Blessings for the Lost

Of course the report wasn't written with immigrant or ESOL/EAL families like mine specifically in mind. But it made one thing clear: the vague, directionless feeling I've had since arriving here isn't mine alone. I'm living its limits myself — the cultural capital I once held in my mother tongue doesn't transfer into English, and I feel that gap in my children's reading. In Korea, we always read for joy. Books were our favourite toy, the start of countless games, a stop along the way and sometimes the destination itself. If that journey also grew their own way of thinking and feeling about a story, wonderful. But it was enough if they simply grew up loving books.

But here, I'd picked up an anxiety without noticing. Which book would make English easier for my children, still shaky in it? Which book would they understand completely? Which book would spark enough interest to make them want to study? Books had stopped being play. They'd become a means to an end, and that end was English.

Still, I could steady myself again. We need to go back to reading for joy. Instead of forcing ourselves to sit down with a book to learn English or build literacy, we'll do what we've always done: choose whatever pulls us in, and turn the pages with the kind of restless curiosity that can't wait for the next one.

We're all growing into a new language here, and before anything else, I had to accept a change in my own role. For now, I'm setting down the guide who walks ahead, and becoming a pacemaker who runs alongside instead.