“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.”

– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For three months in the summer of 2019, I lived in Seoul, South Korea, staying with extended family, studying at Ewha Women’s University, and teaching English at a cram school. I had hoped that during this trip I would improve my Korean skills, learn about Korean history and linguistics, and experience Korean social life as an individual, rather than just a gyopo, or “overseas Korean.” When I had visited South Korea before, I had always had my parents or older sister to rely on for guidance and company. In retrospect, my pride rested on this trip: I needed to prove that I had grown up and that I knew myself well enough to be alone in a country that, despite my proximity to it through heritage, remains foreign to me.

“Language fatigue” is a term that I’ve coined for myself to describe the experience of living immersed in the country of a foreign culture and language. I call it fatigue because I moved through every day in a haze induced by my inability – and soon my disinterest in trying – to speak. I felt in Korean the loss of what I had taken for granted in English. The comfort I so often found in writing burned away with every sentence I struggled to form and the journal I kept in English served only to remind me of everything I wanted to say that I couldn’t in Korean. The confidence I usually find in speaking seeped away as I tripped over every other word in conversation and, more often than not, stayed silent to avoid embarrassing myself. On top of all this, I was confused: had I left behind the Korean that so easily flowed from me back home? Alone in Seoul I realized that, while speaking Korean has always necessitated walking a tightrope, I no longer had the safety net of English to catch me when I’d inevitably trip and fall, so secure when held together by my family at home.

These are all feelings that I’ve only been able to begin to articulate in retrospect; hindsight has shown me that these feelings arose, fundamentally, from my self-centeredness in approaching my Korean heritage as a step towards self-discovery. I failed to really understand that “Korean-ness” is made up of a whole tradition, culture, and people that I am far removed from, that I have removed myself from in many ways. I experienced language fatigue as a consequence of trying to translate myself into a language that I have no real map of. I lacked – and still lack – familiarity with the composition of the world that I wanted to make a place for myself in and I moved through it blindly, thinking that if I could recognize the main roads, then I could take the back-alley shortcuts, too. The reality is that my existence as part of the diaspora is less about where I am and more about where I’m not, where I haven’t been, where I have yet to be.

Throughout my unexpectedly emotionally turbulent summer, what stayed constant was my reliance on the subway system. I felt I was in a state of perpetual loss – of words, of feelings, of security – while in Seoul, but every time I swiped into a station, I moved with the anticipation of a new adventure and the confidence that I would be able to find my way back home. On the subway, I felt no pressure to create my own map – there already was one, sprawling underneath, above, and around my favorite city in the world. Whereas every sentence I tried to speak carried with it the lonely effort of paving a path onto a foreign terrain, making my way from one city to another proved simple. What makes the subway so easy to navigate is its ubiquity; because everyone relies on it, navigating it is less a task of understanding where to go so much as following the people and cues of how to get there – something like language learning, but far more intuitive.

Though learning how to move through the metro system was a survival tactic, the subway stations themselves became my sanctuaries. At every stop, I would fill the time waiting for my train reading the poems that adorn the platform entrances. A cultural project led by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, they were installed to brighten the dark reality of glass doors put in place to prevent suicides. I noticed that almost no one ever stopped to read them, and it took me a few weeks to give them any attention, too. As I traveled alone from station to station across the sprawling city, I found company in these poems. I would miss train after train just trying to piece together what I could understand in them with what I couldn’t. I filled my notebook with my favorite lines and their poorly translated English counterparts and found solace in my personal linguistic cartography. Through my fatigue, I came to understand that language is vitality. If Hangeul, the Korean language, is Seoul’s beating heart, then the metro lines are its arteries.

For those of us raised away from the peninsula, literature is one way for us to familiarize ourselves with a cultural and linguistic topography that lies out of reach. For most of my life, I’ve felt proximity but little connection to my Korean heritage. Immersing myself in the imagined worlds of Korean literature has given me a better understanding of how I can navigate this distance. While at first the subway poems served to guide and accompany me wherever I went that summer, they later became the map that led me to the imagined places I want to find in Korean literature. Poetry and prose articulate the possibilities of worlds yet realized, brought to life by their anchors in reality; they reveal to us our own potential, and let us live openly in what is often hidden.  I credit the subway poems for drawing my eyes to something poetic about daily life in Seoul – Hangeul. While my capacity for Korean is still limited to the point that I rely heavily on translated work, I find comfort in knowing that I don’t need to be estranged from what is Korean just because it’s in Korean. I know now that I don’t need to find a home in “Korea,” as a literal or imagined place. What I need is a system by which I can navigate that pre-existing space, and as my grasp on Korean grows, the better suited I am to find my place in it. And until the next time I can really put a map to use in South Korea, I will get comfortable losing myself in its literary one.

Work Cited:

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 75.

Estelle Yim ’21 is a student of Linguistics, Government, and Translations at Smith College. Their studies are driven by an interest in the role of language as essential to the human experiences of identity and community formation. In addition to their declared areas of focus, they also have a personal, creative, and academic interest in literature and East Asian studies. They have a particular interest in critical discourse analysis and the ways in which language can be used to maintain and subvert power relations in local and global ways. After graduating, they hope to pursue an academic career in either Linguistics or Comparative Literature.

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