Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.

Even though this particular passage is about (and written from the point of view of) Pak, I remember this very thing happening to me. In Korea, I had been a talkative, social, smart girl. In the US (in middle school), I couldn’t understand or say anything. Intellectually, I knew that I wasn’t stupid, that there was a reasonable explanation for my not speaking English and I shouldn’t feel ashamed, and yet, that’s exactly how I felt. It was the most frustrating experience of my life, and even after I became fluent in English, this frustration and shame stayed with me, as I witnessed the same thing happening to my parents—frustration that it was taking so long for my parents to learn English, shame that I was the daughter of people who were so stupid (even though, again, I knew at an intellectual level that there was a perfectly understandable reason for their relative difficulty mastering English, that they were not stupid). I think this is one of the main reasons why I’m drawn to stories exploring autism, especially in those who are nonverbal or who have expressive communication difficulties: it brings me back to that time when I felt so frustrated, knowing that I had thoughts within me, things I wanted to say, and not being able to express them and seeing in others’ eyes that they thought of me as inferior, as less-than. My experience was nothing compared to autism, of course. For one thing, it was temporary, and I knew everything would pass soon, once I learned English. Even so, it was devastating to my sense of self, and I developed a deep insecurity that still permeates to this day. So if this temporary communication issue affected me that fundamentally, how must it affect those with nonverbal autism, who have endured it from the earliest age, without an end point? This really affects me, and it’s something I will explore much more in my next novel.