To Know You Is to Love You

I fell in love with this English pronoun when I first met it on my father's knees more than half a century ago in Seoul.

Initially, it was the sound that captivated me.

Later, as I continued to study English under my father's tutelage -- he was a pioneering scholar of English and German at South Korea's Seoul National University -- I began to love this three-letter word for the way it made me feel.

"Good morning to you," I said with emphasis whenever American and Canadian Presbyterian missionaries visited our home.

When they responded with a big smile and "Good morning to you too," I was in heaven.

You was an ally that empowered me.

It freed me from the encumbrances of my mother tongue, which is one of the world's most complicated and nuanced languages, laden with honorifics. You pushed me out of the confines of Confucian-steeped, hierarchal Korean language into a world of egalitarian impulses.

To be sure, Korean is a wonderfully poetic language, full of alliteration and onomatopoeia. And I love listening to well-spoken Korean.

But navigating it is another story.

Korean has no fewer than six speech levels -- each with a unique set of verb endings to indicate the degree of formality, ranging from extremely polite to actively impolite -- and many gradations in between.

Other languages employ varying degrees of address. For two of the world's more popular languages, two levels suffice -- vous and tu in French, usted and tu in Spanish.

But Korean has four words for you. The irony is we go out of our way to find substitutes so we won't have to use them.

This formality -- and the impulses to maintain or reject it -- colors not just how many Korean Americans speak Korean, but our English. It's a spin on the classic tale of assimilation, when two cultures meet and create something uniquely American.

Sometimes it's an odd blend. Koreans are a communal people who prefer an unassuming "we" over a bold, American "I."

A Korean woman always refers to her husband as "our husband" -- oori nampyon. And we say, "our mother, our father."

"In English, you can't imagine saying, 'our husband,' " said Kichung Kim of San Jose, a Korean American scholar and writer.

To the Korean ear, "our mother" creates a "connection to home, family and all that. That feeling is absent in English," Kim said. "The only time we say 'our father' in English is in the Lord's Prayer."