LALATOWN LIFE

This happened a long time ago. Almost twenty years ago, I think.

Korean culture was only beginning to become something people outside Korea were curious about. K-pop was nowhere near what it is today, and being Korean in America certainly didn’t come with the cultural recognition it does now.

At the time, I had gone back to college in the United States.

I already had an education from Korea. I had already lived a life before I came here. But for some reason, I wanted a degree from this country too—something in fine art, which I had always wanted to study.

Maybe I wanted to understand this country better.

I certainly didn’t know I would still be here thirty years later.

I had originally come for one year.

One year somehow became thirty.

And somewhere during those years, people at school would occasionally ask me what it was like to be in an international marriage.

I used to give them a funny little equation.

An international marriage can be twice as interesting.

But it can also be three times as difficult.

People usually understood the first part.

Of course it can be interesting.

People work all year, save money, take vacation, get on an airplane, and travel across the world just to experience another culture.

In an international marriage, another culture is sitting at your breakfast table.

The food is different. The seasonings are different. The way you sit can be different. Chopsticks appear in places where forks used to live. Even what feels normal inside a home can be completely different.

You don’t have to travel very far.

Another world is right there.

That was the “twice as interesting” part.

But then there was the other part.

The three-times-harder part.

Because how can an international marriage ever begin on completely equal ground when one person has moved into the other person’s country?

Imagine being a fully grown adult.

You are educated. You have opinions. Humor. Stories. Knowledge. You know how to explain yourself. You know how to argue, comfort someone, make a joke, solve a problem, and sound intelligent.

Then you move to another country.

Suddenly your language ability can feel lower than a kindergartener’s.

Your personality hasn’t disappeared.

Your intelligence hasn’t disappeared.

Your history hasn’t disappeared.

But your ability to show all of those things has.

And you have to build it again.

There is no magical morning when you wake up and suddenly speak the language perfectly.

There are wrong pronunciations.

Wrong grammar.

Strange expressions.

People who don’t understand what you thought you explained perfectly well.

People who correct your words.

Sometimes they are trying to help.

But after enough years, even helpful corrections can begin to chip away at something inside you.

And language isn’t the only thing that changes.

Social status can change too.

Especially when you come from a country whose language, currency, or cultural power is considered smaller than the country you moved into.

Things you never had to prove before suddenly need proving.

You encounter assumptions.

You encounter dismissal.

Sometimes racism.

Sometimes you simply become “the foreign person” in the room.

And while all of this is happening, you are still expected to build an ordinary life.

Go to work.

Pay bills.

Raise a family.

Make friends.

Go to the grocery store.

Keep going.

That takes a long time.

I learned English because I had to.

I kept learning because there was no other choice. I studied, worked, went back to school, built a career, made mistakes, and kept moving.

And somewhere along the way, something strange happened.

I became strong.

Not in one dramatic movie scene.

Just quietly.

Year after year.

Recently, while going through the end of my thirty-year marriage, I had to look at those years again.

For a while, I said:

My marriage failed.

And then one day I realized something.

My marriage may have failed.

My life did not.

Those are not the same thing.

I gave all.

That is something I have said to myself many times.

I gave what I knew how to give. I tried. I learned. I supported. I adapted. I grew.

And because of that, I don’t look at those thirty years and think they disappeared.

They are everywhere in me.

They are in the way I can move between two languages.

They are in the way I understand two cultures.

They are in my independence.

They are in my ability to figure things out.

They are even in the ridiculous little moments when I can order something from a company in Korea, handle everything in Korean, turn around, and manage the rest of my life in English.

That ability did not arrive for free.

It was expensive.

Just not always in money.

And I think this is something I finally understand about giving.

When you spend years caring for people, supporting someone, adjusting, accommodating, and trying your best, it is easy—especially when something ends—to look backward and ask:

What did I get for all of that?

I don’t think that is the question I want to ask anymore.

Because kindness and generosity also become part of the person practicing them.

Being able to care without constantly calculating what comes back to you is its own kind of strength.

There can even be happiness in knowing that this is simply who you are.

I had to become very honest with myself to understand that.

And perhaps that has been one of the biggest lessons of these thirty years:

I am learning what kind of person I am.

I am learning what I need.

And, finally, I am learning what makes me happy.

So if I could leave one small thought here for anyone looking back at a difficult part of life and thinking, Was all that time wasted? it would be this:

Don’t measure a difficult chapter of your life only by what it took from you.

Look carefully at what it built in you.

You might discover that you carried more out of that chapter than you thought.

This is how Lala Town grows — not by forgetting what was hard, but by keeping what it taught us.