Facing Changes, New Environments
Being a social butterfly is something that I would say defines me as a person currently. Entering a new environment caused me to become a quiet and shy student. I was a part of a friend group that made me hit my lowest in self-worth and question my identity as a whole. As I was slowly exposed to genuine people and memorable quotes, I found myself back on the path of life that I wanted to be on. When I realized that it was completely normal for others to have defining moments that significantly impacted their life at one point, my outlook towards life changed.
When I was 8 years old living in South Korea, my parents informed me that we were moving to America, which confused me. I enjoyed the life that I had at the time because I had friends that cared about me and relatively decent grades overall. The idea of becoming a foreigner in an unfamiliar country was frightening and something I never expected to experience. Even though the immigration process was gradual, it felt too fast for my 8-year-old mind to wrap around.
Everything was settling down a few months into the moving process and we finally arrived in America. The only words I knew that were in English were a simple “hello” and “how are you?”. The inability to express how I felt at the moment thanks to the language barrier was more difficult than I ever imagined. I was frustrated with myself because I was unable to communicate in the way my brain wanted me to.
I walked up to the counter at my new elementary school’s office and asked with my broken English about where to go and where my class was. Even though I understood only about a small percentage of what the office lady had said, she directed me to my classroom. I hesitated to enter, but one of the students decided to open the door, which alerted the class that there was a new student.
All of the attention was suddenly focused directly on me. I was usually fine with being in the spotlight, but it felt different this time. I was in a new environment with people that did not speak the same language as me, which made communication quite complicated. I was typically one to go up to strangers and initiate polite small talk, but I froze up on the spot. One of the students asked me where I was from, while another one asked how my day went and if I had any issues locating the class. My brain was all scrambled up from the barrage of questions directed towards me.
I wanted to reply, but the phrases in my head were mixed of Korean and English or more well known as “Konglish”. In Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, the author mentioned the term “code meshing”. Young defined that “code meshing is the new code switching; it’s multidialectalism and pluralingualism in one speech act, in one paper.” (Young 114) At the time, I had been code meshing without knowing between my classmates and I. Even when I said yes, I unintentionally used “Uh”, which is an informal way of saying yes in Korean. After I realized I naturally used code meshing, I started to hesitate when speaking so that I would not accidentally mesh during conversations. I wanted to resolve my classmates’ curiosity, but my body acted otherwise. I was confused about the reaction my body produced because I was never like this. I was usually the one to be social with others, but due to the limitations of my verbal expressions, I became the shy kid that no one expected me to be.
From a very young age, I had the label of being the “bright kid” everywhere I went. Personally, I would disagree. I did have a tendency to laugh or smile quite frequently, but that did not mean that I was always “bright”. I felt pressured to always be smiling even when I was not in the mood at that time. When I arrived in America, that label stopped applying to me. I was incapable of both being positive all the time and learning a new language simultaneously. To be honest, I missed the positivity that I held in the past and the confidence that I used to have when interacting with people that I did not particularly know. Now, the first thing that would come to my mind when I talked to a stranger or an acquaintance would be if I was saying my words correctly or if the words I was using fit in with the context of what I was trying to convey. I felt lonely because it felt like I was the only one struggling with this particular issue.
The words would pass through one ear and go out the other. I would constantly be watching shows or movies in English on our cable television and being frustrated at myself for not being able to understand every word that the actors and actresses were saying. Since being used to language was my strongest subject, this struggle was pretty difficult to accept. The loss of this talent extensively dropped my confidence. During class time, students would raise their hands left and right when the teacher would ask about the video clip that we just watched or the reading we read out loud, but the only thing I was able to do was be amazed at the classmates’ answers. Thankful, my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Laing, pulled me out of my comfort zone and assisted me in slowly getting involved in my classes.
Knowing that English was a challenge for me, Mr. Laing would have casual conversations with me without any pressure to make me comfortable. He was the type to tell the students little stories of his daily lives and created a comfortable environment for the majority of the students. I wasn’t really ever the type to tell others about my problems or struggles because I would usually keep them in and handle them on my own, and this teacher knew that aspect about me and respected my boundaries while supporting my decisions from afar. The relationship that I had with Mr. Laing was the perfect ratio between being too close and not being close at all. Looking back, I realized this related to a quote mentioned by Dancing Snail’s Moderately Close. In one of the chapters called “‘Is that so? Or ‘Or not’”, the author stated that “When we meet someone new, we tend to look at them as if they are this perfect individual and we get excited to learn about them.”(Snail 18) The distance that Mr.Laing and I had was the exact relationship that I needed at this particular time to push myself into opening up to my classmates. Once I knew that someone was there to support me through my struggles, I started to get involved in in-class activities and even befriended a few of my classmates. I was definitely better and my self-confidence had boosted from my interactions with my fourth-grade teacher, but I still felt like I wasn’t enough.
Having to switch from my life in Korea to my life in America was especially hard to accept at such an impressionable age. At this age, I didn’t even know why my parents decided to move when everything seemed fine as it was in Korea. They would say that it was a choice made for our future opportunities, but I felt it was an unreasonable explanation to my naive 8-year-old mind. I had plans for what I wanted to do in the future in Korea, but those plans were stepped on because they believed their insights were better in the long run. They proved to be right thinking about it from today’s point of view, but I sometimes wonder how my life would’ve turned out if our family had stayed in Korea.
Another moment that really changed me into who I am today was being involved in a toxic friendship in high school. In this friendship, I resented every moment without a question. I blamed the world for having to deal with these friendship issues when it was my choice to stay or leave the friendship the entire time. In one of my stories titled “Trusting my Guts”, I went into depth about the level of toxicity that was involved in the friendship. Each conversation felt like a competition and I became exhausted after each one because I forced myself to be involved to fit in with the others in the group. Thinking that being involved was one of the essential aspects of adapting to a new environment, I assumed these feelings were normal. On the outside, all of my friends seemed glad to be a part of the friend group. Due to the stressful daily interactions involving my clique, oversleeping became the only way to escape that reality. My parents became increasingly worried that something was wrong with me, but I was dumbfounded by their concerns at the time because it did not register in my head that oversleeping had become a coping mechanism caused by this excess stress.
After forcing myself to be a part of the friend group until my junior year in high school, I began to align the pieces together. I realized that the friendship was toxic and was messing with my mental health as well as being an interference with my personal growth as an individual. I had hoped that things would change, refusing to accept the possibility that I could lose the connection I had with these people. In psychiatrist SoYoung Lee’s How to Untie a Knot in Your Mind, she mentions that “People from our country [South Korea] especially tend to have a difficult time keeping their boundaries between family members and close friends”(Lee 162). The lack of experience with toxic friendships led me to rely far too much on others rather than accepting that not everything was meant to work out.
South Korean society emphasizes the importance of politeness even at the cost of an individual’s own personal values. In my analysis of “Keeping Boundaries” about this quotation from Lee’s book, I mentioned that “My parents always taught me that it’s alright to give a little more than you receive because people do not realize the amount of anything they receive as much as the amount they give out.”(Hwang). I recognized that this mindset was how my parents would deal with conflicts amongst our relatives. I would always question the logic behind that idea. My usual assumption was that people were supposed to be giving and receiving the same amount like the popular phrase, “give-and-take”. It frustrated me when I saw my parents suffering due to others taking advantage of their kindness. I told myself to not be like them and to never be the person that would be taken for granted. Ironically, I was standing at the long lunch table as another addition to the group and nothing more.
Most students had experiences of being excluded at least once during high school. I would find myself practicing my smiles before I got to the lunch table to not spoil the mood for my friends until I realized that it was one of the dumbest things someone could do in this situation. I was trying to distinguish myself as a different individual and concealed my true feelings. I was not the optimistic person I used to be, one that liked meeting new people and liked experimenting. I constantly convinced myself that because all students in the school had a certain friend group that they fit into, I also felt like it was a necessity to be a part of a group. Kwisun Yoo in her I Want to Be a Good Person Only to You displayed a quote in the book that ended up sticking to me even to this day. She simply stated “…stop comparing yourself to a distorted version of others that isn’t even true and use that time to focus on yourself because comparing yourself to others is pointless.” (Yoo 180) I had always told myself that I should be acting fine like everyone else when that was not something that I believed in. This belief came from the fantasy that social media pushed onto me, with the perfect moments captured and uploaded to represent an individual’s life to others. I realized that those flawless moments were only a few seconds of their real life, one that had many imperfections. This helped me realize that it was a norm for people to not be fine every moment of their lives, which made me feel more secure with the relationship I had with myself.
I used to prioritize other’s opinions when it came to how I would reflect upon myself. Being on someone’s bad side was my biggest fear when I should’ve been prioritizing my own needs and feelings before others. I always knew that this should’ve been the case, but it was difficult to see when I was in that situation. My hesitance when it came to me leaving the friend group just displayed how little I valued myself. When I learned how to drive, a new space became available to me that I can say was my own, my car. My car wasn’t anything special, but it provided me a place of solitude. That space allowed me to indulge in my personal interests, which contrasted with the restrictions I had when I was in the toxic friendship.
Learning that people have their own struggles that they do not particularly express to the public has given me comfort in searching for my own personal identity as an intellectual. These realizations have helped me put myself out there and talk to strangers just as well as I did before I ever moved to America. After the language barrier was broken, I successfully incorporated English into my lifestyle (not perfectly, but getting there), causing new pieces of knowledge and experiences to incite positive change in me. Now, I do not even have to try forcing a smile on my face anymore because it just appears naturally knowing that I have loving people by my side that are willing to support me and enough confidence to stand up for myself when another crisis comes up in the future.
Work Cited
Young, Vershawn A. “Should Writers Use They Own English?.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (2010): 110–117.
Snail, Dancing. Moderately Close. Hummingbird, 2020.
Hwang, Kelly, “Trusting My Guts.” Medium, Writing 150 Fall 2020, Sept. 2020, medium.com/writing-150-fall-2020/trusting-my-guts-7d32dabcd273
Lee, SoYoung. How to Untie a Knot in Your Mind. Wisdom House, 2012.
Hwang, Kelly. “Keeping Boundaries.” Medium, Alone Time, 11 Oct. 2020, medium.com/alone-time/keeping-boundaries-bddf9c2c6e63
Yoo, Kwisun. I Want to Be a Good Person Only to You. Studio:Odr, 2019.
