First time back to Seoul since the move

Rather rambling, unedited description of our first trip back to Korea.

So we’re just back from three weeks back in Korea. This was our first trip back (and the kids’ first trip out of China) since moving 6 months ago. I had imagined leaving the kids with the in-laws and having oodles of time to catch up on reading and studying while there but that didn’t happen. We were running around like crazy people pretty much the whole trip, seeing as many friends as we could and having the kids return to their old schools, piano lessons, swimming lessons, and taekwondo. It was great.

We landed at Incheon on a Saturday evening. Pretty much from the moment we landed there was this sense of lightness and relief. The signs, the language -- everything was familiar. We all stopped in the bathroom and I was tickled to be back in a place where you can reliably (in the airport, at least) find toilet paper in the bathrooms. There were no people yelling at each other. And then there was -- a mother yelling at her daughter for wanting to get divorced. That was weird. They were both clearly from the countryside. Later as we were leaving she was crying and holding onto her mother’s leg, begging for forgiveness. [It reminded me to the begger children around People’s Park here in Shanghai -- some of them only 3 or 4 years old -- who grab onto your legs when you walk by and beg for money.] But that’s the thing -- I knew this particular incident was odd. I have enough sense of Seoul to be able to interpret whether something is normal or an exception. In China (because people kept asking me to describe China) I just have no clue. All I can really see is my own reactions to China, with no reliable sense of what lies underneath.

On the airport bus I wanted KC to stop talking to me so I could take in the landscape. “It looks so peaceful and organized, doesn’t it?” he asked me. It did, but I think that’s as much a function of expectation than some sort of reality. Parking on the sidewalk, small stores with contents spilling out into the sidewalk -- my perceptual habits are used to accommodating scenes like that. Our neighborhood in China is relatively new and nice but China in general is still an assault on my senses, because so many parts are still puzzling or unfamiliar. Coming into our neighborhood in Gangnam things seem even more orderly because Gangnam-gu has spent so much money in recent years straightening sidewalks and repaving. The newer buildings also have fewer signs on the outside. The effect of this is a rather restrained, and organized atmosphere. It reminded me of going to Tokyo some years back. Although cities in general tend towards a sense of crowdedness and chaos, the precision of the small details in Tokyo made it feel much more orderly than Seoul at the time.

There was snow on the ground, so after we got off the bus the boys started a snowball fight. Max still has the idea that snow and Christmas belong together, and was quite puzzled when presents arrived without snow. When we got to Seoul he asked, “Is it Christmas again?”

Sunday morning the first thing I did after a nice meal (courtesy of my mother-in-law) of 떡국 and Seoul Coffee Milk was get a much needed haircut and 두피 treatment. As my friend Ming once said, when you move you can always make new friends but it is really hard to find someone to cut your hair. I’ve only cut my hair once in Shanghai (out of desperation) and my hair guy in Seoul spent a good deal of time holding up various parts of my hair going, “Wha....? What happened here? Why is it cut like this? Who cut your hair? Why didn’t you go to a nice Korean salon?” Ha. For the record, I wanted to do it on the cheap in a neighborhood place, and the job they did wasn’t bad, but they did hack one side oddly short. Anyway, I was chatting with the woman who washes my hair and she commented that I seemed to have forgotten a lot of Korean. The words were just coming... rather... slowly. I kept thinking in Chinese first. It was a weird feeling.

Max had a little trouble with Korean too. KC and I decided not to move around much for those first 6 months because we wanted to give the kids a chance to settle down. By the end of 6 months, though, we had all made incredible improvement in Chinese and gotten out of the habit of speaking Korean. We debated about going back to the U.S. for the Chinese New Year holiday (I’d really like to see my friends and family there, especially my new niece) but we decided that on top of the distance, cost, and time difference, having the kids speak Korean and renew all their social and familial ties to Korea would be more important. Watching Max and myself stumble with Korean those first few days made me glad we made the choice to come back to Seoul.

Aiden and KC didn’t have any trouble with the language. Aiden’s at the right age, I think -- I’ve heard (or read? can’t remember) that 8 is the magical age for languages. Aiden jumped right back in with no noticeable difficulty. It took Max and me a few days and then we were fine. And Max surprised me by having whole conversations with me in Chinese during this time. Since we mostly speak English and Korean at home I hadn’t realized just quite how good his Chinese is. He uses conjunctions and will pick up on any word I use and use it back to me, correctly. Blew me away. I knew he had improved a lot, but I had underestimated him.

KC had suspended my cellphone account so I could keep the number while gone and I had to wait until a weekday to reactivate it. So Monday morning I sent out a spate of text messages announcing that we were back and asking if we could make playdates. It was so nice to have my old number and phone intact, and the messages started coming back immediately. I spent so much time on the phone that day that I ran out of batteries and began to think Aiden needed his own secretary.

It was wonderful to re-enter our old communities; it was as if we never left. I felt, again, grateful for doing all those classroom cleanings and lunch duties with the first grade moms because we have a bond now that was slow to build but is now strong. We’re depending on the kids having strong relationships with their friends in different countries in order to maintain both language and cultural knowledge, plus the desire to maintain those. But I’m starting to realize how dependent I am on the mothers of his friends to keep those friendships up. They need to value the relationship as much as I do or it doesn’t really work. I’ve started to notice myself scrutinizing Aiden’s friends’ parents; not because I care so much what their socio-economic backgrounds are but because their values do really matter. Aiden has a new friend in Shanghai that we invited over a few times and each time his mom said no. It didn’t matter to me what reputation his friend had as long as they liked to play together, but after meeting and talking with his mom I began to realize the friendship probably wouldn’t go very far. She’s a very ambitious mom, and pushes her son in all sorts of areas, but just doesn’t seem to place much value on his social relationships.

I really appreciate this about the Seoul moms I’ve gotten close to: that they make an effort to sustain those relationships. And because so many of them, like us, have either lived abroad or are planning to expose their kids to multiple educational systems, they are good to talk to about the experience of moving back and forth. I hear from friends who have repatriated that because the experience of living abroad is relatively rare in the U.S., friends back home often don’t really want to listen to stories of the time spent away; the experience is too incomprehensible, or maybe they feel threatened or something. My friends back home have been pretty supportive but it was good to talk to these moms nonetheless. They know how much effort it takes to try to keep a foot in each culture. It took me a long time to break into the social group here, but those ties, once made, seem pretty strong.

This time back I was really glad we had sent Aiden to a neighborhood school. Walking around the place we kept bumping into people we knew. The first day back (after my haircut) we went to lunch at a neighborhood udon place located next to a large complex where one of Aiden’s friends lives, and while we waited for a table I jokingly said to Aiden, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we ran into Dylan here?” Not five minutes later a pack of boys runs around the corner -- not just Dylan, but Dylan and three more of Aiden’s friends. They immediately begin jumping up and down and shouting, “장웅재! 장웅재! 장웅재!" I had told Aiden that the first day would be a family day, but so much for that. He ate a quick lunch and joined his friends to play. If he had gone to international school (or even local school with an international section, like he does now) we wouldn’t be able to depend on seeing familiar faces upon returning; the turnover rate is too high.

Between running around seeing friends and sending the kids back to their own schools we were continuously busy. The kids in Korea were on vacation too but I assumed that they would be pretty busy with hakwon and other activities so I had planned, with the help of my father-in-law, to send the kids to piano, taekwondo, and swimming nearly every day, having them resume the lessons they left off when we moved. We’ve found lessons surprisingly expensive in China -- perhaps because they are more geared towards the well-off than they are in Korea, where each neighborhood has its own small piano, taekwondo, etc. studios, keeping the prices competitive. The kids come home from school late in Shanghai and with the overwhelming task of adjusting to a new language we decided not to enroll them in anything extra (though Aiden has swimming once a week at school and Max takes piano in his kindergarten). Max started taekwondo this time. It was nice to see him willing to go as long as he could follow his brother. Aiden held his hand and showed him what to do.

Our insurance is in Korea so we also had to do all the uncomfortable medical and dental check-ups. Aiden’s eyes have gotten a lot worse so the first Monday morning we were at the eye doctor, and then later in the day I took him to the Coex to get him new glasses. KC and I have been going to the same store in the Coex for the last ten years or more, always to the same guy there, who knows us well. I left Max with my in-laws and Aiden was positively jubilant the whole way there -- riding the subway, walking down the street. His face was beaming and he was jumping up and down with glee. Not just because he got to have some mommy time but because, I realized, he was so ecstatic to be back in Korea. He’s usually a happy kid, but he was bouncing with happiness to be back. I could, in that moment, really get a sense of how hard the move has been on him. I felt that sense of lightness too, being back in Korea, back in our old stomping grounds, full of random knowledge about where to go for this and that and how to phrase things with tact. It was how I felt going back to the U.S. during those first few years of living in Korea.

Anyway, we got to the glasses store and I was talking with the guy (I can never remember his name, because he looks like an Asian John Cusack, and that’s all I can think about when I see him) about our move and stuff and I had a flashback to the first time I was in that store. It was before we were married, so that must have been over 11 years ago. He gave me an eye exam and I couldn’t understand a word; KC had to translate for me and I felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed because I couldn’t understand. It was a measure of how far I’ve come, to be able to bring my son back here and go through the process of getting him glasses and conversing about a range of topics without a dictionary, without preparation, without even thinking. It felt really good, and reminded me that the feeling of ease and lightness could be had in China too, if I gave it some time.

Both kids went back to their old schools. Max’s kindergarten principal told me just to send him for the whole trip, which was unexpected and very nice of her. I had already scheduled all the other classes so I ended up sending him less than half the time. It’s still the same school year (since they go March to March and we left after their first semester) so his old classmates and teacher mobbed him upon return. Aiden’s teacher also told me to send him, since our last week there overlapped with their first week of school after the lunar new year break. The Korean school schedule is a bit weird. They pretty much finish the curriculum by the end of December, then have a month off. Then they go back after the lunar new year for exams, but in the lower grades there are no exams. So Aiden went to school for a day and watched movies, played games, and made things with paper. No real studying. It was nice to see his classmates though.

I was going to write more but I see this post is already really long. By the end of the trip my Korean was back, Max’s Korean had improved a great deal, and so did Aiden’s. Aiden’s become quite a bookworm. I caught myself scolding him a few times for going over to friends houses and reading their books instead of playing with them. I bought him a new manhwa book on Obama’s life, which he read in something like 30 minutes. I couldn’t quite believe he read it so quickly, so I started quizzing him, and then he accused me of being like Obama’s mother, because I’m always getting after him about studying. Ha. Our luggage was quite heavy with books for the kids and for myself. I picked up TOPIK and KLPT books while there, but I don’t know which one to take. Anyone want to give me some advice?

Several of Aiden’s friends’ moms commented that he’s matured a lot since we left. One called me to tell me that he had told her, “옛날에 할아버지가 잔소리 하시는것 되게 싫어했는데, 이제는 얼마나 사랑하시는지 느꼈어요." (Something like: I used to hate it when Grandpa would nag me, but now I understand that’s how much he loves me.”) He’s been less shy. Neither kid wanted to return to Shanghai, but Aiden said he was still glad we moved because he could appreciate the differences. Max announced, as soon as we arrived, that he loved staying in Grandma and Grandpa’s house and that we should stay there and not go back. I said, “What about Julia?” He said, “She can get on an airplane and move to Korea!”

One of my main accomplishments during the trip: I finally got around to making and printing about half of our Seoul Life book. Long time readers will recall that we make a travel book for each of our trips (I’m almost caught up on those too -- the last trip before the move and the one trip to Shenzhen hadn’t been made yet, but have been now) but I wanted to make a book about our life in Seoul. Aiden and I spent some time brainstorming what it would include: people we know, places we go, schools we’ve attended, food we eat, holidays, seasons, etc. I’m not really sure where to get things printed yet in Shanghai, but I have a guy who did all my printing in Seoul and I wanted to use him so that was good incentive to knock out a bunch of the book. Cost me about 100,000 won in printing, I got a lot of it done, and it was great to be back and look through the pages with the kids and my in-laws. Not only did it give us the chance to look back at all the fun things we did in our five years in Seoul, but it also let us watch the kids grow up again. I had forgotten how little Aiden was when we first moved. And since Max was born in Seoul, looking at his baby pictures again was great fun. I wish there was some way I could post parts of the books online for people to see, but the files are huge.

Anyway, we’re back in Shanghai now. Although it’s great to be back in our own place, and the warm weather has triggered a kind of biological excitement at the approach of spring, there’s a feeling of reluctance to return, a kind of dread at being back in a place where I’m too nervous to even get my hair cut at regular intervals. Aiden’s been complaining about going back to school. I have to remind myself that this feeling will pass, and that it is not the fault of China, but rather a natural shrinking away from the unfamiliar and challenging. I have to remember to be patient, and to appreciate the battles we already won, and know that this feeling, in time, will pass.

Multicultural living forum on Shanghai Family

Hi everyone,
I recently got involved with Shanghai Family magazine, which has just launched its website. Check it out! And, for all you Shanghai people out there, look at the forums. I'll be moderating one on "multicultural living." I hope that we can get some good discussions going there. I've pasted my intro to the forum below.


You may be thinking, What is “multicultural living,” and why have a forum for it?

If you’re anything like me, when you move to a foreign country your first instinct is to think through the logistics: Where will we live? What schools will the kids go to? What do I need to bring? How do we get our visas? But I’ve found, after two such moves, that those are the easy things. There are resources available to help you make such decisions and a finite number of choices.

The hard part, for me, is learning to feel at home in the new place, to cultivate relationships with the people I meet there, and to feel like I belong as I move alongside strangers and go about my daily tasks. I find myself in a new place where even people’s gestures are incomprehensible, where they have different rituals and standards of politeness, and where I stick out like a sore thumb even when walking around.

And I’m not just talking about interacting with locals -- I spend just as much time trying to decipher other foreigners!

So on one hand, I suspect that there are a lot of questions floating around out there about the proper way to behave at a wedding, how much to put in a hongbao, what to bring as a guest at someone’s home, and the meanings of various rituals.

But there’s another side to the idea of multicultural living as well. I'm married to someone who grew up in a different country, speaking a different language and raised in a different culture, and we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to articulate and work with those differences over our marriage. And since want our kids to feel comfortable in both cultures and languages, “multicultural living” has been a kind of domestic experiment: how can we raise our kids to be able to move across boarders and feel at home in different places?

Even for people who are not in a cross-culture marriage, this may be something that you are interested in for your children -- especially for the kids who have grown up abroad.

So whether you have
- questions or insights about cultural differences living here in Shanghai,

or
- ideas or questions about ways in which to incorporate multiple languages and cultures in your own or your kids' lives

THIS is the forum for you!

Welcome to the forum, and post away!

Four Months in

I can hardly believe we’ve been here for four months. I’m feeling more settled. I really love our apartment and neighborhood. Now that the weather has turned cold and I spend the mornings shivering in an unheated and damp classroom, I am supremely grateful for our apartment with its heated floors, double layers of windows and sunlight. So many Shanghai residents spend the winter (so I hear) with their windows open and no heat. I suppose that’s better for the environment but I’m such a wimp about cold I can’t imagine it.

Speaking of the environment, I meant to mention some of the features of our place that I really like. We control our water temperature, so we only heat the water when we need to use it. The boiler doesn’t run all the time; you turn it on before you need to take a shower or run the floor heating system. (Our apartment has ondol heat which is not common in China but since we sleep on the floor we looked for an apartment with this feature; our neighborhood has a lot of Koreans and therefore a good number of ondol apartments.) You can turn it off when you’re not using it. Same thing with the condenser for the air conditioning and the heating system. Also each room has controls for both floor heat and ceiling level air conditioning/heating. And, like in Korea, there’s a switch to shut off the gas when we’re not cooking. Gas, electricity, and water are relatively expensive in Shanghai and we use them as sparingly as possible, although I have been going a little crazy with the oven (having not had one for the last 5 years) and I do like to make the floor nice and warm when I get home in the evening. Sometime in the middle of the night I’ll turn everything off. Our apartment is pretty well insulated (unusual for China) and retains the heat well.

I also love our neighborhood. The complex itself is very nicely done, when I look out my window I see trees and water and the effect is very peaceful. Cars can’t come into the interior of the complex so it is quiet and safe for the kids to play. There are lots of hidden paths which Max loves to explore. In the mornings there are always a lot of people doing taeqiquan and some sort of sword-dancing. In the afternoons the interior areas are dominated by kids riding their bikes or playing badminton. Just outside of our apartment are shops and cafes. A Sephora and Zara are opening across the street which may pose a danger to my budget. The subway station is a little far compared to Seoul but I found that it only takes me 15 minutes to walk at my pace, and the station is on line 2, which is a really good line for going to Lujiazui or Puxi.

The big language news this month is that Max has started speaking. He started perhaps a week or two ago -- I noticed it when two of his friends came over to play. One of his friends doesn’t speak much English (though she speaks Spanish and French) so the three of them were fighting in Chinese: 这是我的！不，这是我的！ Max was saying it also. After that he took off and seems really keen to speak it. He asks me for translations so he can say all the things he wants to say. One day he came home upset because, “Michelle told Julia ‘I won’t be your friend anymore.’ But she said it in Chinese.” So he understands more than what he can say, and he’s able to respond to questions appropriately most of the time. I’ve also made some headway teaching him to read 한글. Considering how much time I have to spend with Aiden on his homework, this is quite an accomplishment. KC brought back some workbooks from Korea on his last trip and now when Aiden is busy doing his homework (if Max is not still working in his dinner) Max sits at the table and does his homework too. He can now recognize 가,나,다,라, and 마. Poor second child, completely neglected by mommy. He’s also doing better with English lower case letters and phonics. Good thing he likes to draw and write.

Aiden’s recognition of characters is very good now and they’ve started to write and have dictation in the last few weeks. Like me, he can recognize many characters but blanks on how to write them. He also has trouble remembering stroke order. He continues to do 2-3 hours of homework a night. After yelling at him for a half an hour about why he can’t remember the difference between plural and plural possessive I have to remind myself that I’m asking him to absorb an awful lot of information at once and asking an 8-year old to concentrate for that long is, well... asking a lot. The other moms are telling me to give it 6 months; they say after 6 months it gets a lot easier. Overall he’s happy and cheerful although he often complains about having to go to school.

Lately Max has been asking a lot about death. I remember Aiden having similar questions at around 3 or 4 years of age. Max asks, “Why do people have to die? Will Mommy die? Who will cook me food then? [this made me laugh] How will I die?” I told him that everybody dies and that this is why we should live each and every day well. So Aiden said, “But how can I do that when I have to go to school every day? It’s a waste of time! I can’t play, I just have to study.”

As for me, I feel like I’ve hit a plateau, but that may not really be the case. I remember in studying Korean that my progress seemed to follow a step-lilke pattern -- I’d feel like I was stagnating and not learning anything for a while, then all the sudden I’d make a lot of progress. But the hard thing is that often you don’t realize how much you actually are progressing. It’s not noticeable. It’s hard for me to get a sense, for instance, of how much my Korean improved after moving to Seoul. I don’t have a clear memory of what I knew at the point at which we moved, but I do remember that I only understood about half of my conversations with my neighbors. I also remember that there were so many words I didn’t know when KC and his parents talked to each other that I didn’t bother to ask what they meant. By contrast, I understand almost everything they say now; if they use a word I don’t know I ask about it.

The problem right now is that I am a very poor student. I don’t do the homework and I don’t review. For shame. Also I skip class whenever I’m too busy or feeling sick (like right now). The other problem is that I don’t interact enough with Chinese people. I talk to Aiden and KC’s teacher every day, but you have to talk with a variety of people in order to really learn to speak and listen well, especially in China where there’s so much variation in usage and pronunciation. When I was in Korea meeting with other school moms I got to hear a lot of Korean -- they talked a lot and were generally nervous about speaking English. But here when I meet the school moms they are all comfortably bilingual. They speak to each other in Chinese but speak to me in English. Their English is so good and my Chinese so poor by comparison that it feels inappropriate for me to inflict my Chinese on them, therefore I have less chance to practice.

One thing about moving abroad is that you learn that you have to work at cultivating social relationships from the moment you hit the ground. I’m willing to skip class more than I should if it involves meeting people, because I know that I need those relationships for psychological and practical purposes. The biggest accomplishment over the last few months is probably that we have connected with a bunch of other people through our schools, neighborhood, and random other ways.

My papers

After a much-needed break, I'm back at printculture on Fridays (that is, if I can get my act together).

Post from: http://printculture.com/item-2066.html
Or: What I did on my printculture vacation.

I spent my printculture vacation moving from Seoul to Shanghai. Moving on a tight budget requires a paring down process -- we ended up giving or throwing away a good portion of our belongings and all of our furniture and were still left with about a ton of stuff to transport to our new home. But the logistics of transporting stuff turned out to be a lot less complicated and interesting than the logistics of transporting our identities from one country to another. And that process, it turns out, is one of accumulation -- of documents, stamps, and allegiances sworn and committed.

I thought of H Saussy’s post “Your Papers” many times over the past few months as I tried to get our visas straightened out. H asks, “One project for those who really want to enumerate the brass tacks of nationality and nationalism would be to study the emergence of these famous “papers.” Who got the idea first? How did the practices of “keeping tabs” grow and change?” “What was the nature of the links between the document carried by the citizen in his or her pocket and the files against which it would be verified or supplemented?”

I wasn’t out to investigate nationality, systems of accountability, or systems of verification, but I kept subbing my toes on the corners of these topics. [And having taken a month off from writing I will approach them with baby steps.] All I was trying to do was document the family relationships between my husband, me, and our kids so that we could get the appropriate visas to reside in China. This process was complicated by the fact that my husband and I are citizens of different countries and our children our dual citizens; it was also complicated by the more stringent visa regulations the Chinese government had implemented in preparation for the Olympics.

Korea is one of those relatively panoptic nations — each citizen has a resident’s number, needed for everything from opening a bank account, reserving a movie ticket online, and visiting the doctor. On a practical level this makes Income taxes pretty simple because everything you do is recorded under your number. There are no joint bank accounts. Even foreigners holding a “resident foreigner” number have trouble in Korea: we can’t get credit cards, have trouble getting a cell phone (also registered under one’s number), and run into problems ordering things online. I wouldn’t want to be a criminal in Korea, but for the purposes of establishing identity my job was easier. From the Korea side all I needed was one document — the 가족관계증명서 (family relationship document) from any neighborhood office (동사무서). We had to have it translated and authenticated by the Chinese embassy in Seoul. This document in itself is relatively new, a stripped down version of the all-important Family Register (호적등본). It shows that our children are indeed our children and that my husband and I are married, but my kids are listed (of course) under their Korean names and my name is written into the document in Korean and with no other identifying numbers. Would the Chinese officials recognize “이제니퍼” as “Jennifer Lee”? National documentation is self-referencing and doesn’t include many options for people who don’t belong to the same national system. If we ended up using the kids’ American passports would we have problem with their name inconsistencies? With all those potential problems we thought it best to cover all our bases and go through the steps of processing the American documentation.

On the American side things were considerably more complicated. Documents like birth and marriage certificates are issued by states (and counties within states) and therefore need to go through several layers of authentication. I was married in Northern California, my older son was born in Michigan, and my youngest was born abroad; therefore I needed to request documents from three different places, have each signed by a notary, and then have each certified by the secretary of state which has jurisdiction over that location. Then each document needed to be sent to the Chinese consulate or embassy for that location: the marriage certificate sent to San Francisco (not Los Angeles -- it was returned to me), one birth certificate to Chicago, one to the embassy in Washington, D.C. Since I was doing all this from Korea with help from my mother in San Diego, you can imagine the cost and time involved. Getting consulate certification of the SOS-certified marriage certificate alone took about a month.

In the end it turns out we didn’t use any of the American documents; it took too long to acquire them and since visas for Korean citizens are cheaper than those for American citizens we ended up sending the kids to China on their Korean passports. (The new regulations also means we received six month single-entry visas instead of year long multiple-entry ones. Guess we won’t be leaving the country for six months.)

While I was doing the groundwork to establish an identity in China (an identity bound to my husband and children) I still had to maintain my identity in Korea. I was living in Korea on a two-year family visa (my ability to stay in the country again dependent on my relationship to my husband) but my visa was going to expire a month before our move. I could have stayed in Korea for 90 days without a visa but then I would have to give up my resident’s card and the aforementioned resident foreigner number, making it difficult to do anything.
Family visa holders are really only supposed to receive one year but depending upon the mood of the processing officer and how well you can mimic desperation or trustfulness you can receive more time, as I did — my last visa had been for two years. But in those two years I had forgotten which documents I needed and the immigration office website and online reservation system had changed. I spent a good deal of time trying phone numbers trying to figure out which documentation I needed before making the trip out to the immigration office, only to find out upon arrival that I had made the reservation incorrectly. I must have the look of desperation down, because the officer in the reservation-only line took pity on me (the non-reservation line was at least 70 people long) and served me, but asked me why I hadn’t applied for the equivalent of a green card. We hadn’t even known such a thing existed, and it turns out I had been eligible to apply for one for the last two years. If only we had known! That would have saved us a lot of money and time, and would have enabled me to come and go from Korea with such ease. But it was too late; I didn’t have two months to go through the application process. Laws and procedures in the Immigration Office are purposefully opaque.

The state has a little trouble with people who don’t fit into strict citizen/foreigner categories (of which there are increasingly many). For the Korean visa one of the documents I needed to bring was my husband’s 주민등록등번, a document which shows his resident’s number. The problem is that he doesn’t have one because he himself is a green card holder in the U.S., he has to use the 국내거소신고사실증면 (Certification of Domestic Residence Report) instead. He is a citizen without a citizen’s number, ineligible to vote or apply for a credit card. Our children had to be registered under their grandfather’s name in the Family Register in order to be eligible to attend public school.

We finally arrived in China and promptly (within 24 hours) reported to the local police station to receive the “Registration form of Temporary Residence,” which we needed to convert our visas. Given our experience in Korea and the complication of applying for visas I was surprised how easy it was to apply for a credit card — all I needed was a passport, a contact in China who would vouch for me, and a hunk of cash. I didn’t need to make myself a stamp/chop for banking the way I did in Korea, although the tellers use them frequently. I still have a collection of stamp/chops (도장) from Korea: the 인감도장, registered with the government, is used for very important legal documents, while other stamps/chops are used for bank accounts and less important documents.

So here I am with a folder full of papers from three countries creating a web of verification and cross checks, cobbling us together as a family unit despite the multiple passports and names. I closed two bank accounts when I left Korea (leaving two behind) and opened three more here. I have a drawer full of stamps/chops, cards, and OCTPs so that I can move my money around. I have a new “parent card” that authorizes me to be the one to pick up my child when he arrives on the school bus. I have a new access card to enter my apartment building. “Show me your papers,” in retrospect, seems like such a simple request. Now it is more like, “Show me your passport, your ID cards, your fingerprint, your 6-digit PIN, and bring someone who can vouch for you.” This is no longer just a question of the government keeping tabs over its own citizens, but of, on the micro level, needing to provide proof of identity for small, daily level tasks, and on the macro level, finding ways to check identities across borders as international travel and exchange increase in frequency and volume. To go back to H’s questions, I too am curious: “How did the practices of “keeping tabs” grow and change?” “What was the nature of the links between the document carried by the citizen in his or her pocket and the files against which it would be verified or supplemented?”

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P.S. Because of GreatFirewall issues, I can't hit livejournal, wordpress, etc. sites. Blogger's ok. I try to read things through google reader, but I can only do that if the full feed is available... vTunnel is ok but slow for some reason. So my plea is: make the full feed available! Thanks!

Living language

I'm rediscovering the difference between learning a language while living in the country where it is spoken versus learning it somewhere else. Put me in a social situation with someone who speaks putonghua with a clear accent and I can have something like a conversation: I can talk about where I'm from, why I'm here, what I did during the day, and give my (simple) opinions on various topics. I like talking to KC's Chinese tutor because she speaks so clearly and it is a boost to my confidence that we can actually TALK. But put me in a situation where I need to get something specific done and I'm not so great.

For example. I need my coffee fix every day, but I left my grinder in Seoul. It was made for 110 volts and I didn't want to buy adaptors for every little household appliance; figured it would be easier to buy a new one when we arrived. But I couldn't immediately find a grinder so I went to purchase some already-ground coffee, not knowing the word for "grind" but figuring I could wing it at the Coffee Bean. The woman understood "grind," then asked me in Chinese what kind of coffee maker I had. I understood the question but didn't know how to answer it; we usually use an Aeropress which was still arriving via airmail and in the meantime had borrowed a Bialletti from my father (one of those you put on the stove). The Bialetti doesn't use a filter so the grind can't be too small. In any case I had no idea how to describe either machine so I just gestured and tried to explain it was not like the machine they had there. I didn't know the words for "coarse" or "fine." (I do now.) I ended up agreeing to something I didn't quite understand and got my coffee a little too fine, but the Aeropress arrived and it's all good.

Or the other day: I took Max for his health check. He's required to have one before entering kindergarten, and it took place at a local women and children's hospital. If I hadn't lived in Korea the system would have been seemed weird and chaotic, but because I was familiar with it in theory I could figure most things out through observation. I went in and told the woman at the information desk that I needed a youeryuan jiancha. She handed me a ticket, told me to pay the cashier and then go through a set of doors and wait. I did as I was told and entered a large waiting area with dozens of people and a small indoor playground. I had a number but wasn't sure if I was supposed to check in. From Seoul I'm used to butting in to get a nurse's attention; the nurse was very kind and told me to sit and wait. We didn't wait long before entering a room where Max was weighed and had his height, head circumference and chest measurements taken (not much privacy, the kid before and after us were also in the open room). We were then told to go to room 125, but after fighting for the nurse's attention in that room (because there didn't seem to be a line) she told me I need to go and do something which I didn't understand. Some body gestures and a few words of English later I got it: blood test. But where? She gave me directions I thought I understood but I ended up somewhere random and another nurse helped escort me to the blood drawing area. But then the blood guy (I know there's a name but I can't be bothered to look it up -- language centers already overloaded) told me I have to pay for the test first. So back to the cashier where I paid; then back to the blood station where I figured out (through observation and pathetic hanzi skills) that one line is for children. Max got his finger pricked and it was over faster than I expected. (I like having blood drawn by people whose job it is to draw blood all day. They are fast and inflict relatively little pain. Max did very well.) We then went back to room 125 where the nurse told me something that I didn't understand, referring to one of the papers I was carrying. The kindergarten had told me that the a urine test would be involved, so I deduced that it was that test we were missing, (and confirmed using my dictionary and some scrutinizing of the test sheet) which was perfect because Max was doing his "I need to pee" dance. But where is THAT test done? Asked the nice original nurse, who escorted me back to the blood area. Realized that the urine test windows were right next door. Oops. Took a plastic cup, did the pee thing in a cramped bathroom, went back to now-familiar room 125. Now a different nurse was there, one who spoke some English, and asked me where the results are. Oh, you mean I have to wait for the results? Since I'm already there, she feels Max's stomach and organs and looks him over. OK. Back to urine. Find the results. Take it back. Where are the blood test results, she asks me. Oh, I have to wait for those too? (I'm used to those blood tests where you get the results in 2 weeks). Go BACK to the blood and urine area, where sure enough Max's results have already come out and are sitting on the table waiting for us. Go back to room 125. Hand over the results. The nurse finishes off the paperwork and tells me to give it to the teacher. The people next in line are already nudging us over. I take Max home. This, my friends, is how I learned the words for "blood test" and "urine test."

(I also know the names of many infectious diseases in Korean because Max had all his vaccinations there.)

The Korean connection

I have temporarily abandoned my old style of writing in favor of recounting events, as I guess is appropriate when a lot of things are going on and I don’t have much time to process them. In any case, I write all these details because I think the whole process of moving from one foreign country to another is pretty interesting. At least I find it interesting.

I mentioned before that on our last trip to Shanghai, the other Koreans in the program that KC will be attending were of great help to us when we were searching for an apartment and trying to figure out health insurance, visas, etc. So on the day after we arrived we met with Ethan (one of the Koreans we had met on our last trip), who has a son the same age as Aiden. We went to their apartment (located in the complex next to ours) and played for a few hours, and ended up staying for dinner. The kids hit it off right away, and we liked Ethan and his wife very much. From then we went on to meet a number of other Korean families at the swimming pool a day or so later (I’ve lost track, so much has happened).

As I mentioned before, we were immediately fit into the existing network. Because these people are all related through their program, there’s an automatic 선배, 후배 relationship there, but because KC is older than the people who came before, he’s a “hyung” or “da ge.” These people come from all sorts of different backgrounds, but someone like Ethan, who worked for a chaebol, is used to the kind of give and take that we’re benefiting from now: when he and his family arrived a year ago they were taken under the wings of the people who were here before and taught the ropes. Now they do the same for us. It’s been incredibly useful and because of that network we’ve hit the ground running.

Carrefour, where I’ve spent a great deal of time lately, is wonderful but doesn’t deliver. So to buy water for the water dispenser or large amounts of rice I learned where to call and how to order it by interrogating Ethan and his wife. KC was pretty sick yesterday, some sort of 24-hour stomach virus (perhaps 水土不服?) and we were wishing we had brought 위청수. I called Ethan’s wife to find out if she had any. She suggested calling the Korean grocery store. I called them and ordered the 위청수, rice, kim, and cider and it arrived via delivery 10 minutes later for 97RMB total.

There’s also a Korean hakwon in the area, that teachers math, English and Chinese. We enrolled Aiden in Chinese classes for the next three weeks, 2 hours a day. A shuttle comes and picks him up and drops him off. Although he’s been playing with his new friend daily I hope he’ll make some more friends at hakwon.

I can’t imagine making a move like this without the internet. Whatever I need to know I can find out through the people I know, through the English-language message boards, or for the Korean boards, where people post pretty much everything. It’s no substitute for going and seeing it yourself, and our situations differ because our kids have different languages under their belt. (Many Koreans come here so that their kids can learn English and attend international school. Ethan’s son goes to one of the American schools.) Max’s preschool (bilingual Chinese and English) is tough for kids who only speak Korean, so they tend to go elsewhere.

The danger here, as with all ex-pat communities, I suppose, is that it would be easy to slide into this network and not get out of it. I could take Chinese classes at a hakwon for Koreans, lunch with the ajumas afterwards, and shop with them until it was time to get my kids. That’s not what I plan to do -- I want to be a part of the Korean community but not exclusively that community. We may only be here for 18 months and I hope to actually learn something about the local people and ways of living -- as much as I can. But for now, I’m grateful to have all this help at my fingertips, and surprised at the high level of colonization of this area by the Korean community.
And geez, it feels good to speak Korean. It just rolls off my tongue, I don’t even have to think about it. The mandarin comes OK, considering I took a break from classes for the last 3 months. Taxi drivers seem to understand me. But tonight I ordered 오므라이스 and 수재비 for dinner (we still have no kitchen supplies) and it was like I had never left Seoul. Except the plates were plastic. More on recycling another time.

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I should say that despite all the advantages gained from being a Korean speaker, English is the most useful language here. The bank, the grocery store, the hospitals -- all have people who speak English. I can see why Western ex-pats find Shanghai an easier place to live than Seoul. I opened a bank account and a credit card yesterday with nothing but a passport. The manager had to help me fill out the forms, but it was pretty easy.