투쟁: language, miles, returns, stories

view from Seoul Tower, 2009

i'm going to Korea next year.

i don't know when, or how, or in what capacity, but i am going back.

my saturn return is approaching, and i have been feeling it since the summer. all signs point towards this being the time, the right time, for me. i feel compelled to go, i feel i *have* to go.

i will post A LOT more in the coming months about this journey, my reasons, my feelings, my fears and hopes and plans and all of that. today, i'm going to start with a brief history of knowing and knowledge and language and distance and shame. language study is my number one goal for this journey, and all the heartache and struggle that comes with it.

my first trip home was in 2009. i dropped out of my language class on the third day. i wasn't ready. i'd only been in the country for a week, my body was still jet-lagged, my mind was still overflowing and overwhelmed. i felt shame every time the teacher corrected my pronunciation. i was afraid to even start my homework for fear of what it would mean for me to not succeed.

back in college, i took one East Asian studies class. it was called "Gender, Modernity and Social Change in Korea". the whole thing is kind of a blur. there were Asiaphile white boys and let-me-show-you-photos-from-my-trip-to-India white girls. so many fucked up, racist, misogynist and transphobic things got said on a regular basis, and there were only three of us who actually pushed back. but i remember so vividly the shame i felt at not knowing anything about Korea or Korean history. i remember how these white people shamed me for not knowing the history of my own country. for not knowing as much as them.

and there are so many really deep and valid reasons for why I never read Bruce Cummings' book. but i couldn't shake that shame. the same shame i felt when a stranger at the airport started talking to me about Korean ondol heating and exclaimed "you don't know your own history?" at me when i didn't know what that was.

when i was younger, feeling all this difference on my face and body and hair and history (or lack thereof) and getting "ching chonged" on the playground and people always asking "is she with you" when i was at the grocery store with my mom and avoiding other Asian kids like the plague because separately we could survive, we could dodge the slurs, we had a chance of being something better, more acceptable than each other.

when i was young like this, wounds i couldn't name until a few years ago just barely beneath the surface, when the people who claimed to love me looked just like the ones who taunted me, when my mother dismissed racism as "ignorance", when i was force-fed feeling grateful and elementary school teachers publicly interrogated me about the circumstances of my birth and abandonment past the point of tears, this is when i first learned to be afraid of Korea.

i was told that Korea hated girls, and hated me because i was the child of an unmarried mother, that she had worn a girdle for her entire pregnancy to hide me, that i was her shame, but that she had given me up for a better life in america, that i had no identity in Korea, but here -

i learned to run from my reality of my country. my dark hair, my slanted eyes, my taste for spicy food - these things made me exotic. exotic was good. white people liked exotic. exotic was my pass. if i bent to their will, if i played into the sexual fantasies of every white boy and man; if i let white women ooh and ahhh over my hair, my tan; if i played diverse background dressing in the promotional photos of my private school - that was the way to survive. 

but to know any truth, to imagine myself as a part of Korea and Korean history, was too risky, too painful.

my mother bought me an elaborately rhinestoned American flag pin when i was naturalized. i wore it every Memorial Day, every 4th of July, well into high school. photos of me dressed in red, white, blue and that pin, were taken every year.

my mother always gushed about how beautiful the color red looked against my black hair.

standing in World Cup Park, 2009

i didn't know how to be Korean. i didn't know where to start. i didn't even know that i could.

one of my brother's best friends was Korean. his mother would bring me gifts from her yearly trip to the homeland, but also told my mother that i must never search, must never return. she gave me the film "Daughter of Danang" and told me point blank that real Koreans would hate me.

these are the things that make distance greater than miles and years and language.

i don't know if i can say i'm not afraid anymore. but i'm ready. 

i've set out to learn Korean many times before. but i never committed to it. the characters fell out of my head, they could not find purchase in my brain. i was too afraid of failing, too afraid i had no business learning. 

but all that has changed. little by little, bit by bit, i have found the strength. i have found the need to learn. i can hold the alphabet in my head, heart and hands, my tongue can force out fits and starts of foreign native tongue.

i want to go to Korea and learn. i want to be surrounded by the sounds of this most beautiful language, that makes my heart race and leaves me breathless, a strange and primal memory.

it is time to shed this skin of shame. it is time to write my own story with a diasporic hand.

i am going back, to learn, to live. 

i'm still afraid, but i'm ready.