Even Korean girls get the blues
by 400Windmills on April 03, 2006
As a Korean-American and also as a non-native English speaker/writer, I have begun to develop a theory about my literature, which I suspect may not be politically correct. By my literature, I refer to the literature that I imagine inside myself-- the one that makes sense to me to write, hopefully, in my future. The problem I am starting to come up against is the fact that there is very little record of what the fictional life can be for someone like me, who has read nothing except American and British literature my entire reading life (excluding the Bible), but has her fundamental culture rooted in Korea and immigrated Korea-in-America. How do I write what I imagine when (and here I think I am not being melodramatic) the simplest sentences of what I see and hear and feel have never existed in public print? It seems impossible. And also, it seems--inevitably--shameful.
I love how Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy write Anglophilia into their (non-sympathetic) fictional characters. As an unlikely Anglophile myself, it’s a relief to have someone call me out, run me through the (very literate) gauntlet, and help me laugh it off. I forgive myself because, at least, I am not as accomplished in my Anglophilia as some of Rushdie’s and Roy’s creations, who are monsters of self-fashioning. (I, on the other hand, would be a Pinocchio at best--and one day I will turn into a real little boy...oops that’s another post.) For someone who loves words, it seems only natural that one should love the words one has read-- I would even make the case, for myself, that it was actually the mystery of the new language, English, which I had to learn as a child after I had only barely learned to read and write my first language, Korean, that made me love it more. Even now I remember how I wanted to master it. It was more than that I needed English to communicate, so I could ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom before it became a catastrophe. I felt I needed it to be really truly heard, to become grown up.
Ironically, now that I have it, I have only the words of other people’s literature, not mine. To figure out how to make those words fit into my literature is a struggle, which I am desperate to master as I was to master just the basics of the language when, as a six-year-old, I immigrated with my family to the States. One of the problems of finding my literature is the fear that my literature is not as rich as “the literature,” which has had hundreds of years to develop--from the time of Chaucer, through Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, bell hooks. My literature has had only a generation or two to develop, and I am feeling the dearth. Worse, I am afraid to admit that this is how I feel, because I feel it is disloyal--and there is nothing worse.
Perhaps this is the essential problem of a hybrid literature that tries to match native experience with and within a foreign rubric. Still, problems have always been good for literature. So I have faith. But even Korean girls get the blues.
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