하나

You love the way the words fit into your mouth. A string of consonants, consistent intonation, tethered to an orderly alphabet. There’s a sense of stability, assurance that the vowels will always make the same sound. 

 

둘

You can claim that culture shock overtook your desire to assimilate in your first year, but by year two, it’s just sad. Justifying, there’s no reason to learn a language that would be discarded in two years. All of the signs were in English anyway. 

 

In the first weeks, I clung to the other staff kids who made the room feel too small. But the weeks wore on, and that personality draped loosely. You found a more suitable skin, one that let you pass as Asian, one that made you like yourself a bit more. 

 

셋

For what it’s worth, you can pat yourself on the back for being able to read. Easy, not immediate, the characters pull into focus, meaning derives as the sounds are said aloud. 

 

Of seven, you only had three with reading literacy. Three years of squinting at road signs, piecing together the sounds on the subway ads, passing crude notes littered with swear words during Chemistry class. 

 

넷

In your fourth year, your parents call you into their room and you start crying before they tell you. This was your last chance to get away, start a new life in Doha with new friends and a new house and a new school and a new personality. But he didn’t get the job and you’re told that you have another three to go. Hiccuping as I sobbed, I asked my parents if this means we’ll finally get a cat. 

 

다섯

He starts with swear words. Adding phrases to your iPhone keyboard with keywords that trigger autocorrect. Phrases magically appear in your texts that you can’t read. But it’s all about context and you became proficient in swearing people out without even knowing the alphabet. 

 

씨발 너 진짜 왜그래? 

 

Elbow-to-elbow, he wrote a litany of rude words underneath the gray table for you. Phrases written on sticky-note page markers that I added to an index card in neat lines. 좆, 응아니야, 개새끼, 병신. The patterns slowly emerged, I silently mouthed the shapes of the sounds during lectures about covalent bonds. 

 

여섯

An alphabet at your disposal, and you can only manage playground potty talk. You did try to learn verbs, though, string together polite sentences. Eager to show off your new skills, you ran up to her and repeated your new phrase. 

 

           What was that? Oh, that’s not what I thought you said. 

 

일곱

You want to learn, though. Everyone in homeroom fills up an entire whiteboard for you. The best insults, their favorite slang, when to use them in which contexts. 

 

But the vocabulary leaks. The online tutor who you thought would fix everything gets progressively disappointed with you each session until you stop going all together. 

 

(eight)

You hate the way you can’t even count to ten. 

 

아홉

Isn’t my mouth made to form the sounds of another language? I spent the first nine months of my life ingesting Chinese. No wonder my mouth betrayed me as I grew older. At the age of five, my parents sent me to the school speech pathologist to correct my r’s. When half days at kindergarten ended, our family friend would drive me to the big kid school where I waited in the staff lounge eating applesauce and watching Barbie Fairytopia. It was a good thing, right? 

 

열

They give you that pitiful smile, always switching to flawless English when you utter that broken phrase 한국말 몰라요. 

 

It rolls flawlessly. But they’ve never gotten mad at you, never said, you’re in Korea so speak Korean. They just switch. A nod of understanding, seamlessly asking you what you want. 

 

Because gestures and bowing can get you far, even when the words don’t fit quite right and you’re too embarrassed to mess up. 

 

Because you could never be good at it, even if you tried, and now you can’t help but blush every time you mention you lived there for seven years because you know that it’s shameful to not even have tried to learn the language.

 

Because I knew that even if I learned it, they would still switch for me, give me that pitiful smile, and ask me what I want.