ABSTRACT
In this final chapter, I return to my starting point for this study, the concern for my increasing silence in situations where speaking Korean is involved. As a way into exploring this silence, I started by thinking about Ang's (2001) book On not speaking Chinese, where “not speaking” has to do with not being able to speak Chinese but being expected to because she “looks Chinese.” Ang, a person of Chinese descent, who was born in Indonesia, raised in the Netherlands and now lives in Australia, uses her in-between position to consider the social and intellectual space of the “in-between.” By reflecting on the mutual entanglement of Asia and the West, she argues for a theorizing of living “together-in-difference,” that is, in “complicated entanglement of living hybridities,” rather than “living-apart-together,” which is generally how the concept of multiculturalism operates in many societies, “maintain[ing] the boundaries between the diverse cultures it encompasses” (p. 16). Taking on her views but thinking more carefully about my own situation where I am able to speak Korean but do not, I explore the many dimensions that constitute silence and how we might think differently about silence in language and identity studies where the literature is increasingly shifting towards a conceptualization of “a linguistics of xenoglossic becoming, transidiomatic mixing, and communicative recombinations” (Jacquemet, 2005, p. 274).
