Buchanan 1

Haebin Buchanan
Michelle Liu
ENGL 302 A
14 November 2016

Critical Story

I’ve always been a big music person. So, when Epik High, my favorite Korean

artist group, came to Federal Way, out of all places, for a signing event in 2009, I skipped

Bible study and made my way over to the Verizon store they were at. You know those

random things that people tell you and they just kind of stay in your head? Well, excited

as I was, there was one thing that they asked that stuck with me. “Have you ever dealt

with racism?” Without hesitation I told them no. Thinking back on it, I think it’s one of

the things I regret most: that I said no so easily because the older I grew, the more

prevalent the issue of race became. It’s not that I didn’t have my fair share of encounters

with racism, it’s that I had no way to identify what it was that I was feeling.

My mom does this weird thing where when we are out in public, she will speak to

me in English, but I have no idea what she is trying to say. I even got mad a couple times

telling her to just speak to me in Korean. What I didn’t realize is that I’ve been doing the

same thing all my life. I usually speak to my whole family in Korean, but out in public, I

felt the need to speak English so that other people didn’t draw the assumption that

‘because she’s Asian, she can’t speak English.’ With all the pride I hold, I hate feeling

like people are “looking down” on me for being someone I cannot change— Once, my

parents were in an accident that was not their fault, but the person in the other car saw

that my parents were Asian, automatically assumed that they knew no English and tried

to take advantage of that fact; As if them not knowing English resulted in them being

uneducated. Luckily, my dad grew up in the U.S. and didn’t allow the other driver to take
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advantage of them, but I think that incident left a mark on me. These little things I did to

“prove” I was American, I never knew why I did them. I just knew I had to do it to be

accepted.

It wasn’t until college when it dawned on me that other people didn’t wake up and

think the things that I did. As an Asian American, I was constantly worried about things

because I am not White, but never knew that, that was the reason why I thought the way I

did. But what, then, is the difference between being a White American and an Asian

American? Is it culture? Is it language? Although as Americans we speak English, could

it be that Asian English and White English are different? I could swear that I was a U.S.

citizen, with an American education, but I was always questioning my identity. And this

always went back to language. At home, when I spoke Korean to my family, I was

Korean. When I spoke English to my teachers, friends and strangers, I was American. For

some reason, language was the defining factor of my whole identity.

As I switched between my two identities, every now and then, I found myself

having difficulties with expressing my feelings through words. There would be Korean

words that perfectly described how I feel, but that word didn’t exist in English and vice

versa. So, then I resulted in trying to explain the word to friends through more words,

made up words and body movements. For example, the Korean word 답답해 (dab-dab-

hae) directly translates into ‘frustrated,’ but it means a little more than that. The meaning

of frustrated is “feeling or expressing distress and annoyance, especially because of

inability to change or achieve something,” but dab-dab-hae does not necessarily follow

the guidelines of frustrated. The way I described the word was by saying, “It means

frustrated-ish, but you don’t have to feel an ill feeling, but this describes the feeling you
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get when you want to implode,” while I hit my chest with my fist. This language

definitely was not the most scholarly (obviously), but I thought felt a lot less pressure

build up in my chest, than being content with compressing the meaningful word into

something that doesn’t do it justice.