I Am Still an Immigrant

I arrived in the United States on December 18, 1999.

When I woke the next morning, even the air I breathed felt unfamiliar. I had moved from one country to another, yet nothing around me felt comfortable.

My mother, who had immigrated thirty years before me, had been waiting for this reunion with my stepfather. They had prepared a place for me to stay and food for me to eat. Looking back, I think of the care that went into those preparations. Yet surrounded by that care, I felt as though I could hardly breathe, almost like a prisoner entering a cell.

I had family welcoming me and a home where I could rest. But some part of me had not yet arrived.

About two weeks later, I needed a haircut. My mother told me to go to the barbershop on Main Street. I would be fine without speaking English, she assured me. There were large pictures of hairstyles on the wall. All I had to do was choose one and say its number.

Holding on to that reassurance, I left her house alone for the first time.

This was a small rural town in Iowa. People said “Hi” whenever our eyes met. To them, it may have been an ordinary greeting. To me, even that small word was cause for anxiety. Eye contact meant I might have to say something. I kept looking away, dodging people’s gazes as though I were maneuvering through a military field exercise.

Up ahead, a white woman was walking with a little boy, perhaps six years old, holding his hand. When he spotted me, he suddenly ran over.

“Jackie Chan!”

He began striking kung fu poses, studying me with fascination. Standing there, I felt like a monkey being watched at a zoo.

Looking back, perhaps he, too, was responding to an unfamiliar encounter. An Asian young man on a street in his small town may have reminded him of the actor he had seen in movies. But I had no room in me then to share his amusement. Just getting down that unfamiliar street and safely to the barbershop was enough.

When I finally reached it, I hesitated at the door. My mother had said I only needed to say a number. Still, my legs were trembling.

Find the picture. Say the number. That is all.

At last, I gathered myself and opened the door. A large, elderly white barber greeted me.

“Hi.”

That was the last word I understood.

Everything that followed was beyond me. My mind went blank, and my body froze. I had studied English in Korean classrooms for more than ten years, sometimes taking lessons under the threat of corporal punishment. Yet here I was, alone in a barbershop, unable to understand a single thing the barber was saying.

Where had all those years of learning gone? Why couldn’t I manage something this simple?

Bewildered and ashamed, I stood there like an icicle hanging from the eaves.

Eventually, I gathered my wits enough to find the hairstyle pictures on the wall.

“Three.”

With that one word out, I let the barber guide me into the chair. About five minutes later, the haircut was done.

I looked like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.

I can laugh about it now. But that day, I was so overwhelmed that I cannot even remember how I paid. Only after I got home did something else occur to me.

I had not even said “Thank you.”

That stayed with me, too: I had come home without managing those two small words.

So ended my first outing alone in America.

That day, I began to understand how deeply differences in language and culture could reach into an ordinary life. Almost everything I had learned and relied on in Korea seemed to be of little use here. Even “common sense,” the things that had never needed explaining, no longer felt dependable.

Could I act as I always had? What was the other person saying? How was I supposed to answer? Again and again, I stopped short at things I would never have thought twice about back home.

I am an immigrant.

I had known that when I entered the country. But I felt it far more clearly on the day I went alone to get a haircut.

More than twenty years later, I look back and wonder: how much has really changed between the person I was that day and the person I am now?

The setting and circumstances of my life have changed. But I still hesitate before things I do not understand. I am still learning how to live the day I have been given. Then as now, I am a pilgrim on the journey entrusted to me. I walk not because I know the whole way, but because there is a stretch of road before me today.

If something has been added to my life, it is that I have begun to notice the other people walking that road.

Back then, I had a home to stay in. My mother and stepfather were there, waiting for me. I had warm meals and people looking after me. Even with all of that, I could hardly breathe in the unfamiliarity of it all.

What must it be like, then, to arrive without a place to stay, without family nearby to help, without the money to keep oneself afloat?

I cannot claim to know the whole of anyone else’s experience. But when I think of their isolation and helplessness, I remember my own trembling legs outside the barbershop door.

There are people who carry those fears and still take one step, then another, toward a dream for themselves and their families. Some call it the American Dream. These days, what moves me more are the individual lives and footsteps behind those words.

I want to offer this story to those who still feel they live not comfortably within the mainstream, but somewhere along its edges, on the fringe.

Even after many years, unfamiliar moments can find us. A word we know may refuse to come. Something that looks easy for everyone else may leave us hesitating for a long time. A day like that does not diminish the road we have traveled, or the life of the person walking it.

I would like to say that to the young man trembling outside the barbershop, too.

You were awkward and afraid. But you opened the door, went out alone, and came home. That day, too, was a day you lived your way through.

I do not say this as someone who has reached the other side. I say it as someone still finding his place on the fringe, speaking to the person beside him.

Even today, I see myself walking with steps that are still unsure. But I am glad there is an “us”: people walking together, with someone as unsure as me among them.

I am still an immigrant, walking that road alongside them.