When What Tethers Me Is Gone
By Natalie Kim, a first year ETA in Gongju, Chungcheongnam-do “너의 외할머니가 살아 계셨다면 아마도 너희들이 한국말 잘 할 수 있도록 너희들 한테 한국말 가르치셨을거야.” If your wei-halmeoni were still alive, she would have made sure that her grandchildren spoke Korean. When my mother’s aunt said this, I could feel a pang of emotions. These words unraveled what I already knew but felt painful to admit—that with each generation, my family was getting farther from our Korean culture and roots. As a child, I could only grasp Korea through fleeting instances—traditions of warm tteokguk and bowing to our elders for New Year’s and eating my halmeoni’s seaweed soup for every birthday. It was through my halmeoni’s cooking and her stories that I gained a tangible connection with Korea—her cold naengmyeon in the summers, the sweet spice of gochujang she added to every meal, and the pungent smell of her well-stocked kimchi fridge. Sometimes, while she cooked, she shared bits of her life before moving to America. She spoke of the farm she grew up on, the dishes she learned from her mother, and the origin of her name. I tried to catch these memories to keep them safe, but I knew that even these connections were transitory and already beginning to fade. I began to wonder who would tell my children, “aigoo, yeppuda!” or if they would grow up knowing their favorite Korean foods and associating them with home. I know they won’t see their grandma squatting over a large blue plastic bowl to make kimchi while they eat goldfish, and their grandpa won’t smack them a little too hard on the back in the way that all ajeossi do to show affection. Maybe they won’t even call my parents wei-halmeoni and wei-harabeoji, and maybe they won’t go through a phase of rejecting their Koreanness—hating the smell of H-Mart and the shape of their almond eyes. I wondered what ties to Korea I would pass on. So, at the age of 22, I sought to build my own by moving there. I am a child of Korean immigrants who both moved to America at a young age—my dad before he learned to write his own name in Hangul and my mom before she knew her multiplication tables. This meant that Korean wasn’t spoken in our home, and to me, we were just typical Americans. I took a distorted pride in being so assimilated that I only spoke English, falsely thinking that this would somehow absolve me from being a perpetual foreigner. I didn’t think of myself as different from my white peers, but the words and actions of others told a different story. I was sometimes called “the Chinese girl” at school, asked if I could speak English in the grocery store, and yelled at on the street, “wasabi, wasabi. It means get the f*** out of the way.” As I experienced people’s perceptions and grew older, I realized that everything behind the hyphen in Korean-American was invisible to them. It didn’t matter that I didn’t feel different and that I had only known one country. I grew to understand that a large part of my identity was what the world reflected back to me, and the world was constantly telling me that I was something other than American. I was not expecting an idealized “homecoming” when I moved to Korea. I knew that it would be challenging not knowing the language and that people would still not know how to categorize me. Why does she look Korean, but the sounds coming from her mouth are too sharp and awkward? For an American, she knows how to use chopsticks so well and eat spicy food! I encountered confusion wherever I went, and this constant feeling of displacement left me with a deep sense of loneliness. Before moving to Korea, I didn’t realize that there could be such a physicality to loneliness. It felt like a weighty presence that I carried with me, even when I was surrounded by the new friends I was making and the experiences I was collecting. But in a way, I welcomed it. I had never felt close to my grandparents or really understood my family’s immigration—the language and cultural barriers sometimes felt like an insurmountable chasm. But living in Korea, I was able to understand a small fraction of the emotions and experiences that my family went through to settle in a foreign country. I picture my halmeoni’s face with anger simmering behind her fallen eyes as a woman told her that she smelled like garlic. I picture my uncle, who was raised in America, going back to Korea to be called “foreign pork” by classmates who were too young to understand that their xenophobic words were an insidious gift from the years of conquest and colonization of Korea. I also picture the way that my grandparents’ tongues must have felt heavy with the unfamiliar sounds of a language that wasn’t theirs as they tried to navigate a new terrain. However, just as I began to feel closer to my family, I was reminded of the fragility of it all. One night in June, my phone screen lit up with a call, and in a distant voice my dad told me that my halmeoni was in the hospital. She had fallen down the stairs and had a series of strokes that took away part of who she was. She would forget where she was and what year she was living in, and when she spoke, it didn’t seem like she was all there. I asked my dad how he was processing everything, and he replied that “this person isn’t really her anymore.” That night I cried. I walked in the dark by the river because I couldn’t stand to be alone, and my apartment felt suffocating. I was thousands of miles from the people and places that I called home, and now all I wanted was to be back. This homesickness caught in my