Fried Potatoes
My dad’s tongue was wrestling with the syllables. Each one had to be painstakingly rolled around, pushed down, and forced out of the mouth before this sincere request was voiced: “I would like some fried potatoes, please.”
In his head, he examined what he had just said, like a scientist laying out a foreign specimen on the cutting board. It was all there: the subject, the verb (conjugated in the conditional for politeness), the object of the verb, and the essential addition of the “please.” It was a Sunday afternoon, not long after we arrived in the States, and we had stopped at a Taco Bell off the road on our way back from grocery shopping. As always, my parents had fought, and my mom had won, over who would be the one to order. But my dad was pleased. He had performed honorably; he had safely communicated his point, or so he thought. He waited, drumming his fingers on the counter, for the cashier to give him back his change. He would never understand why it took Americans so long to subtract, especially when they had a machine to do the math for them. When the food came out, he walked towards the table at which my mom and I were seated, meeting our expectant eyes with a look of triumph.
I looked down at the plastic red tray he had slid towards me. I frowned. I had asked for fries, and what I saw was a baked potato. “Dad,” I said in Korean, “This isn’t what I wanted.” My father shrugged. “I asked for fries,” he claimed. “I guess they ran out and had to give us the next closest thing.”
As a kid, I accepted what he said. But after years of repeatedly returning to his excuse, I’ve pieced the puzzle together. My dad had taken the Korean expression for fries, translated it word for word, and there it was: “fried potatoes.” It was a small mistake, but the embarrassment I could see in my dad’s eyes made me uncomfortable. It proved to be the first of very many times I would see him reduced to something less than he actually was. It proved to be the first of many times that I felt how frightening it can be to have the power of expression taken from you or from someone you love.
To many, it may seem dramatic to mention ‘fear’ as an emotion associated with watching your dad unsuccessfully attempt to order some fries in a suburban Taco Bell. But as an immigrant in America, it is when a language prevents you from achieving the most trivial of tasks that you feel the most vulnerable. Once, I came home from preschool and told my mom that I had held it in all day long because I didn’t know how to ask to go to the bathroom. I thought it was a funny story, but the response I got from my mom was one of distress, even sadness. At the time, I didn’t understand, but just a few weeks at Mustard Seed Preschool taught me why this story had made her so upset. Every class was a new lesson in my own uselessness. The most common, and most hated, feeling of my school day was that of my voice catching in my throat.
In my many years living in the U.S. since then, I have noticed that Americans will often describe Koreans, or Asians in general, as combative and competitive. But this aggressiveness arises partly from Korean culture itself and partly from the broader immigrant experience. As a non-native English speaker, every single time you journey beyond the front doors of your house you need to be equipped for a fight. And that equipment is whatever quality of language you can manage to muster. A native American will look at Willa Cather’s character, Mrs. Shimerda, and see an ungrateful, vain, crude, and harsh-spoken woman. A fellow immigrant, however, will see a woman who believes her everyday experience is a modest crusade against people who want to take advantage of her family’s linguistic and cultural handicaps. But as many immigrants, Mr. Shimerda and my parents included, have realized, there is hope always for the second generation—in the form of an education in English.
Therefore, growing up, I equated language with power. For me, to speak English was to be American, and to be American was to be powerful. I became obsessed with speaking the language beautifully and perfectly. I also became obsessed with personal success, the one way that immigrants like me believe they can punish America for their early years of hardship. But for a long time, I resolved that I would become a native speaker, but never a native. I would glean all of the benefits that this country and language had to offer, but never lose myself in a culture that had disparaged, sometimes laughed at, my Korean heritage.
But time has shown me that language and the culture that gave birth to it are not things you can just partially embrace. When you inadvertently come to love a language, you become the language. Today, English flows through me, and fills my head up with words that I find to be beautiful. A language I once needed to fulfill my most basic needs in life—order food, ask to go to the bathroom, push my way past in a crowd—has become a language in which I learn, in which I love, and in which I now find myself.
My dad’s tongue was wrestling with the syllables. Each one had to be painstakingly rolled around, pushed down, and forced out of the mouth before this sincere request was voiced: “I would like some fried potatoes, please.”
In his head, he examined what he had just said, like a scientist laying out a foreign specimen on the cutting board. It was all there: the subject, the verb (conjugated in the conditional for politeness), the object of the verb, and the essential addition of the “please.” It was a Sunday afternoon, not long after we arrived in the States, and we had stopped at a Taco Bell off the road on our way back from grocery shopping. As always, my parents had fought, and my mom had won, over who would be the one to order. But my dad was pleased. He had performed honorably; he had safely communicated his point, or so he thought. He waited, drumming his fingers on the counter, for the cashier to give him back his change. He would never understand why it took Americans so long to subtract, especially when they had a machine to do the math for them. When the food came out, he walked towards the table at which my mom and I were seated, meeting our expectant eyes with a look of triumph.
I looked down at the plastic red tray he had slid towards me. I frowned. I had asked for fries, and what I saw was a baked potato. “Dad,” I said in Korean, “This isn’t what I wanted.” My father shrugged. “I asked for fries,” he claimed. “I guess they ran out and had to give us the next closest thing.”
As a kid, I accepted what he said. But after years of repeatedly returning to his excuse, I’ve pieced the puzzle together. My dad had taken the Korean expression for fries, translated it word for word, and there it was: “fried potatoes.” It was a small mistake, but the embarrassment I could see in my dad’s eyes made me uncomfortable. It proved to be the first of very many times I would see him reduced to something less than he actually was. It proved to be the first of many times that I felt how frightening it can be to have the power of expression taken from you or from someone you love.
To many, it may seem dramatic to mention ‘fear’ as an emotion associated with watching your dad unsuccessfully attempt to order some fries in a suburban Taco Bell. But as an immigrant in America, it is when a language prevents you from achieving the most trivial of tasks that you feel the most vulnerable. Once, I came home from preschool and told my mom that I had held it in all day long because I didn’t know how to ask to go to the bathroom. I thought it was a funny story, but the response I got from my mom was one of distress, even sadness. At the time, I didn’t understand, but just a few weeks at Mustard Seed Preschool taught me why this story had made her so upset. Every class was a new lesson in my own uselessness. The most common, and most hated, feeling of my school day was that of my voice catching in my throat.
In my many years living in the U.S. since then, I have noticed that Americans will often describe Koreans, or Asians in general, as combative and competitive. But this aggressiveness arises partly from Korean culture itself and partly from the broader immigrant experience. As a non-native English speaker, every single time you journey beyond the front doors of your house you need to be equipped for a fight. And that equipment is whatever quality of language you can manage to muster. A native American will look at Willa Cather’s character, Mrs. Shimerda, and see an ungrateful, vain, crude, and harsh-spoken woman. A fellow immigrant, however, will see a woman who believes her everyday experience is a modest crusade against people who want to take advantage of her family’s linguistic and cultural handicaps. But as many immigrants, Mr. Shimerda and my parents included, have realized, there is hope always for the second generation—in the form of an education in English.
Therefore, growing up, I equated language with power. For me, to speak English was to be American, and to be American was to be powerful. I became obsessed with speaking the language beautifully and perfectly. I also became obsessed with personal success, the one way that immigrants like me believe they can punish America for their early years of hardship. But for a long time, I resolved that I would become a native speaker, but never a native. I would glean all of the benefits that this country and language had to offer, but never lose myself in a culture that had disparaged, sometimes laughed at, my Korean heritage.
But time has shown me that language and the culture that gave birth to it are not things you can just partially embrace. When you inadvertently come to love a language, you become the language. Today, English flows through me, and fills my head up with words that I find to be beautiful. A language I once needed to fulfill my most basic needs in life—order food, ask to go to the bathroom, push my way past in a crowd—has become a language in which I learn, in which I love, and in which I now find myself.