Language is a social tool, a culture contexter, and a leveling force—capacities I wield, but have always been removed from.
I have spoken about this before on other blogs, but I’ll take a different angle here.
Though, let’s back up, because I don’t want to seem like I’m above anybody else.
I see culture as a means to an end. Not in an appropriative way. I don’t use cultures for my own social clout or profiteering. They’re tools for exploration and thought provocation, ways to expand my mind.
And that’s probably why I’ve spent years collecting resources on language, letting their meanings slow-drip into me and trickle into usable chunks that pop out sporadically when necessary. I don’t “just learn a phrase or two.”
I learn etymologies, lexicons, and build learning methods for whole tongues. I eat words.
This is likely what people call an autistic “special interest” nowadays (though I hate the term). I wasn’t hyperlexic (reading early without equivalent comprehension) as a child. In fact, I didn’t want to read. And I ignored my family’s attempts to communicate with me in our heritage language, likely as a result of many factors—not just neurodiversity.
When I got older, my interest appeared in spirals, first starting in isolated pockets of creative writing steeped in stereotypes and repeated viewings of what I’ll now (jokingly) call “formative literature.” But my understanding evolved quickly, almost quicker than parts of me could keep up.
That’s when I started learning Korean, and in a very autistic way. I hadn’t been diagnosed with anything formally yet, but my focus on this language was profound, sticky, and deeply felt.
I started out “wanting to learn like a baby” just because with other languages, I’d had formal classes, and my interests in the MBTI were rapidly forming alongside those in Korean language and culture. I had a rudimentary understanding of “intuition” as pattern detection. But what I didn’t know was I had a cursed gift, thanks to a mixture of autism, ADHD, and other quirks: a hyper-attuned ability to pick out patterns on the spot, but incredibly slow uptake of integrating them into use… especially for my own understanding.
I was operating on all cylinders, including the ones that couldn’t make the car go, but instead produced drag.
Nonetheless, I was learning something important: I was real. Language was me.
I’m not ethnically or culturally Korean. I’m very clearly culturally American. But in learning Korean through an IV, I learned to see parts of myself in higher resolution, or even alter myself to become understood cross-culturally. Learning Spanish was the precursor to this, and as I took more of an interest in global cultures and developed mentally, you might safely say I exploded into synthesis and observation modes.
The tipping point wasn’t really an iceberg moment, but when I realized over months that I was steadily improving on pronunciation and real-time production. I’m not a good speaker in any language (even in English, my native language, where I pass, but end up sounding like a textbook… probably like I do here). So when I felt the words in my mouth, the vowels shifting, my tongue hearing every movement (yes, hearing), I was alive.
In English, I feel knowledgeable. I feel awake. In Spanish, I feel gentle and emotionally precise—educated and “ready.” But with Korean, I feel like my presence matters. There may be no native speakers around, but I feel resonance. There, on the other side of the globe, are people who emote and breathe in this language. It’s like communing with nature, sprites flying invisibly in the garden or wood.
If English is my air, and Spanish my lungs, Korean is my heart.
I don’t claim to be anything other than a white American, but if you’re Korean, reading this, whether diaspora or mainland, know that your language and culture is more than K-pop, attractive people held up too high, and appropriative memes that simplify. At least for this lady. This shows up for me in small ways—how carefully I attend to honorifics, how long I sit with pronunciation before speaking, how willing I am to remain a learner rather than a representative.
If anything, openness to culture takes this kind of kindness and responsibility to hold multiple ways of being and knowing at once, and not let them collapse in on one another. That’s what true global citizenhood is. I don’t claim to be perfect at it, but what I do experience is cognitive plurality in the best way now that I’ve recognized a human’s capacity to do it.
I can’t agree with John Lennon when he sings, “Imagine there’s no countries”—I firmly believe humans are designed to absorb each other and live in ways that foster cultural osmosis, but not destruction.
True diversity isn’t a quota or a census number in debate. It’s realizing the potential of every human being, neutrally, but not denying their right to be. In regalia. As provocateurs. But mostly, as carriers.
I know learning language—and seizing words—are what helped me recognize that I have a place in this world, too. Cultures are not me; and yet I am culture.
For someone like me, who had viewed culture through broken glass, this is immensely gratifying.
Images by Getillustrations + and machines.
The Self-Styled Scholar 