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 1 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 2 and bowing to our elders for New Year’s and eating my halmeoni’s 3 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 4 in the summers, the sweet spice of gochujang 5 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!” 6 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 7 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 throat, making it harder to breathe while I tried to choke back my tears. It felt strange knowing that this was just a regular day—that people were carrying on with their routines and laughing with their loved ones—while I felt like a part of me was being ripped away.
My halmeoni wasn’t a warm person to my siblings and me growing up, but I knew that she loved us. She showed my siblings and me her love through silent actions like cutting apples with the skin in the shape of small red bunny ears, making us an after-school snack of soy sauce-glazed tteok 8 , and shuffling into our rooms late at night in her slipper-clad feet to check on us. She communicated her love through silence, perhaps because words are often messy—gaining a life of their own and slipping away from their intended meaning. I would end up crying as she hurled sharp words at me after misinterpreting my gratitude, and she would not understand why I was so upset. I always felt an impassable distance between us, but I had a naïve notion that if I learned Korean and spoke with her in her language, she would love me more or maybe the space between us would shrink.
Now I was in Korea and learning the language, but instead of feeling more connected, I had never felt more alone. We didn’t know what her condition and recovery would look like, and I felt like I would never learn quickly enough to finally have a meaningful conversation with her. My tears were for the woman who moved her family across the world, but they were also for a piece of my identity that I felt like I was losing. When my halmeoni and wei-harabeoji are gone, the language and connection to our family members in Korea will be gone. Our family will be fractured from the rest of our relatives in Korea, and this thought makes my heart ache. I have already felt during my time in Korea that I am a stranger, but now I feel like I’m drifting further away because I don’t know what ties I will have to this land once the people who have tethered me to it are gone.
The reality is that I will never have the same connections to Korea as my grandparents. I am Korean-American, which is something entirely different and beautiful in its own right. I am slowly learning how to embrace and create my own identity, one that is not bound to others, but is something that I alone possess. Both parts, Korean and American, are equally woven into my narrative. And while Konglish and Korean fusion food are part of my culture, a conversation with an ajeossi affirmed that I am forever connected to Korea. He exclaimed with excitement, “한국 피가 있어요!” You have Korean blood. And this is a tie to Korea that I will always have. My halmeoni’s face appears on the screen and I ask her, “할머니, 잘 지내셨어요?” 9 and I see her face light up at my small attempt to speak Korean. I tell her “사랑해요,” and she replies, “나도 사랑한다고.” I love you too.
