Perceived {Cultural} Sameness and Language: The Beauty of English (Part 1)

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. 

 So the rewrite lasted for approximately one week. That is unfortunately the trajectory of my creative energy the past two months. I suppose I can't complain, at least I am writing something sometimes. But it's not the kind of production I was hoping for and definitely not the level that I am "supposed" to have. 

I have an immense amount of creative energy, a kind of busy feeling which I can't explain. This has been going on for nearly a year now, and while it is nice, it unfortunately has absolutely no determined outlet. I'd love to be able to sit down every single day and be in the mood to write 2k words in my novel, but that's unfortunately not how my mind works. 

People say you can force yourself to sit down and write every single day, but I'm not seeing success in that. I have tried sitting down for fifteen minutes in front of my document every day, undistracted. But I don't always have fifteen minutes of undistracted, free time when I feel I can actually write. 

Once I start writing, I write for hours usually. That is also unfortunate, but also nice. 

I guess these days everything is both nice and unfortunate. Welp. That's all I have to put here, I suppose. The rewrite will be delayed, my own novel has a fuzzy, unclear ending, I attempted to start writing two romance novels and couldn't get into writing them, and I haven't sat down to write fanfic in a while. I suppose that's the trajectory of my creative writing as a whole this year. 

Start one thing, start another. 

The Rewrite, Part 5

 The original rewritten scene which began "The Rewrite". I wished to include a call back to Rurik, as he was created by me later on in the process of this storytelling, but became a larger and larger force in Ailith's life as her time in my head continued. Rurik's role is quite important now. Gris is not my character. I guess I took a few liberties with him here, but I changed very little dialogue as it was all to my liking, generally.

Ailith felt her body falling to the ground and landing on a person, but she couldn’t control any of her limbs. For a minute, her head just pounded so loudly that she could hardly hear, her anger and desperation overwhelming her senses.

But the stranger grunted for her to get off, and she scrambled up, tripping on her skirts and falling again.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she blurted out as she stumbled away from the body and slumped to the ground.

“Not your fault. I understand.” From the voice, she could tell her cellmate was male. He did not seem to be a threat, but she remained on guard, just in case.

Ailith looked around, trying to make sense of her surroundings. Pale moonlight crept in through a crevice not wide enough for a fist to fit through.

She shivered in the cold damp. Her cellmate pulled himself up and dragged his body to the far side of the little box they were in. His breathing was labored; a rattling, strangled sound.

He did not seem in good health.

In good health.

Kyle’s face flashed through her mind and she panicked. Was he here, somewhere, in the darkness? Just nearby?

“Kyle! Kyle, Kyle are you there?!”

No sound.

“I don't mean to sound rude, but yelling will only annoy the bandits. This "Kyle" probably can't hear you. Settle back. Once you stop trying to escape, bread crumbs and acrid water become a meal fit for a king.”

Ailith bit her lip. It sounded like he’d been here for a while. She squinted in the darkness, and noted the stranger’s messy brown hair, longer than most commoners. He lay nearly motionless, his body a heap of old, ratty clothes and thin limbs.

She determined he would not hurt her. But what was he doing here?

“I'm Gris. I've been stuck here for 2 years, why, I know not.” He answered her question before she asked.

“I’m Ailith.”

“Hello Ailith. Listen, the rules are simple. Learn them from me, and you'll save yourself a couple of bruises. 1; Stay relatively quiet. 2; Do what the bandits tell you, even if you might harm yourself. They will harm you worse if you don't. 3; Give up all hope of escaping. I lost track of how many times I've tried and failed. Only came up with rule 3 a week ago.”

Ailith blinked. Give up...all hope…?




“Don’t give up hope. No matter what happens, don’t ever, ever give up hope. You’ll be free one day. I know you will.”




She blinked back tears at the recollection. His lifeless eyes. His tan skin gone grayish with death and splattered with his own blood. It was her fiercest, most evil memory. She shook her head.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to stay here, and I most certainly don’t want to do whatever those men tell me to.” She didn’t dare let pass from her lips the things the men had said to her earlier. “My name is Ailith. My older brother is Kyle…” Ailith trailed off, thinking of the moment when she had last seen him, lying on the ground. Perhaps, he was already dead, and she was alone in this world.

Very well then.

She’d still escape this awful place.

Gris shifted himself and crawled across the cell. At first, this made her jump, as she’d been certain he was incapacitated. After a few moments of trying to puzzle out what he was doing, she noticed Gris was trying to pick the lock.

“Gris?”

“Remember rule number two? Well, I'm following it right now. Stay here. I don't want to see another noble with arrows in their back.”

“But-what? How is that…” she trailed off. She didn’t want arrows in her back, and if they did have Kyle, she didn’t want them to punish him for her bad behavior, either.

He turned to her then, though she could barely make out his face in the low light.

“Close your eyes. Open them in about a minute.”

She didn’t close her eyes. She wasn’t about to close her eyes with a strange man standing there. He opened the door of the cell, and bright torchlight streamed in. She squinted in the brightness to see someone thin enough that the bones stuck through his clothes.

Then he was gone, and she was left alone.



She pulled her knees up to her chest and tried to think.

The Rewrite Part 4

 Jan is, in fact, my own original character, drawn up today on the spot. The post was written from the POV of a different bandit before (I have given him the name Oda) but I changed it. I thought having a sympathetic but dirty POV would be interesting. I've become fiercer in my writing, but let it be known that the creator of this scene wished for "the bad guys to be bad, not half-good half-bad". This reminds me of the "half-good, half-bad, half-boy " line from that comedy sketch song. Anyway. 

Jan looked down at Patrick. Blood flowed out of the wound in his side, and his face had gone all gray and clammy. 

“Well, Pate’s dead,” he muttered to himself. He reached down to feel the man’s pulse. Nothing. 

Henny, their leader, tied the little girl up before she came to. By Jan’s estimate, she couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. Just a delicate flower, a spring bloom. He grinned to himself and riffled through Pate’s pockets for valuables before the others did. Nothing much, a few coins. 

Oda came scrambling over and started feeling up the filthy noble boy, looking for gold. 

Damn, Jan thought, I should’ve checked him first. 

Oda came up with a little pouch of coins, but Henny was quick to step in. 

“Gimme that,” he snapped, taking the pouch from Oda’s hands. Jan shook his head at Oda. He was always an idiot, worse than Pate. It would’ve been better if Oda had died instead. 

The noble boy was not dead. Jan could see his shallow breathing. But he didn’t say anything to Henny. He preferred to not get involved, ever, in Henny’s business. It was always better that way. 

Plus, Jan wasn’t the one who had “killed” the kid. Oda could take the hit if his lack of competence came back to bite him. Jan had no part in it. 

“Let’s move,” Henny barked. They all stood up and began the trek through the woods back “home”. Jan watched the young girl stir back awake, her eyes widening when she realized she was slung over Henny’s back, heading somewhere she didn’t know. Jan thought it was cute, charming really, how she started to cry without screaming. She was a smart little thing. 

They stopped by the creek to get a drink of water and wash the blood off their hands. Henny threw the little girl on the ground by a tree. She curled up in a ball and didn’t say anything. 

Oda was gazing in her direction with that dumb look on his face when he decided to open his good-for-nothing mouth. 

“Ey, sir,” they all called Henny ‘sir’, “that little one’s so quiet. Whatdya say we have some fun with her before we get back? Make her scr-” 

“Oh shaddup, Oda. If I see you lay a finger on her, I’ll behead you.” Henny snapped. Oda shrunk back, but kept casting lustful gazes in the direction of the girl. Jan shook his head again. Obviously, if anything were to happen to the girl, Henny would be the one in charge. He was unlikely to share his plunder with anyone. It was like Oda didn’t learn anything. 

They stood up. Henny claimed the girl was heavy, so he made Jan carry her. Jan knew that this was Henny’s way of testing Jan, to see if he was trustworthy. Jan flung her over his shoulder and kept his hands to himself the whole way back. He didn’t want to lose a hand just for being a pig. 

When they arrived at the encampment, Jan greeted Riley, his friend, and shared the news that Pate was a goner. Word travelled fast in their large band of thieves, totaling more than forty men and one...well, one witch. 

They took the captive to the cell, a stone box with a heavy wooden door. Jan let her slide to the ground and Henny cut her ropes. She struggled then, her little white face turning red as she thrashed around on the ground. Jan held her legs down before she could kick Henny, and then Henny picked her up and tossed her in in one swift motion, laughing as he shut the door with a whump.