Native Tongue
My shoes shuffled. I struggled to keep up on the unforgiving pavement as the line proceeded in a military-like fashion. This was how class 3-1 traveled, like a train of well-disciplined little ducklings, ordered by height—tallest in the front, shortest in the back, as if to shame those of us third-graders who had gotten the butt end of the genetic lottery. The January wind was cutting, and the cold lining of my blue blazer offered no solace. I shrank into myself. Perhaps if the fabric hugged my shoulders as it did the shoulders of my classmates, I might have felt less alone. But my mother, anticipating a growth spurt that would never really happen, had bought me a uniform one and a half sizes too big.
This line-up in the school courtyard was the last event of the day, and I was immensely relieved. My ears rang from the high-pitched Korean that had bombarded me for hours on end. The language moved with a rapidity and harshness I had never encountered with English, and seemed so much the pinnacle of efficiency that I was afraid of interrupting with my slower, softer speaking. I almost envied the girl in the seat next to me for her painfully obvious regional dialect. Her speaking marked her as a kid who didn’t belong in Seoul, but I thought it preferable to my dictionary-learned, English-tainted pronunciation, which seemed to mark me as a kid who barely deserved to be in the country.
During our Korean lesson, I felt trapped by the boxed shapes and uncompromisingly straight lines of my ‘native’ tongue as our class read an abridged, and as I would later discover, woefully inadequate translation of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince.’ While others happily gave themselves checkmarks on their responses, I sat confused and distressed by the fact that somehow the question of “What is the theme of this passage?” had a million answers in America but only one pre-ordained, unarguable, five-word answer in Korea: “The joy of helping others.” It pained me to reduce the story to that one phrase. I could not help but think that the phrase, like this cinder block school and this cold, foreign city, tasted like a mass-produced, factory-stamped Lunchables box.
My shoes shuffled. I struggled to keep up on the unforgiving pavement as the line proceeded in a military-like fashion. This was how class 3-1 traveled, like a train of well-disciplined little ducklings, ordered by height—tallest in the front, shortest in the back, as if to shame those of us third-graders who had gotten the butt end of the genetic lottery. The January wind was cutting, and the cold lining of my blue blazer offered no solace. I shrank into myself. Perhaps if the fabric hugged my shoulders as it did the shoulders of my classmates, I might have felt less alone. But my mother, anticipating a growth spurt that would never really happen, had bought me a uniform one and a half sizes too big.
This line-up in the school courtyard was the last event of the day, and I was immensely relieved. My ears rang from the high-pitched Korean that had bombarded me for hours on end. The language moved with a rapidity and harshness I had never encountered with English, and seemed so much the pinnacle of efficiency that I was afraid of interrupting with my slower, softer speaking. I almost envied the girl in the seat next to me for her painfully obvious regional dialect. Her speaking marked her as a kid who didn’t belong in Seoul, but I thought it preferable to my dictionary-learned, English-tainted pronunciation, which seemed to mark me as a kid who barely deserved to be in the country.
During our Korean lesson, I felt trapped by the boxed shapes and uncompromisingly straight lines of my ‘native’ tongue as our class read an abridged, and as I would later discover, woefully inadequate translation of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince.’ While others happily gave themselves checkmarks on their responses, I sat confused and distressed by the fact that somehow the question of “What is the theme of this passage?” had a million answers in America but only one pre-ordained, unarguable, five-word answer in Korea: “The joy of helping others.” It pained me to reduce the story to that one phrase. I could not help but think that the phrase, like this cinder block school and this cold, foreign city, tasted like a mass-produced, factory-stamped Lunchables box.