Do my parents’ accents bother you?

by Monica Kim

Appa tells me an anecdote from work earlier that day: he had been talking to his [white] colleagues about the company Amazon, but they couldn’t seem to understand what he was saying. “I kept saying amazon, amazon, amazon, but they just looked at me.” As if their brains couldn’t make a guess at what he was saying, couldn’t make a guess out of context. The only difference in the way he pronounces amazon is the z sound becoming a soft g sound, so it’s as if he’s saying ama-john, the o elongated like how you might say go [back to where you came from]. If you hear a word starting with ama and ending with on at the end, wouldn’t your brain make the logical conclusion to amazon? Is the soft g sound really all that different from a z sound? In my head I imagined myself yelling this to his [white] colleagues but as the imagined scene bloomed I found myself explaining to him, “It’s not ama-john, it’s ama-zon.”

Roll the tape backwards about ten years, cut the frame to high school aged me, entering a store with appa to pick up new glasses. Normally we’d go to Korean owned eye care, but the reason why we went to a different place is lost in the aged film of my memory. My dad speaks to the [Black] receptionist; I don’t know if I’m imagining the harsh tones of his voice, I don’t know if I’m assuming he’s speaking more gratingly to her because she is Black, or if it’s because she’s looking at me, not at him, with a confused look on her face, the same look that I imagine his [white] colleagues will give him about ten years later when he says amazon. Perhaps it is both, but I interrupt him and speak, in my customer service I’m-eventually-going-to-be-an-English-major voice, repeating what he has said to the receptionist, who smiles and whose shoulders visibly come down. When we leave, I ask appa why he was being so rude to her, and he quips back that she was being rude to him. Anger blooms in my bones, anger at how he was speaking to her, anger at how she looked at him as if he were a child, anger at how I treated him like a child, anger at how he couldn’t seem to understand how he was both wrong and had been wronged.

Trace the scene ten years later, a few weeks before the amazon anecdote, different parent: umma is talking to our apartment’s [white] office manager, her words slightly muddled underneath her mask. Do I imagine the long pause from the office manager, the crease in her eyebrow, as if she has understood nothing of what umma has said, as if she’s going to ask her to repeat what she said again, in a voice reserved for children? Before my assumptions / anxieties can be confirmed / unconfirmed, I repeat what umma has said, in my impatient I-graduated-as-an-English-major, don’t-you-dare-assume-the-same-things-about-me voice. Do I imagine the lack of a pause from her reply after I’ve spoken, the quickness of her reply? When we leave, I clench and unclench my fists in the pockets of my jacket so umma doesn’t see, but I tell her how angry I am at the woman, and she merely responds, “Some people are like that.”

Some people are like that, and what does that make me? Am I the daughter weaponizing her second language as a barrier to protect her parents from further infantilization, from further alienation; am I the colleague, the receptionist, the office manager?