Either Name Is Fine

Either Name is FIne

Daehyun (DH) Won 

“Identity is changed by the journey.”

By Madna Sarup, “Home and Identity.”

    It was one bright late-summer day with beautiful-like murderous sunshine, over one hundred-degree Fahrenheit. At that moment, an “international” student was attending a language school to learn English reading, speaking, and writing skills that are barely used in his reality. The student’s name is a unique-sound name, Daehyun, which nobody can pronounce at once even in his ESL class, made of “foreign students” from every continent.

    His commuting journey happened every day from Denton to Trinity Mills in Carrolton, Texas, through the A-train stations, and the trains kept brutally cold air inside that made invisible temperature borders between the natural hot and artificial cold that I could not sense in my homeland.

    After getting off the commuting train, he went to the school mandatorily and inevitably to keep and stay “immigration” status with his roaring rusted-metal-bike day by day. Actually, he was being kicked out from a university program by an external, administrative force due to an official document issue on his “student” visa, which could not be solved because of his non-fluent English to justify himself for the reason of non-summer registrations in front of an international education officer. Ironically, he spent his early summer vacation with all smiles and pleasures that he could possess, without any class registrations and knowing the policy that was required for his case. 

    Unfortunately, the reality was cruel to who was a just ingenuous person and never intended to become an actual “immigrant," only wanting to study English literary works with passion. At that time, his life became a comical tragedy with his full smile that he had in the early summer vacation.

    Anyways, again, after getting off the commuting train, he always had to step into the abandoned pedestrian “wilderness” on the fissured grey asphalt beside the green grass-covered plain invading the collapsing asphalt’s chasms, to ride on his bicycle. One time, suddenly, he noticed a dried carcass of a poor squirrel between the equivocal gray and green borders, who could not decide to stay which border sides, even in his or her death. Simultaneously, sweating his all possible saps due to riding his bike on the asphalt, he identified himself as the poorly dried carcass. Right, his Korean “Daehyunic” soul was being dried through the trials through all invisible, invincible, and non-transferable borders surrounding his reality, including the unclear borderline of producing, translating, and understanding processes between his native language and English.

    Right, this is my autobiographical short story, and I apologize for the pessimistic tone toward this past. At that period, the borders that I had experienced were “fixed and fluid, impermeable and porous,” and “separatable but connected” as exactly the same as Susan Stanford Friedman writes. I physically experienced the physical and political borders, but all the sorrowfulness came from metaphorical borders, which forced me to think I am terribly isolated from my secure home country and could not pass to the other side.

    Fortunately, my strength from my slow-and-steady personality as a Korean “Daehyun” (which could not completely be “dried” due to my fundamental identity made in and of Korean language from my parents' mother tongue) allowed me to endure my lawful “immigrant” status and passion for English academia and get used to the physical and psychological sufferings until I could get the eligibility to transfer to another university’s program. Also, paradoxically, during attending the language school, I could have natural contacts with English speakers and slowly (very slowly…) make my alternative transferable identity between two borders through building cultural intersectionality.

    About three years later, on one bright day in late fall last year at Texas Woman’s University, after several brutal summers had passed, when heading home, I abruptly thought like “when I get my cozy home, I will eat and sleep forever.” Surprisingly, the home means that my apartment in Dallas, my new hometown, and that was the day when I introduced my name as both DH and Daehyun to classmates.

Like this long term experience for years, I could reach a realization that there are no exact lines on two national borders and the determination on which border I am lining only relies on my choice between DH and Daehyun’s identities even though the two have no “clear” distinction like the borders. 

    So, what will happen next? Honestly, I don’t know. From the last year and the current, I am in process of actual immigration after meeting my wife. Life is ironic (and romantic... sometimes:).

    Oh, I forgot to mention it. After a few months later when I noticed the poor squirrel’s dead body, I saw a bunch of yellow flowers around the place in the front of the winter season entrance. That became my motive for my first professionally published poem, Flowers like Anzaldua argues that “Living in a state of psychic unrest in a borderland is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flash.”