The sound of my voice melts into that of my partner, stringing together a melody of Korean words that reaches the ears of our startled opponents. It is the final round of the Heritage Hall national debate tournament, and we have given our first speech. The other team stands silent. Panic creeps up their reddened faces. The timer ticks by. They are visibly shocked that we dared to sing a song in a debate round, and a Korean one at that. They don’t understand the situation or the song.
My greatest fear used to be of incoherence. Growing up between two worlds, Korea and America, I had a shifting identity that was hard to understand; I was stuck within the gap of translation, a perpetual immigration between languages. Constantly, I was trying to get to one side, to one clear answer for the questions that haunted my sense of identity. “Are you sure you’re Korean?” whispered through the halls of my school in Seoul. “Can you speak Chinese?” shrieked through the New York subways. “Why do your eyes slant like that?” jeered through the streets of Arkansas. I struggled to find the answers to these questions; I translated my answers from Korean to English to Korean again, constantly trying to find an explanation of myself that would be comprehensible enough for them. I was Korean, but also American; I belonged, but was not bound; I was home, but I always felt homesick. But mere words did nothing to translate my identity into the grammar, language, and culture of my surroundings, and my fractured thoughts were too dispersed to form a single idea. But my answer was always a mistake, like a yellow stain on white paper.
Debate was the corrector with which I chose to fix myself, to white out the stains of my unintelligibility. I was determined to assimilate into the answer of debate. I would immigrate to the West by donning the mask of a US policymaker, trading my Korean citizenship for the comfort of simulating policy, the rapid-fire of technical terminology, and heated argument of heightened rivalry that all characterized policy debate. I would speak in the clear, crisp words of “The United States Federal Government should…” I would speak so eloquently that people would forget that English was my second language. I would finally be understood, completely, by my audience.
And at first, it seemed I was. Judges praised me for my quick rebuttals, calculated strategies, and casual confidence. I was coherent enough to communicate with others, without the clutter of my Korean identity. I was finally known, finally understood. Yet I was not satisfied. Beneath my fluent façade, my hidden half lay in waiting. Korean twisted in my mouth, clawing its way into unsuspecting sentences; my black eyes and yellow skin bore the branding of the foreignness of my culture and my country. So when I encountered debaters who used their personal experiences as proud weapons against the norms of debate, I was captivated. They battled debate itself, its discrimination against “deviant” individuals, its homogenization of those not protected by the government into assumed US identity. These debaters were different, but weren’t ashamed to be; they defiantly defended their deviance with a confidence I aspired to achieve.
The answer I had been seeking came not with erasing my difference but in embracing it. My debates slowly made room for my identity, as I accepted that I was and always would be a Korean-American woman. I stopped trying to translate myself into the standards of America, but gained confidence in cross-cultural expression. I began to see that I did not hover between two incompatible worlds, but belonged within both; I did not have to cross the border when I myself was the border. Debate transformed my attitude toward my identity, and my identity, now fully embraced, started to transform my debates.
In the final round of the Heritage Hall tournament, my opponents urge the judge to reject our song because “it isn’t English, it doesn’t belong in a debate round; they should go somewhere else if they want to sing in another language.” I laugh because that very logic is what makes me I do what I do, questioning the notion of who belongs in debate and who doesn’t, what is accepted as “American” and what isn’t. The strange song of Korea weaves into my speeches a distinction between deviance and delinquency; “different” does not translate to “disallowed”. My tune is always changing, its melody always new to me, but it is always perfectly incoherent as I navigate my difference toward a sense of identity. My unintelligible performance is a question, and the answer is ambiguous; it is bordering on difference, it is beholding both worlds, it is belonging in between.
