by Annie Choi
“Did you golf today?”
“No, not today.”
“You didn’t? Then why are you wearing the visor?”
“Because it part of set.”
“That’s a set? But you said you didn’t golf today.”
“So?”
“So, why are you wearing golf clothes? Why aren’t you wearing normal clothes?”
“This normal clothes, Anne.”
My mother, the one who used to scrutinize Korea’s version of Vogue, the one who taught me the difference between Kenneth Cole and Cole Haan, now looked like she shopped exclusively at Golfsmith and singlehandedly exhausted all the plaid in Scotland.
“Mom, are you going to change before we go out to lunch?”
“I did change.”
“Well don’t you think you should put on a dress? Something pretty? You can’t go out like that.”
My mother exploded with laughter. She grabbed my arm and clutched it to her chest, shaking me. The plaid on her clothes quivered, giving me mild vertigo.
“What? What’s so funny?”
And then it occurred to me that I sounded like my mother.
My face turned into a gigantic eggplant, for what child wants to sound like a parent? I was even holding back. I had nearly asked my mother to clear her crap off the kitchen table, which was cluttered with old mail, church newsletters, phone books, and a pile of muddy golf tees.
I rolled my eyes and left my mother chortling in the kitchen. I walked into the master bedroom and took a peek into my mother’s closet. I was aghast. I saw what seemed like hundreds of collared shirts, in plaids and stripes and even animal prints—tiger and zebra. I wondered if my mother ever mixed prints, so predator and prey could meet on the lush green hills of Los Robles Golf Course. Her drawers exploded with overly pleated shorts in a dizzying array of oranges, greens, purples, and puce. Her stylish dresses and skirts were pushed aside and crumpled to make way for windbreakers, golf slickers, and sweater vests. I shook my head. My mother has always been fashion-savvy, so what if hers were the best threads on the links? What exactly were the badly dressed golfers wearing? I shuddered.
I picked up a shopping bag from a pro shop off the floor. It contained an extremely chunky green wool sweater with a giant appliqué of golf clubs and a ball. The price tag was still attached. I sprinted back to the kitchen.
“MOM! HOW COULD THIS COST ONE HUNDED AND TEN DOLLARS?”
“Anne, it on sale!”
“Are you out of your mind? No one should pay for a sweater like that. It should be free.”
“It style! It Callaway, very famous. Make golf club and clothes.”
“Well there’s the problem. Companies that make golf clubs have no business making clothes.”
When did my mother forego sensible, silk blouses for wallet-gouging, wooly mammoth sweaters? What happened to that elegant lady? And, more importantly, why was she wearing a visor indoors? Golfing had ruined her fashion sensibilities and my eyesight.
“Anne, you ready to go lunch?”
I flinched at her outfit. I had a choice here: I could force my mother to wear something civilized, or let her be her and let me be me, which in this case would be an accomplice to the worst fashion felony since 1982, when my mother forced me to wear a puffy barber-pole-striped dress that had matching pants attached underneath. This outfit, meant to offer the femininity of a dress with the safety and comfort of pants, put me in tears because I couldn’t figure out how to take it off to go to the bathroom. The surly hag of a recess aid—the one everyone feared—had to help when she saw me jogging in place with my hands cupped around my crotch.
“Yeah I’m ready, but can you take off the visor?”
“No, I tell you, it part of set.”
“Take it off.”
“No, Anne, I say no.”
“You can’t wear it. I won’t let you. I can’t eat with you if you’re wearing a visor.”
“Anne, why you make Mommy angry?”
“Why are you wearing all that plaid?”
“Why you get you clothes from trash can?”
“This jacket is yours.”
“No I think you wrong. I never see this jacket.”
“OK fine I bought it at a store, but come on, take off the visor. Do that.”
“Anne, NO.”
We ate at California Pizza Kitchen and my mother babbled loudly about golf—she had just volunteered to organize the next church tournament. I hunkered in the corner of our booth, hoping the power would go out.
STROKE ORDER
Although my brother and I were born in America, Korean was our first language. My parents never taught us English because they only had a small working knowledge of the language—hello, excuse me, thank you, how do I get to the 101-freeway? By the time I was born, my parents had been living in the States for five years, and they had found ways to work around their limited English. As a chemist, my father spoke and wrote in the international language of elements, compounds, and formulas. My mother had taken English classes at a community college, but she didn’t practice her skills much because she sought out other Korean immigrants. She didn’t need English to buy groceries or drop off dry cleaning or get a haircut—merchants in Los Angeles’s growing Korean community offered goods and services at prices lower than their English-speaking counterparts with none of the embarrassing hassle of staring blankly at labels and faces. Though their English has improved considerably since immigrating thirty-five years ago, my parents still struggle with the language today. Whenever I watch a movie with my mother, she tugs on my sleeve every ten minutes and asks me to translate, not into Korean, since I’m incapable of that, but into a simpler version of English.
“What happen?”
“Leonardo DiCaprio is in love with the girl, and other guy doesn’t like it.”
“Which one Leno Decrap?”
“The short, blond one—yellow hair—with the big head.”
“Why that man tie Big Head to table? Why they fight?”
“Because he’s in love with the girl, too.”
“I not understand—why they fight now? Boat sink, who care? Everyone drown and they fight? This movie so silly.”
“Mom, shh, there’s still another hour.”
“Hour? Oh my gosh, how? Boat sink in ten, fifteen minute!”
Befuddled by the rules of English and all of its illogical exceptions, my parents figured that English should be something that my brother and I learned in elementary school from trained professionals. The rest of the family shared this sentiment as well. My cousins, who knew only a mouthful of English words when they immigrated, were dropped into the American school system, and they figured it all out eventually,
My mother tells me that as I child I was shy at first, but after I warmed up I was quite chatty. I talked to my relatives in Korean, played Korean games, and sang Korean songs. Even my stuffed animals spoke Korean to each other. My first word was ohm-ma, or “mommy.” Korean was what I knew. But then I entered elementary school and suddenly what I knew was not what everyone else knew.
On the first day of kindergarten, my mother took me to my classroom and handed me my lunch. I sat down, ate it, and in five minutes I was ready to go home. When Mrs. Smith began talking, I realized that not only was my mother nowhere to be found, but also I had no idea what this stranger was saying. Just like a few other children, I started wailing, “Where’s my mommy?” but I cried it in Korean. Of course, no one understood, but Mrs. Smith figured out quickly that I didn’t want to be there. I wept, sputtered, and sniffed and I kept on looking at the door, expecting my mother to rescue me like she always did whenever I had a major freak-out. When Mrs. Smith bent over and put her arm around me, I screamed. Mrs. Smith was shaped like a pear and had tight dark curls that set off her pale, ghostly face. She wore a large silver stopwatch around her neck and had long purple fingernails that curled menacingly. This was not someone I wanted comfort from; I wanted someone who smelled like garlic and sesame
oil and had delicate, thin fingers with trimmed nails.
Mrs. Smith took me to a room with long tables where young children squirmed on one side and adults sat patiently on the other. There were pictures, blocks, and spiral notebooks littered between them. The school administrators gave an IQ test to every incoming kindergartener—in English. Even though it was clear that I didn’t understand the language, I still had to take the test to prove that I didn’t understand the language. I don’t remember many specifics of the test, but I do remember one particular question the tester asked me.
“Which picture is a steeple?”
He held up three pictures and motioned for me to point, repeating the word steeple rather loudly, the way some people do when they talk to a non-English speaker, as if increasing volume will somehow increase comprehension. My choices were an American flag, a group of stars, the top of a church, and a tree. I chose the flag. Even if they had asked the question in Korean, I’m pretty sure I would’ve gotten it wrong. I wasn’t going to church yet and I had never seen a steeple before, at least not the kind white people put on their IQ tests.
If one could fail an IQ test, I suppose I did. School administrators labeled me “special,” and every morning my mother sent me to Mrs. Smith, who then ushered me into a “special” class just for kids who didn’t know what a steeple was. I was in a remedial learning class because the school didn’t have an English as a Second Language specialist. My brother and I were the only two non-English speakers in the school. We were also the only two “Orientals.” (Actually, I’m wrong, there was also Otto Ho, but he was fluent in American things like Mexican food and Three’s Company, so he didn’t count.) I joined the remedial learning class half of each day, along with a mentally challenged girl with enormous glasses that made her eyes look like gigantic russet potatoes. We didn’t really belong together, since she spoke English and I didn’t, and I could button my own clothes and she couldn’t, but this is where I learned how to speak, read, and write.
Despite the language barrier, I still managed to make friends. The nice thing about kindergarten is that you can play with other kids and don’t really have to talk. You can just jump rope, swing, and get sand in your pockets. Occasionally you throw a fit or whine when you want something. But no kindergartner ever asks if you have a gong or came over in a boat or eat dog—all of that comes later. But as I made friends, my mouth began shaping English words into mostly coherent phrases. And that was the beginning of the end, as it were.
Children learn languages quickly, and English began replacing my Korean. By first grade, I spoke in Korean and any word I didn’t know, I just replaced it with the English word. Whenever my mother asked me, in Korean, what I did in school, I would answer something like this: Korean, Korean, merry-go-round, Korean, slide, Korean, Korean, fingerpaint, Korean, Korean, sandcastle. My parents would teach me the Korean word, but I ignored it. There was no sense in learning the same word in two languages, right? I figured as long as my family knew what I was talking about, it didn’t really matter which words I used from what language.
My brother and I attended a mostly white school in a mostly white suburb far removed from Los Angeles’s Korean community, which was downtown and afflicted with downtown problems like crime, homelessness, and substance abuse. Our neighborhood had parks, crossing guards, and mountain trails afflicted with mountain problems like cacti, ticks, and poison oak. Everything around me was in English—classes, books, television programs, menus, signs, labels, voices. By second grade, I had absorbed all that English and spoke mostly in English to my family. I did, however, sprinkle sentences with a few Korean words. When my mother asked me what I did in school, I would answer something like this: I sang a noleh, played handball with my chingoo, and drew a geleem of our house. I had a lot of jehmee.
My parents still spoke to me in Korean, and I understood them perfectly, but I answered in English because it was easier. English, not Korean, was the language in which I now thought and dreamed. At seven years old, I was exploring language like my classmates. I enjoyed English tongue twisters, puns, jokes, and tall tales. I liked listening to poems where English words created rhythms and patterns I hadn’t heard in the language of our home. The Korean versions didn’t interest me because I had no one to share them with except my family, and what was the fun in that?
My parents recognized my waning Korean as a problem. First, my mother showed me videos of Korea’s answer to Sesame Street, which I thought was boring because what I really wanted was Sesame Street. Then, she gave me Korean picture books, which also failed to keep my attention. My brother, whose Korean had also degenerated, rejected all of his Korean books and preferred his Hardy Boys and Star Wars serials. Eventually my parents realized it was time for more formal measures to make us read, write, and speak Korean like Korean people. They enrolled Mike and me into a Korean school held on Saturdays, and really, that is what all children really want—more than a trip to Disneyland or a Golden Retriever puppy—a sixth day of school.
The Korean classes were held at a junior high school about forty minutes away from where we lived. I felt odd sitting in such a foreign classroom, one without colorful banners, watercolor artwork, and an aquarium with caterpillars. Instead, there were D.A.R.E posters, large maps, and diagrams of the human body (on which many students, including me, pointed to the crotch and giggled). Though I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me into the first grade of Korean school. I had to start from the beginning, they explained to me. My brother, being three years older, was in a class designed to teach Korean to older students—the pace was much faster and the homework load much heavier. Most of my classmates were my age, in the same situation—they too had become more inclined toward English than Korean. My teacher was a middle-aged woman who pointed to students with a ruler and occasionally slapped it on a desk when we answered incorrectly. She was short, had greasy skin, and her hair was a gigantic, frizzy mess. She looked like a Korean troll and for a while I was convinced she lived under a bridge, or perhaps one of the freeway overpasses. She passed out large sheets of paper and had us copy the Korean alphabet over and over and over again. And then over again.
The Korean alphabet doesn’t have an l or r sound as Americans know it. The closest sound is somewhere between l and r. Oddly enough, it is similar to the t/d sound in the word water (when it is not pronounced in the ennunciated Martha Stewart way—“wat-ter”—or in the garbled Philadelphian way—“werddur”). The sound of this Korean letter is subtle. As air moves out from the throat, the tongue gently flicks the roof of the mouth, behind the front teeth. It’s like a quiet purr or a gently rolling r. However, the letter, called lee-ul (maybe ree-ul?), looks nothing like the sound. It looks like a backward s, but instead of a curving, serpentine shape, the Korean letter is written with horizontal and vertical lines. It’s like the 2 on a digital alarm clock, the kind with the red numbers that burn into your retinas when you can’t fall asleep.
When I first learned how to read Korean, this letter deceived me. I pronounced it like an s, as in strenuous, not like the t as in daughter. It was confusing and part of the reason why I got held back in Korean school. At the end of my first year, my Korean teacher told my mother I was reading at a kindergarten level. I didn’t even know kindergarteners could even read—apparently they could in Korean school. So, I was forced to take the Korean first grade twice.
“Anne, you make Mommy so mad, weh gongboo ahn heh?”
“I do too study! I gongboo everyday! It’s my sonsengneem. She’s so mean. She doesn’t like me.”
“Always excuse. You fail and now you take eelhanyong again. Ayoo, Mommy hanadda! So shame!”
“I hate hangook hagyuh! I don’t want to go—ahn ga shipoh!”
“No, you say wrong. Say ahn gagoo shipoh, not ahn ga shipoh.”
“I don’t care. I’m not going!”
“Anne. You. Have. To. Go.”
Somehow my mother and I understood what the other was saying, though we d
idn’t really listen to each other. Because my mother’s English and my Korean had large gaps in vocabulary, we developed an awkward Koreanglish. We pulled words and phrases from both languages and transitioned so seamlessly that I often had no idea what language we were speaking, or yelling. Sometimes, in arguments where my mother yelled at me completely in Korean, I responded completely in English. It was a power struggle, a battle for turf. She felt more comfortable in Korean, and wanted me to argue in Korean, where I would have a distinct disadvantage. I, of course, wanted it all in English for the same reason.
The second time around in the Korean first grade, I got a teacher who focused on “having fun.” She drew silly pictures to teach words and gave us word searches and comic strips, but no matter how enthusiastic she got about vowels and consonants, I hated learning Korean. It was infuriating enough having to go to “regular” school Monday through Fridays, learning the increasingly complex rules by which numbers and English words operate, but on Saturdays, I had to learn a whole new set of rules for a whole new alphabet, while my “regular” friends went to birthday parties and sleepovers and played Atari. Then on Sundays, I had to go to Bible school. I went to school seven days a week. I also attended dance classes and piano lessons, practiced piano everyday, and had to choose between swam and swimmed on my Mommy homework.
The intensity of my schedule caused my grades in “regular” school to slip, and I received B’s and B+’s on my tests, which horrified my mother. Though learning Korean was important, my American education was the priority. Despite my protests, my mother cut my dance classes to give me more time to study—I had preferred to cut piano instead. Still, by the time I got around to my Korean school homework, I was just too exhausted to read and write sentences and memorize vocabulary. And when it came time to read a book where Jesus appeared as a cartoon figure and write a paragraph about why I was blessed, I fell asleep. Fortunately, Bible classes didn’t have grades, but my teacher told my mother I couldn’t even name all the commandments, which was true but, really, my mother didn’t need to know that.
