Writing in Korean,Living in the U.S

Abstract

The author uses a screenplay form of experimental writing to enhance the sensory richness of her bilingual data. The author takes her academic prose¹ and transforms it, using multilayered scenes to better portray both her and bilingual son's voices. Voices often squeak with conflict resulting mainly from differences in people's linguistic/cultural understandings. As Orwell observed, people remain ignorant of their surroundings even when the evidence is staring them in the face; in this way, the author describes how she was unable to recognize her son's bilingual/cultural dilemma until she stopped evaluating him through a monolingual lens. In this piece, the author takes readers on a journey into the everyday world of parent—child interactions. Using the genre of screenplay contributes to the emerging construction of new traditions in scholarly writing with bilingual data, and promotes the decolonization of bilingual research from the standard monolingual/cultural perspective.

Keywords

experimental writing bilingual/cultural dilemma decolonization Koreans in the US

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