I've published a series of posts related to my experience of living in a foreign country. There's my post from 2017, in which I discussed my search for romantic love and acceptance. My desire to pivot away from that, and instead pursue my interest in Korean culture lead me to applying for grad school.
In mid-2018, I wrote a detailed blog post on my Wordpress blog. There, I explained my history of becoming interested in Asia, and then Korea. It was about a month before I began graduate school.
I'm choosing this blog again for various reasons. One is the age of this blog and my desire to maintain and retain it for longer. I've had this page of the internet since 2008, which is an impressive amount of time and makes my little ISFJ brain quite happy. Two is that my wordpress blog features a lot of poetry and I'm thinking I want it to only have poetry, even if I don't write much poetry anymore. So here we are, back on Autumn Winds/In Sunlight Golden, talking about some stuff I think is cool.
I believe my path has slowly been leading to this point and could have predicted it as early as the spring of 2018. By around May of that time I had reached a relatively high level of fluency in Korean but my dedication to learning more was waning. I think this was largely due to (deeper) cultural differences which I was becoming more and more aware of and will delve into in Part 2 (honestly the more interesting half of this post). I was still fiercely writing poetry, even if my brain stalled on most English words, and delved into a new creative hobby, crocheting, as I watched Korean dramas to increase my listening skills.
I shared my youtube account with my then 12 year old sister. This meant, among other things, the poor algorithm was riding the struggle train to pin us down. Here it had one Korean speaker who was interested in Korean youtube and one English speaker who was interested in English youtube. To make matters worse, our interests were markedly different. I suppose that's why the algorithm recommended me the most random of things at that time. Fresh out of a breakup and bored to high heavens, I got recommended the most unlikely of shows and got addicted: Bondi Rescue.
What was a girl who spent most of her time watching Korean shows doing watching a bunch of Australian lifeguards? I'm not sure. To this day, I'm not sure, but it changed me *insert dramatic pause*. A fascination reawakened in me that I hadn't felt since undergrad. That I hadn't felt since I moved to this homogeneous country and became completely immersed in this language.
English was so...beautiful.
No, I wasn't swayed by the lifeguards and their hot bods (most of them aren't my type). And to the people laughing at the idea that Australian English reacquainted me with my language's intricate beauty, I hear you. But I'm from Appalachia. I studied Linguistics. Difference and uniqueness intrigues me. Dialects make me happy. The linguistic background of Australian English is just as complicated and interesting as the linguistic background of Appalachian English, and has experienced similar stigmatization before becoming popular in the media (due to some crocodile guys I guess). That's an interesting research topic, actually: when did Australian English start being associated with an expertise in the animal kingdom, and what effect does an Australian accent vs. a British accent vs. an American one have on the viewership of an animal documentary? Too bad I don't have the attention span to research a lick of anything!
Then, in August of 2018, I met my English-speaking Filipino boy. I transitioned from speaking Korean 90% of the time only about 40% of the time in just a few months. My interest was waning. I came here as I sought acceptance, approval, and love. I applied to grad school as I tried to immerse myself and prove something; that I could do it, I could assimilate. Then the love of my life arrived. I no longer cared for the acceptance of strangers, I no longer wanted my professor's approval, I no longer wished to assimilate because meeting someone who knows who The Paper Kites are, can rock out to "Sk8ter Boi", and likes ranch Doritos is.....nice.
I genuinely enjoyed literature studies in *English* translation, and the books I read were incredible. I especially loved the class which focused not only on Korean literature but Japanese and Chinese literature as well. Yet, inevitably I had to drop out. I knew I couldn't write a thesis in this language. Don't get me wrong; I was studying my ass off at first with barely any free time. Yet I knew if I tried to graduate I'd be in grad school for a lot longer than my scholarship money would last. Lastly, I wasn't writing. No poetry. Nothing. My brain couldn't process English like that anymore.
So my Filipino boy and me cooked up a little plan, and I quit grad school. I felt so much relief, guilt, and confusion when I left. I didn't know what I was doing with my life. We had very little money, but we moved to Gwangju together and we got married in December of 2019 on a cold morning at the local district office. How romantic! <3
<Enter Stage: The Disease>
It's weird how a state of panic and uncertainty in the whole world can make your own state of panic and uncertainty about your life slowly...improve. Everything stopped being normal, and in the abnormality I was suddenly just myself. I wasn't having to work to fit into a world that was living at a pace faster than I was, a world that was asking the questions I didn't want to answer, a world that had career goals and was hustling.
I was living in a world made for me.
A world where we settle down into our bunkers of blankets and candles and we watch the afternoon sun cross the sky outside our window. Where we live each day with our thoughts simmering in our heads and our faces less readable by the public. Where we aren't expected to meet the deadline and instead our best efforts to give a smile and a laugh are more appreciated than our productivity.
Now, I'm not going to lie and say the pandemic was easy for me. I began to develop ~~anxiety~~ which is just the best thing ever ya know. But things in my life did ironically improve at the same time. My husband and I love watching American sitcoms together, which had a cool cultural impact (details in the mysterious and much anticipated Parte Dos of these posts). Watching TV was kind of my hobby in late 2019 to early 2020. Those who really know me will know that I lived and breathed anime as a teenager, and I wanted to reminisce with my husband on my youth. We watched Fruits Basket 2019 and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood together because I'd been dying to introduce him to the shows that defined my teen years. Then we were watching My Hero Academia with my youngest brother and the bb sister on weekends. I thought I had nothing in common with the two of them, but just like that, I shed my cocoon of normalcy and revealed to the world (and myself!) that I was still a total weeb.
One of the cool things about anime is how the Japanese use language. Japanese can be quite poetic, and although I can only understand some of it, I can appreciate the nuances because of my Korean language knowledge. There's a significance in how it is translated into English; translations grasp the essence of the words quite well because English can be very poetic, too. Many anime are animated to focus on taking such breathtakingly normal scenes and making them fantastical. These become scenes I want to exist inside of, even if just for a moment. Since I was old enough to read, I would think about stories to fall asleep. I wrote stories in my head all through my teen years. The pandemic, and rewatching beloved classics, hit the "on" switch in the creative side of my brain.
I was writing again; scribbling story ideas on notebooks while my students did their writing assignments, sneaking on my phone during their listening classes to read. Next I was rewriting a whole introduction to a novel. Then I was writing for hours on the weekend. In the fall of 2020, I was 80 thousand words deep in a rewrite of a novel I wrote at 17. It is the most I have ever written on a single work before, and for nothing but the enjoyment of it. I started researching more about psychology and character development, and I started reading actual books again. The ability to get my thoughts out, to create new worlds, and to describe these beautiful scenes and places that lived in my mind's eye meant I had an outlet.
And it was all in English.
While I'm no longer in the linguistics field or the English teaching field, I think I know what I want to be doing in 10 years. I'd like to be doing something similar to what I am doing these days. Sitting down and making things. Be that art or working magic with words, I hope that I can continue to focus on what makes me feel something. And English, it makes me feel something, guys. It makes me feel something I can barely contain inside of myself.
Instead it is bursting forth; stars raining from the heavens. Like a crashing symphony, the farthest lights in our galaxy expatriate themselves to our rock, to bless our skies with the most delicate and fleeting of artwork. Yet their descent is a disastrous pursuit of a world which they can never enter.
See what I did there?
Augh, English, you are so glorious. I can describe a meteor shower and make it into a commentary on exclusion. And so, I've learned to appreciate my language again. It has become precious to me once more and I regret I ever tried to abandon it. I've been watching British streamers recently (if you know, you know) and I've once again been thinking about the nature of my language, ethnicity (PART THREE?), our history, and our cultures (I'm writing part two eventually I swear). The large English-language diaspora should be appreciated more, and our language, though a mess of a thing, sprung up from some of the most unique interactions in the history of the world in a very linguistically diverse area. Our many many accents and dialects and their socioeconomic implications make for engaging conversation topics and something to mull over when considering the psychology of language.
But also English is just beautiful and I am proud to speak it as my native tongue. That is all.
