A1 - Breakthrough or beginner

I am Maria.
I am from America. I am from Korea.

My family is from America. My family is from Korea.
I am from Korea, but my family is from America.

I am American.
Well, I am Korean. But I am American.

My family comes from Italy. I come from Korea.
They do not live in Italy. They do not live in Korea.

No, my family lives in America.
No, my father is not Korean.

No, I do not have Korean relatives.
No, I do not know my Korean relatives.

A2 - Waystage or elementary

I live in Myrtle Beach. My hometown is Leominster.
My birth city is Jinhae-si. Now it is called Jinhae-gu.

I went to Korea. It is lovely. I came
to the USA to live with my family.

Every day I think about Korea. I think about
visiting. I think about living, and loving, and leaving.

I think about a poem I read. I feel
sad. Every day I meet new people.

They ask
questions.

B1 - Threshold or intermediate

I made my pain into a passable conversation. I read classic literature with a glossary. I painted my feelings in flag colors: black, red, white, blue. I started to combine, mix paints, iterate on sentence structure. I impressed you with some vocabulary while falling down on grammar. I considered the words I cannot spell in any language, the unique sounds that expelled themselves from my ancestral mouths. That nameless sensation, that thing you lack the words for, that exists. What you think of as language is just a wound.

B2 - Vantage or upper intermediate

I have not yet achieved this level on the back of my heritage, not yet let my ancestors carry me up over this hill. I see the cliff ahead of me, the promised view, the just rewards. I see an AirBnB in my great-grandfather’s hometown, cherry blossoms and salt water. In hypotheticals, if I had been born in any other place, I would not yet have traced the lines of my bones tremoring under the earth. Had I known either more or less than what I now exactly know, I could have never adopted so many other ugly duckling languages to float in the pond in my hometown’s neighborhood. I could have gone fishing under the ice. But those swans circling around my identity—백조 cygne cigno 白鳥, theyah’s no friggin’ swans heyah.

C1 - Effective operational proficiency or advanced

we are all crying
out for something. we are all
cries in crisis—call us, humans—we none
of us have never cried, no one
crystallizes with their crystal
eyes a lack of cry. I, too, cry

over the past; I cry inside a happy moment
to watch it die; I cry with the anguish of family,
the hurricane of my history, the jet lag rising
fast within me, echo of the places in me,
passport to the trauma in me, generations spilling
tears within me. bitter-tongued, I taste these
crystal droplets, and I cry.

C2 - Mastery or proficiency

[...]