Chloe Park

I learned my way around hospitals as a daughter before I ever did it as an interpreter. My mother was treated for cancer, and I spent a long stretch of my twenties in waiting rooms — reading everything I could find about her illness, first in Korean and then in English, because I wanted to know what counted as standard somewhere other than the room I was sitting in. Somewhere in the middle of that I noticed how many people were doing the same thing in the opposite direction: reading about Korean hospitals from the other side of the world, with nobody to tell them what any of it actually meant.

My first client was a woman in her fifties who had flown in alone. For the first hour she was difficult — short with the front desk, short with me. It took me most of that morning to understand that she was not difficult at all. She was frightened, in a country where she could not read a single sign, doing something significant entirely on her own. I held her hand in the operating room before she went under. That was in no description of the job I had been given, and it is still the part I would defend hardest. The message she sent afterwards is the reason I kept going.

That taught me what the work actually is. Interpretation is not the transfer of sentences — anyone with two languages can move sentences. What people are short of is someone in the room who is on their side: who catches the question they were too polite to ask a second time, and who is still reachable at three in the morning when the swelling does not look the way they expected.

I work across Seoul. Around a third of it is plastic surgery; the rest divides between dermatology, dental clinics, and the university hospitals — comprehensive health screening, and the more complicated operations people travel here specifically for. I have interpreted for more than a hundred people since I began doing this properly in March 2025.

I am not going to tell you I have been at this for a decade, because I have not. What I have is a hundred-odd consultation rooms behind me, two languages I genuinely think in, and more patience for the administrative parts than is probably healthy. I am building it into something more formal as I go — written terms before we begin, and proper records of what was said. I would rather tell you where that stands than pretend it is already finished.