Picture of Seoul Korea

Author: Erin Million

Coming To America:

It was over 20 years ago but I spoke English before [going to America] I’ve studied and spoken it.  I was pretty comfortable.  I spoke almost as well as I do now.  I would say I spoke fairly good English, we learned to read and write from probably the 6th or 7th grade on and even before that.  So I had quite a few years of experience speaking English.  Well, class taught and actually being there is two different things.  In a class environment, when we have all kinds of questions the teacher can only teach, you know, from text books.  Although, the teacher we had attended Oxford.

I think it really helped being with my husband and he kind of guided me so that really helped.  I didn’t have any trouble at the Airport at all but then it’s not like what you see today.  When I first landed, just because I grew up in the city, you know being in San Francisco, it was just another city.  The only difference I saw was it was less crowded, there’s not many people, although there are some people in the street it’s not like what they do in Seoul.  Seoul is like if you see New York streets on T.V. where the people are walking by in Manhattan.  You see streams of people walking by.  So then we didn’t really spend a whole lot of time there because from there we rented a car to go all the way to L.A. We just got off a long flight; we were so tired. Finally in the end when we got to L.A we found a hotel. The reason we drove from San Francisco to L.A. was we were going to Disney Land.  It was the whole purpose for going to L.A. before we were to go to my husbands' parent’s home.  I liked Disney Land a lot we did all kinds of stuff.  You hear about Disney Land, everybody knows, in Korea anyway, you know of Mickey Mouse since you get to see cartoons and stuff.  So I wanted to go and see Disney Land and what it was like, so we went to Disney Land.  I saw all the cartoon characters I’d seen on T.V. 

Anyway, so I’d say it was a very good experience for me, personally.  Even though you actually are here and your senses tell you you are here, your mind it always kind of wondering; Am I here? It’s kind of like, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.  It’s something like bewilderment.  Your sensory perception, you don’t have it, it's kind of confusing, you’re looking around, it's so different, you just try and compare it to what you’ve grown up with and what you’ve seen but still it's big differences.  One thing you get to see all different colors of people.  There's blond hair people, there’s white haired people, there’s black people, other Asian people, and there’s people of maybe Hispanic backgrounds, now that I know what they are back then when I first saw I didn’t know because Korea’s mostly Koreans.  [In Korea] You do see some Americans and Europeans being in the big city and all that, but now I’m seeing it as I’m being the minority and there’s a big mass of different people, different color people, and your just wondering Wow!  You just feel different. 

Keeping up communication:

I call them, I take trips, send pictures through the internet.  My sister just sent be a picture of her new born daughter.  She sent some video but it won’t play.  I don’t know why it won’t play. 

Best and worst experience:

My best experience would be, learning that women had an unrestricted kind freedom.  See when I was growing, because of the situation between the North and South,  your movement was restricted during the nighttime.  We had curfews so unless you were in dire need, hospital emergency or something, you weren’t allowed to move about.  Here you can go any where you want any time you want.  I guess I felt really free and not only that once I became a citizen I could vote for whoever I wanted to vote.  I can say anything about anyone, you can even curse them if you want to.  I learned the meaning of freedom.  So long as I’m not hurting anyone I’m free to do what ever I want.   I don’t know what to consider my worst experience the worst thing is probably not being able to see my family as often as I would like.  That would be the only thing.

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