Cultural Immersion: Language Practice as Performative Activism

I chose to write a monologue for my Theatre 617 PaR performance as a way to explore the concept of performance of self. By exploring the trajectory of life events that shape who I am continually evolving to be, I hoped to use performance to possibly influence this path I am on in life, based on the idea that performance is a powerful force to shape reality and how we perceive the world and people around us—my reality, but also those who experience the performance—the audience. I created a rhetorical situation between all of us in the theatre to affect the entire culture and connections of those in attendance. 

My education as an outsider welcomed into the rituals of Korean and Hawaiian culture, someone not raised and reared in the tradition of these rituals, offers unique experience, worthy of consideration. I find cultural immersion to be an appropriate way to show respect to my host culture by giving my full attention to understanding and participating. It’s walking the walk—performing in order to be accepted, admitted as a practitioner rather than as an observer or spectator, but you won’t be accepted if you can’t perform well or aren’t trying to earnestly. Only through cultural immersion, through practice, can someone understand “ritual,” the enactment of a culture’s most codified social activities.

How someone chooses to take the knowledge gained through cultural immersion and put it to use is absolutely open to criticism. To immerse in a culture is to gain the trust of the culture’s practitioners.The attempt to then represent a host culture for an outside audience becomes a rhetorical situation, and the ethics of the performers' representation, whether written or embodied, should certainly be taken into consideration when studying this situation.

With this in mind, I crafted my performance monologue, “ʻO Liʻulā Koʻu Inoa,” which is Hawaiian for “My name is Liʻulā.” I chose to write about my life, starting with my parents and my hometown, where I am from, origin. I was inspired to do this by my Hawaiian language professor from the previous two semesters, Kumu Kekeha Solis. He wrote a moʻolelo in the beginning of his dissertation that also began with genealogy, which is very important in Hawaiian culture. 

Leonard and Kathryn. My parents. Lenny Jacobson and Kathy Stone. Jacobson is my maiden name. Jake the Jew, they called my dad, when he was growing up. Even now, he’s referred to by this moniker by those from Holyoke who still remember him fondly. Jake the Jew. Neither wholly shunned nor fully accepted by the predominantly Irish descendants of his home town. But he was only half Jewish, born out of wedlock, mixed, and given up for adoption. 

I wonder about his birth mother. If she held him before letting him go. If she wanted to keep him.How old she was when she got pregnant. If she had a fulfilling life and if she outlived his adoptive mother, whom I never knew. I wonder if she would have been the one person in the world who would have recognized me from a young age as kindred. My paternal grandmother.

I was nineteen, living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, out at the very tip of Cape Cod, when I became pregnant for the first time, and although I wanted to grow and know the life inside me, the thirty-three-year-old married man who had been cheating on his wife with his employee for the past two years did not want another child, already having a toddler at home. So instead of driving me to my first doctor’s visit that I had scheduled, to learn all the vital information one learns on such an occasion, he drove me to the clinic, where he had made a different appointment and told me if I didn’t get an abortion he would have nothing to do with me ever again. Terrified and numb, I went in and let them suck the life out of me. I don’t even know how far along I was. After that, at age twenty-one, I moved to Hawaiʻi.

I felt it was important to explore this connection in my performance between the grandmother I never knew and the loss of her first born child and my first experience with pregnancy. As a woman, my body becomes a space that other people want to control and to share this experience with my audience is an act of reclamation.

When I studied abroad in South Korea at age 25 for one semester, I joined the university taekwondo club, 기파랑, and practiced with them every weeknight for the just over 4 months I spent there. I didn’t miss a single practice. I went to a university taekwondo competition with my teammates, taking trains and buses to get to the capital (I lost in the first round), and I took a belt test right before the end of my stay (but never found out if I passed!). 

While there, I traveled, went to festivals, historical towns, ate all the food, studied the history and language, using it whenever I could, attempting to understand what it really felt like to be among my new friends, experiencing the culture and ethos, learning, feeling, changing. 

Ritualistically, every night after taekwondo practice, a big group of us would go out to eat some late-night food at one of literally hundreds of spots surrounding the university catering to students, and we would all drink soju. It was common to ask someone how many bottles of soju they could drink in one sitting (before becoming inebriated). 소주 많이 마셨어요! There were a bunch of different drinking games we played. There was even a bit of romance, but not much, not publicly. 

But intimacy grew between my new friends and I during these liminal moments of bonding over food and alcohol after kicking each other. This is when I most learned how to “fit in,” during our communal ritual that’s whole performance and purpose was for only those involved. At the time, my only goals were to connect and grow and learn and understand humanity a little better by making the foreign familiar. To be open and authentic. 

When my teammates presented me with a black belt on our last night out, with my name embroidered on it in hangul, the Korean alphabet, one of them said to me: “There has never been anyone like you before. 엘리 씨, 한국 사람이에요!” meaning, “You are a Korean person.”

In my performance, I did not explain the meaning of this last Korean phrase, and I debated including it here, but I want to discuss the omission of translation. Although it is possible that no one in attendance at my performance understood the literal meaning of these words, they still held meaning and were able to stand for the special moment of having them spoken to me. I discussed the decision with my Kumu Hailiʻōpua Baker, who met with and assisted me with revising the draft of my monologue script, especially the parts written in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, which needed quite a bit of discussion and editing. I told her what the phrase meant and she asked if I was going to tell the audience. I said I didn’t want to translate it, and she agreed with me that it was better left in Hangul. Similarly, none of the Hawaiian language sections were translated to English. I wanted each language to be allowed to tell its part of the story. I wanted to honor the languages of my host cultures that have accepted me into their rituals and the human beings who have shared their culture with me. Although they may not have been in the theatre physically, they were there with me and I was performing for all of them.