They say that for immigrants, we actually carry the place, politics and manners of that former country, and it lives on in us as if trapped in amber. In language, it slips out. Like the time I called Vietnamese pho "weolnam guksu," to my friend's great amusement. "Weolnam? Who still calls Vietnam that?" he laughed. But these dated tidbits lodge themselves into our Korean, unbeknownst to ourselves sometimes until we actually speak Korean with Korean nationals. And even then, as in this case, we may learn that our Korean is simply borrowing loan words from Chinese, English and Japanese.
My dad, who was born in South Korea, immigrated to the United States in 1971. Regarding East Asia a decade earlier, economist Ha Joon Chang said, "In the early 1960s, the richest economy in the region (Japan) was on par with South Africa and Chile in terms of per capita income, while the poorest one (Korea) had a per capita income less than half those of Ghana and Honduras." The world has changed. In the shiny, ultra-modern face of today's Korea, we only buried that deeply poor, old country, still reeling from the war, a generation ago. "Today East Asia is literally the........