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 I send her a link to my outdated travel blog and I mention my freshman drawing final, which included a chalk portrait of my host nephew.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 … Continue reading 뉘앙스