Goulet.pdf

Millie Creighton
Given the manner in which this story just flooded forth from the
informant, it took some time to begin to make sense of it to present it
as I have just done. It became apparent that although quite attached
to each other in their lives, during the Korean class, and in other con-
texts, the two sisters strove to appear as if they barely knew each other.
I realized that the older sister’s interest in the Korean language had
not simply been sparked by happening to tune in to an nhk television
program. This was the language she had learned first as a child, and
to a much later age than her younger sister, such that it was well es-
tablished by the time they left Korea. Knowing this did make me feel
somewhat better in terms of understanding why her Korean could
progress so much faster than mine.
For both women, taking the class had been very important and an
intrinsic part of a desire to connect with who they were. For the older
of the two this was her first language and she wanted to speak it again,
and re-gain her competency in it. The younger of the two wanted some
knowledge of it. She talked about having gone back at some point to
Korea after her father’s death and how she felt about not being able to
talk to her relatives there at the time, although her sister and mother
could. She hoped someday to go back again, and she wanted to be able
to communicate with those same relatives in Korean when she went
back again. Their desire to better their Korean language skills, even
taking the free class offered by the Tokyo city ward office, had pre-
sented a dilemma for them. Her sister had expressed serious qualms
about enrolling in the course. They discussed taking the course for
some time, and although the older sister very much wanted to, she
was reluctant to do so. The upcoming Seoul Olympics in 1988 had
provided them with what seemed a window of opportunity to pur-
sue their desire, because there was a “Korean-language boom” going
on in Japan, generally as a response to the upcoming Olympic games.
According to the informant, her older sister nonetheless repeatedly
warned that it was not a good idea to appear to be able to speak Ko-
rean too well. It might be better not to be able to do so, or at least not
to let people know one could speak Korean. She felt that if one knew
Korean, people might suspect one were Korean, even if one were sup-
posedly a Japanese person who had studied it as a foreign language,
just as Japanese study many other foreign languages.