Discomfort and a Tiny Bit of Courage

A Reflection on the Language Diversity I Experienced in the U.S.

Learning about diversity on the Japantown Historical Walk with USF.

“All Americans must speak English well, right?”

This was the thought I had before I came to the U.S. I assumed that people living in America would, of course, all be good at English. But once I actually started living here, it was clear that the reality was different from my preconceptions.

Many workers in the USF school cafeteria cannot speak English. Among the people I met in San Francisco, especially among the working-class, there were many who could not speak English either.

I learned that about a third of San Francisco residents were born overseas, and many are non-citizens. This helped me understand why so many U.S. workers do not speak English.

Looking back on the 20 years I spent living in Korea, I realize that I had almost never met foreign workers. The most recent memory was a foreigner I met when traveling to Daejeon with a friend. There, we met a foreign worker who was in charge of cleaning at the hotel. Communication with him in both English and Korean was impossible.

Visiting Chinatown in San Francisco as part of the Global Engagement Program. They say that about 35% of San Francisco residents were born overseas as of 2023. Seeing the statistic that about 63% of them obtained U.S. citizenship and about 37% are non-citizens, I understood the situation better.

At first, my friend and I didn’t realize they were foreign and asked in Korean if they could empty the trash bin in the room. They replied, “desk.” So I used my poor English skills and asked again, but they just continued to repeat “desk.” It became clear that both English, the world's common language, and Korean, the language of the country he was living in, were difficult for them.

To be honest, the first feeling that came to me was “discomfort.” Neither English nor Korean worked, and I didn’t know their language either. Even the smallest communication was impossible and so we had to communicate through the desk staff, which added extra hassle.

When I dealt with the cafeteria workers in the U.S. who didn’t speak English, I felt something similar. I had questions I wanted to ask, but not being able to communicate with them was uncomfortable. I had to either figure things out myself or find another staff member who could respond in English, which was frustrating.

On the other hand, I also thought: if I feel this uncomfortable, how uncomfortable must it be for them?

To live in a region where you don’t know the language and you still have to make a living… how overwhelming and helpless must that feel? At the same time, I realized that even if I lived somewhere without knowing the local language at all, it would still be possible to continue living there. Life would still go on.

It might seem trivial, but this gave me a tiny bit of courage.

In particular, San Francisco is said to be a city with extremely high linguistic diversity even within the U.S., with a large proportion of Asian immigrants.

It might seem trivial, but this gave me a tiny bit of courage. I had always believed that if you planned to live in another country (long-term or short-term), you had to speak that country’s language to some degree. I thought that was the only way you could live there. But in reality, ways of living turned out to be much more diverse than I had imagined; there were clearly lives that managed to continue without direct communication through language.

Most people living in Korea are native. For the past 20 years, I had grown used to a society where natives were the overwhelming majority and where life was shaped by the lifestyle of natives. But by coming to San Francisco, I was able to encounter even more diverse lives within a diversity of languages. It was a refreshing shock for someone like me, who had spent the past 20 years with a pretty rigid framework of how life should be lived.

But in reality, ways of living turned out to be much more diverse than I had imagined; there were clearly lives that managed to continue without direct communication through language.

“You mean, you can really live life like this? You can live in a place even if you don’t speak the language?”

These sort of realizations struck me. Naturally, if taken to the extreme, there are people who justify it to themselves and therefore don’t even make any effort to learn the language of the country they’re living in. Accepting and rationalizing a lazy life is definitely something to avoid.

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Even so, encountering these people taught me something, as someone with quite an obsessive set of values:

“Even if something falls short of a certain standard, we can still take on the challenge, keep going, and continue living.”

This is the lesson I took from experiencing linguistic diversity.

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So what’s the conclusion? If I really had to put it into words, I gained just a little bit of courage. Just as I used to think, “If I can’t speak the language, I can’t live in that place,” I had always lived with the belief that if I wasn’t ready or prepared enough for something, I couldn’t even attempt it. But now I see that a mindset of recklessly ‘trying first’ might not be so bad. It would be hard of course, but perhaps not as bad as I imagined. Realizing this gave me just a little bit of courage.

<aside> 🔍 Sena is a second cohort student at Taejae University.

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