Things in the Attic:
Of cassette tapes, memories and forgotten languages

The things one finds when one rummages through the attic. An old shoe box with dusty cassette tapes, for instance.  I listened to one of them, to check whether they were to be thrown out. The sweet voice of a little girl babbled away, telling stories, singing songs. That was me, when I was 5 years old. How surreal, listening to one’s childhood self. What totally flabbergasted me was that I was speaking Korean! Fluently and without the trace of an accent. Here we have the evidence. My parents were right when they said that we used to speak Korean like native speakers when we were little.

Yet we never spoke Korean in our family, but German. When I was younger, my father, a Korean, attempted several times to speak Korean with us. He eventually gave up because we resisted him and would not react whenever he addressed us in Korean.  Sometimes people express the notion that we must feel sorry now that he didn’t insist. Maybe he should have tried harder. Maybe he should have forced us to speak Korean. But my response is: no. No regrets. It just did not feel right for us to speak Korean with him. We felt awkward, so did he. We would have resented it greatly if he had forced us.

With each language comes a different way of behaving, and this seems especially true when switching from a European language to an Asian one. Korean is a very hierarchical language with many honorific forms. You cannot respond in the same manner that you are addressed, especially when conversing with an elder. Even though my father used the informal form when speaking to me, as appropriate for an adult addressing a child, I would have had to reply using a formal expression. This creates a distance between the speakers. It is considered to be respectful. But as children, we didn’t like that one bit. We spoke German with our father because the language helped us establish a closer, more intimate relationship. German allowed us to meet our father on the same level. We address him as “Du” (informal “you”). We felt that, in Korean, he’d stop being our familiar Papa and become “aboji” (formal: father), suddenly towering high above us, aloof and distant. This we could not, would not accept.

My father’s German wasn’t perfect and he spoke it with an accent, but that was never a problem. We still grew up speaking Hochdeutsch perfectly. Now and then he’d read us children’s books, and he taught us how to count and sing simple songs in Korean. As long as he kept it on a playful level, we did not mind.

We moved to Korea for two years in the late 70s. My father, without much ado, enrolled us in a local Korean kindergarten. Soon after, my brothers and I were babbling away in Korean as if we had always spoken it.

The radical change of environment and language was not traumatizing, as many adults would think. The first day of kindergarten was more bewildering. Everything was odd: the yellow uniforms that the children wore, the military-like exercises that they had to perform on the huge football field. The food that we ate. Not bread and ham, but rice and soup. And of course, the language, my father’s language, which suddenly everyone around me spoke. The other children eyed me curiously. “Waegug-saram!” they whispered. Foreigner. A lady came and took my hand. She said something I didn’t understand. But I trusted her because her eyes were kind. She turned out to be my kindergarten teacher, and she managed to convey that I had to put on a yellow dress, a bag and a cap. Yellow from top to bottom: I was a real Korean yoo-chi won girl. I liked it. Soon I became my teacher’s little pet and enjoyed the special status as a waegug-saram.

As a child, I soaked up Korean like a sponge. I made friends quickly, and interacted with ease with my Korean grandparents and cousins.  Communication was not a problem for me. It was easy to make the distinction between home/family language and environment language, and to switch between the two. Speaking Korean became a second nature to me.

After two years living in Korea we returned to Austria, to an exclusively German-speaking environment. This is when something interesting happened: I apparently “forgot” Korean. One day, my friend asked me: “Say something in Korean.” And I just could not think of anything to say.
   “Say, this is a house.” This should be easy. But the words would not come out! It was like my tongue was all twisted and knotted up. When I finally managed to translate the sentence, with a lot of effort, it sounded odd to me. I ran home, wondering why I could not speak Korean anymore.

What happened was that after we returned to Austria, I stored Korean somewhere in my brain, in a container labeled “Passive language to be reactivated only when necessary”. Speaking Korean wasn’t necessary for me anymore. My priorities were elsewhere now, like brushing up my German, and learning English (my parents sent us to an exclusively English-speaking school later on).

When in a German or English-speaking Environment, it is still very difficult, almost impossible for me to speak Korean. Yet I can still follow Korean conversations and surprise people when they realize that I’ve understood most of what they just said.

My relationship to Korean is one of love and frustration. I cannot and do not want to ignore that the language is a part of me and my heritage. I still know the songs from kindergarten, and the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that my grandmother taught me. But I have am also frustrated at the difficulty of the language, and at the fact that my tongue knots up every time I try to say a simple sentence. I took language and conversation classes at University to help things along, but the classes were too easy for me. It is not a matter of learning the grammar or vocabulary, but of simply overcoming an internal barrier and of “un-knotting” my tongue. Sometimes I ask myself why I am hanging on to Korean so much when no one in my environment is speaking it at all.

It is only when back in Korea that I can pull out my Korean again. Provided I let go of my self-consciousness and don’t think too much about it. It’s a very odd phenomenon. Suddenly I can converse with the taxi driver, the market lady, my aunts, uncles and cousins. My Korean is not as fluent as it used to be as a child. It is rusty and stilted, and I get the tenses and honorifics all wrong. The reactions I get from Koreans are mixed. Mostly people praise me, saying something along the lines of “How well you speak Korean!” But I’ve also received other responses. One taxi driver scolded me: “If your father is Korean, you should be speaking better Korean!”  I started to argue with him. I paid, slammed the door and stood on the street, furious. Then I laughed. Because I had been arguing in Korean with him, all along. And that rather fluently.

I have, at one point in my life, soaked up the language so completely, and mastered it with ease. All this knowledge is still there somewhere. It is not true that one “loses” the language, or “forgets” it completely. It is still there somewhere, locked away in that container, latently waiting to be reactivated again.

©Alice Lapuerta - http://www.stitchdiaries.blogspot.com

Alice Lapuerta is a monthly contributing editor for BBFN. She grew up in a trilingual household of German, Korean and English and now, together with her husband, is raising her daughter and son trilingually in German, Spanish and English. Check out Alice's Multilingual Melange column each month. Learn more about Alice at her blog.