Ever since I’ve been bilingual, I’ve had this dilemma—the Korean language didn’t seem marketable.

To the east you had English the lingua franca. China to the west with it’s massive population and diaspora. And Russia and the post Soviet states were up north. The languages that had a limited, local impact seemed to be Japanese and the minority languages. Korean felt minor.

The facts were too obvious. I would get a higher ROI if I spend time mastering any of the other languages as opposed to Korean.

I had this desire to write for everyone and that further complicated things. Moving around as a TCK made my language development uneven. Tradeoffs were made and my Korean and Chinese were nowhere near the level where I could comfortably write.

“Focus on what’s immediately in front of you. Write in English,” spoke an inner voice.

Once I listened and obeyed the voice, guilt at forsaking my mother tongue enveloped me.

I tell myself,

Korean, as a language finds beauty in conformity. The language of a monoethnic and monocultural people that took root in a peninsula always seem to point to a single answer. The language pushes diversity away. English, on the other hand, is open towards the pen regardless of where the writer is from and accepts their work as part of its canon. Non-native writers have left their particular marks and shaped the language.

I assure myself,

My past interactions with Koreans from the peninsula convinced me that I didn’t have what they wanted to read and it would be annoying at best. I’m still clueless about how to communicate multiculturalism—something that means so dear and near to me—to people who’ve known nothing but monoculture.

I ask myself,

Did other English-as-a-Foreign-Language and multilingual writers wrestle with this anxiety? Did they worry about the language they wrote in, fretting over how they should express themselves?

Whether Hemingway, Rand, Buck, or Nabokov, I want to find comfort knowing they struggled writing in English too. After all, they emerged victorious from that fight with their works as olive wreaths.

Who knows, I may be writing not for Koreans of the present but of the future. I’m sending signals to the Koreans who’s left the land of monoculturalism and are in the middle of the ocean sailing to find footing in multiculturalism.