With the help of a Fulbright Fellowship that gave her a full year of study in Korea, her native land, Mickey Jung Eun Hong is well on her way to becoming a bridge between the literary worlds of Korea and the West.

For several years, she has been translating Korean poetry into English. Recently, she had the opportunity to co-translate Ted Hughes's last book of poems, Birthday Letters, into Korean. For some time, she had recognized that it might be her role to help introduce Korean literature to the English-speaking world, but "I never thought of myself as someone who would introduce Western letters to Korea," Mickey says.

This vocation began when she was an undergraduate in English and American literature at UC Santa Cruz. "People started asking me about Korean literature," Mickey says, and when she looked for books in translation, "I was disappointed that so little was available."

Her first translations were a personal tribute to her maternal grandfather: works by his favorite poet, No Ch'ônmyông, one of Korea's first modern women poets. Eventually, she translated 50 poems by this author as her senior project.

By the time Mickey had completed her master's degree at UCLA, however, she had not only decided to continue working toward a PhD, she also felt a commitment to expand the handful of Korean literature available in English. "It was almost a crisis that I felt," she says, "that somebody has to do this."

Mickey was well-equipped to be this "somebody." Born in Korea, she was remarkably fluent in her native language when she came to the United States at age 8. Thanks to "an only-child neurosis," she says, "I started reading early" and having no siblings to practice with, her knowledge of the language focused on its written form as much as its spoken form.

"A lot of people are really surprised that I maintained my Korean at all," she says. "Some of my students came to this country at the same age but lost their language. My mother made sure that I would not lose touch with my mother tongue." When she returned to Korea for her Fulbright year in 1997-98, she was one of the few fellow Americans who could speak Korean. While some Fulbright scholars were spending time in language classes, Mickey could concentrate on her research.

Although she was a native Korean living amid a large Korean community in Los Angeles, Mickey nevertheless experienced a considerable amount of culture shock. "Just because you're Korean doesn't mean you know about Korea," she says. "Things constantly change. Experiencing the change for yourself while it's happening is different."

One of the things she encountered was a strong difference in gender roles. In a reversal of what was once the norm in American universities, the science faculty at Seoul National University includes many women, while the literature faculty has none. Her Korean professors "had nothing but utter kindness for me but they didn't know how to treat me," she says. One key professor began to address her with the Korean suffix -kun added to her last name, the suffix applied to young men. As "there's no way he could have mistaken me for a guy," Mickey speculates that the form of address was "an odd way of being accepted and respected by making you into a man."

The gender role differences followed her everywhere. In Korea, it is unusual for unmarried women to live alone, as Mickey did. "Maybe I brought some of the troubles on myself because I was trying to do things on my own, the way it's always done here," she says. "People would be really offended if I was carrying something and I would not accept help."

Mickey also found that her dissertation subject raised questions. She is studying Korean poetry during Japanese colonialism of the 1930s. It was both an "exciting and desperate time, when poets began to experiment with modernist technique," she says. In the 1950s, when Korea was divided politically, a number of these poets affiliated themselves with the government in the north. As far as North Korea is concerned, they disappeared: "You don't even know when they died," she says.

She also found that a political agenda strongly influenced the way poems were interpreted. According to her South Korean professors, the poems she was studying didn't need to be examined "so carefully, line by line, as I was doing." His attitude was that "the poems are already canonized-you know they are good."

But if there were a few hurdles in her Fulbright year, there were also advantages and rewards. She had access to the National Library of Korea, which includes among its resources almost every dissertation ever written in Korea. This was a priceless asset that would be very hard to duplicate in the United States.

Personally, she found that spending a year abroad "really strengthens you and tests your independence." Once "you've taken this opportunity to be courageous," she believes, the next challenge is easier to face.

For Mickey, that challenge is completing her dissertation, a task that should be finished in a year or two. Then she hopes to find an academic job that will allow her more time to do personal writing and to explore other time periods in Korean literature.

One of the poets she is studying, Chông Chiyong, was one of the first Korean poets to inject English & modern elements into his poems. In a similar vein, Mickey has stopped writing poetry only in English. Her poems and her diary are now completely bilingual-using the perfect word or phrase for what she means, regardless of whether the language is English or Korean.

Thus, she has achieved the goal she sets for her Korean language students: "The ultimate bilingualism that I ask people to strive for," Mickey says, "is the power to flow in and out of both cultures freely."

Published in Spring 1999, Graduate Quarterly