“Native Tongue”
I.
In August, I visit my parents in the suburbs of Atlanta to spend two and a half weeks with them. It’s a trip that I feel called to make, one where I hope to learn more about my parents’ stories and to prove to them my own maturity as a thirty-one-year old.
Upon picking me up from the airport, my dad and I grab a bite to eat at Longhorn Steakhouse, my parent’s favorite restaurant. Against the towering, puffy booth behind him, my dad stares at his menu when he gives his order, avoiding eye contact with our server Cindy. His words fall out like the runny yolk of an egg and Cindy keeps looking at me when she asks questions. What kind of side do you want with that? she asks. My father looks at me with confusion, as if Cindy is speaking in her own runny yolk language, and I point to the menu, showing him where the crispy brussels sprouts, elbow mac and cheese and loaded baked potatoes sit. He scans the options and decides upon sweet potato sprinkled with brown sugar, stating his choice with downcast eyes.
My father’s been in the States for about 40 years. He knows English, uses it on a daily basis at the glass business that he runs. And yet, in this situation with a white woman named Cindy, he is reduced to an immigrant who barely knows how to read. And I am his American daughter, his translator.
A few days later, my father and I go to a Korean restaurant with my grandmother to eat soondubu. My father says the customary “chogiyo” to get our server’s attention and then spits out a fast, strong string of Korean. He is commanding the orchestra of his native tongue, of his native people. Sitting across from my grandmother, who speaks very little English, I ask her what my father was like as a boy. I form the sentence in Korean, which ends up sounding like this: young father, how was he? My grandmother’s mouth flounders and I tug on my father’s shirt for assistance. He bounds in with the question that both me and my grandmother can understand. He is so different from the man I saw at Longhorn, where he was dwarfed by the colonizer in a Western-themed restaurant that paid homage to the pioneering and claiming of Native land without acknowledging the lives that were captured, diminished, and killed.
II.
While in Ha Noi, Vietnam three summers ago to complete a capstone project for graduate school, an Indian tourist tells me that Vietnamese women are so coquettish and shy. This after a salsa class, where we sit on black leather banquettes in a small, curved room, where coffees and juices are being served to us in beveled glass cups. We are the only fluent English speakers amongst a group of Vietnamese people and we sit next to one another, as if by accident.
I want to laugh in his face at the absurdity of the comment, which quickly turns into a quiet rage. How would he speak if he wasn’t well-versed in Vietnamese? Would it be with such confidence and bravado? I stew on this as we make small talk. He tells me he’s here for a business project. I ask him how he knows the women he’s with. He says he’s just met them. I don’t know anything else about this man. I don’t know his culture or his history, what the shape of his oppression is or isn’t.
Instead of diving into his life experience, I think about all the times I have heard these assumptions. Asian women who don’t speak at all must be quiet and shy. I remember a moment as the only Asian girl in the classroom, a yellow dot on a whiteboard. Our teacher asks us where the comma should go in the sentence she has written. The weather today is nice she said. The answer pops in my head and my arm tingles as my palms get sweaty. Will I be the first person to respond today? Am I willing to take up that space? What if I get it wrong? I wrestle with these questions for too long. The blonde boy in the back takes my answer.
I wish this tourist could pause to witness these Vietnamese women within their community, maybe he could then see how their mouths expand to fit the sounds that pour out, how their tongues wrap themselves so artfully around the words that neither I nor he can speak. And yet, we have forced upon them the language of English because English means power and opportunity. It is in this way that their mouths contort into silence.
III.
After eating soondubu with my dad in Atlanta, we drop my grandmother off at a house she is staying in. I bow my head to the woman who is taking care of her as she speaks Korean to me. I guess that she is telling me how nice my grandmother is; I also think I hear her tell me to hug my grandmother. So I do, reaching down for my tiny halmoni whose stature has shrunken to at least 4’10.
My halmoni’s hands lift from her walker as she embraces me; I feel her bones underneath the sheer vest she wears. It feels like hugging air.
I nod my head a few more times as the woman speaks to me, trying to think of a response other than neh. Neh is a word I grew up saying to my parents. When they called my name, I’d respond with neh. If they asked me if I was hungry, I’d say neh. When they told me to do something, I’d sometimes say neh. Neh isn’t simply yes or what or okay, neh is so much more than that enco0mpassed into one.
And yet, neh is the only word that can come out of my mouth when surrounded by native Korean speakers. It’s my shield to avoid embarrassment and shame. If I say this word adeptly, maybe they’ll never know how much of a fraud I am, how lacking in language I am. Maybe I could pass for a Korean Korean.
IV.
In that same summer in Vietnam, I am at the Noi Bai airport in Ha Noi, waiting patiently to check in for my flight to Cambodia. Out of the corner of my eye I see quick, aggressive movements and flickers of white skin and blond hair. Moments later I hear the tornado behind me assert, Are you open? After a few minutes, she darts to the empty priority counter, where a lone Vietnamese check-in officer sits behind it. The traveler’s voice sings out, slicing into the air.
Hello, why isn’t there a line? This is the VIP line, I am VIP but there’s no line.
The check-in officer moves the “closed” sign to the middle of the desk. The traveler continues her rampage. There is no sign and there is no line. Where’s the line? Why wouldn’t you check people in when you’re just sitting there doing nothing?
She uses her command of English as a weapon, with her tone and volume sharpening each blade with every word, a stronger opponent to the quiet and broken English of the Vietnamese.
My initial reaction is rage. I quickly pull up my phone’s camera to record this atrocious behavior, trying to quell the fire that is building. How could she speak to people so rudely? Why couldn’t she just wait the five minutes to get her boarding pass like the rest of us? Who does she think she is?
But I also remember how I have been in situations like these. I have spoken rudely to many customer representatives. I have lost my temper at strangers because I was tired, hungry, emotionally wrecked, or just straight up triggered. And yet, watching it, watching the power dynamics of language takes me back to an experience that belongs to my parents. I hadn’t yet been born when they owned the gas station in Atlanta but I can see my mother, eight months pregnant with my sister, working the cash register. A man drops a six-pack of Bud Light on the counter and she tells him the total. $5.25. He passes her a five across the scratched linoleum counter. She accepts the bill and asks for the remainder. Twenty-five cents, please. He looks at her as if the words she’s speaking are her own mother tongue, not his. I don’t understand, he annunciates into the air. You said five, so here’s five. My mother glares at him and feels that deep well rising within her. Another white person who asks her to prove her worth, to prove her citizenship, her American-ness. She clenches her jaw, silently nodding her head for the man to leave. The moment stays with her, seeping into her bloodstream, passing through the umbilical cord to my sister and then, a few years later, to me.
V.
One day, in the midst of a fight with my mother in middle school, I tell her that no one can understand her. She looks at me blankly, a shield for the river of sadness that courses through her body. She doesn’t respond to the comment. Instead, she circumvents it, returning to the very thing we were fighting about in the first place: my grades.
To this day, I think about how hurtful that must’ve been to hear. I imagine my own non-existent child telling me that the language that I speak, which isn’t my own native tongue, isn’t good enough. If I was a Korean child born in Korea, such realities might have never been achieved. I imagine a world where my mother and I would understand each other with a fluidity that I have only experienced with English speakers. I imagine her as a white woman and me as a white daughter, the picture-perfect duo as seen in “Gilmore Girls” or “The Brady Bunch.” But what is the use of imagining when my reality sits in front of me so starkly? I will never know these experiences because my parents and I will never speak the same native tongue.
VI.
About two months into my time in Ha Noi, I meet a Korean woman who is there with a cohort of start-up entrepreneurs. They are all Korean, ranging from their 20s to mid-40s. We click instantly because of our shared blood. Come over and have dinner with us, she says. I put on a linen dress and meet up with a group of Korean Koreans over a meal of galbi, banchan and soju. They joke and converse over the sizzling meat, pouring one another rounds of soju. I smile and laugh, generally understanding every second or third word. The woman who invited me translates from time to time.
The man to my right, who has spent decades in America, asks about what I’m doing in Vietnam. I turn my body towards him as my tongue prepares for my English response. I see the man sitting across from me glance over as I talk about the project I am working on, his head juts up and down as his gaze returns to the sizzling meat. I wonder if this isolated movement serves as a furtive signal to the others that I am a Korean American, a gyopo, not a Korean Korean. I try to bat the idea away, to shred it and blow it upwards into the vent that sucks up our meat smoke. I want this moment to end.
But it doesn’t. I spend four hours with them that evening as we move from the restaurant to an Airbnb. I watch their faces flush red as they down the third, fourth, fifth Corona. Their curiosity and courage increase as the hops absorb into their bloodstreams and I can see the unspoken question in their gaze. How much does this gyopo know?
The moment comes after the second case of Coronas is ripped open. They ask me if I speak Korean. I respond with neh. Say something, they exclaim. I pause, leafing through the rolodex of Korean phrases I know.
Neo, joogeullae? I say with the best accent I can muster.
They look at me stunned and then roar in laughter. The empty beer bottles dance on the table as their fists slam down. What better way to signal your Korean-ness than to ask a table of strangers if they want to die.
VII.
A few weeks ago, I head to my local Korean grocery store for the usual stocking up of essential ingredients: gochugaru, gim, tteok, kimchi. The last thing on my list is pork belly. As I walk by the counter, I see a Korean man preparing items behind the cold case of meat strips. The first time I pass, I say nothing. The second time I pass, I wonder if I should speak to him in Korean. I consider the words I would say, stacking blocks together in the same way I used to write wobbly English letters as a child. I become confused about the sentence structure and release the effort, convincing myself that I don’t really need the pork belly right now.
When I check out without the pork belly, another native Korean speaker greets me. She tells me the total and I try to process the numbers without looking at the screen to test my Korean. Baek, chil. 107. I nod my head with a neh to signal my understanding of the numbers as I put my card into the machine. The chip isn’t taking and the woman explains to me in Korean why, as she plucks the card back out. I continue nodding, understanding her through a combination of words and actions. I want her to think I know the language, that we are the same.
Eventually the card works and I thank her in Korean, wheeling my cart out and releasing my bound tongue.
VIII.
Throughout my time in Vietnam, I try to learn the language. At night, I pull out my Duolingo app to guide me in learning new words. I pick up a few phrases but none that really allow me to communicate effectively.
Towards the end of my trip, I join a group of university students for an education program. They are able to practice their English as they speak to me and other American students. The days are long and packed as we ride buses from one site to another, learning about shrimp farming in the Mekong Delta to sustainability practices in a non-governmental organization.
On one bus ride, a young girl sits next to me. Her English is probably the best of all her friends who peer at me from behind the seats. She tells me about how her mother advised her to not eat much because of the time her hips blossomed in her sophomore year of college. She holds onto the foreign shape of English as it clings to her mouth and I listen to the familiar halting of non-native English speakers. My own brain feels too tired to grasp onto anything, much less formulate another sentence of the most basic English I can conjure.
I rest my head back and look out the window, willing silence, willing reprieve. I feel bad for shutting her out and I know how hard she is trying. I am learning how hard it must’ve been for my parents, to try and understand a language that wasn’t theirs to begin with. I imagine them, in their mid-20s, roaming around America in the 1980s. Receiving quizzical stares as they annunciated the words for “fuh-ried-uh cheek-een-uh.” Collecting long pauses as they searched for the English word that was on the tip of their brain. Calculating the numbers – all those numbers – translating them from English to Korean and back to English to do the math.
I wonder if my parents’ lives would’ve been easier if they had stayed in Korea. Maybe they opened up more doors for their children here, but was it really worth it in the end?
IX.
Last week, I see two friends who are fluent in Korean. I ask one of them how my mother tongue sounds.
She doesn’t say yes or no, just that my intonation is off.
I know as much. When I say Korean words, instead of hearing the sounds that roll so naturally out of my parents’ mouths, I hear a white person trying to speak a language that isn’t theirs. I see this in the way Korean eyebrows furrow as I drop a Korean word amidst a string of English. Oh you mean bbang, they’ll say, pronouncing the two Bs with a sharper bing! than I could muster in the moment.
I have to really try to speak my parents’ language. I want so badly for it to be mine, as well. I want so badly to no longer be an imposter in Korean and in English.
I think about this. Is it very American of me to try to claim something? To want to achieve ownership of a culture that will never – and should never – fully be mine to claim?
To belong is a verb. But belonging can be a noun. In English, we talk about belongings as property. We also talk about belonging as acceptance. In this way, do we conflate ownership with acceptance? Perhaps. Perhaps I am striving for belonging in the American sense. Instead of trying to claim my Korean parts, what about embracing them and accepting them for where they are now? Instead of lamenting a bond that my parents and I will never know, what if I understood that this is how we were meant to be and that language isn’t the only thing that is keeping us apart?
A few days later, my brother texts to tell me that my grandmother’s birthday is today. I promise myself I will call her. He makes a joke that he has his Google Translate app ready to go when he calls.
The hours pass quickly through the day, and I miss the window of opportunity and don’t want to call her too late. I promise I will call her the next day.
The next day comes and I push the task out of my mind. I’m running away from discomfort, disappointment, awkward silences, fractured Korean. I’ve never spoken to my grandmother alone on the phone, without my father or mother nearby to hand the receiver back to. I think about how I would have to tell her who I am, because she doesn’t have my phone number saved. I think about how I don’t even know my grandmother’s favorite color or food, or even how old she’s turning. And then I think of all the times before this, when my grandmother would speak to me in her strong Korean voice and how all I could do was nod my head and say neh.
I tell myself that next year I will call, when my Korean is better.
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“Three Motels”
A few years ago, I visited my family over Christmas break. My father and I went out to dinner one evening, just the two of us. We picked a local restaurant in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the servers wore plaid button downs and couldn’t wait to tell us about the IPAs on tap.
Over plates of medium-rare steak and grilled fish, I asked my dad about my keun samchon, a term we used for my father’s middle brother. How is he? What is he doing? When did you last talk to him? My father responded in the manner I am used to – evasive, sparse, winding. So I dug deeper.
“Remember that time keun samchon crashed our minivan?” I asked through a mouthful of mashed potatoes, refraining from discussing the possible DUI.
My dad nodded, his head bowed over his seared meat.
“Why don’t we see keun samchon anymore?”
“He’s busy.”
His answer hung in the air as the noise of the restaurant swirled around us. I fluffed my mashed potatoes in a repetitive motion, willing momentum in my words. The waiter stopped by and broke the silence. I smile at him and told him everything was “Great!” I could feel my words beginning to catalyze.
“Remember when you gave keun samchon money a few years ago? You were so angry with him. Why were you so…angry?”
With this question, my dad paused. I could feel the sigh his body wanted to expel. It was the same sigh he embodied when I probed about our family’s secrets. But when he looked up at me, I saw something different this time. Instead of the glass wall I was used to, I saw a lifetime’s worth of exasperation in his eyes.
“Your uncle…he just likes to have fun all the time. Ever since we were young. He just wants to have fun. He doesn’t take care of his family. He gambles all his money, he drinks too much. He just wants to have good time.”
By the time he finished talking, my wheels were squealing in overdrive. Like an engine that’s been brought back to life, my brain was moving forward and backward in time at the speed of light.
In the late 1980s, around the time I was born, my father, along with his father and two brothers, would broker several motel deals that would set the course of our lives. Through a series of handshakes, broken English and signed franchise contracts, they eventually secured three motels for all three brothers. The motels – both new and old – were close to one another, as in right next door. The Hampton Inn, my father’s, sat proud and tall as the newest, two-story building. Across the bustling street of Lee Highway, my dad’s youngest brother had his Econo Lodge, which was only a few years old. The middle brother managed the motel right behind my father’s – a Ramada Inn that was the oldest building and was barely visible from the road, eclipsed by my father’s Hampton Inn.
My father is the eldest son of three. He was born in 1955 and maintains the title of filial son. When my grandfather died in 2016, my father made all the funeral plans and greeted all the guests. He and my mother moved to Atlanta a few years later, right before my grandmother underwent chemo to ward off cancer last year. He visited her every day, slogging through rush-hour traffic in the outskirts of Atlanta, where the Google Maps view is a cluster of angry red veins more often than not. He made the 45-minute drive there and back after a long 10-hour work day.
The youngest son is my jag-eun samchon. He came to the United States at the tender age of 19, following his parents and older brothers. After a few years, he went back to Korea to find a wife, where he met my aunt and swiftly brought her over. Together, they have three children. Our grandmother lived with him and my aunt for a brief period, moving in after successfully fighting off the cancer. She continued to dote on him, even though her body could not care for him. “How will he survive if you don’t prepare him dinner?” she asked my aunt.
Our middle uncle, keun samchon, raised two sons with his wife, who he met through my father. He came to America after serving his mandatory military service in Korea. My dad shares the same birthday with him, just two years apart. I don’t know much else about my keun samchon. Where my father is sharp features, my uncle is soft. I remember how jolly my uncle would get at our family get-togethers. The brothers would play Go Stop with their father, the tiny rectangular cards peppering the table with empty cans of beer and flecks of dried squid. My uncle would stumble and we would laugh.
At these gatherings, before the booze and the games, the three brothers would walk off together to smoke cigarettes and talk business and family. Once my keun samchon stopped coming, it’d just be my dad and his youngest brother, swapping $20, $50, $100-dollar bills so they could dole out the proper New Year’s Day amounts to me and my cousins and consulting each other on their respective business plans.
My keun samchon was the uncle with the Ramada Inn. From Lee Highway, a paved road wound back to the motel, whose exterior looked dingy and dusty compared to the crisp angular corners of my father’s Hampton Inn.
Compared to my memories of the indoor pool at the Econo Lodge and the tiled hallways and expansive pantry of the Hampton Inn, I don’t remember spending much time at the Ramada. The only memory I have is walking into the office one day, which sat on the first floor, looking suspiciously like a former motel room with its desk and striped couch. Upon entering, I found my dad sitting on the couch with his two brothers drinking beer. He ushered my four-year-old self to sit on his lap. As I made my way there, I remember watching a gruesome scene unfold on the small television box in front of them: a man had been trapped with aliens who held his eyes open with metal wire contraptions, pouring milk into his eyes and stuffing brain parts into his mouth. Later in high school, when I’m still thinking about that movie scene occasionally, shuddering at how scary it was, I’ll watch Clockwork Orange and wonder if the milk and eye scene is what I actually saw. I’ll convince myself that it must be it as I watch the certainty of that former memory disintegrate like sand.
While diving into nostalgic conversations to patch together my family’s history, I asked my cousin, the eldest daughter of my youngest uncle, about the minivans after learning from my father that we actually had two. “Do you remember the silver one? The one that keun samchon crashed?” She paused over the phone and I imagined her eyes rolling back into her head as she flipped through her rolodex of memories. “I thought we had a burgundy one, but I don’t remember the silver one,” she said with slight uncertainty. She then revealed that her own father had gotten in a car crash, with the burgundy minivan.
I asked my dad later about the burgundy minivans to see if he remembered that crash. He said no.
Like the scary movie scene, I wondered if I would ever find answers sifting through these delicate memories that crumbled and morphed with every conversation. It felt like recounting a dream that, while so vivid upon waking, turned to dust as soon as I tried to bring it back to life.
As confirmation that maybe I would never know the true answers, I sent a version of this essay to my cousin only to have her gently correct me like the nicest body check ever received. Her father owned the Ramada Inn, the one who’s presence was hidden from view. Which meant my keun samchon, my middle uncle, ran the Econo Lodge, the motel I remembered the most fondly. How convenient that my memory would assign the lesser-than motel to my keun samchon; was I reaching for metaphors that never existed?
In the early 2000s, the Ramada Inn was the first to go under. And then the Econo Lodge folded after that. My father’s motel was the only one of the three that remained.
My jag-eun samchon moved his family to the suburbs of Nashville when I was 12 years old. They rebuilt their life there, opening up a gas station and then a car wash. They bought a used Escalade and sent their kids to a well-esteemed public school. They lived among privileged white people, reaping the benefits within reach.
My upbringing wasn’t much different. My siblings and I were sent to prestigious private schools and my parents drove us around in their secondhand Lincoln Navigator and Mercedes Benz. We were given everything we wanted and needed, and yet I saw the limits of our finances through the girls who wore designer clothes I could never afford and went on trips that I could only dream of.
My keun samchon’s story was different – it had always been different. He sent his kids to a less-prestigious private school and lived in a smaller, older house. After the crashed minivan, I’m not sure what kind of car my keun samchon drove. When his motel went under, he moved to Atlanta with his family, where rumors swirled about divorce and my aunt’s job at a retail store. Even today, they remain unconfirmed and unspoken of.
His eldest son, my cousin, came to a family gathering once without his family in tow. His glasses were cracked and, when we asked him about it, he brushed it off. He was saving up money for them.
It was in those moments that I saw the differences in our lives. The middle son, my keun samchon, was not even able to pay for his son’s glasses. Or maybe it was that his son didn’t want his father’s help. Maybe his son had realized how unreliable his father was, resenting him for his drinking, gambling, and unpredictability.
No one talked about my keun samchon. I’d hear bits and pieces in the forms of whispers and aigoos.
Five years ago, after my grandfather died, I learned that my keun samchon had another business deal that had gone awry, that his business partner had run away with his money. My grandmother would learn of this and be beside herself, my mother and aunt holding her hands to calm her down.
When my father told me over dinner in Chattanooga that my uncle just wanted to have fun, I thought of all the times that I wanted to have fun and how it was all a disappearing act from all the pain I felt.
“Remember how I couldn’t stop drinking or throwing up my food? Don’t you think it’s the same for keun samchon?
“No, you were different. You got better too.”
I thought about all the times I stole money from my dad, the various calls he got from either me or my principal when I was in trouble, the lies he caught me in. I thought of how long it took to explain to him how sick I was, how with each therapist or treatment program I went to, I had to clarify why I was doing this. “I am sick, I need help,” I would say to him in the most basic words I could find. At one point, my father asked why I couldn’t try harder, as if I just needed to access some discipline. I told him it didn’t work like that, that my story was not his.
My father came to the States when he was 23. He caught onto business quickly and stepped into his role as eldest son. He made plans and continued to pave the path that his own father had started. He is the only brother with a college degree from Korea.
When I was 23, I was celebrating a year of sobriety and a shaky four months in recovery from my bulimia. I was still in college, racing to finish my bachelor’s degree because I felt like a failure graduating a year late when all of my peers were decorated with grad school acceptance letters and jobs that sounded important. At 23, I was still reliant on my father for money, working at my parents’ small hibachi restaurant on the weekends. At the end of my shift, I’d take $60 from the register even though the tips only amounted to $20. My mom furtively nodded in approval, all but whispering “Good job” in Korean.
I wasn’t an adult at 23. I was an infant reborn, learning how to do many things for the first time. The year leading up to my 23rd was trying to survive nights without the crutch of booze and throwing up my food, learning how to handle stress appropriately, understanding the meaning of naps and what it meant to go to sleep without substances, making friends based on a shared interest other than getting fucked up, examining my relationship with my mother and all the ways it defined me, and reuniting with my childhood dog, Spike. I spent evenings alone with him, swaddling him in blankets and singing him lullabies – things I wished my mother had done with me.
When my father was 23, he also experienced firsts. But different from mine, perhaps more serious than mine. He navigated a language that he had only studied. He signed contracts and built a business in a culture he barely knew. He married and raised children with a woman he had been dating for three years in Korea.
But my father survived with a tenacity that I still fail to understand. My father is stoic and generous. He works hard without complaining and still lavishes us virtually with exclamation points. My father has always been that man, the one who wanders off at the mall with his hands clasped behind his back to busy himself, while his wife and two daughters spend hours browsing the sales racks. He never complains, never says that he is tired or hungry. My father just is.
Just as my father’s and my stories are not the same, my uncle’s story is not my father’s. As a middle child myself, I feel my keun samchon’s pain. The middle child, the one that evades the responsibility that saddles the oldest, sinking further and further into the shadows as the youngest is born. I recognize my own positionality within my family. How, to a certain extent, my acts of self-harm were a cry for help while my brother, the one and only golden son, eclipsed me in importance.
Growing up, I watched my mother shower my brother in hugs and kisses. He clung onto her like the mama’s boy he still is today. I taunted him and mocked him, but only in retaliation for the cool and critical feedback I received from my mother.
I learned about an experiment on attachment recently, one where a baby monkey is given a stuffed cloth toy and the other is given a metal rod. The former monkey grew up feeling more nurtured from the warmth and softness of the toy, while the latter monkey received none of that. I resonated with that story, as the shirked middle child who had an iceberg for a mother rather than a stuffed bear.
While growing up, my cousins and I were close. We lived within minutes of one another as children, our fathers buying homes the same way they bought property for their businesses. We’d gather at one another’s houses and stampede up and down the carpeted stairs in a game of tag, sounding like a herd of elephants. My uncle’s Econo Lodge had an indoor pool that we spent many birthdays at, running around like little Tasmanian devils with Styrofoam noodles squished in between our legs and screaming into the echo chamber of chlorine water and stone walls.
My cousins represented Korean Americans before I knew the word. We grew up with our parents who represented a country we knew nothing of. But we learned many things from them. Like how to accept money with two hands, how to sniff out perfectly ripe kimchi, how to roll our bap into sheets of gim or lettuce. We also learned how to say hello and thank you in Korean and how to bow low to our grandparents on New Year’s Day.
We also learned the deeper feelings of what it meant to be Korean. We learned how to sweep things under the rug and avoid talking about the very thing that was asked about. We learned about shame through the way our mother’s sucked in air through their teeth, the way they shook their heads or slapped us.
But we are were taught different things because no two cousins or siblings are ever alike.
Each of our families boasts an eldest child who inherently carries that legacy and responsibility, whether it’s pitching in the most money for a present or feeling the unshakeable sense of duty to care for our aging parents. But our families only have one other middle child besides me and my uncle: my younger cousin, the son of my dad’s youngest brother.
Growing up, my younger cousin and I shared a similar mischief in our blood. I saw it in the way we laughed about a joke we made at our sibling’s expense and rebelled against authority. I felt it in the way we’d occasionally side with one another in a game of tag, as if it was us against the world. I heard it when, eventually, I lived with him at the age of 23.
I spent my first few years of recovery in Knoxville, Tennessee. After fleeing the South for more cosmopolitan opportunities in New York only to hit rock bottom, I had landed back in my home state with a new, sober outlook on life. My cousin was in the same city, attending the same university. He needed a roommate and I remembered our kinship as children and accepted eagerly, forgetting the battle royals we had engaged in before: the time I yelled at him for not coming to New Year’s Day because he was too hungover to come and all the times I fiercely defended his younger sister when his sadistic ridicule became too much.
I forgot all of that and unwittingly signed myself up for sleepless nights of Adderall and drunken stumbling at 2am. In my newly sober state, I began to watch what felt like a documentary about my life, delivered in horrifying familiarity by my cousin – the constant drug use, the non-stop partying, the shunning of responsibilities, and the anger. The anger. My cousin and I fought like middle children, screaming “fuck off” to one another through our paper-thin walls.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” my cousin yelled through the phone. This was after he learned that I was going to keep his security deposit because he had refused to clean the house on our last day.
“I hope you learn a lesson and grow the fuck up,” I retorted, feeling like my blood was going to spew chunks of lava out of my skull.
We hung up on each other, each of us simmering in anger and resentments – a lifetime’s worth of trying to make sense of our emotions and feeling ignored, misunderstood, and antagonized by our families. In that moment, it was hard for me to see my cousin’s suffering in my newly-born state. I was a baby foal, learning how to walk for the first time, my long, bony legs shaking underneath me. I was reactive and blind; I was trying to survive.
Only now can I understand how my cousin may have also been caught in a game of survival, doggie paddling in a sea of drugs and alcohol as a means of feeling okay. I wonder if he saw me as the enemy in the same the way we had pitted the world against us as children. My own healing as a middle child had been dismantling that narrative, the one that tells me that the world is out to get me – that my mother is out to get me. I wonder if he felt the same way.
It’s been almost nine years since that fallout and my cousin and I have never talked about this period in time. Despite seeing him at various family gatherings over the years, our past remains a memory that feels like it’s meant to be forgotten. Like the hundreds of stories that our parents refuse to bring back to life.
I never saw my dad and uncles fight in this explosive way. But sometimes it takes two middle children to tango. I wonder what my keun samchon would be like as a fellow cousin. I wonder if we would lock arms and engage in a battle, only to come to a divisive standstill.
These days, I want to reach out to my keun samchon, to tell him that I get it, that being a middle child sucks and that our families and society have a way of really messing us up. I want to tell him that he is not alone, that sometimes we need more than just discipline to battle our inner demons.
And yet here is my reality: even if I could see my keun samchon today, he and I still have a language barrier that seems impossible to penetrate. He speaks to me with hand gestures and the shuffling of his feet. I speak to him with smiles and small bows of my head.
This past Christmas I found myself on Zoom with my cousins. I hadn’t seen some of them in a long time, years maybe. But there we were at the end of 2020, connecting despite – and maybe because of – the challenging year. We were six consecutive squares that linked the eight of us together, each of us peppered across the United States in all three time zones.
Looking at my cousins’ faces on the small Zoom squares, I thought about how different we all were and I felt sadness that some of our burdens are heavier than others. I wanted to ask the sons of my keun samchon if they resented me because of the life they had to lead, the hardship they had to endure. I wanted to ask my fellow middle child cousin if things were okay between us, if he had forgiven me because I had long forgiven him. But I felt afraid. Afraid that resentments would come to life and unlock centuries of unspoken realities that our parents and ancestors had long since buried.
Instead of sharing all of this, I smiled and waved. We asked each other for life updates and gave tours of our respective living spaces. My dad and jag-eun samchon made brief appearances and seemed less interested in making the connection over a screen, showing either only half of their faces or waving like a small moving statue in the distance.
My middle child cousin left the call halfway through. He was tired and wanted to take a nap, he said. We watched him disappear from the screen, his siblings looking at us with a simple shrug.
Even though my keun samchon was absent, I still subtly searched for him in conversation. “How are your parents doing?” I asked my cousins. They both responded the same: “My mom is good, she’s still in Atlanta doing her thing.”
Nothing more, nothing less. And to honor our generations-old tradition, I refrained from asking further about my keun samchon. I watched him shuffle back into my memory, disappearing into the abyss of unnamed secrets I have yet to uncover.
About the Author
Jen Shin is a Korean American based in Portland, Oregon. Jen’s writing focuses on addiction, exploring the impacts of identity, race, and intergenerational trauma. A participant in the Pacific University’s Residency Conference, she has a website up and running at www.jen-shin.com
With ten years in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia, through her writing and mental health advocacy, Jen hopes to reach communities of color to destigmatize the stigmatized, decolonize shame, and encourage healing. She’s an Anaphora Arts Fellow and has been published in Beyond the Margins and with zines + things. She is an essayist and author of Have You Received Previous Psychotherapy or Counseling?