For the better part of fifteen years, I was a telephone Korean.
It all started the third year I was in Japan. By this time, my Japanese language skill had progressed past the run-Spot-run stage and moved into True Communication. One day, I called the Tokyo YWCA to ask about membership. There was a brief silence as the woman at the other end registered my non-native Japanese, then all of a sudden she started speaking to me in Korean.
I interrupted as soon as I could get a word in edgewise. "Sorry, I don't speak Korean."
This was followed by another brief silence as the lady at the other end absorbed this information, then she rebounded. "Oh. You are Chinese?"
"No, I'm--"
"From Taiwan?"
"No! I'm American and I just want--"
"Korean-American?"
"No!" I spluttered, wondering why I had to account for my race. "I'm hakujin." This is white person in Japanese and it finally got the YWCA lady to hush up and listen.
"Really?" She sounded provokingly skeptical.
"Really!"
"Well, you certainly sound Korean."
This was news to me: I'd been to Korea four times and not one Korean person had ever told me my Japanese sounded Korean.
"Are you Korean?" I asked her. There are a lot of Koreans who live in Japan.
"No, but I'm studying Korean." She sounded a little disappointed.
When I met this woman at the YWCA a few hours later, she shook her head and looked even more disappointed. "You really sounded Korean, you know!"
A few months later, I called a travel company in Tokyo that arranged ship voyages. My boyfriend and I were planning a trip to Europe and wanted to book tickets on the ferry from Norway to England. But as soon as I'd said "Hello, I'd like to book--" the woman who answered the phone interrupted me. "I'm sorry, but our lines don't sail to Korea."
"Well, that's fine, then, because I don't want to go to Korea, I want--"
"You'll have to call a different number for the ferry to Pusan. Shall I give it to you?"
"Please listen to me! I don't want to go to Korea, we want to sail from Norway to England!"
The woman sounded puzzled. "Ah. But you are Korean, right?"
Not again! "No! I'm an American and my boyfriend is British and we want to sail from Norway to England."
Fifteen minutes later, I'd managed to book two tickets from Esbjerg to Harwich and I'd given the lady our names and passport details. But I could still hear the doubt in her voice: I got the feeling she would have to see my actual photograph before she'd give up thinking I was a Korean national.
Over the next fourteen years, I don't think I could count the times I got mistaken for a Korean over the telephone. Pizza delivery places. Telemarketers. Exterminators. Plumbers. Receptionists at swimming pools, restaurants, and cinemas -- all of them wanted to speak to me in Korean or know how long a Korean like me had been studying Japanese. My husband thought it was hilarious. I thought it was a pain in the neck.
During our last few months in Japan, I had to arrange for a company to ship our household goods back to the U.K. I called half a dozen companies to get that many estimates, and I was a telephone Korean many times over, gently explaining again and again that we were sending our effects to London, not Seoul or Pusan.
In retrospect, I know my Japanese pronunciation didn't really sound Korean. Some of our friends in Japan were Korean and they all confirmed this. Being mistaken for a Korean was really a compliment: it meant that my Japanese, though non-native, was at least in the ballpark. It also showed a little prejudice: there is a strong feeling in Japan that if a foreigner speaks Japanese reasonably well, he or she must be an Asian. So whenever strangers heard my foreign-but-intelligible Japanese over the telephone, they envisioned an Asian face at the end of the line. They could tell that I didn't sound 100% native, so they figured I must be the closest thing to a Japanese person: a Korean. When my husband spoke Japanese over the phone, no one ever took him for any kind of Asian. And when our daughters spoke Japanese on the telephone, strangers always assumed they were Japanese.
No, I was the one and only Korean in our family. And who would have thought how much I'd grow to miss it?
Here in Scotland, whenever I have to telephone a stranger, I will often hear that same short pause I used to hear in Japan as my foreignness is registered.
"American or Canadian?" the stranger will ask.
"American," I always tell them. And sometimes, I just can't help myself: "Korean-American, that is."
