어떻게 한국어는 "함께"라는 뜻이 포함된 구조로 생성됐을까? 이제는 당당하게 살아간다.

어느 외국인 영어 교사의 한국에서의 생활체험 얘기를 기사를 통해 읽었다. 그이야기를 읽으면서, 나의 이민초창기의 180도 다른 문화충격에, 내자신의 Identity를 한동안 설정하지 못하고, 우선 그때만 해도 후진국인 한국에서 선진국인 캐나다로 삶의 터전을 옮겨 살면, 느끼는 챙피함으로, 움추려 들었었던 기억을 새삼 떠올리게 했다.
벌써 그로부터 거의 반세기의 세월이 흘렀다.

지금은 많이 이민자로서, 현지의 언어와 문화에 많이 익숙해져 있지만, 아직도 어느면에서는 전연 동화를 하지 못하고, 예를 들면, 식생활에서는 아직도, 햄버거와 디저트 먹어야하는 이곳 서양사람들의 습관에 완전 동화하지 못하고 살아가고 있다.

그이유를 나는 이렇게 생각한다. "한인생의 언어와 문화는 태어나서 10대 중반( Middle of teenage)사이에 형성되여, 그이후 다른 대륙으로 옮겨서 살아간다해도, 기본 골격은 영원히 변하지 않고, 변화된다해도 일부일뿐이다"라고.  

예를 들면, 이곳에서 바라보는 한반도, 특히 남쪽의 주민들중에서 경상도, 전라도 출신 사람들이 서울로 삶의 터전을 옮겨 평생을 살아도, 어렸을적에 몸에 밴 그지방의 사투리가 대화속에서 깊이 자리잡고 있다는 것이 그증거다.

그러나 지금은 나의 어렸을적 문화와 언어에 자부심을 갖고 살아간다. 늦게나마 그것이 나의 Identity를 지키는, 바꾸어지지 않는 민족혼을 지키는 유일한 방법이고, 삶의 가치를 현지인들과  Share해도, 충분히 그들을 이해 시키고, 나자신을 나타낼수 있다고 믿기 때문이다.

"우리집 남편은 선생님입니다." 나의 직장동료가 국물을 후루룩 소리나게 마시면서 나에게 해준 얘기다. 그녀는 또한 그녀처렴 후루룩 국물을 들이키는 다른 동료옆에 자리를 같이 하고 앉아 있다.

혹시 내가 잘못들었나? 할정도로 혼돈이 일어난다. 이 많은 여인들이 같은 사람과 결혼해서 살고 있는게 아닌가?하고.

"그녀는 그녀의 남편에 대해서 얘기 하는데, 한국에서는 우리는 일상대화에서 서양에서 처럼 "내" 또는 "나자신" 대신에 "우리"라는 표현을 합니다"라고 나의 의아해 하는 표정을 응시하면서 선명하게 설명해준다.

우리 셋은 내 새로운 직장인,매향여자중학교의 교직원용,  식당에서 대여섯번 만나면서 서로 알게된 사이다. 
김치 한조각을 집기위해 뒤적거리면서, 서툴은 알루미늄 젓가락사이에서 미끄러져 나가는 김치한가닥을 꼭 잡기위해 애를 쓰고 있었는데, 한국어에서는 흔히 이런 경우가 많은것 같다.

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It was my first week in Suwon, South Korea, working as an English language teacher. I was fresh out of university from the US state of Wisconsin, on my first international job contract and impossibly excited. I didn’t know it at the time, but South Korea would be my home for the next four years.

Throughout those years, this curious ‘our’ or ‘we’ – in Korean, ‘uri’ – cropped up again and again. Out of all the words explained to me, it was the one to make the biggest impression and leave the deepest, most enduring mark. Because, as it turned out, uri wasn’t a mere grammar point, it was a cultural canon. It captured the very essence of a nation.

“Korean people use ‘uri’ when something is shared by a group or community, or when many members in a group or community possess the same or similar kind of thing,” Beom Lee, a Korean language professor at Columbia University, told me in an interview. “[It’s] based on our collectivist culture.”

South Korea’s communal values are tied to its compact size, ethnically homogenous population and ardent nationalism. Here, a house – even one you pay for – is not yours; it’s ours. Likewise, my company is our company, my school is our school and my family is our family. Just because I might own or belong to something individually doesn’t mean others do not have a similar experience of ownership or belonging. To say ‘my’ is almost egocentric.

“Korean people always use uri nara(our country) instead of nae nara(my country). 'Nae nara' sounds weird. It sounds like they own the country,” Lee said. “Nae anae (my wife) sounds like he is the only person who has a wife in Korea.”

Above all, the country’s cultural collectivism is a testament to its long history of Confucianism. While South Korea has outgrown its dynasty-era, class-based hierarchy, it holds onto its Confucian ethics that dictate individuals should approach social contexts – from ordering food and drinks with friends to riding public transport with strangers – with the group in mind. In group networks, the ‘we’ is the collective Korean self, according to Boston University cultural studies professor Hee-an Choi, and it’s indispensable to the ‘I’.

 “There is no clear boundary between the word ‘I’ and the word ‘we’,” Choi writes in her book A Postcolonial Self. “As the usage of the words ‘we’ and ‘I’ are often interchangeable, so too is the identity of the ‘we’ often interchangeable with the identity of the ‘I.’ The meanings of ‘we’ and ‘I’ are negotiable not only in colloquial Korean usage but also in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Korean minds.”

Not long after I joined Mae-hyang as its only native English language teacher, I also became its only non-native Korean language student. My instructors, a giggly gaggle of teenaged girls in red plaid uniforms, would meet me in my classroom after school, notebooks, flashcards and dictionaries in hand and grins spread wide across their faces. “You are a student, just like us!” they said. “Yes, I am!” I smiled.

It wasn’t only my students who were eager to be my teachers.

It was also my co-workers, bosses, neighbours, landlords and even the occasional taxi driver or shop assistant or bartender. They all took the opportunity to teach me a thing or two about this tongue that once belonged to me, but then suddenly did not when I was adopted to the US from South Korea as a child. “You are Korean,” they would tell me, “so it’s important for you to speak the language that Koreans speak.”

 Being Korean meant knowing Korean. To understand myself was to make sense of the country. Such notions were blurry to me then, but would eventually come into focus as one and the same, at least based on traditional attitudes of Korean togetherness.

The 1400s in Korea was the golden age of its Joseon Dynasty, which reigned for five centuries and counts the Korean alphabet among its numerous scientific and cultural legacies. Before then, the kingdom, lacking a script of its own, borrowed Chinese characters to write Korean speech. But the classical Chinese system was too difficult to be democratic, its logographic nature ill-suited to Korean’s complex grammar. Seeing that large sectors of society were unable to adequately express themselves, King Sejong commissioned the invention of Hangeul in 1443.

One of the few scripts in the world to be deliberately designed, not organically evolved, Hangeul was intended to be easy for everyone, from the richest royalty to the poorest peasant, to learn how to read and write.

“While Americans generally have an egalitarian and individualistic consciousness, highly valuing personal autonomy, Korean interpersonal relations are, in general, still strongly tied to social hierarchism and collectivist ideals, highly valuing interpersonal dependency,” Sohn wrote in his book Korean Language in Culture and Society.

When Choi, the librarian, met her American husband, Julio Moreno, in South Korea, the contrasts between their two cultural communications became all the more apparent. Moreno, too, noted misunderstandings. An English language teacher and blogger, he recalls overhearing his students chatting about “their mother” and wondering how so many of them could be siblings. “It was very confusing,” Moreno laughed.

Grasping singular and plural possessive pronouns, professional translator and interpreter Kyung-hwa Martin can attest, is one of the greatest challenges for Koreans studying English and vice versa. Ultimately, learning another language necessitates learning another perspective. “Language and culture are embedded in each other. Language reflects culture and culture reflects language,” said Martin, who moved from Seoul to Virginia. “When you learn a different language, you have to think differently.”

For me, thinking differently didn’t come easy.

If one half of my most idealised identity was supposed to be American independence and exceptionalism, then the other half was Korean collectivism. It was a dichotomy I didn’t know how to reconcile. And the consequences weighed heavily. But the disappointment I so routinely sensed from my peers, I came to realise, wasn’t the condemnation I mistook it for, but an innate yearning for unity. It’s a lesson I still sometimes forget, but I know I can rely on uri to remind me.

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