Bank balance down, confidence up
I went to a Korean mall for one thing. I left with a whole lot more.
There I was again, psyching myself out. That’s maybe my one most reliable talent: the ability to talk myself out of doing things that are considered benign to most. My palms were damp, my pulse was through the roof, my knees shaking.
I wasn’t on a stage, or getting ready to dive out of an airplane, or preparing to make a speech in front of hundreds and thousands. No, I was standing in the middle of a Korean cosmetics store in Los Angeles, debating whether or not I should practice my Korean on the shopkeeper.
My journey with the Korean language started about 10 years ago. At the time, my family got television service via satellite and one of the many international channels we received was KBS (Korean Broadcasting System). I knew absolutely nothing about Korea back then, save for the Korean drama called “Coffee Prince” that my sister was nuts about, but the fact that there were subtitles on the channel locked me in. In no time, I was looking for more, starting with the music — in particular, K-pop, or Korean pop. Once I found songs I liked, I decided I needed to learn the language so I could enjoy the music more. I went from memorizing hangul (the Korean alphabet) to cramming grammar and verb conjugations into every crevice of my brain in less than a year.
After a while, I could form sentences and do some light translation. The problem, though, was that I had no one to practice with face-to-face. The way I saw it, knowing how to read and write meant nothing if I had a hard time speaking and comprehending speech. I tried an app where I could voice-chat with native Korean speakers, but the idea of talking to a complete stranger in a different language made me anxious. It felt like a lost cause. I needed the practice, but was scared to receive it! There were plenty of times when I felt like giving up.
The times I did speak with native Korean speakers, they reassured me that I was doing well. “Wow, you sound like a Korean!” one person told me. It made me feel awesome, but I still doubted myself. Since I rarely spoke Korean aloud, I felt like I was being humored about how great my pronunciation was. Everything I knew about pronunciation, I learned from mimicking my favorite K-pop artists or dialogue from Korean dramas. Eventually, I uninstalled the app and tried other methods instead.
But let’s get back to present day — or, at least, last week.
Last September, I was accepted into a program to intern abroad in South Korea in summer 2018. As it is now March, I had mere months to tighten up my Korean-speaking skills.
It was my second time in Los Angeles. My favorite part of the city by far is Koreatown; on my last visit, I didn’t get to spend much time there so I tried to take advantage of not having any structured plans this time around to soak it all in. We — me, my sister and our friend — took a trip to Koreatown Plaza, a shopping mall in the heart of the district. My objective was to visit the music store there, pick up an album I’d had my heart set on then leave, but once we saw the sheer number of cosmetics stores I knew it wouldn’t be so simple. I’ve been on a skincare kick lately, and seeing so many shops fully stocked with products I’d ogled through my screens but wasn’t willing to pay shipping costs for in person made the temptation too hard to ignore.
We made a bee-line for Aritaum, where I filled my arms with my beloved sheet masks from the displays at the store front in a matter of seconds. The store couldn’t be more than 100 square feet, but it managed to hold two large displays in its very middle, flush with lipsticks and blushes of varying pinks and reds. Shelves lined the walls, illuminated by bright white lights to emphasize the various serums and emulsions in their sleek packaging. We marveled at the wares for a few minutes before we made our way to the cash register. There, one of the shopkeepers and her customer were speaking in feverish Korean to one another, and it hit me that this would be a perfect practice opportunity.
“I should say something in Korean to the shopkeeper,” I murmured to my sister, who instantly perked up.
“Yes! Do it!” she said.
Damn it, I thought, why was she encouraging me?! I started to backpedal right away. “No, I’m kidding. I can’t.”
She started prodding me. “What do you mean, you can’t? The worst that can happen is that she’d correct you, and that’s a good thing. Say something to her.”
She was right. There was no denying it. I started racking my brain for every vocabulary word and grammar construction I could think of.
I was quiet for most of the transaction; at one point, I thought I’d given up because I defaulted to speaking English to the shopkeeper. Her English wasn’t perfect, but she was trying, and that gave me the confidence to try too.
At the end of the transaction, I muttered a quick “kamsahamnida” — or “thank you” — and the woman smiled broadly. I turned to leave and I nearly ran into the customer from earlier, who overheard my exchange with the shopkeeper and gave me a knowing grin. I scuttled out of the store with my sister and our friend cooing behind me.
We visited another store, this one called La Belle and even smaller than Aritaum, if not doubly stocked. Here, I took it a step further and asked for directions to the music store I had initially come to visit. “Music Plaza-ga eodiyeyo?” I suddenly asked the girl behind the counter, after using English for the majority of the transaction.
“Downstairs,” she answered with a giggle. “You speak Korean?”
I nodded shyly. “I’m trying to practice, because I’m going to Korea this summer.”
She gave me a thumbs-up and I felt my heart swell. I was two-for-two so far, not a correction in sight. To be fair, I hadn’t said anything very advanced, but I also hadn’t stuttered or botched the pronunciation. So far, everyone I encountered understood what I was trying to say, and that gave me so much more confidence.
Once I got the album I wanted from Music Plaza, we decided we should head out before I bought even more sheet masks. Unfortunately, we forgot the ticket to the parking garage in the car, and we needed to get it validated before we could leave so we didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for parking. At the foot of the escalator was — sigh — yet another cosmetics store, this one much larger and well-stocked than the rest, so I bargained with my sister and our friend to go get the ticket from the car while I browsed the store so we could just validate the ticket there.
The two Korean ladies running the shop watched me as I wandered the store alone, and my “they’re watching me because they think I’m going to steal something” senses took hold of me. I tried to make it known that if I wanted something I was going to definitely pay for it by asking questions — albeit, in English — about products and their prices. As it turned out, they weren’t at all suspicious of me, as evidenced by their short conversation.
“Her face is really pretty,” I heard one of them say, and the other woman agreed. Whatever else they might have said, I tuned out as I realized that I understood them! I was adamant that my listening comprehension was garbage, and yet I was picking up their words and translating them into English in my head! I just felt my confidence creeping higher and higher.
Any concern that I might have misunderstood them was erased when the woman, as she checked out the product I decided to buy, looked at me and said, “Your skin is very beautiful!”
“Oh, thank you,” I said softly, but I was doing cartwheels in my head. The other lady came over and she said it again, this time in Korean, and I said thanked her again in Korean.
They gawped at me. “You understand Korean!” they exclaimed in unison.
I nodded.
“You’re very good,” the other woman said. The affirmations were going to my head at this point.
I thanked them as my sister and our friend returned with the validated ticket and left the store. After a pit-stop at a bathroom, we stopped into a cute little cafe, lured in by the smell of freshly baked bungeoppang.
Riding high on my successful interactions, I exclaimed to the woman behind the counter, “Naemsae johayo!” — “It smells great in here!”
She nodded and thanked me with a smile. My sister and I gleaned the menu for a few moments before I went ahead and ordered for us — in Korean.
“Bungeoppang du-gae,” I said, asking for two of the fish-shaped breads. My sister said she wanted to try the thai tea boba. “Geurigo thai tea boba han-gae juseyo” — “and one thai tea boba, please.”
My sister beamed at me, and our friend kept remarking about how cool it was that I could speak Korean. I was so pleased with myself; it gave me pause to have small-talk with strangers in general, but to drop my native tongue to converse with these strangers in their own and to do so successfully filled me with pride.
I felt even better when our order arrived and everything was correct.
We made one more quick stop at Aritaum to use a $10 certificate I received for signing up for the store’s membership. It was going to expire at the end of the month, and since there are no Aritaum stores in Florida, it would have been a waste of a free $10 if I didn’t.
I picked out an emulsion by Mamonde (because my multi-step skin routine definitely needed another step) and went to pay for it with the same shopkeeper from our first visit. She asked me in Korean if I liked Korean food, and I said yes; she rattled off a few popular ones and laughed as I replied emphatically. We continued to converse in Korean about food, and at the end of our transaction, she smiled warmly and told me to keep it up.
I promised her that I would and we left the mall, my chest held high.
