Honestly, now.

Visa Status: ……..

Being who I am and looking how I do, people in this country are delighted when they discover that I speak a handful (a scant handful) of Korean. Their faces light up in dazzling joy, like someone just told them that their every wish had come true and that Japan was now at the bottom of the Sea of Korea and all of their children were going to get married to the son or daughter of Hera or Samsung. They beam at me like I just revealed the secret of cold fusion or that I discovered that, yes, kimchi really, truely does cure cancer.

However, this is only the case when I’m with my similarly round-eyed friends. Put me next to a bunch of kyopos (Korean-American or Korean-Canadian) and it’s a whole different dumpling.

Being next to people who are inherently bilingual makes me feel a little rough around the edges. I’m envious. I see them as towering world-citizens, able to slip into different cultures with the ease of a well-lubed otter. I know that this isn’t the truth, but it’s hard to see the downside of being able to tell everyone around you exactly what you’re thinking. And sitting next to a kyopo at a restaurant apparently decreases my IQ to somewhere in between a cup ramen and 9 month old. Gone is my magical ability to master my handful words. I tried to order a set lunch today (Set A, M8, Vietnamese Coffee). Our waiter looked at me as if I had just banged my chopsticks on the table and grunted. He turned to my kyopo coworker and said, “Uhhhhh…..what the hell did she just say?” I don’t know if that’s a direct translation, but that’s all I could get from his tone. My coworker repeated the exact same thing that I said and the waiter was off to get our food.

Vietnamese coffee is a delicious concoction. It’s basically a cup with some sweetened and condensed milk in the bottom and a tiny, adorable peculator on top. It takes several minutes for your coffee to drip through and then you stir it will a cute little spoon to make the milk kick up in a miniature storm in your cup. The waiter bustles back with my coffee. He set it on the table and then hesitated. He looked at me, then at the cup. He then said something in Korean. He said it very slowly so, of course, I understood none of it. This was accompanied by a circular motion of his hand. I just looked at him. What the hell is wrong with my coffee, I thought.

The waiter again turned to my kyopo friend and said something quick in Korean. Joon looked at me and then said in overly-loud Special English (the kind that is reserved for dogs, deaf people, and foreigners), “YOU HAVE TO STIR IT!”

Something about being with kyopos makes me appear unable to handle myself. It’s almost as if the natives look at me and say to themselves, “That poor girl doesn’t know a damn thing.” I imagine them shaking their heads as if I’m some tragic character in a Western T.V. show. “Poor girl must be addicted to cocaine,” or “She must have been sold to human traffickers.” And between C.S.I. and Sex in the City (the two major American T.V. shows on here) , I can completely understand where these ideas come from.

And on that note, I’m off to bed with some warm milk and my copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day. At least David understands.