When I told my parents that we had made the decision to move to Chicago, my father was very angry. More accurately, he was crushed. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. There’s no way he could understand why a job would move me and his grandchildren across the country, away from him. He is from a different time, a different world.

My father is the embodiment of a rich culture that has been lost. It’s easy to say that he should get with the times or that he should try and stay relevant. But what he preserved within himself is an artifact embedded and entwined in a way that’s completely at odds with what his children learned and lived every time we walked out of his house. So while it’s easy and un-nuanced for me to judge, it’s the only life and values he’s known. I wish I could say that it is better for him in his own native Korea. But his own home country has evolved, leaving my father preserved as a relic in a snow globe, captured and suspended in time and space. It breaks my heart that the only home he has now is the globe which he has tried to muscle us into – one whose walls, to his dismay, are permeable to us and do not encapsulate us. He’s becoming irrelevant with only the indignance of our wild ways to preserve him. As he gets older, I often wonder what responsibilities I have to uphold and honor the culture he embodies.

I came across this poem several months ago, and it has remained in my heart and mind especially as society chooses to distance itself from us in the name of safety and preservation:

Unlike my father, as a Korean American, I have spent a good portion of my life trying to blend into the dominant culture by blurring and blending and behaving. Where he held firm his beliefs, unrelenting to opposing values, my brothers and I became malleable. I have only recently come to embrace my non-cereal eating, chopsticks-for-Cobb-salad self amidst tanning salons, Easter baskets, and parents called by their first names. I CAN be both-and, and not either-or. My father could never understand this. We, as second generation Koreans living America, have made this an art form. We have carved out our unique bookmark in Korean and American histories – bulgogi sandwich bookmarks. We hold the hearts of two cultures, making them uniquely our own. Neither relics nor renegades, we embody transition. We preserve and make new. Where have we arrived? Exactly where we are. Neither here nor there is the perfect place.

As SLPs, we have been trained to coax vowels and consonants into whatever shape we want, but what if, instead, we embraced the subtlety of the non-tense sibilant /s/ that always sounds stressed in American English or the tense /d/ that is often contorted into a /ð/ in speech therapy sessions all over the country? Both-and. And what if, instead of arriving, or *mastery* as we like to call it, we allow individuals to preserve the melodies of their heritage? Maybe we could tune into the beautiful range of songs that come from native tongues instead of therapizing nonconformity. We deal in pathologies, not national-ologies. I honor my father for not conforming. For instilling within us the beauty of his heritage and the colors of his native tongue. My father would not be coaxed. Perhaps he was misguided in trying to coax us into his world, but he fought for the preservation of his ideals to help form mine.