When Mom was angry at me from the ages of 7 to 9, she’d say a phrase, 야메노새끼야. Yameno-seikiya. It means, “Yameno little bastard.” Yameno isn’t a Korean word as far as I can translate. A lot of her language was hangul, but some of it was different. Some from North Korea. Some from other places.
Some of her words were half Japanese and half Korean. Like, Yakimandu. Yaki is Japanese. Mandu is Korean. Fried/Grilled Dumpling.
She’d call me a mule sometimes. A half-donkey, half-horse. Japan and Korea traditionally held antipathy for people with ‘mixed blood.’ When Mom was really angry with me as a teen, she once called me 혼혈. Honhyeul. Mixed blood. Unclean. She regretted it as soon as she said it. I didn’t learn what the word meant until a decade later. It hurt the same both times.
She regretted all of that name calling. She apologized more than once, and I told her thank you and she didn’t need to do that. But eventually she’d insult again, she just didn’t use those words.
I think I misheard ‘야메노새끼야.’ Not the seikya part. The first part. There’s a way to say stop it in Japanese, やめる. Yamero. So, やめる새끼야. But you can also say Yamelo in Korean, and it also means stop it. So, 야메로새끼야. Yameroseikya. For the first time in my life, as of five minutes ago, this spelling sounds correct to my ear.
야메로새끼야.
Yameroseikya.
Stop it you little bastard!
Did Yamelo come to Korea from Japan?
Or did Yamero come from Korea and go to Japan?
The younger generations seem to be letting go of so many prejudices. But for me, I’m grateful whenever anyone in the U.S., Korea or Japan called me halfbreed, mutt, mixed blood or any other ugly word. It told me nothing about me when they did. I didn’t yet understand that as a child, but I understood it well as a teen.
Because when anyone said that to me, they revealed their own prejudices, and the tar on their souls. Including Mom.
And I’m grateful that this tar isn’t on my soul. And also knowing that it’s probably me as a child finally spitting back 야메로새끼야 in anger once that probably helped shock Mom enough that she stopped saying it.
It’s part of the reason I know to this day that words are magic. And that ugly words are too powerful to use lightly. It’s why you won’t hear me say that phrase outloud. It’s also why if anyone directs it or similar words at me, they turn into a sheet of glass that I feel no need to break. Just ignore.
And walk on.