This week I helped Danielle make finger models. She has a mold that the machinist in Hubo Lab made beautifully from her design. We fill the mold with silicon and let it sit for 24 hours. A lot of the guys in the lab have been involved and really helpful to Danielle, from muscle power to brain power. She has spent the last two months researching to build the mold and this was the first week we tested it out so it was a big deal. It was a little ghetto to measure out the silicon ingredients with tiny plastic ice cream spoons in a paper cup in this high-tech lab but there was not a beaker or graduated cylinder to be found. I guess that is what engineering is for anyway.
We were taking out the very first mold. Danielle was so nervous that the machinist had to take apart the mold for her. Every time something moved she screamed; I am not sure what she would have done if any harm had come to her baby. The machinist jokingly said, “I’m a professional.” I now refer to him as Mr. Professional because I have no idea what his name is. Inho, Choel, Keim, Peter, Danielle, Chung Su, Chung Wu, and I were all huddled around, our anticipation building with each screw Mr. Professional removed, bringing us that much closer to seeing if it had worked. Piece by piece the mold came apart but we still could not see the silicon until it was detached from the very last piece.
This is what popped out. There was a split second of silence. Then the Koreans and the Americans spewed out a combination of eruptive laughter and speaking at the speed of high school girl in between breaths in our respective languages. I have absolutely no idea what words they were saying and I’m not even sure if I could discern what we were saying but everyone knew what was being said. It was funny to be surrounded by all of these guys who poked fun at Danielle saying, “What is this…!” Inho remarked, “Is this your hubby?” (He was saying hobby but the fact it came out as hubby (like husband (for the not so hip)) had us laughing for an additional twenty minutes.) They bring a girl into the Hubo lab and this is what she comes up with. We were all wearing grins while passing the model around for the rest of the day; we could not stop laughing. Even Later that night Danielle and I were working on making another mold and Dr. Oh came in to see the progress. Danielle handed him the mold. He said, “This looks like a…” and Danielle cut him off to preserve some of her mold’s pride.
I chose to talk about this moment because although I have discussed the wonders of everyone knowing English, the feeling has definitely worn off. I mean it is easy enough when we are traveling to find someone who speaks English but in a restaurant or a store where only one person is working, no such luck. And it is a hassle to find someone who speaks English. It is energy draining and just a pain to find someone or to attempt to communicate otherwise. This was the one time where the language barrier proved its permeability, which was really refreshing. I am really happy to have Danielle as a friend. We can talk about how sometimes we are just sick of kimchi, sick of the boys talking in Korean, sick of old women giving us the hairy eyeball or craving some home cooked food.
I am lucky though that in the lab everyone knows at least some English but it is still a game of gestures and some things definitely get lost in translation. Danielle and I make jokes all the time with the guys and they don’t even realize it. Or one time I was asking Inho what sound a certain character made and it took about fifteen minutes because he first explained to me what the whole word I was looking at meant and didn’t understand I just wanted the one noise no matter how I said it. I definitely feel more like an outsider in the negative sense than when I first got here. Maybe I just didn’t realize people weren’t understanding me earlier or maybe everyone is making less of an effort to pretend they understand that language seems to be a bigger barrier than I had originally thought. And Korean class makes me want to jump off a bridge sometimes but that’s another story.
But despite this there are still moments like the mold that revive me. People are people and even all the way across the world we still have the same young dirty minds.
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