Interests

Biology

Under construction

Linguistics and Korean Studies

I moved from South Korea to the United States when I was nine, and found between me and my new peers a deep linguistic divide. Because I could neither understand nor speak English, I remained silent for the first two years of school here, and my peers were stunned to hear me fly off in fluent English my third year. Even then, from translating for my parents and listening to my peers fail to pronounce my name and my lunches, I realized that certain sounds, particles, and phrase structures in Korean were unavailable to my English-speaking peers, just as the English distinction between /ɹ/ and /l/ or "the" and "a" had been lost to me.

Koreans invest staggering amounts of time, effort, and money into developing English ability because they see it as crucial to obtaining and maintaining socioeconomic status. My parents uprooted their middle-class life in Korea so that my sister and I could learn to speak English “like a native”, in a practice called “early study abroad” (chogi yuhak). As a child, I primarily got a crushing sense of responsibility out of our ill-fated stay in the United States, but when we returned to Korea, I realized that I bypassed six years of a grueling school system which feeds six billion dollars per year to the English education industry alone. As a sixteen-year-old high school dropout, I was paid handsomely as a “native-like” English tutor to an elementary schooler, a young businesswoman, and a business executive before they each realized that I was, in fact, utterly clueless about language pedagogy.

These experiences were formative in my choice to study linguistics in college. I developed a desire to explore the breadth of structures among languages (nurtured in great part by exposure to a variety of languages on Duolingo!), and to understand how English came to possess so many to take extreme measures in its pursuit. I also hoped, as a secondary goal, that I would learn to overcome my insecurities which stemmed from my period of linguistic isolation. My time studying linguistics at Boston College taught me so much more—I learned to appreciate the surprising unity underlying the diversity of structures across languages, and to evaluate theories and propose new ones to maximally account for available language data. I also learned to situate linguistics, as a discipline tied to some of the most progressive and regressive social movements, within history.

Currently, I am interested in Korea’s contact with modernity. In particular, I see Korea’s current hypercompetitive society and its ailments (youth unemployment, economic inequality, declining birth rates) as a direct consequence of Koreans’ Darwinian understanding of modernity as an object of mastery necessary for their survival in a globalizing world. To understand the sources and development of this worldview, I have been examining the influential editorials on Tongnipsinmun, the first Korean-language newspaper, by Soh Jaipil, who fled to America and became the first Korean with an American medical degree after throwing a failed coup. I am also interested in Koreans’ responses to loanwords, and have been analyzing a database of “purified” loanwords maintained by the National Institute of Korean Language.