How 아빠 Learned English

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Gina Kim Kotinek

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He told me while we nursed his favorite scotch on the porch. Rocking in our chairs. Basking in the dusk. Seeing each other under starlight. I asked him what my first word was, not because I didn’t know, but because I liked hearing the story. Appa was a great storyteller, and he had incredible English. So I liked giving him every excuse to use it.

Today, he spoke in Korean.

Appa, he said. You’d yell Appa Appa Appa, desperate for me to pick you up.

And my first English word?

Appa, he replied. 

That’s not English.

It basically is. Turn 아빠 into appa, and it’s English.

I laughed, buzzed. Mom claims my first English word was mom, I said.

Your mother doesn’t understand the first thing about English.

I sipped my scotch. It was a joke he told often. He would die on the hill that my first word—both English and Korean—was appa. It was just one of those battles he refused to let Mom win.

The cicadas chirped, and the wind rustled through the trees, echoing like rain. On the stone porch, pinprick shadows danced across the chipping paint, as if the darkness had sewn needles through the light and left tiny hollows in its wake.

Then, what was your first word? I asked.

I’m too old to remember something like that. He finished his glass, so I poured him another. He shouldn’t drink too much, I knew. He was at risk of needing a liver transplant. After hearing the news, Mom had cried, while he had stubbornly declared that if he had to live a miserable life, he would rather drink and smoke than not.

You don’t know what I went through, he had told Mom. When people like me first came here—the bullshit we had to endure. You whites wouldn’t get it. Smoke and drink help stave off the pain.

Eventually, he compromised to quit, but sometimes he and I would drink a couple of glasses of scotch outside, away from Mom’s prying gaze. It was in these moments I felt most connected to his Korean half in me—when he would open the wounds Mom had stitched and suppressed, and pour his blood over me to remind me who I was, no matter how I looked.

You really don’t remember? I asked after a moment of silence. I traced the rim of my glass with a finger. How about your first English word?

He huffed. Drank a bit more. I could tell I had broached a topic he didn’t like, but the buzz made me bold, and I hoped it made him willing to share.

Come on, Appa. I just want a new story.

I tell you enough stories. 

Not the story of your first English word.

He sank back into his chair, and the clouds shifted, letting the moonlight slice over his body like a blade. He looked old like this—scotch in hand, back hunched, face sculpted into a glare. The silver light immortalized him in his stillness and made his skin gleam like marble. 

He smacked his lips, then set his glass on the unsteady wire table between us. He looked out toward the yard that stretched for acres beyond our home, and the seriousness that hardened his gaze cut through my buzz, leaving only a quiet chill. At his first word, it was as if the cicadas, the wind, the world itself silenced for him. My attention was his.

When I first came here, I only knew Korean, he said. There weren’t any resources to teach us English. The whites hated and feared us, and my fellow Koreans didn’t know English either, so we could only do our best. I could say my first English word was no, or yes, or stop, but my heart doesn’t consider those my first. I didn’t understand the weight of the English language yet. Back then, I was still speaking Korean in English. It wasn’t until I got my first phrasebook that things changed. It was originally for the Chinese, but a Korean translated one for us. It was a big event. I remember gathering with the few acquaintances I had to learn the English phrases: Is this the right way to Fifth Street? Next month, my lease will expire. Do you have any other kinds that are better than these?

So those were your first English words?

He shook his head. Those phrases were just Korean pretending to be English—all memorization and no understanding. I wasn’t speaking to the white men yet. He paused, then turned to lock eyes with me. The day I said my first English word was the day I finally learned. A woman’s necklace was stolen, and she blamed it on me. I was a busboy at the time, and I didn’t know how to tell the officer I was innocent. So I repeated the only phrase I could think of, even though they wouldn’t understand, even though they would beat me regardless.

He downed the rest of his scotch. This time, I didn’t pour him another. I fidgeted in my seat as Appa stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed as if his memories were unfolding in the moonlit field. When the silence grew too heavy, I asked:

And what did you say, Appa?

Everything and nothing, he replied. My first English word was much like yours—Korean but English, pummeled from Hangul into the alphabet by pure desperation: 제가 안 했어요. Je-ga an hae-sseo-yo. Jega an haesseoyo.¹

 ¹ Translation: I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.

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Gina Kim Kotinek is a biracial Korean American writer based in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. She can usually be found hunched over her computer—reading, writing, or attempting to master the art of conquering carpal tunnel and tendonitis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rat’s Ass Review, Eunoia Review, and The Foundationalist, among others. Her poetry was also shortlisted for Epiphany’s 2024 Breakout! Writers Prize.

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