As I’m writing this, the Rosé and Bruno Mars song, APT, is in its second week atop the Billboard World charts. With a beat and production similar to Mickey and That’s Not My Name, APT is a catchy earworm anthem-type song that has earned every bit of its record as The Fastest Song to 100 million streams on YouTube. I love this song for a variety of reasons, but mainly, because it brings back some very fond childhood memories.
The name, APT, is the romanized abbreviation for the Korean word, 아파트, pronounced apatuh. It’s one of those Korean words that has its phonetic root in English. With English being the world’s lingua franca of the last few generations, every language has their own English-based words and phrases. In Spanish, for instance, the word for baseball is…béisbol.
When I first heard APT, I immediately remembered my days in Korean Language School. I was born in Busan, Korea and my first language was Korean. But after immigrating to the United States as a baby, and over the course of my childhood and its pressures to assimilate, I lost all ability to speak my native tongue.
By the time I entered middle school, my parents enrolled me in Korean Language School, 한국학교, and for a thirteen-year-old boy who wanted nothing to do with going to school on Saturday mornings, it didn’t take. For the next three years, I never advanced past the 특수 (teuksu) class. Teuksu is the Korean word that means, “special.” I’m sure there are nuances to the word that are beyond me, but I do know that it was the beginning level class, and I was anything but special, or I was really special if you catch my drift.
For three consecutive years, I learned the Korean alphabet while I colored pictures of lions (사자) and ducks (오리) and apples (사과). The worst part of it, I was only one-of-two middle school-aged kids among a class full of four and five year olds. At the end of the year, those little kids would graduate to the next class and I repeated the same class the next year with a new set of four and five year olds. If I really cared at all, I should have been so embarrassed. A regular Billy Madison. The only reason I agreed to keep going was for the basketball during lunch, where I would finally get to hang out with kids my own age.1 But after three years of being special, my parents realized they were spending too much money and gave up.
Aside from basketball, the best memory I have of Korean School was when I discovered the Korean word for hamburger. 햄버거, pronounced ham-buh-guh. Me and the other middle school kid thought it was the funniest thing in the world. We both nearly fell out of our chairs when our teacher said it, “햄버거/ham-buh-guh”.2
Now, over thirty years later, with APT being such a huge hit, and many non-Korean listeners wondering what APT means, I am loving the little inside-joke I tell myself. “It’s self-explanatory isn’t it? It means apatuh (apartment), of course.”
This song—aside from being a great song to listen to while I’m on my morning commute, or while I’m waiting in the car line to pick my kids up from school—has brought back some very fond memories of my Korean School days. Special days. If you catch me humming it, know that on the outside I may be singing, “apatuh-apatuh,” on the inside I’m singing “hambuhguh hambuhguh. Uh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
I would actually go on to meet some future church youth group friends during this lunchtime basketball recess. A couple of these friends would go on to be some of my closest friends from church. We would go on missions trips to Mexico, we’d be groomsmen for each other’s weddings, and we’d serve as deacons in the same church many, many years later. Good times.
The other words that had us busted up were pizza (피자) and tennis (테니스). Hey, what can I say? We were overstimulated and under-motivated 13 year olds.