Walking in Seoul (originally posted 11/13/2006)

All these years later, I'm restoring here some of the old posts I wrote for Printculture, since the archives are no longer visible.

Walking in Seoul

My son W is very picky about his shoes. From a young age he cultivated a fine and mysterious sense of what shoes are fit to adorn his feet and which ones he won’t wear. Soon after we arrived in Seoul he chose white leather sneakers, which amused my in-laws to no end, a cross between the traditional white-colored shoes that people in the countryside wear, and 70s throwback sneakers with flat bottoms. 

He has a right to be picky about his shoes, I suppose (though he outgrows them quickly); we spend so much time walking around the city that the shoes seem part of his body. Unlike the car-obsessed U.S., Seoul is a walking city, and it is through walking that we have discovered and explored Korea.

We moved here from Michigan – a Midwestern state filled with open spaces where a little boy can run really fast! OK? OK!—and wide, clear skies empty of buildings. But in America the price of space is time spent behind the wheel. And though I loved to drive – loved to have time to think and listen to music, knowing W was safe and secured in the back– in the car W watched his world go by from his climate controlled cage.

Americans walk an average of less than 75 miles a year – which works out to around 350 yards a day – literally the distance between bed and bathroom, couch and refrigerator, door and car. In Ann Arbor we used to take W to the zoo and see 7-year olds pushed around in strollers, unable to walk for a few hours on their own. We hear of 2-year olds showing signs of heart disease, and see adults who start exercise programs plagued by the years of childhood immobility and little muscle base. My husband and I vowed that our children would grow up walking, and decided not to take the stroller when we moved to Korea.

At first the transition to walking was hard. W’s three-year-old legs were unaccustomed to serving as his primary means of transportation and I had just come off several weeks of rest after surgery. Jet-lagged, awed and open-mouthed, on occasion lost, and busy with the tasks of moving to a foreign country, we strolled and skipped and strided around Seoul so that by spring, walking defined the rhythm of our new lives.

Everyday we walked to W’s grandparents’ apartment in the morning, and then he walked with his Grandpa to school. In the afternoon I picked him up to walk home, or sometimes to the grocery store, or the doctor, or the subway, or wherever it is we had to go. Our ten-minute walk from school to home usually took us an hour. W figured out all the various permutations through the apartments to the river, and insisted on taking only the back secret ways—winding behind apartment blocks, finding quiet and secluded spaces, discovering dark scary tunnels and secret gardens. There are rules in these spaces: “Shh, mommy, you have to be quiet and whisper here! You have to talk really loudly here! You have to jump over this hole. You can only walk on the red tiles!” W found a fantasy world in the city terrain, a labyrinth of spaces to explore, control, conquer, be master of, be concealed in, be small and afraid in – all while holding my hand.

I remember that first spring – the smell of it in the air, how we optimistically replaced his winter coat with spring coat and several layers of fleece, how we stopped to breathe in the air and inspect the buds forming on the trees. W triumphantly declared, Mommy, this one is an evergreen—– in truth, by summer I didn’t know the difference between an evergreen and not, but spring makes naturalists of us all. He rubbed his jacket along the rough texture of a brick wall as we stealthily rounded a building. He delighted in telling me what things are made of – brick, cement, barbed wire, dirt. We pee-yooed! at the smell of car exhaust, and turned our noses to the smell of the river. We stopped to listen to the water gurgling and tricking (in my effort to endow him with a rich English vocabulary, I repeated listen to the water gurgle and babble!—over and over) until the sound was drowned out by two big military helicopters. We talked about littering, stopped to examine a praying mantis and help it get unstuck from the rubber path. Walking across the bridge one day the sight of two men replacing a streetlamp with a cherry-picker captured our attention and we spent a good twenty minutes watching them. We peered in open manholes and saw the workers cozy in their nests of wires and pipes underneath the earth. Summer came and W stripped to his underwear to play with the other children in the small rock pools by the river, next to retired men soaking their feet after a day of hiking. A good sturdy branch provided a powerful tool for warding off enemies, for tapping on manholes and cracks, a souvenir worth keeping in our collection by the apartment door along with cool rocks. The uncool rocks were thrown into the river to make satisfyingly big splashes. We stopped to watch people exercise, then precariously walked the balance beam made by the edge of the sidewalk, and climbed the embankment to become the king of the world and examine our shadows. Seoul became a world of senses, where we both controlled the pace, where we could stop and examine a small ladybug or the crane constructing a skyscraper for a second or for an hour.

Now we’re approaching our second spring in Seoul, baby M has joined us on our walks, and W no longer holds my hand, instead running ahead of me to brave the crosswalks by himself or to seek out playmates. The weather has suddenly turned cold again, so as we set out this morning I thought only about hurrying W to school and getting back in time for M’s nap. Walking by the river W suddenly pulled me aside to examine the trees: “Look, Mommy! Buds!” So immersed in our now routine life I had not noticed winter slipping away, nor realized that I had stopped savoring the rhythm of our secret world. Rummaging through our closet to pull out the spring clothes I came upon W’s old white shoes, still in pristine condition – he outgrew them so fast – and I realized suddenly how quickly we have grown into our lives here. For that one stolen season the smug and jaded adult strode around the city like a child, openmouthed in wonder, overwhelmed by new sights, smells, and sounds. For one spring I was able to walk in W’s shoes, and now we’ve both grown up. 

My So-Called Ex Pat Life (originally posted on 10/18/2006)

All these years later, I'm restoring here some of the old posts I wrote for Printculture, since the archives are no longer visible.

My so-called ex-pat life

I (Chinese-American with ambiguous facial features, married to a Korean, two kids, tendency to slouch and procrastinate, addiction to cafe lattes) have been living in Seoul for three years: long enough that it is, unambiguously, home; long enough that I navigate through my daily life without much thought or preparation. Gone are the days of dictionary toting and rehearsing conversations in my head; gone are the days when a trip to the bank made me break out in a cold sweat; gone are the days of falling into bed exhausted at 8 p.m. from the effort of listening to and speaking Korean all day long. 

And yet. There is nothing like a visitor from the Homeland to make you realize how far you’ve come, and how very far you have yet to go.

Emily (loud laughing, curly haired, opinionated, East Coast, Jewish rugby-playing feminist psychology PhD currently living in LA) and I have been best friends since high school and this was her first trip to Asia.

Like a Dummies Guide to Living in Korea I prepared her: I taught her to bow and smile, to take and receive things with two hands, not to be alarmed by women with Darth Vader visors or by being jostled in the street by older men smelling of soju and cigarettes. I gave her index cards with phrases like where is the bathroom?—and I am 32 years old—(over her protests). Armed with mental and tangible tools she lived with us for a month, eating barley rice and seaweed, bowing and smiling, paying outrageous prices for fruit, walking all over the place, throwing away food garbage in specially marked bins, and being the only white person in the vicinity.

On her last day here she was at the gym, running on the treadmill and lifting weights, and an older man approached her and chastised her, You’re exercising too fast! Slow down!

I had warned her about this. One of the hardest things to learn about another culture is what is acceptable and what is rude. In Korea, it is completely normal to comment on other people’s appearance: You have gained weight,—Do you know you have a pimple on your forehead?—or sometimes women will just come over and brush lint off my shirt or fix my crazy hair. It is also fine for an older person to give constructive advice based on his or her wealth of knowledge derived from age: Your baby should be wearing more clothes.—Don’t use your MP3 player near your belly when you are pregnant.—Eating kimchee prevents cancer.—Or: Don’t exercise so fast.—

Despite preparation and her determination to follow the local cultural norms, she was unable to follow through with the standard response: a yes—followed by a bow of the head as acknowledgment, promptly followed by incident amnesia. Instead, she gave him that kind of smile/grimace which is technically a smile but communicates, Fuck off—in any language. As she said later, still seething with anger, It took all my control not to scream, ‘I was a varsity athlete in college and am the only one in this gym breaking a $*^%$*% sweat!—

That’s the hard part of cross-cultural interaction: if they receive you, it’s on their own terms, and if you respond, it is on your own terms. I’m sure that man was trying to break the ice, trying to be friendly and welcoming. And Emily wanted to be civil and kind and friendly as well, but her upbringing and personality made it almost impossible to provide the kind of response that he would have expected. He had hit her at her point of vulnerability; for all her educational and athletic success, she was still afraid of not being taken seriously. And this I understand well, because it is my problem too. Although we grow up and travel the world, we can never quite shed the residue of past fears, insecurities, ghosts, relationships past and loves lost.

Aside from whatever baggage we all harbor, there is a particular psychology to being an ex-pat; to some degree I am always aware of my difference and perhaps overly conscious of what I represent. For the many Koreans who have never been to the U.S. and have had limited access to foreigners, my small habits and idiosyncrasies will fill in the largely absent pieces of a bigger picture of what Americans Are Like; but for Koreans who are sensitive to the perspective of other nations I also represent the judgmental gaze of the U.S. There is a power to being a First World foreigner and at times I brandish my outsider status like a light saber or a Get Out of Jail Free card. You “ kid spraying graffiti on the side of our apartment building! I will scold you in two languages and watch you wriggle under my double-eyelided gaze! You “ fancy woman judging me for having wrinkled pants! I am an American and don’t have to adhere to your standards of dress! Mwah ha ha ha.

But to have my high school friend walk by side for a month was to remind me that I was always aware of my difference in the U.S. as well. Emily knew me when I had big glasses and braces and had to shop in the children’s department and when all I wanted was to fit in. She, with her parents who spoke perfect English, nice clothes, popularity, and tickets to the Opera, was my idea of a normal—American teenager, something I believed I could become if I tried. Years later, positions reversed, I was teaching her how to fit into Korean society, bequeathing to her the lessons hard won from my years in the field, making me realize that we haven’t changed so much after all. Having spent my youthful years feeling like a spy or a shape-shifter in the U.S., the idea of coming and living in Korea just seemed like an extension of that same project. I never believed in monolithic, stable identities, because my survival and my power seemed to depend on being flexible and infinitely adjustable.

Although aware of my difference and not ashamed to use it sometimes, I still believe somewhere in my unexamined heart that cultural assimilation is a matter of knowledge and will. I am ambiguous enough physically that if I dress and walk a certain way I can pass for Korean; indeed, when I return to the States I find myself bowing and accepting things with two hands without even thinking about it. I have reached some point in-between, I think, a true cultural chimera/cyborg. Then BAM! Like Emily, some latent emotional baggage overcomes my hard-earned cultural and linguistic knowledge and I find myself regressing into some teenage version of myself. High school: second only to family, the source of all anxieties and insecurities “ which, apparently, we are still overcoming.

Nowhere does this conflict rear its head more frequently than in my relationships with my Korean in-laws. I have spent ten years now working to master the Korean language and culture. I have studied the history, tried to fit in, and tried to be appropriate. I have just about mastered the smile-and-nod in front of strangers, but every time my father-in-law tells my how to clean something properly or how to line up my shoes at the door I boil over with resentment and anger. “I’m a smart, well-educated adult! Don’t treat me like an idiot!” Even though intellectually I know that this is how he expresses his concern and affection for me, I receive every piece of patronizing advice as an insult to my intelligence and ability. I know he wants and expects me to respond with a respectful bow like a good little daughter-in-law, but I cannot. Even Korean women have trouble with their in-laws “ how can he expect me to shed my feminist sensibilities and mimic subservience? I could gain power over this relationship, perhaps, by being meek and manipulating him into doing what I want. I see it all the time on TV in those Korean dramas I can’t stand watching. But in order to do so I would have to abandon my sense of American-feminist individualism and power.

I would like to think that I’ve learned a lot since high school. I have travelled the world, learned new languages, created two new beings, and figured out how to walk fast while drinking a hot cup of coffee. As with many of life’s lessons this one catches me off guard: I must accept that I cannot (contrary to what my mom always said) become whatever I want. I am not limitlessly flexible. I learned my way into this ex-pat life through study and rehearsal, but the old modes are still there, molding my performance and giving it another dimension of meaning. I suppose that an ex-pat, like a teenager, is stuck somewhere in-between; not a child nor an adult; not quite this culture and not quite that one either. And like a teenager the ex-pat spends her day trying to fit in while simultaneously thinking of every act as a declaration of Self and what she can or cannot become. At least I don’t have to worry about pimples.