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When I started my search for people to interview, I thought of people I had already met during my previous visits that had impacted/helped me during my time in Korea. So, I decided to start with my program teacher from my internship in Korea last summer, Mark (마크) Brazeal, or as we know him, 막구. Mark worked as a teacher/mentor during my internship at Haja Center, leading us through the Global Future Youth Lab program activities and preparing us for the talk show episode we would make at the end of the program. During my time at the internship, I found that Mark was someone that was easily approachable, extremely helpful, and a very admirable person, and hopefully you’ll be able to see these qualities through our interview.

Mark and I at Haja Center last summer

Mark is originally from Oklahoma but moved to California at a young age. While in California, he got the opportunity to take Korean classes at his local high school and found that he truly enjoyed the language. After being entered into and winning a Korean writing competition in his sophomore year of high school he was able to visit South Korea for the first time and truly loved his experiences in the country. Years later, through the help of his extremely generous host family (whom he’s still connected with 17 years later) and his dedication to furthering his Korean skills, he made the decision to move to South Korea by himself when he was only 18, to attend Yonsei University. He has been here ever since, studying and working for different companies as a teacher, freelance and in-house translator, localizer and interpreter, among countless other jobs. During the interview, I asked Mark to tell me more about his previous work experience and I learned that he has dipped his foot into numerous career paths.

After graduating from Yonsei, Mark was scouted by CJ group for a 6 month internship, where he worked as a translation and HR intern, among other work. This internship turned into 3.5 years of work at CJ, where he made internship programs, interviewed foreigners who were planning to enter the company, did multicultural and language training and crafted numerous programs to help incoming staff. However, during his stint at CJ, he came to realize a few things:

1. Rubbing shoulders with the big whigs wasn’t always as fun (and ethical) as it seems and
2. Doing that type of work was not something he could maintain in the long term. He said that if he had stayed, he would have been on track to becoming a burnt out husk, something he saw in a lot of his older coworkers.

So he switched paths and through unexpected circumstances, returned to the states, where he met someone who was in the midst of a start-up project, which he promptly joined as an interpreter and localizer. They returned to Korea and Mark eventually became the co-founder of a start-up, essentially doing the work of a localization manager. Through this start up work, he was able to drift into lots of other fields, doing work in the arts, specifically with music performances and act promotion, and then pivoted to educational work. I met Mark during this his time in educational work when he worked at Haja Center, among other similar places. He is still doing a wide range of work and these are only a few of the paths he told me about, but I hope you can get the picture that Mark has truly been everywhere.

During all of this, the switching of career paths and his work at finding his footing in Korea, one thing remained constant for Mark: translation. Much of the work he did required an element of translation, but he also did translation work on the side, translating documentaries and other works as a freelancer. He says that he likes to translate things that are hard for others to learn about without knowing the language, such as politics and other subjects. But in particular, Mark enjoys translating and working on creative projects, things that are fun or the “squishy stuff” as he put it. An example of this “squishy stuff” can be found in his senior thesis, where he translated expecting families’ 태몽s, or ‘conception dreams’. This cultural concept is something that all Koreans know about but many outside of the culture are oblivious to. He cherishes the ability to bridge this gap and make these interesting parts of Korea known to others.

However, Mark was sure to let me know that not everything is as fun and easy as we may expect it to be. He faced hardships with working, specifically as it pertains to Visa status and actually having stable and consistent work. Start-up work was a real hit or miss for him, with some start-ups working out really well and being quite lucrative, while others were not as lucky and ended up falling apart despite the hard work he and his colleagues put in. He said that a lot of the experiences he’s gained are from just trying things out to see if they’re right or not, spending a year here and two or three somewhere else. These experiences have helped in figuring out where to position himself in his field, but he noted that he’s still trying to solidify things. And now that he’s getting married (WOOOO!!), it’s even more important to him to be find his footing so that his future family can also be stable. And I truly wish him the best of luck in this, as I know that he works endlessly hard and deserves the best.

After interviewing Mark and writing all of this out, there are a few things that stick out to me.

1. The field that we are in is…well hard. It is a valuable and necessary field, but it can be difficult to get into and even harder to be constant in. You have to be ready to hop around and try work that you don’t really love. You have to try a lot of things, you have to fail sometimes and you have to be willing to try again.
2. You have to have connections here. Doing this on your own is almost (basically) impossible, so having a community is absolutely vital.
3. Nothing will come easily or quickly. You have to invest years into what you want to do and you won’t always know what path you’ll go down next. Even after being here for 17 years, Mark is still figuring things out. And you have to be okay with this.
4. It will all turn out fine. This is the hardest thing to accept, especially for a worrier and avid planner like me. But taking a breath, a step back, or even a break is okay. Because in the end, things will work out. Maybe not in the way you initially think, but that’s okay too. Ultimately, things will be fine, you just have to wait a bit for it.

To finish this entry, I want to write out something that Mark said that really resonated with me, especially as I plan out (and struggle with) my future path and what I’ll do with my life after grad school.

“I knew that translation was what I wanted to keep inside. It was something that was meaningful to me. [Through everything] , it was always language”.

I hope that, like Mark, I can always keep language close to me and that it can remain a constant, no matter what path(s) I take.

Thank you again Mark, for starting my interview series off so well and for being someone I can talk to about these paths. I appreciate all the advice and help you’ve given me. I hope that on one of the paths I take, I can be as helpful to someone else as you have been to me.