detail of being adopted to another country.  Note that this fact is entirely separate from any conversations about the pros/cons of international adoption and whether we should have grown up there or not.  And it is this fact that complicates an already-difficult learning process, should we choose to (try and) learn the language of the country where we were born.

I’m not afraid of hard work, and obviously learning a new language requires plenty of that.  But frequently while studying Korean, I’m reminded that if I had grown up in Korea I would have learned Korean from hearing it spoken to me as I grew up, rather than from books and tapes. Adoption itself challenges the entire concept of birthright, but I still can’t forget that the Korean language is something that could have been mine from birth.  (Of course, I also think about how I would be struggling with English right now if I had grown up in Korea, which is a post by itself.)

Anyway, I’ve written several posts already about my own “language journey,” but Alexis writes in more detail about hers at http://lex-b.blogspot.com.  I encourage folks to check it out!

*Obviously I’m not saying that cultural dances or martial arts aren’t important aspects of culture.  I think they can be, and certainly offer some benefits that language can’t offer.  I just think that when adoptive parents are trying to give their children identity-building tools, they usually ignore (or severely underestimate) the importance of language.

Unwed Moms Brave Stigma, Lower Incomes

I just wanted to share this article about Ae Ran Won, the shelter in Korea for single mothers and their children.  (As an aside, I’m not all that crazy about the term “unwed”. I know that “single” encompasses a broader range of situations, but at least it focuses on what people are, rather than on what they are not.)

Anyway, Ae Ran Won was the shelter that I mentioned visiting in this post.  I’m guessing that it has changed a lot over the years, based both on things I’ve read in the media and from anecdotes I’ve heard.  Here’s an excerpt from an article* mentioning Ae Ran Won that appeared over 20 years ago:

“According to the questionnaire that we distribute at the orientation interview, 90 per cent want to keep the babies,” says Kim Yong Sook, the director of Ae Ran Won.  But after counseling, “maybe 10 per cent will keep them.”

“We suggest that it’s not a good idea to keep the baby without the biological father,” explains Kim Yong Sook, “and if the unwed mother and biological father are too young or weak financially, we suggest that they give the baby up for adoption.”

Now here’s a quote from today’s article:

“If the government wants to deal with the country’s low birth rate and help single mothers raise their children, they should first support single mothers, then adoptive parents,” Han [current director of Ae Ran Won] said. “Adoption is not the best solution for children born out of wedlock.”

That’s quite a shift, and obviously one that I’m glad to see.  The graph accompanying the article is interesting to me also, particularly that sharp drop from 2004 to 2005.  Does anyone know anything that happened in this time frame that would account for such a dramatic decline?

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Aeranwon trains, shelters, counsels women with nowhere else to go

She might not have much money, but she still has her son.

Despite deeply embedded prejudice against unwed mothers in Korea, Kim, 36, decided to keep her child after she broke up with her boyfriend.

She didn’t want to have an abortion and she didn’t want to have her child adopted.

“I’ve met mothers who gave up their children for adoption and they said they suffered from a sense of guilt later in life,” said Kim, who only wanted her family name used in this article.

Born in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, Kim was raised by her grandmother from the age of two after her parents divorced.

She has not seen her biological mother since middle school and she said she wishes her mother had been there for her while she was growing up.

To make a living, Kim makes ceramics and natural soap, and she recently took a course on natural and organic cosmetics.

“I never have enough money but I felt that it would be better for my son if I raised him,” she said.

Read the rest of the article here.

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*  Rothschild, Matthew.  “Babies for sale: South Koreans make them, Americans buy them”.  The Progressive, Vol. 52., January 1988.  pp. 18-23

Hat-tip to K@W.