For a while, I wrote every post in English first. I live in the U.S., I write about the U.S., so it seemed obvious. But if I'm honest, those posts never quite felt like mine. The sentences were correct. The person behind them was missing.
I figured out why while writing about Korea. When Korean news reaches me over here, something rises up — a pull to speak for Korea, to stand up for it. Anyone who's lived abroad knows the feeling. But when I put that feeling into English, I'd catch myself writing about my own country at arm's length, coolly, as if it were someone else's. Inside I was worked up. On the page I was even-handed. And I started to wonder whether the language itself was doing that to me.
So I flipped the order: Korean first, then English. One small change, and the writing warmed up. My own feeling finally made it onto the page instead of getting filtered out somewhere between the thought and the keyboard.
Not that the new way is easy. Going Korean-to-English (or back) keeps collapsing into flat, literal translation — and no, letting AI do the converting doesn't fix it; the result comes out the same. Which makes me think the honest approach might be to write each language wholly from scratch, never translating at all. If I were turning German or French into English, maybe I could get away with it. But Korean and English don't share a sentence structure or an idiom between them, so for me the seam always shows.
Rewriting the same story across three blogs, in different languages, has turned into an odd kind of mirror. I'm not translating myself. I'm editing myself — and slowly finding out what my own voice actually sounds like.
I did lose something in the trade. My husband Jinguk used to ask me about American life constantly, and every question was free material. But he's been here more than ten years now, and the questions have dried up. These days if I start to explain something, he waves me off — "I already know that" — a little indignant, even. My life got easier; a reliable source of material walked out the door. I'm not going to invent things to replace it, though. I'll get by on what's actually mine.
I still don't know if this is the right method. I only know it feels closer to my own voice than anything I wrote the old way. At the very least, I'm no longer writing in borrowed clothes.
Have you ever felt like a slightly different person in another language — a different temperature, a different nerve? I'd like to know I'm not the only one.
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📍 From New York — miguk | 📺 YouTube: @miguktv
Tags: bilingual writing, writing voice, Korean and English, translation, writing in a second language, blogging journey
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