Phil Seo
Phil Seo: My Love-Hate Relationship with the Korean Language
“My Love-Hate Relationship with the Korean Language”
Phil Seo
My first words as a baby were in Korean. But being born and raised in Vancouver, I was speaking English by the time I started kindergarten. My journey to relearn my native tongue included years of Saturday morning Korean school spread across elementary and high school, an intermediate level UBC Korean language course, and a semester abroad in Korea to cap it off. In the end, my Korean wasn’t great, but it wasn’t horrible. What was horrible was when I was on exchange in Korea and taxi drivers would scold me saying, “Hey, you’re Korean, so why can’t you speak it properly?” Or little kids saying, “Why do you sound so funny?” Or relatives saying, “What a disgrace. You’ve got Korean blood, but you can’t even speak the language.” I ended up really hating having to speak Korean and often shut down and just stayed quiet, not able to fully express myself.
Fast forward to 2017 – I went back to Korea for the first time in 16 years. Now married with a baby, all those destructive memories of speaking Korean flooded back. But one thing had changed. Over the years, I realized that I needed to accept who I am, all the good along with the bad. My story is I had to deal with three decades of perfectionism to finally say, “Hey, I was born in Canada, grew up loving hockey, only had English-speaking friends, married a Chinese-Canadian, and had a “Chorean” baby, so it’s okay that my Korean isn’t perfect.” Not being able to master the Korean language taught me how to get over my fear of making mistakes. This is who I am, and I accept myself. So when I went to Korea this time, I spoke my broken Korean freely and loudly with all its unglamorous glory to relatives, strangers, and even taxi drivers. The result? I had an amazing time. I realized that once I changed my perspective, I was able to enjoy being who I am so much more. Learning Korean taught me something far more than a new language, it taught me self-acceptance.