The dangers of a multilingual family

Writing a blog entry on my parents' computer is a strange experience. All of the links are in Korean, which I can read out loud, but have nary a chance of understanding without an English-Korean Blogger's Dictionary poised within my hand.

Thus, most of my navigating is through guesswork and trying to remember which links did what, for the layout is the same - merely the medium of communication is purely Asian.

As we eagerly await the upcoming trip tomorrow of which for the next two weeks, should I write on this blog, it will be broadcast live from South Korea, our family struggles with the dichotomy of being both Korean and distinctly American. While my parents chide me in my unwillingness to learn Korean before the trip to make token attempts at trying to communicate with my ancestry, they at the same time are determined to outfit us in the most American way possible, via board shorts and Hawaiian t-shirts. I assured my mother that my Norman, Oklahoma t-shirt will do just fine to broadcast the fact that I come from a country obssessed with guns and Paris Hilton's boobs.

My sister asks me why I don't take the time to learn Korean before the trip, since I am taking Korean 101 in the fall at school. My logic is thus: I don't want to learn Korean like a tourist does, hastily learning the counting system for money so that I may buy Asian trinkets to adorn upon my beautiful girlfriend, or how to say "I want more Sake" in native tongue. I would want to learn Korean correctly. To try and take this trip as some serious study into the language is like taking Intro to Calculus in the Fall, and then going to a multivariable calculus convention replete with stuffy professors who have lost all touch with reality in exchange of obscene amounts of information concerning mere numbers. Yes, I may learn some new concepts, but I will be utterly lost most of the time, and any information I gain will most likely be incorrect, inaccurate or just plain useless for my upcoming studies. Rather than waste brainpower in deducing the strange scrawlings on my Blogger website, I intend to use it for more studious things, like making Yahoo Messenger work on my computer so I can steal away several minutes of Dantzel's time from her employer to make clandestine conversations over the internets.

As I plan on minoring in Korean while at school and teaching English in the land of my fathers after I graduate from college, I feel I have plenty of time to learn the language and utilize it in a more suitable fashion in my near future. I certainly don't feel this will be the only time in my life I shall visit such a glorious land. In the meantime, I loathe sticking out like a tourist, rather hoping my decently Asian features will allow me to blend into the background and observe, rather than being observed like a circus animal, having Koreans walking up to me, attempting to practice their heavily accented English to one who is planning on becoming a journalist - a profession of which I recently described to David, the more artistically inclined language manipulator of us two - as the "engineers of English." Such encounters I'd find painful, though perhaps I could take the time to acquire an apprentice or two and instruct them in the finer nuances of the English language, practice for the profession I plan on pursuing in the future.

As much as I can, I will certainly try to find an internet cafe, which I hear litter the streets of Seoul, like a Korean Starbucks in Seattle. Such precious connection to the internet will of course, be used first to send emails to Dantzel, and then to update my blog. Expect some reports from the Orient soon.