THE BALANCING ACT

Christina Lee
University of California, Davis

I
’m only whatever my parents wanted for me in utero.
Books, TV show characters, acquaintances—that’s what they claimed to
have helped determine the name of their fourth child and that fourth child’s
identity from then on, and that’s what they assumed would be best for me: to
be Christina and Huiyeon.

That was their first misconception.

Three years old, face pudgy with baby fat. I grip puzzle pieces with my stubby fingers,
those seashell fingernails visibly pink on the TV screen. My mother, who stands in
CREATIVE NONFICTION

front of me holding the camcorder, had most likely painted them on for me.
“What is your name?” my mother asks me in Korean on-screen.
“Huiyeon,” I answer, fidgeting around, a typically restless child.
“What will your teachers call you when you go to school like a big girl?” she presses.
My face fills the screen, the timestamp in the corner reading, “2004.” I turn to
the camera. “Keu-ri-seu-ti-na.”
On the screen, I reach my small hand out to touch the camera lens, but as I sit
silently watching my younger self, the oddity of the passing moment lingers. My
mother on the screen must have praised me afterward or moved onto the next bout
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of interrogation to capture on camera, but my mind urges: “Rewind. Rewind to the

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second when I hear myself pronounce my own
name in a Korean accent,” as if the syllables rested
uncomfortably in my three-year-old mouth,
clashing against my baby teeth in a struggle to
escape as a sound that would supposedly be
uttered in the future to identify me.
Keu-ri-seu-ti-na. I had managed to say my own
name in a succession of five syllables, a name
that should only take three.
There had to have been an exact moment that I
stopped pronouncing my name in this way. There
had to have been a moment when my tongue
underwent an unconscious metamorphosis,
shifting, conforming to a foreign frame. It must
have been the day that my tongue stopped
curving in the way of Korean vowels and
consonants, instead adopting the shapes and
trickling fluidity of English letters.
When was this?
It would have certainly been before
that one day in the middle of
first grade when my teacher,
holding the door open while
saying goodbye to her HE CALLS
HIMSELF A
students, caught the eye
of my mother who waited
nearby. My teacher struck up MAN OF NO
IDENTITY.
a conversation: “Christina is
doing great in my class.”
I blushed and suppressed a
smile, pretending to be modest.
My mother did not smile. Instead,
she opened her mouth, suddenly
exposing my unfavorable tendencies to my
teacher, making me feel a kind of shame that
I could not put my finger on at that time but
nonetheless still feel vividly today as a self-
inflicted attack on the roots of my identity:
“Christina doesn’t talk in Korean at home as
much anymore.”
My teacher frowns. My mother smiles. There it
is, the shame.
This was the second misconception: that my
father thought telling the story at the dinner
table about his youth would stay at the dinner
table as a nonchalant show of effort to somehow
connect with his daughters. That I would laugh
at it then and forget about it later.
Sitting at the head of the dinner table, my
father recites the well-known tale from his high
school youth as an immigrant: how he spent
his school nights reading novel after novel—
twice the work assigned to him by his English
teacher who understood the work necessary for
my father to learn a new language—yet never
understanding a single word and spending most
of his time flipping through the dictionary.
My father jokes that he speaks zero languages,
referring to his evolving Korean accent molded
by his years living in the United States—
something peculiar that his father-in-law once
pointed out upon meeting him in Korea before
my parents’ wedding—and his imperfect
English pronunciation, not quite perfecting the
vowel sounds simply as a result of learning the
language in his later teenage years.
He calls himself a man of no identity. Going
by “Chul” throughout high school, my
father had shortened his already
brief, two-syllable first name
to accommodate the tongues
of students unfamiliar with
his origins. After college,
my father legally renamed
himself to “James.”
I imagine that this transition
from Chul to James couldn’t
have been as straightforward as
learning to sign five new letters
with a pen or introducing oneself
with a new syllable of sounds.
There I am on the TV screen. I’m crouching
in the hallway, still three years old with the
puzzle in front of me.
I look up at the camcorder in my mother’s hand,
glance down at the scattered pieces at my feet,
and insist in Korean, “I’m not doing it anymore.”
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On days particularly sluggish and punctuated
with mundane topics of conversation, my
mother will lean her back against the couch and
tell her version of a story about the countless
times she and my father spent looking through
books and pamphlets of names, trying to
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find the perfect combination of sounds that
would sit well in their mouths and identify
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 their newest baby. They agreed that the name
shouldn’t be uncommon enough to prompt
brow-furrowing. It should be appropriately
universal and translatable in multiple
languages, and it should destine me for great
things and simultaneously accommodate my
father’s penchant for nine-letter names. My
parents settled—I would be named Christina.
Keuriseutina, reminding me of my first years
of testing the linguistic waters, awkwardly
fitting the English syllables in a mouth with a
tongue only meant for uttering Huiyeon.
Keuriseutina, a demonstration of my mother’s
own discomfort with my English name, the
unfamiliarity of the foreign syllables resting in a
mouth meant for eu, ah, and ee. The woman who
gifted me hair that only shines brown in the light,
who feels unnatural when referring to
me by anything other than Huiyeon.
That woman teaches me to repeat
the syllables exactly as they left
her mouth: Keuriseutina.
I SEARCHED
FOR ANSWERS.
Sixteen years have passed,
and I can still picture myself
in the floral summer dress
trailing on the hallway carpet.
The baby crouches, assembling
As, Bs, and Cs. This is one of her
first experiences grappling with the
English language. She then mugs at the
camera, trying to elicit responses from her
mother who films the baby’s every movement
as documentation of who she once was.
Without warning, the selfishly dubious and
one-sided part of me emerges to ask, “Why
was my mom so upset about my growing
distance from the Korean language when she
has placed that expectation upon me since
the beginning?” The small-minded Christina
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goes back to that day in the first grade, the
embarrassment of being shamed by the adults
I trusted the most, the confusion of being
expected to balance English and Korean,
American and Asian, all within the small
hands of a six-year-old.
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The third misconception: that names are easy.
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I wonder why my father opted for a brand-new
English name for himself over his Korean one
while my mother clung onto hers. I wonder why
my English name was chosen to overshadow my
Korean middle name according to the nature of
simple succession. I wonder why my identity had
been decided before the day I was born, how it is
that I would be American first, Korean second.
Meanwhile, I searched for answers. I taught
myself to write my Korean name in its original
Chinese script, and I compared memorizing
those common Chinese characters to learning
the Greek and Latin roots from middle school.
I learn that Huiyeon is “bright lotus flower.” I
learn that my mother’s name means “lotus
flower” as well. I spend the next several weeks
looking at photos of lotus flowers, reading
poems about lotus flowers, drawing those
blushing petals of lotus flowers.
I also find an image of an oil
painting: Raja Ravi Varma’s
artwork from 1896. The Hindu
goddess Lakshmi stands
poised in the heart of a
blooming lotus flower, two
of her four hands delicately
grasping the stems of smaller,
budding ones. Later, I learn
that East and Southeast Asian
cultures embrace the lotus flower
as a symbol of life and resilience,
noting the plant’s ability to revive itself after
long periods of dormancy, as the flower blooms in
warmth from the depths of murky waters.
Perhaps my mother knew this. Perhaps she
had bestowed that hopeful concept of resilience
onto her last daughter through a Korean name
symbolizing the lotus flower. I’m my mother’s
daughter, the one who still carries with her the
shame from the first grade whenever she utters the
sounds of the Korean language. I’m the daughter
who learns to be resilient, to recover from those
embarrassing moments, to come back after years
of struggle and confusion in her original state
or—better yet—to come back improved.
Like Lakshmi, I want to hold onto the ends of
things that tend to bloom. The label of Asian
in one hand, American in the other. The two
flowers in the form of the English that I speak
to my friends and the Korean that I speak to
my grandparents, both languages possessing
the potential to bloom, to become an integral
part of my identity.
If I could hold my two names in my hands
as Lakshmi holds those flowers, I would.
Rather than first introducing myself with, “I’m
Christina,” I would show the names residing in
each of my palms, each name weighing down
equally as heavily into the skin of my hands,
Christina and Huiyeon displayed with the
same amount of importance—not one after
the other—but with balance, becoming the
dichotomy that can complete “me.”
My father never became “James” to his parents
and two sisters. Likewise, my mother never
went by a monosyllabic version of her given
name to her family in Korea.
What really is the difference between my
parents and me?
Perhaps we are all struggling to find that
balance, to know when to respond to James
or Chul, to Christina or Huiyeon, to figure out
how to hold these names between our fingers,
whether we must bring each higher or lower, to
find that perfect balance.
Perhaps it’s the struggle itself that stabilizes
us: the occasional annoyed looks we receive when
we speak in Korean at the store, the peculiar
back-and-forth of asking and responding in
both tongues at home. Perhaps that’s the beauty
of it all; when we cannot find that one word that
sits comfortably in our sentences, we switch.
ups and downs. I disregard them, just like I do
when a lady stares at my family speaking in Korean
at a Target. Instead, I let her be, and I let myself
be. I let each half rest in my palms, balancing my
weight, managing my breath, just like the puzzle
pieces in my pudgy three-year-old hands.
And the grandest misconception: that I had
looked closely enough.
I admit that I hadn’t observed the things that
balance not only me, but my parents—a mother
and a father who decided on Christina but also
Huiyeon, who taught me to write Hangul but
also bought me the English alphabet puzzle of
my childhood. If only I had searched for the
right things, and if only I had known that the
hands of the mother and father who taught
me twoness weren’t only weathered from age,
work, the sun. If only I had known that we are
more similar than we appear.
Because if you stare, squinting, searching,
just barely seeing enough, you’ll see something
familiar. Creased and flushed with the weight,
their hands—my parents’ hands—are not one-of-
a-kind. They’re balancing, and they’re familiar.
They look just like mine.

The next misconception: that it’s okay to blame

the one half of us that doesn’t feel adequate on
a certain day, and the other half the next day. It
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means poisoning our own duality with unrealistic

expectations of what “could be” when the beauty
lies in the reality of what “is”: the twoness. It means
belatedly recognizing that we derive meaning
from the synthesis of both our halves, regardless
of each one’s strengths and weaknesses.
I later learn that these pros and cons of
experiencing “twoness” come and go like moods,
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like erratic weather, so I learn to disregard these

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