When people realize I am bilingual, there are usually a few things they want to know. Starter questions, if you will: Do you dream in English or Korean? Which language do you think in? Do you translate between the two languages in your own head? How are you so good at English? 

 
I laugh politely. The truth is that sometimes even I am not sure when one language ends and the other begins. I read English books while watching Korean movies, write English essays while texting in Korean, give presentations in English and laugh about them with my friends in Korean. Within my slippery dreamscape, I speak some strange amalgamation of both. I never consciously think about which language I am thinking in. There are words in both languages that I cannot translate, certain gaps in my understanding. There are things I can say in Korean that I cannot say in English, and vice versa. 

My bilingualism is not so much a translation as a conscious rejection of it. To be translatable is to be binary, forced to pick between an origin and a target language, and subjected to the expectation of faithfulness to an original text. But what would I be faithful to? Who would I be translating? What could I reasonably claim as my original text?

Recently, I have been asking myself: Why can’t I be both? Why can’t I be fluid? I can’t shake off the idea that defining my bilingualism as a state of constant translation, of conscious switches between languages, means chasing my own tail forever. At some point, I begin running in circles—this could be a better essay written in Korean, but there are things that are better expressed in English, but there is a word in Korean that I really want to use, but you could also substitute that word for this phrase in English, and so on. I don’t want to be pacing back and forth between English and Korean, trying to translate my existence into a tongue that is always intelligible.

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A few weeks ago, the Brown Daily Herald sent me a staff demographic survey. One of the questions was: Is English your first language? I was given two options, yes or no. I paused, considered for a moment, and skipped the question. At the time, my answer felt deeper to me than simply an exercise in memory—although I truly didn’t remember if my education in hangul began before, after, or during my enrollment in English-language kindergarten. To select either option felt like a claim to one identity, and an abandonment of the other. 

To say Yes, English is my first language, I felt that I became, somehow, less international. This was neither good nor bad. I would have liked not to be a foreigner, to some extent, or not to be perceived as one. This option allowed me to innocuously become less foreign, less immigrant, through implied early association with the lingua franca. But did I really want to be American? I had never seen myself as one, so why did I want to squeeze my eyes shut and tell myself that being someone different was was suddenly desirable? Did my desire to belong here ring so deep that I was willing to renounce my language for it? 

When I consider my relationship to English, something always lingers in the back of my mind. It is the feeling that I am not supposed to speak English, that these words I am writing now are only mine because my parents could pay their daughter’s way through an international school. My English is a product of good fortune more than anything else—I keep thinking about the many lives I could have led in which I learned English as a second language in the confines of textbooks. 

I feel unnatural, manufactured. Wholly manmade. 

Speaking English in Korea was equivalent to going against the grain, the natural way of things, the life I was meant to live. It also implied that I had to forge something worthwhile out of my education since we had already given so much to the pursuit and fruition of it. I don’t consider myself a native speaker of English the way Americans might because there were strings attached to the English alphabet I learned: a silent agreement that an English education was an investment in my future, that my fluency was a debt I would have to repay to God knows who. I had to be good at English. I had to be in America. Otherwise, what would all of that have been for? Where would all that money have gone? 

After deliberation, I think I told the Herald that English was not my mother tongue. The term “mother tongue” implies a home, a family, a mother. It reminds me of the place that birthed and raised and challenged me, not the country I feel obligated to die in. 

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Now I realize I consciously rejected identification with the monolingual majority when I was in Korea, not knowing what a privilege it was to be able to live with a language coherent with the person I am. I still remember laughing with my friends over our pronunciations of the word “latte”—where Koreans split the word into two sounds, la-te, we (because we weren’t Koreans) would repeat the word in our American accents. Why would you say it like that, my friend would giggle. They can’t understand you. 

Not being understood was a privilege we carefully hid. My mother would sometimes tell me to only speak Korean when I was out with my friends. She’d never tell me why, but I knew what was implicit in her advice. To speak fluent English indicated certain things about our socioeconomic status: wealthy enough to pay for a private, English education, to pay for a college education abroad. It was the privilege of being in proximity to America in a country where 89% of its citizens indicate favorable opinions of the US. English set us apart, made us different, maybe even better—but in doing so, it alienated us from the country we lived in. 

I came to truly recognize the extent of our isolation when I was in sixth grade. On a class trip to a golf course, my friends and I had been casually talking in English when one of the workers came up to us and said: Do you think you’re better than us? Those words and my mother’s warning had been built on something very real: an underlying sense of unfairness that we were given the opportunity to learn things they could not. It was the acidic feeling that, just by speaking, we were rubbing our privilege into their faces—the privilege granted to us not because we were better, but simply because we were lucky. Language indicated this chasm: us vs them, me vs you, the haves vs the have-nots. 

I understood that, to some, I was no longer Korean in the same way that they were. I did not have the same claim to my country that they had. In my head, I rationalized this: The world in which I had been raised and educated was different, and the English alphabet was proof of it. I told myself that this estrangement was not surprising, because while they had been born to live here, I had lived here only to leave. Thus, as I grew older, my English redefined itself from a shared joke to a personal burden. 

Therefore, it is difficult for me to grapple with my bilingualism and the consequences of my education. No matter how many Korean books I read, I will never be able to communicate in Korean the way I can in English. It’s a paradox that I am more eloquent in my second language than I am in my first, that I am pursuing a university degree in my second language when I probably speak the same level of Korean as the average high school student. That I will grow more and more distant from my home, my mother tongue rotting in my mouth, while living the language I am beholden to. I am torn between pride in my accomplishments and a profound sense of self and national betrayal. My fluency feels like an abandonment and condemnation of Korea, linguistic and otherwise. 

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In late October, a friend and I made the four-hour train ride to New York City to see a K-pop group performing there. When the members began introducing themselves in Korean, I started to cry. It was then that this amorphous feeling—betrayal and confusion and displacement—took the shape of fear. Before that moment, I had not understood that to be fluent in English did not mean that I was comfortable in it. My American accent didn’t mean that I wasn’t constantly thinking about things that I’d said that a native speaker would have said better, or that I wasn’t listening to my friends speak English and secretly picking phrases from their conversations to use later. What did it matter that I could participate in class discussions like a native speaker? To be forced to exist in a language I didn’t recognize as entirely mine was another challenge I had not anticipated.  

So, the realization that I did not need translation to understand what the members of the group were saying had driven me to tears. I think it was perhaps the strange newness of that experience that affected me so deeply. I’d never lived in a place where I’d had to make an effort to speak Korean, and I realized that, subconsciously, I’d forgotten that those places could even exist. That was the first instance I felt truly homesick in the two months I’d spent in the United States. I’d had to come face to face with what I lacked to recognize that I’d suffered, even unknowingly, from the absence of it. 

Korean is my mother tongue. Now, I am forced to reckon with the consequences of being foreign to it—for the past few weeks, I have found myself increasingly overwhelmed by the idea that, impossibly, I am losing what used to be so certainly and effortlessly mine. A few days ago, I was practicing for a job interview that would be held in Korean. I’d given myself a list of possible questions and was attempting to answer them on the spot. No words can explain how damning it felt when I realized that I was now translating from English to Korean—that somehow I was wishing that the interview would be conducted in English, because my Korean, even to me, sounded broken and unprofessional, and because there were words I wanted to say in Korean that I could not come up with on the spot. 

I texted my friend: I’m scared they’ll ask me a question in Korean and I won’t be able to answer it. 

She responded: No way. 

But to me, this was a real fear—why did I sound like a foreigner in my own language? How could this happen to me? I’d sounded out my own unscripted answers just to find that I’d used the same five academic terms over and over again, and even then I’d stumbled over the pronunciations of words that I’d never even thought about before. Who was I without this? Who was I without my mother tongue? Who could I even hope to become?  

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In her 1982 book Dictée, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes: “I speak another tongue, a second tongue. This is how distant I am.” 

For some reason I cannot explain, I know that there is a chasm between the place and language I left and what I will return to come December. I am afraid that I will discover that nothing is as I remember it: a rude awakening that spurs the realization that there is simply no way to return to, or belong to, the country that I left. That things will always change, and thus, as a person that left one home to become a foreigner in another, I will never exist wholly in one country. 

To me, my bilingualism is no longer proof of my competence, intelligence, or socioeconomic status. It is, rather, evidence of the distance between my country and me, my family and me, my mother tongue and me, me and myself.