The Language of Seeing: What Learning Korean Taught Me About Life
The Language of Seeing: What Learning Korean Taught Me About Life
The Air Force told me I was going to learn Korean. I never imagined it would change the trajectory of my life. From the warmth of shared meals to the depth of words like han, language became more than communication — it became a new way of seeing the world.
The Language of Seeing: What Learning Korean Taught Me About Life
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “the language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It’s too beautiful for English to explain.” She was speaking of Potawatomi, an endangered language with only a few elders left who speak it fluently. Centuries of missionaries and government policies forced children to abandon their mother tongue and learn English. To lose a language is to lose more than words. It is to lose a way of being.
The Air Force told me I was going to learn Korean. At the time, I thought it would be cool to pick up a new language, but I had no idea how deeply it would change me. It was a true before-and-after moment, the kind of shift you can mark like BC and AD. What started as an assignment became the lens through which I saw the world, and eventually, the path that led me to my wife, my family, and a new way of living.
There is a word Koreans use often: 시원하다 (siwonhada). It means “refreshingly cool,” but the meaning is bigger than that. It is the feeling of sipping an ice-cold beer on a hot day and letting out that long “ahhh.” It can also describe a breeze through a crowded subway station or the relief of finally saying something you have carried inside for too long. Its opposite, 답답하다 (dapdap-hada), translates as “stuffy,” but it goes further than a room without air. It names the tightness of frustration and the feeling of being trapped. With one pair of words, Korean offered me a vocabulary for both physical and emotional weather.
That richness showed up everywhere. Goodbyes ended with blessings: go in peace if you were leaving, stay in peace if you remained. People asked, “Have you eaten?” instead of “How are you?” Food was the measure of well-being and community. Even cooking came alive in sound. A stew did not simply boil. It 보글보글 bubbled. Meat did not just fry. It 지글지글 sizzled. Language wrapped around experience until the words themselves carried warmth.
There was also the word 한 (han). It does not translate neatly into English. Han is the deep sadness born from separation and injustice, the ache of something lost that cannot be recovered. In Korea, it carries the memory of families divided when the armistice was signed after the Korean War, loved ones cut off from each other with no way back.
Sometimes I wonder if America needs a word like that. We have never named the grief caused by centuries of enslaving African Americans, the pain of families torn apart and the lasting wound it left in our culture. Without a word for it, we leave it unrecognized. It is not “a thing” in the same way. Language gives weight and presence to experience. Without it, the silence swallows too much. I do not think I would have had that thought without studying Korean and learning its culture.
One of the clearest memories of belonging came on a trip to the countryside. The other soldiers stayed in a group, but I wandered off and found some locals passing around bowls of 동동주 (dongdongju), a traditional rice wine. They waved me over, and soon I was laughing, drinking, and talking with them. I spent the entire afternoon without a single word of English. Not once did I feel like an outsider. For those hours, I was simply another person at the table.
Living outside of base gave me the freedom to live this way often. I walked and biked through neighborhoods just to see, hear, and smell what was around me. I would forget I was an American soldier until I caught sight of my uniform again. Korea was easy to fall in love with. The people lived passionately. Meals were meant for sharing. Autumn blazed in red and gold, just like the trees of the Hudson River Valley where I grew up. For a while the two worlds felt like one.
And then there were moments of sharp contrast. One night at a 포장마차 (pojangmacha), a drinking tent, a man began berating me for being American. This time I did not stay silent. I answered in Korean: “You do not know me. To assume I am an asshole because of my nationality is wrong.” His face froze as if he had seen a ghost. For a while, Korean was my superpower. No one expected a white kid to speak it fluently, yet I did.
But language is perishable. When we moved back to America, it was my wife’s turn to focus on English. We stopped speaking Korean in our daily life, and my fluency eroded.
Even so, my mind has been permanently changed. Korean gave me more than words. It gave me a new way of seeing, a new way of belonging, and even a new life. Kimmerer was right. Language is the heart of a culture. It carries memory, meaning, and possibility. To lose one is to lose a way of being human. To gain one, even for a time, is to be forever changed.
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