When she was nine, her family lived in a narrow brick apartment building in Queens. Her father repaired city buses, her mother worked long shifts as a nursing assistant, and money was always carefully divided between rent, groceries, electricity, and whatever unexpected expense appeared that month.
Across the hallway lived an elderly Korean woman who had moved to New York to be closer to her adult children.
The elderly woman spoke limited English.
At first, their conversations consisted mostly of gestures, smiles, and the names of vegetables.
The Black girl's mother occasionally helped carry groceries upstairs for her neighbor, and the neighbor responded by leaving containers of homemade kimchi or warm rice cakes outside their apartment door.
One winter afternoon, the girl discovered the elderly woman struggling to understand a notice about building maintenance.
She sat beside her at the kitchen table and tried to explain what the English words meant.
The elderly woman listened patiently.
Then she pointed at a line of Korean writing on a newspaper and asked whether the girl wanted to know how to read it.
That afternoon became the beginning of an unusual friendship.
The girl learned the Korean alphabet one character at a time, writing letters in a school notebook while the elderly woman corrected her pronunciation.
At first, she enjoyed the challenge.
Then she began to love the language itself.
She discovered that Korean required attention not only to vocabulary but also to social relationships, context, and levels of politeness.
A sentence could sound respectful or insulting depending on the ending chosen by the speaker.
A person could express contempt without raising their voice.
And sometimes the most revealing part of a conversation was what someone deliberately left unsaid.
By the time she entered high school, she was reading Korean novels with a dictionary beside her bed.
She practiced listening to news broadcasts, studied grammar books borrowed from the public library, and spent weekends helping the elderly woman translate ordinary letters.
At seventeen, she won a scholarship that allowed her to study abroad.
Her parents were terrified about sending her so far away.
Her father worried that she would be lonely.
Her mother worried that she would struggle in a place where she looked different from most of the people around her.