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ESL

In Disney’s 1961 animated film, 101 Dalmatians, one of the hundred & one Dalmatians says, “I’m tired, & I’m hungry. & my tail is froze, & my nose is froze, & my ears are froze, & my toes are froze…” A popular internet meme was born from this scene, as the exhausted & whiny, yet plenty lovable puppy in the snow mirrored the mood of girlfriends in Northeast America enduring the snowstorm. If you ask me, I do relate to being tired & hungry & freezing in a cute, dramatic way, except some people don’t find it so cute or literate when a woman of color quotes a cartoon dog with poor grammar.

My love for the English language began in childhood, which is strange considering I grew up in Seoul, Korea, where the majority of the population doesn’t speak English. My mother, a middle school English teacher, had an ambition for her firstborn to learn Korean & English simultaneously in my earliest developmental stages. I could group Apple & Alligator & Alphabet at age 2, while learning how to say “Good morning” & “Can I have a cookie?” in Korean. By third grade, I spoke fluent English, though lacking the big words, & I helped my mom come up with mid-term quizzes for her students. The truth is, I loved speaking & writing in English because it made my mom happy, until I met an American man from Chicago.

In fifth grade, I was enrolled in an after-school program for kids who could stand to learn more difficult texts in English. M, who taught this class, was a white man from Chicago with rosy cheeks & an MA in English Literature. He always wore a button-down & chewed the push button of his pen. He discovered early on in the program that my English was more advanced than the rest of the kids. My mother was thrilled when he reached out to say he’d be happy to teach me for an extra 20 minutes after the after-school program. During the additional weekly one-on-ones, M taught me how to cite sources & format letters, as well as mellifluous vocabulary. He gave me real books, instead of the chopped-up paragraphs in textbooks. (My first epistolary was a copy of his: Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster.) He corrected my writing with a red pen, which he chewed up to almost non-existence. He wrote me sticky notes that said, “Some mistakes, but really interesting story. –M.” Those notes made me feel so seen as a young girl, because while my mother was only interested in my command of the language, he cared about my stories– he liked what I had to say. Soon enough, he gave me his phone number & said I could text him to use more English every day. I texted with him day & night, about my parents fighting, my sister’s first communion, almost getting hit by a car, chocolate milk for dinner, etc. He didn’t correct the errors in my texts then, & I mostly remember a lot of his responses being “I’m sorry you’re feeling sad” or “It’s not your fault.” One late night, I was texting under the covers, when he said I was not only pretty & sweet, but also smart & interesting. I would ask you out in a heartbeat if you were older. The Google search for alternative meanings of the phrase “ask someone out” came up empty & I dreaded composing a response. Funnily, my mom wasn’t alarmed to discover this. She told me it wasn’t surprising that an adult man would be interested in dating me because I was so mature. You should probably stop texting him… but let him down gently.

Before I could “let him down gently,” he was already mortified & apologetic, & texted he had had a couple of beers, which led to a terrible mistake. I told him it was alright, but I could no longer text him or take his after-school plus after after-school classes. I didn’t see him much afterward, & pretty soon I was a truculent high schooler with nowhere that felt like home. In 2018, after a non-negligible first read of Lolita & a couple of nights spent in the McDonald’s parking lot running away from my parents, I sent him an email. It was an impassioned, self-pitying, dripping mess of an email, with carefully reviewed grammar, big words, & big blaming. To this day, I honestly don’t know why I did it. I was starting to go out with older men at that point, & maybe I felt like I had overcome what had kept M from pursuing me years ago. He did not hold back upon receiving my email:

I had to go back to Chicago for a while, but I missed you every day since… I’m so sorry… I love you… I care about you so much… I’m sorry… I regret leaving you alone… It is truly my biggest regret… I will come get you… whatever you want me to do…

Instincts pushed me to shut it down then. As dumb as I was, I knew enough to understand love doesn’t come that easily. His response left me with unsettling fear & self-hatred, as it reinforced my belief that normal men don’t love me, hence confirming my suspicion that M wasn’t a normal man. I told him it was a mistake to reach out & that I never wanted to hear from him again, which was the end of us.

I moved to Baltimore for college in 2019, & English has been my primary language since. I speak Korean a handful of times a year when I call my parents, & I rarely read or write in Korean. English shares almost nothing in common with my native language, & I continue to learn new words, idioms, & metaphors. Outside the confines of a Creative Writing classroom, didactic comments about my grammatical errors, excessive compliments about my impressive English, snappy corrections of my pronunciation, & requests to speak up come from all directions, encompassing friends, coworkers, & strangers. As I realize myself as a person who is expressive through language, I try my best to just laugh about it when someone feels the need to tell me that the correct thing to say is “my tail is frozen,” not “my tail is froze.”

The assumption of incorrectness is generally rooted in racism, & I have not much desire to write about it at this time. Although I do ponder on the products of racism containing so much nuance, e.g., Black people’s incorrect use of grammar as ghetto & hood, which sets the tone that it is cultural, yet still perceived as déclassé, vs. Asian people’s incorrect use of grammar as foreign, which sets the tone that it is a mistake, lacking in experience.

One can score an easy high from imposing oneself on others as a teacher, but what gets lost in this type of interaction is the opportunity to learn something perhaps more meaningful than froze vs. frozen, or it vs. they, or is vs. was. The quality of a thought or an idea is not defined by the quality of its delivery, & more often than not, we need help bringing brilliant stories to life. The implacable fixation on correctness deters the joy of communication & loses beautiful & creative moments in language. I happen to believe that a language is more a vessel for sharing than a standard to uphold, & anyone who truly loves the language doesn’t aim for the easy highs.