picking flowers
By Rachel K. Fauth, ETA ’16-’17 what I know about the old lady is maybe three things: first that she is pious, second she is harsh, third that sometimes she wears white and only white, matching linen shirt and pants. that, and she once stopped to lift my wrist, flip it, graze its pale, translucent underside, cooing oh 예쁘다, beautiful! * in the field she picks only white ones, while I search for the mutations: blushing, emotive pink blooms, some hot red peeling from the petal’s edge. she says of my selection, 귀엽다, this is very cute. there’s my dad’s comment about how flowers happen, and though it be another species altogether, the bluest hydrangeas are because of the acidity in the ground. that I can’t tell her, joyous woman, bounty of only the whitest wild, cut and compliant. we don’t share a language or perhaps its definitions. * driving back at dusk I recognize one word on the radio. it’s her son’s name, the Korean word for hymnal. the sky burns borderless beautifully the same color as my fistful of derelict buds. and I wonder, does this woman prefer the daytime for its purity? Rachel K. Fauth was a 2016-2017 ETA at Changpyeong High School in Damyang, Jeollanam-do. She now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee
A Different Kind of Conversation
By Lisa Chang, ETA ’16-’18 I punched in the key code to my door and pushed down the knob. Dragging my sweaty body, I clumsily slipped out of my shoes. The lights in the house were on, which meant that someone was back, but instead of the usual accented calling of my name, there was no response to my entrance.“엄마?” I quietly called out for my host mom. “어, 리사.” Oh, Lisa. There was a weariness to her voice, probably from another long day of work. I walked towards the dining table, where she was eating dinner alone. A few simple 반찬, side dishes, laid out as well as a small porcelain bottle and a narrow shot glass in front of her. “밥 먹었어?” Did you eat dinner? she asked. “네, 먹었어요.” Yes, I ate. After living with her for ten months, this exchange had become a daily routine. She asked me about what I was going to do tomorrow with my day off, and what time I was leaving and returning to the house. With our language barrier, it seemed that the only thing we could confidently talk about was my daily plans. Whether I would stay at the house to eat lunch, what time I would return to be back for dinner, etc. I was about to turn away to take a shower, when she mumbled. “오늘… 슬퍼.” Today… I’m sad. This was different. She frequently told me how tired she felt after work, but she rarely blurted out her other emotions. Caught off guard, I managed to respond, “왜요?” Why? “친구… 죽었어요.” My friend… died. Before I could say a word, she added, “자살.” I didn’t know the word, so I awkwardly shuffled to my room to grab my phone and look up the translation. 엄마 turned back to her food and waited patiently for me to figure out her words. I tapped my phone a few times, then: Suicide. I looked up, as she heaved a sigh. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but I knew that the Korean wouldn’t translate what it would otherwise convey in English. Instead, I walked to the other side of the dining table and took a seat opposite from her. “괜찮아요, 엄마?” Are you okay? “네, 괜찮아요. 초등학교 중학교 친구.” Yes, I’m okay. She was my elementary and middle school friend. She simplified her language for my comprehension. “친하셨어요?” Were you close? She nodded as she poured out a clear liquid from the porcelain bottle into the shot glass. “친구… 가족 있었어요?” Did your friend have a family? She went on to explain. I grasped a few words. 남편. 아이들. Husband. Children. “어…” I nodded and pretended to understand everything she said, but by now she could read my expression to tell whether I truly comprehended everything. There was no need to pretend. Regardless, she went on. “In Korea, suicide happens often.” “Yes, I’ve heard.” “Three, four of my friends have died.” She spoke more than usual, the alcohol swirling in her body. “All of them… suicide?” “No, two of them committed suicide. One of them died in a car accident. One of them had 암.” Another word I didn’t understand. I mumbled the word as I typed it in my translation app. Cancer. “A lot of Koreans have 울증. Some days I also feel the same way.” Again, I typed in the new vocabulary. Three small green squares appeared and disappeared on the phone screen as I waited for the translation. Melancholia, hypochondria, depression. I thought back to the first week of school, when I attempted to wake up a sleeping student in class. My co-teacher in that class came over to gently stop me. She explained that the student often sleeps in class, and that he probably has depression, so I shouldn’t disturb him. I wasn’t sure what I was taken aback by more: the depression, or her nonchalance when she explained this in front of the very student she was talking about. “Recently, one of the teachers at school told me that a third-grade student tried to commit suicide. But he didn’t die.” “At our school?” I nodded. I expected a gasp from 엄마, but she merely blinked and nodded. What could I do, besides smile and say 화이팅 as much as I could? I remember hearing the news a week ago, when the teacher told me with a hushed tone. “I tell them all the time that grades are not everything, but to them grades are everything.” The teacher explained. As the school counselor, she had seen too many similar cases of self-harm, depression and self-loathing. But words seem to carry little significance to students, I thought. It’s difficult to comprehend what else matters when you’re studying for most of the day and striving for the best grades. What could I do, besides smile and say 화이팅 (fighting) as much as I could? What could I say, when the students shrank when I approached them with English? “Lisa, you must also feel it too, right?” 엄마 asked. “Me?” I thought back to a few months ago, when after a long day of work I had confided in my host mother with my even more limited Korean. 오늘 우울했어요. Today I was depressed. I didn’t mean to say that I was depressed, but merely sad from a stressful day. But somehow I learned the Korean word for “depressed” before I learned the word for “sad.” My host mother responded with much concern, and seeing that I couldn’t understand, much less respond to all her questions, she later called my co-teacher to check in with me. “I don’t get depressed. I get sad sometimes, but not depressed,” I responded again in broken Korean. “Really? Lisa’s so healthy.” A few moments of silence as she resumed to picking at her food. I tried piecing together a response. 하나님 is “God” in Korean. 도와주셔요. He helps me. But I couldn’t quite piece together and say my thoughts quickly
뉘앙스
By Mara Guevarra, Yonsei University Graduate Student ’16-’17 한비 “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you studying Korean?” To be fair to my friend, I know the answer. I spent half a summer in Seoul when I was seventeen. Primarily taken care of by my host grandparents, I tried to communicate with them with my broken elementary Korean, while they spoke to me in a mix of Jeolla-do and Seoul-mal accents. Our time together was short but my memories are still strong. The shy smile of my host grandmother when she told me to start calling her 엄마, mom. The blue, textured wallpaper of their old apartment. Walking post-dinner laps together in the nearby subway station plaza. Telling my friend of that summer is its own answer, and my tongue trips over itself trying to inject the power of memory into my words. I tell her how seriously I took my summer language program. I send her a link to my outdated travel blog and I mention my freshman drawing final, which included a chalk portrait of my host nephew. I tell my friend that 아빠, father, still introduced me to their neighbors as 우리 미국에 왔던 딸, our daughter from America, without hesitation. It had been six years since we’d last seen each other. But telling is not showing, and my impassioned answer still lacks. It’s not enough to share facts about my old host family or of a month and a half in 2011; instead, I want to cut out the nostalgia from inside me and present to her, this years-old affection delicately wrapped and maintained. If she saw the depths of my affection, maybe she’d get her answer. “Wow,” my friend says offhandedly, her eyes wide in surprise. “You really acted like their daughter.” I smile. That’s good enough. Mama A week before my paternal grandmother moves back to the Philippines—a month before I leave for what would be almost two years in Korea—I nest myself into my grandmother’s embrace as she prays her daily novenas and try to commit the scent of her perfume to memory. When she finishes praying, we talk and joke, and then finally settle on a game: she says a phrase in English, I give it back to her in Tagalog, and then I translate it into Korean. It starts off gentle: I switch my grandmother’s “Have you eaten?” into “Kumain ka na ba?” which morphs into “밥 먹었어?” My grandmother basically guffaws, and I grin brightly at her delight. “Ano ba yan,” she laughs. “You sound so Korean.” A few months later, I confess to my grandmother over text that I’m losing my Tagalog without the constant immersion that is living with family. You’ve been learning too much Korean, she messages me. Dapat mong matutunan ang wika natin. You need to learn our wika. My face burns with shame. I’m both a heritage speaker with no real grammatical command of Tagalog and an on-and-off Korean learner whose speaking skills still haven’t gotten over the plateau of a high-intermediate level. Even so, the weight of Korean on my tongue is a heavy one, and the weight of knowing my brain seeks out Korean first rather than Tagalog is a burden. As my heart fills with spite, I type the words then why did no one teach me Tagalog? only to back out and text her back a deflection instead: What does wika mean? Her response is immediate. Wika means language. I do not respond, and I let the text get buried. 언니 On my first day of my Korean language summer program, 언니, older sister, personally delivers me to school by bus. After some light conversation, she stares at my face searchingly, smiling slightly, and she says kind of wonderingly in English, “You really look like a Korean.” I squirm under the pin of her smile. I think of my American-ness and my fastidiousness to interrupt and say I am Filipina before anyone can assign an ethnicity otherwise. I think of the parental side of my family, quick to say they are part Spanish (from Papa) or part Chinese (from Mama’s Tatay), but I know nothing about Spain nor China; my only inheritance from those two cultures is the blood in my veins. After everything that has passed, out of all possible identities, I have clung to diaspora as my label. The bus ride is long, so I give 언니 a pained smile and attempt to close the conversation. “Well, my parents immigrated from the Philippines,” I say slowly, “so I’m Filipina.” “I know,” 언니 says, smile serene. “But if I didn’t know, I would see your face and think Korean.” Tatay I spend my first proper 설날, lunar new year, not alone and kind of lonely in Seoul, but in the Philippines instead, with extended family and a different kind of loneliness. Manila couldn’t feel more like the opposite of Seoul. The Philippines’ January humidity covers me in a thin sheet of sweat as I copy and paste a 새해 복 많이 받으세요!!! Happy New Year!!! across multiple 카톡 chat rooms. Instead of the rice cakes I’ve come to associate with 설날, the Philippines is celebrating the Chinese New Year in every mall, mooncakes and tikoy advertised on hard-to-miss bright red kiosks with signs in gold lettering. And—because Tatay was half-Chinese—we are also having tikoy for breakfast. As my aunt and my grandmother bring up anecdotes of my great-grandfather, I chew our breakfast tikoy thoughtfully. Tikoy tastes like oil and fried eggs and sugar, chewy and sticky and sweet, greasy and decadent at ten in the morning. I wonder about my great-grandfather, a man I know my grandmother loved fiercely, and therefore, by extension, a man that I wonder about from time to time because love and memory are my family’s only heirlooms. This was a man who abandoned his Chinese father to stay with his Filipina mother, whose Chinese surname was cast away to take up his