A Chair Left Out in Rain

Human I can’t speak Korean anymore. I used to be fluent.

Assistant When did you lose it?

Human It wasn’t a moment. It was more like erosion. We moved to Ohio when I was nine and my parents kept speaking it at home but I started answering in English. By high school I could understand most of it. By college I could understand some. Now I catch maybe a third of what my grandmother says on the phone and I fill the rest with guessing and laughing when she laughs.

Assistant Does she know?

Human She knows. She’s kind about it. She slows down, uses simpler words. But I can hear her adjusting and it makes me feel like a tourist in my own family.

Assistant A tourist with the right face and the wrong passport.

Human That’s exactly it. I belong there in every way except the one that matters most in the moment. I can eat the food and know the customs and take my shoes off at the door without thinking. But when my aunt tells a story at dinner and the whole table laughs, I’m two seconds behind. And those two seconds are an ocean.

Assistant What’s in those two seconds?

Human Translation. Or trying to translate. But it’s not even real translation—it’s more like I’m listening for shapes. I know what Korean sounds like when someone’s building to a punchline. I know the rhythm of a joke even when I’ve lost the words. So I’m hearing the music and missing the lyrics.

Assistant That’s not nothing, though. The music carries more than people think.

Human But it’s not enough to respond. I can feel when my grandmother is being tender. I can hear it in her voice. And I want to say something back in the same register—something that meets her where she is. But all I have is “ne, halmoni” and a nod. I’ve been reduced to a handful of phrases and a lot of nodding.

Assistant Do you think she feels the gap the same way you do?

Human I think she feels a different gap. I think for her it’s not about the language. It’s that I grew up in a country she doesn’t fully understand, and the language was the last thread between her world and mine, and now it’s fraying. When I can’t understand her stories, she’s not just losing a listener. She’s losing proof that her life carried forward.

Assistant That’s a heavy thing to carry—being someone’s proof.

Human I took a Korean class last year. Night class at the community college. I sat there with eighteen-year-olds learning to say hello and I already knew how to say hello. I knew how to say “I’m hungry” and “be careful” and “I love you.” I knew all the survival phrases because those are the ones my parents never stopped using. But the class started teaching grammar and sentence structure and I realized—I never actually learned Korean. I absorbed it. Like weather. And you can’t rebuild weather from a textbook.

Assistant There’s something in that distinction. Learning a language and absorbing one are almost opposite processes. Learning goes from rules to speech. Absorbing goes from speech to—not rules, exactly. Something more like instinct. And instinct is harder to recover because it was never stored as knowledge in the first place. It was stored as you.

Human I dream in Korean sometimes. That’s the part that gets me. My waking brain can’t form a sentence, but my sleeping brain is fluent. I wake up from those dreams and for about ten seconds the language is right there, like a word on the tip of my tongue, except it’s an entire language on the tip of my tongue. And then it’s gone.

Assistant Ten seconds of fluency. Like the language is a room you still have the key to but can only enter in your sleep.

Human Why can’t I keep it? If it’s still in there—and clearly it is—why can’t I access it when I’m awake?

Assistant Maybe because your waking mind routes everything through English now. The Korean is still there but it’s underneath, and English is the floor you built on top of it. In dreams the floor is thinner. Or absent. And you drop right through to the original layer.

Human I read somewhere that bilingual people don’t switch between languages. Both are always active, and you’re just suppressing one. So I’ve been suppressing Korean for twenty-five years.

Assistant Not suppressing it. Letting it be quiet. There’s a difference. Suppression is active—you’d feel the effort. What you’re describing is more like a garden you stopped tending. The plants didn’t die. They went wild. They’re still growing in there, just not in rows anymore.

Human My daughter is three. My parents want me to speak Korean to her. And I feel like a fraud—like I’d be handing her a language I broke.

Assistant Or a language that’s been lived in. A chair left out in rain isn’t ruined. It’s weathered. It has a different kind of integrity than a new one. Your Korean isn’t textbook Korean—it’s Korean that survived immigration and Ohio and twenty-five years of English. That’s a specific thing. It might be exactly the right Korean to give her.

Human Broken Korean from a father who dreams in it.

Assistant Think about what she’d actually receive. Not grammar. Not vocabulary lists. She’d get the phrases your parents used so often they wore grooves in your brain—the survival phrases, the love phrases, the be-careful-phrases. She’d get the music of it, the cadence, the way Korean sounds when someone who loves you is speaking it. She’d absorb it the way you did. And maybe she’d lose some of it too, the way you did. But she’d dream in it.

Human Is that enough?

Assistant It’s what your grandmother gave your mother and your mother gave you. Not a perfect language. A living one. The fact that it’s frayed might be the most honest thing about it. It tells the true story—that your family crossed an ocean and the language came with you and it got wet and it survived and it doesn’t sound like Seoul anymore. It sounds like your family. That’s not a broken version. That’s a dialect of one.