This article is part of Mochi Magazine’s summer issue on Art: We invite you to expand your perspective of what art is or who an artist can be. As you check out the rest of our issue here, we hope you are inspired to find your own form of artistic expression.
I always hear iterations of “jeogi-yo” (an interjection used to grab someone’s attention) cutting through the stalls when I visit the sprawling Gwangjang Market, a well-frequented street market in South Korea. When said aloud, that phrase seems to roll off the tongue quite easily, yet it always rises above the mass of market-goers and is, therefore, surprisingly effective in its intention. It is also linguistically reflective of a culture that thrives off such interjections as a way to verbalize the nuances of feelings that are often unable to be put into words.
“Ai-goo-ya …,” the lady manning the hotteok stand sighs when a little girl drops the fresh hotteok that her father had just gotten for her.
“Ya!” I hear the girl’s father exclaim in disbelief, throwing his hands up in the air.
Scanning the center aisle of the market, I witness a plethora of not only food but also expressions, some vocally more dramatic than others. On one end, a group of college friends sit around a plate of steaming tteokbokki and clink together shot glasses overflowing with soju. “Jjan!”
On the other end, a couple argues over a jacket that the husband has purchased. “Jagiya,” the wife endearingly calls her husband, admitting defeat, and approaches him again after ostensibly cooling off.
What all of the instances above have in common is the broader participation in a rhetorically expressive culture, within which language (as a mode of expression) and tradition are inextricably tied. Language itself, regardless of the language, is universal.
When considering the impact of art on society, I think of Eisenhower’s age-old adage, “Art is a universal language and through it each nation makes its own unique contribution to the culture of mankind.” This is true with most visual forms of art and even with some forms of multimedia. Paintings, photographs, and sculptures are visual representations of the world surrounding us, tapping into the emotions, experiences, and places that make us human. This connection is what allows art to transcend linguistic and cultural bounds. But what happens when we turn this concept on its head? In other words, could language — or rather, the participation in our own language — be considered a universal art?
Language as we know it, as in the words we speak and the sentences we write, can be defined by common characteristics such as the geography where it is used, its letters and characters, and its particular speech patterns. For instance, while sentences in English are usually constructed in a subject, verb, and object order, Korean sentences demand a subject, object, and verb construction — not unlike many other non-Western languages. However, many Asian languages, like Mandarin Chinese, are also distinctively tonal and rhythmic: Verbalizing a character with one particular tone may convey a completely different meaning when expressed with another tone.
It’s obvious that different languages have different characteristics (there’s a reason I wish I had learned many more languages, other than English and Korean, when I was younger and my brain was spongier). The mere participation in any language, however, seems universal as not only a form of communication with others but also that of self-expression. And what is self-expression, if not another mode of performance?
At places like Gwangjang Market, I have come to realize that I, too, put on a performance. As a second-generation Korean American, I consider myself to be decently fluent in Korean, thanks to the many, many Saturdays I spent at Korean school when I was younger. What’s missing, however, is the confidence that the Korean I use is truly my own self-expression; after all, my knowledge of Korean is somewhat limited to growing up with the Korean that my parents spoke at home. I specifically remember one day at Korean school when my teacher asked the class if anyone knew the Korean word for “economy.” I immediately recalled hearing my parents talk about the economy using the word “kyung-gi” (a game/competition or, in this case, a highly nuanced way to refer to the state of the economy rather than the economy itself) and proudly declared my answer to the rest of the class.
“Really close, good try! The word for ‘economy’ is ‘kyung-jae,’” my teacher revealed. I felt a wave of disappointment and confusion wash over me.
This moment was when I first experienced the rift in my Korean American understanding of Korean as I tried to make sense of the dissonance between that word I’d picked up from my parents’ conversations and the more context-relevant one. Later in life, as I interacted with other Korean students at college, I was often met with somewhat backhanded compliments about how I spoke “super properly” and adhered to character spacing rules well while texting. This is how I eventually came to realize that the Korean I was fluent in was really that of my parents.
So, walking into a sea of unwavering “jeogi-yo”s at Gwangjang Market, I pull off a quick-change act, switching into the customs and phrases that closely mimic those I hear and see on the street rather than the arsenal of phrases and words I use at home with my parents. I would argue that this act of switching languages within my own language is not only a defining feature of the Asian American experience but is also another act of performance.
More broadly, our successful execution of language — using syntax, tone, and diction to convey our emotions or thoughts — is, in itself, an ongoing performance: the world’s longest one-person act. Choosing the right words, the right phrasing, and the right tone requires conscious and fluid decision-making in how we act out our thoughts for others to understand.
In her essay “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan meditates on the power of language and reflects on the idea that she has used multiple different “Englishes” throughout her life. Tan describes her realization that the English she has used with her Chinese mother differs from the one she learned in school and through books. What is especially pertinent to the discussion at hand, of language as a performance, is Tan’s rote categorization of all of the different “Englishes” as they exist in her mind:
“The English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as ‘simple’; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as ‘broken’; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as ‘watered down’; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure.”
I resonate deeply with the differentiation of these different “Englishes” in Tan’s mind because it almost mirrors my own experience using the different versions of Korean I’ve learned. The existence of languages within a language reflects not only a second-generation American’s experience communicating with an immigrant parent but also the overarching idea that how humans use language is inherently context-dependent. For immigrant families especially, this is a learned survival behavior more so than an inherent one.
Going back to my original question of whether language could be considered a universal art, I would say that, much like an actor must take on the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of a particular character, a language performer must similarly take on the contexts and considerations of a particular environment. However, this performance seems more nuanced — and not at all universal — when I think about the way I myself, as a Korean American, understand and utilize Korean. So while language performance may not necessarily be a universal art, the use of languages within a language seems to be a shared experience, particularly among second-generation Americans. And in this case, perhaps my request for a steaming bowl of kalguksu at Gwangjang Market is as good a performance as my mom’s request for a hearty steak at our favorite American restaurant.
Cover credit: Clement/Unsplash
