At least we have Sundays

An immigrant family learns English through America’s favorite pastime: football

Story by KRISTINA RIVERA

Illustration by KATIE ROBINSON

My mom says, when she dies, she wants me to spread her ashes in three places: the mountains, the ocean and Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado, where the Broncos play. To her and the rest of my family, watching the Denver Broncos play football isn’t a hobby or a casual affair. It’s a way of life.

Football Sundays have always been devoted to family at my house. For the first Broncos game of the season, my grandmother makes a Korean-style beef soup with clear rice noodles, chunks of beef, chili peppers and whatever vegetables they have on hand. They call it Broncos soup. It’s their way of bringing their Korean heritage to football. To them, football is more than just a reason to get together. It’s how they learned English.

My mom, Jenny and Aunt Susan moved to the U.S. at 9 and 6 years old. Their parents, Jung and Do Pak, brought them from rural Busan, South Korea with their older brother, Jung. They were among the 38,700 Koreans who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s.

They moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1976 to live with Do’s sister, Linda Myung, and her first husband. Linda and her husband met in South Korea when he was stationed with the U.S. Army in Korea. She moved back to the U.S. with him and petitioned for my family to become U.S. citizens. It worked.

When they moved to Colorado, no one in my family spoke English. Jung and Do worked tirelessly every day to try to support their family. They took whatever jobs they could get. Jung worked either in a sewing factory or serving food in airports during the day while Do watered cemeteries. At night, both worked as cleaners.

In school, my mom was relentlessly bullied for being Korean. In the 1970s in Colorado, only 0.5 percent of the population identified as Asian, which left her feeling alone and isolated. She didn’t speak English at the time, but she didn’t have to know what the kids were saying to know they were making fun of her. The kids pulled their eyes back with their fingers and laughed. On one of her first days of school, a group of kids led her into the boys bathroom because she couldn’t read the signs.

All they wanted was to go back to Korea. But the U.S. was their home now. They knew they had to keep working because there was nothing back in Korea for them. So, my mom and her siblings promised each other they would lose their accents. They tested each other daily on spelling and vocabulary and stopped speaking Korean altogether.

“We didn’t want to be Korean,” Jenny said. “We wanted to fit in.”

In 1977 they moved to Aurora, Colorado. Linda got remarried to a man named Doo Myung, who started to teach them the rules of football. It was the perfect time to start. The Denver Broncos had won the Super Bowl for the very first time. There was something in the air in Colorado, and my family took it all in.

Every Sunday, Doo came over to watch the game, while Jung made Korean food in the kitchen.

“I learned the rules of football before I learned to speak English,” Jenny said.

Watching football every Sunday helped my family assimilate into American culture. Football is as American as it gets, and watching it made them feel like they were a part of something.

By the time my mom reached the fifth grade, her and her siblings were fluent in English.

But learning English came with a price.

“Our lives changed after we lost our accent,” Jenny said. She felt more accepted at school. “But we lost the ability to speak Korean.”

Like many immigrants in the U.S., they had to give up a part of their culture to be accepted. Being Korean in a mostly white state made them resent their heritage.

Now, Jenny says forgetting Korean is something she regrets.

Jung and Do worked so much, they didn’t know the bullying their children faced in school. Jenny, Susan and Jung could get rid of their accents, but it didn’t change the way they looked.

But on Sundays, they could forget it all. On Sundays, they could laugh, yell and eat without fear or judgement. It was the one day of the week they knew they could be together. It still brings them together.

Now, Jenny and Susan live in Federal Way. They own thousands of dollars worth of Broncos merchandise and haven’t missed a Broncos game, on TV or in person, in 42 years.

My mom says growing up as an immigrant was difficult. But she remembers feeling happy on Sundays. She’s still happy on Sundays.