Habits of Waste

When my grandmother stayed with us she used to drive my mom crazy. She had trouble with the stairs, so she’d sleep in the library on the ground floor, near the kitchen and powder room. In her obsession to conserve, she never closed the door when she went to the bathroom (so she wouldn’t have to turn on the light, thereby conserving electricity) and she didn’t flush after peeing (to conserve water). My mom would yell after her, “We have guests for goodness sakes! At least close the door!”

My father-in-law is not quite that bad (though he also tends to leave the door open and neglect flushing), and he drives me crazy every time he comes over, pointing out that “That light has more bulbs and uses more electricity than the other one, so don’t use it.” He cuts their trash up into small pieces so they can fit more in each garbage bag, and he will eat spoiled food rather than throw it away. He’ll park in the first spot he comes to because he doesn’t want to waste gas.

I get annoyed by all these things, but perhaps behind that annoyance is a sense of guilt. These are people who have been trained by war and poverty to save, to conserve, to prize the efficient and proper use of things. The next generation -- my mom’s generation -- prizes convenience and efficiency. My mom doesn’t recycle because she has so little to recycle, and she throws out the trash every day, even if the bag isn’t full, because she doesn’t like the smell. She parks in the same spot at the mall every time so she doesn’t forget where her car is. She’ll ask for an extra paper cup so she doesn’t burn her hand.

We are creatures of habit, our daily activities shaping small acts of waste which accumulate in the earth invisibly, like the dark matter pair of our visible accumulation of money and goods. Living in Korea has helped shaped my awareness of my wastes in small ways; living here has helped point my mind towards waste rather than just convenience.

I have been meaning to blog about recycling here for a while, and made a mental note that others beat me to it. Seoul Man and Here in Korea both have descriptions of recycling here as well as pictures of the recycling areas in their buildings. I won’t repeat what they say except to sum up that we recycle far more here than in the States. I would be curious if anyone knows of an article about what happens to everything once its gone in the truck -- I know at UCLA, for instance, my informant tells me that the building cleaners just dump the recycling into the trash and take it all out together. Here, at least, different trucks come to get the cardboard, food trash, etc. The food trash is a bit of a pain to take out, and the containers stink, but just the act of recycling food makes me realize how much I waste (that and the high cost of food here -- if I allow something to spoil I feel both a pang of guilt and an economic pang as well). When I was back in the U.S. recently I felt so strange about throwing away food in the garbage. I had to make myself do it. It was (forgive the metaphor) like peeing in the ocean or something -- you’ve been trained to do things a certain way and it is hard to get past that training.

The counterpart to recycling here is the extra charge for take-out and bags. Every time I visit the supermarket, for instance, I bring my own bags or I have to pay for bags from the market. They cost very little, perhaps 50 won (5 cents) but just the idea that you have to pay makes me more likely to bring my own, more conscious of the fact that I am wasting when I don’t reuse my own bags. The plastic bags you get (if you do purchase one) are quite sturdy and will hold up for quite few shopping trips, unlike the plastic bags they give you at Safeway which barely make it home. I assume they make the plastic bags thin in the U.S. to create less waste, but what ends of up happening is people just double-bag. Anyway, if you go to Starbucks here and ask for a mug, there’s no extra charge. If you ask for a paper cup they charge you 50 won (5 cents). But if you bring your own mug they give you a 300 won discount (about 30 cents). That’s a huge discount, and one I take advantage of, especially since coffee costs so much more here.

I was working on my “ten things” printculture post, trying to imagine a utopian kind of future where people would wake up and start taking better care of the earth. What would push people to change their habits? Economic incentives and punishments, like we have in Korea, do seem to help train us to think a little bit differently about the small choices we make each day. But how far will that shift us into a sense of the toll we each take on the earth everyday? My friend Emily suggested that what we need is some sort of counter that reminds us as we are trying to decide whether to take the bus or sleep ten more minutes and drive to work, what that costs us in energy and fuel and pollution etc. (she said there’s a book that does this for food but it’s late and I don’t remember what it is called -- anyone?). But she was not optimistic about how much impact that device would have for the sleep-deprived person wanting a little more shut-eye and not seeing any immediate cost.

Anyway. Here are some of my resolutions for the new year as I train to be more like my father-in-law and grandmother:
1. turn out the lights I’m not using, turn of the power strips, turn off the computers.
2. use heat and air conditioning sparingly (this is much easier here since our apartment is small and we’re out most of the day. Our apartment gets a lot of heat from the sun during the winter and if I leave the windows open we get a good breeze in the summer.
3. Carry my mug with me as much as I can, carry my own cloth bags to the grocery store
4. We don’t have a dryer, which saves a lot of electricity. And we wear our clothes multiple times before washing them (most Koreans have indoor clothes and outdoor clothes, so you change clothes when you come home. So even though the city is dirty, you can keep the dirt and the dirty clothes for when you leave the house). People here, as far as I can tell, have no problem with wearing the same or similar clothes for days in a row. (My husband does it all the time, even in the U.S.!). Other than underwear and socks, and unless you do a lot of sweating, there’s really no reason to wash your jeans and shirts after each wearing.
5. Also following what it seems most Koreans do, we use rags to clean rather than paper towels. Kollae for the tables and haengju for the floors.
6. take public transportation. I used to never drive. But with Max getting heavier and the weather being cold I have been driving more. I need to go back to my old habits.
7. don’t let food spoil.
8. go through our clothes and toys and give away things we don’t need.

I'd love to hear more ideas. I just found the Treehugger site, but haven't really been through it yet... anyone have some ideas to share? Or more about recycling in Seoul?

Ah! I just posted this and I saw that oreneta has posted about switching off the electricity for five minutes on Feb 1st... I have to figure out what time that makes it here...

newsworthy

I just think it is funny how condom sales keep making the news. Who keeps track of these things?

wanted: travel songs

I keep remembering small things I wanted to post about. I have been feeling scatterbrained lately, and have to remind myself that I am still really tired and that this will pass.

When I was writing the "Art of Travel" essay I obsessively listened to the Pearl Jam song "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town." I have always loved that song, and wanted to capture the feeling of that moment when Eddie Vedder (sp?) shouts "I just want to scream hello!" It doesn't read well, you have to listen to the song. Although you can't tell from the finished product, most of the essays I've written have a song behind them. Sometimes the song's lyrics or content aren't related in any way to what I have written; rather it is the sort of emotional or cathartic topography of the song that helps me think about the way I want to structure something. Anyway, that song (and the essay) got me thinking about good travel songs. Here are my current ones:

Pearl Jam song "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town."
Simon and Garfunkel, "America"
Paul Simon, "Graceland"
Mountain Goats, "Going to Georgia"
more later...

The other random thing I wanted to ask: we're thinking of buying an espresso machine. Nothing too expensive. The one I've been using was only 30 bucks and has lasted four years, but keeps exploding grinds these days. I am willing to spend a few hundred dollars... maybe... actually I haven't decided yet. Any recommendations?

Where's the beef?

I'm catching up on the blogs I usually read. The Marmot's hole has this fascinating post on beef prices. Friends back in the U.S.: now do you understand why we go so crazy for meat? But then can't consume very much of it (without throwing up)...

a Top Ten list...

My top ten... Not really strong on global politics, but I got to put in "Who's your Mommy? And DON'T YOU FORGET IT."

That makes ME laugh, anyway.

The kids seem to be making it past 5am now, so I promise you all some actual KOREA-related stuff soon...

Jet-Lag

I always tell people that traveling 14 or 15 hours on a plane with two young children is not all that difficult. With some preparation, a few good bribes, several sets of spare clothes, and an adult bribe of choice (I like caffeine and black licorice but some people prefer alcohol) you can go far. Literally. The problem is not the traveling itself, but rather the jet lag.

And that is the black hole I find myself in right now: two kids who sleep and eat at different times, who make it impossible for me to sleep, who I have to keep quiet at 3 am since we live in an apartment and I don’t want the neighbors to come bearing arms.

So forgive me for not blogging that much lately. I am too grumpy to say anything nice.

On top of that, it has probably become obvious that I have become a regular contributor over at printculture.com, and my turn is coming up next week. We’re doing a theme “top ten” two weeks and I have been racking my brains to think of something. But don’t worry, “Between pee and kimchee” is still my first blogging love, and I won’t ditch you guys for those guys. They don’t appreciate all my peeing stories like you guys do.

Once the kids get back on schedule and go back to school I’ll be back to my usual sarcastic self. I have lots of stuff I’ve been meaning to blog on. I swear on this latte.

The Art of Travel

My printculture post on Alain de Botton's book The Art of Travel. Not so much a book review; more like a riff on the way I think about travel in my life.

Status anxiety

Returning to the U.S. I become, in the name of "stocking up," a crazed consumer. Things are so cheap here! I spend a lot of time in Target, Safeway, Starbucks, Whole Foods, the toy store, etc. And as I eavesdrop on conversations in the name of research, I hear a lot of status anxiety. No one NEEDS to talk loudly about their new car or vacation in Cabo while in line at the register. Coming from a place where status anxiety is all out in the open, displayed through designer handbags and Prada loafers, I was surprised to find status anxiety all over the place here, in every casual conversation. People don’t seem to know how to behave towards others, especially towards clerks and salespeople. My knee jerk theory is that in Korea, status is all out in the open, and interactions are guided by status designations -- titles, verb endings, gestures, even the display of emotion. But in the U.S. everybody is suppoedly equal, and we're not used to dealing with strangers, and no one gives you props for being ... whatever you are. So I go to Target and see people (especially women) fighting over the crumbs of status, trying to get some recognition, trying to subtely and perhaps subconciously one-up the poor woman at the cash register and the other standing in line.

Back in the U.S. we are

This is the first trip when I have felt more at home in Korea, and the U.S. seems strange and bizarre. Here are some things I just can't get my head around:

1. Crocs.
2. Earpiece phones. Have the Borg invaded?
3. Juicy Couture. I know this has been around for a while, but first of all, why anyone would think having stuff written across your ass is cool is beyond me, and second of all when I see a velour tracksuit I have flashbacks to my mom doing her mall-walking.
4. So many joggers!
5. a small Starbucks coffee -- only 1.50!! Wow!
6. I forgot how BIG Americans are. Not just fat, but big -- big hands, big feet, big necks. I feel so petite and skinny here.
7. U.S. suburban playgrounds -- wonderful places. Clean, well-built, not crowded. You can hear so many languages spoken. Yesterday was a cold yucky day and I heard Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Russian, Spanish, Korean.
8. Why are people so incredibly rude?
9. There is something really relaxing about being back in the place where I grew up. It is so quiet here. The parking spaces are big. Driving is enjoyable. Spaces are not crowded. The aisles in the grocery store are large. I had forgotten how crazy Seoul made me in the beginning just because I wasn't used to the level of stress and stimulation of living in the city. I have gotten used to that background noise and busyness now, but when I come back here it is like being tucked into a warm blanket. Nice. Soft. Cozy. Plus all the streets are familiar; things look much the same. The same categories of people are here, but now that I've been out in the world for a bit they don't put me on the defensive. I can just observe that they are still there.

Trip of tummy troubles

I haven't been posting lately. But here is a little taste of what we've been doing:

Dec 21. Finish frantic packing. Attend kids' school pagent. Hop on airport bus. Terrible traffic. Arrive at Incheon 40 min before scheduled departure. Check-in agent doubts they can get the luggage in on time, tells us we need to be at the gate by 5:20 or we're screwed (in nicer language). Luckily no one in immigration and customs, though I get stopped as always for having many tiny metal objects in my carry-on (trains, cars, etc.). KC leaves first to pick up the stuff from pre-shopped duty free. Of course our gate is the farthest away. I hold Max, pull the suitcase, Aiden pulls his and we sprint through the airport (Aiden, I have to say, is a trooper and a born athlete) and arrive at the gate soaking with sweat and panting at 5:15. I hover around the entrance blocking them from closing the gate and KC sails in at 5:18.

On plane. Serving Singapore slings (Singapore Air: love that airline). Haven't really drunk in the last 6 years, am parched from running, didn't get to have dinner before boarding as in previous plan. Tastes pretty good. 10 minutes later am drunk.

Dec 21 (U.S. time now) arrive in SFO. Due to rental car gaffe am upgraded to an Infiniti with bluetooth and GPS device. We like it. We'll take it.

Dec 22. Eat excellent Cuban food in San Jose. Declare "this is now one of my favorite restaurants!" Begin what appears to be several weeks of gluttony. Eat and enjoy to fullest extent.

That night: 10pm - 4am. Discover that after 3 years of Korean food, stomach is not able to handle other delicacies. Spend 6 hours vomiting. Did not know that it is possible to vomit that much and still be able to walk around. Did not realize how much food I had consumed. Was given opportunity to relive the night's meal over and over again. Max keeps waking up and searching the house for me, calling "Mommy where are you?" Vocal chords stopped functioning after the first hour of puking so can't respond. KC wakes up periodically and reigns him in. Our friends (whose bedroom is next to the bathroom) will never let us stay with them again.

4am scheduled departure for drive down to LA and San Diego. Am still clinging to the toilet and covered in sweat, mumbling "Please god make it stop"

7am After shower manage to regroup and hit the road.

9am Aiden throws up all over himself and car seat. We pull over by a farm in Gilroy, smell of garlic mixing with vomit. We thank the stars for wet wipes. Cover the car seat in plastic (impossible to scrub all the fabric now, can't detach it) and continue.

11am? More puking. me again. Bag leaks and our poor Infiniti is baptised yet again.

Time has no meaning. Aiden again. We decide to skip LA and head straight to San Diego.

3:30pm. Arrive in San Diego. Collapse greatfully into bed. KC hoses down the car seat.

next day or so... rest. Start feeling human. Dare to engage in a tete-a-tete with some food. Spend another sleepless night with my new intimate friend, Percy the Porcelin Convenience.

Skip to the 27th. Drive 12 hours from SD with a stop in LA to SF. Make it to within 20 minutes of our destination and Max lets loose with his share of puke. Too much, in fact, for us to clean up, so we opt to speed to my cousin's house, showing up at the doorstep demanding towels, running water, and disinfectant. His care seat gets thoroughly sanitized.

Today. Finally made it through a day with no gastrointestinal difficulty. We are leaving California, the state of Puke, and heading for Washington, D.C. -- a new time zone and a new chance at gluttony? Or at least putting some color into my cheeks again? Getting something out of the trunk of the rental car I pull a back muscle.

Somehow we make it through the flight, through getting steadily demeaned at every turn in the airport (when did Americans become so rude? And why do TSA agents feel the need to make everyone feel stupid and small?) Am now settled into my mom's place, coked up on expired Advil and immobile for the time being. Good time to update my blog, right?

Happy Holidays everyone!

a good way to give

Looking for last minute gift ideas or ways to help out this time of year? Check out today's printculture article on kiva.org

Aiden

Crap. I thought I was picking an unusual name. So much for that.
After growing up with such a common name, we really tried to find something uncommon. Can't tell you how many times I got e-mails intended for someone else, or how many times they mixed up my chart in the doctor's office.

text msgs

November and December have been busy months. Haven't had much time to post.
I have been compiling a list of uses of cellphone text messenging... seems like a good time to post what I have so far (especially since this time of year brings SO MANY MESSAGES!)

short list of text msgs:
-results of hospital tests
-confirm appointment with doctor
-reminder of school field trip
-coordinating soccer schedules
-confirmation of receiving tuition for taekwondo
-exhortation to pray for church member who is having surgery
-notification of death/funeral
-advertisements for money loans, other spam
-message from foreign ministry about leaving the country
-reminder of elementary school, middle school, high school reuinions
-credit card charge
-notices from the government about: missing people, inclement weather, etc.
-all other social uses: "I will be late," "it was good to see you," "where are you?" "what time will you be home?" "can your kid play today?" "do you have so-and-so's number?" etc.

KC: You can’t be an adult without a cell phone. You miss too much information.
Like not wearing underwear. You can do it, but its uncomfortable.

Am sure I’m not the only one who considers this a new medium, with new grammer, abbreviations, physical skills, and a new way of tying people together.

But also new systems of doing things. Koreans don't leave voice messages, either text or call back. They don't worry so much about being on time or setting definite meeting places, because they can always call. Phones are also used to pay for things -- on public transportation, in cafes and conveninece stores.
The phone has become part of one's identity, even part of one's body. Cyborgs of the world, unite!

Interpretive Eating

The new Rorschach medium: rice.

This fine one was done by Aiden. Can you guess what it is?



OBVIOUSLY it is a map of the world. He likes to say, "Mommy, I'm eating North America! I'm eating Antarctica!

That's my boy.

Here is another map of the world, this one done by me:


Those are collages of our travels around the border. You can't really see the color coded post-it flags on the map, but they're there (though Max likes to move them around). Aiden made the flags. I used to make these out of real photographs, but they curled at the edges. Now I do them on powerpoint and get them printed and laminated. Much better. Plus I like going to the office supply store. There's something very satisfying about laminating things.

Hmmm. I just re-read that last sentence. I can just hear someone screaming, "Get a life!" If I start sculpting things out of rice, I know I'm really in trouble.

co-sleeping

We recently returned from a trip to Shanghai. Interesting: I can’t hit any blogger sites from there. Blocked? A problem with my Dad’s provider?

Observations of myself from this trip: you know you’ve been traveling too much when you no longer get excited or panicked about it. I used to start packing at least a week ahead of time -- not so much because of the clothes but because of all the bribes, toys, medicines, and just-in-case things needed for travel with small children. I would hide old toys away a month in advance so that I could magically produce them on the plane/restuarant/etc. and the little ones would be distracted for a little while. Now I have my systems in place: my stash of old toys, my Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase full of stickers, stamps, paper, crayons, matchbox cars, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, colored rocks, etc.; my ziplock of medicine and my first aid kit (which I carry every day anyway, complete with about 15 different types of band-aids). And my kids have been trained pretty well too; something I realized when I travelled with my in-laws recently. It was like having 2 extra kids, but kids who were not accustomed to traveling and didn’t know all the rules. KC and I have done trips together so many times that we work well as a team, communicating almost telepathically, each knowing our duties. I remember heading to the States last year; we were, as always, running late and rushing toward the gate with our friend Joe whom we happened to meet at Duty Free. No time to take off all of Max’s coats, no hands to carry them. So as soon as we got to the gate Max threw up all over himself and me (he is very sensorially sensitive, overheating makes him puke). Joe pulled back in horror and surprise as we wordlessly went to work, me quickly stripping off Max’s clothes and putting them into a plastic baggie, changing him into set of spare clothes and changing my shirt as well; KC going at it with the wet wipes, Aiden checking the status of the boarding. Five minutes later we were on the plane, leaving an impressed Joe to admire our particular version of parenting triage. (Tangentially, I brought 4 changes of clothes for Max and 1 for myself that trip, and we needed almost all of them: he vomited again on the plane and also in the car on the way to my mom’s house.)

Anyway, this was a short flight, and we go to Shanghai several times a year to visit my father who is living a truly cushy ex-pat life: nice serviced apartment, driver, the works. Basically we go to mooch and eat really wonderful food. We stuff ourselves silly, use the hotel pool, sit on a real SOFA (we only have a kid’s sofa) and CHAIRS (we sit on the floor at home). The kicker is figuring out how to fit the 4 of us on the queen-sized bed. We push one side against the wall and push a small sofa on the other side, then KC and I squeeze ourselves rather uncomfortably around the kids, trying not to move or get kicked, dealing with the small space and weird sleep effects of MSG and heavier Chinese cuisine.

One effect of moving to Korea was to “go native”: we have very little furniture. We sleep on the floor, we eat on the floor, we recline on the floor. Originally we wanted to avoid buying furniture because we only intended to live in the country for a year (we’re now 3.5 years into this adventure) and anyway our apartment is so small that it is a much better use of space to sleep/eat and then put away the “yo” (like a futon) or table and use that space for legos or train tracks. But we’ve gotten used to sleeping on the floor now and quite like it.
We are big co-sleeping people. The four of us all sleep together, kids talking in their sleep, rolling and kicking around, and occasionally peeing in the bed. On the floor we have more room to spread out (we put 2 “yo”s together), we don’t have to worry about them falling off, and movement doesn’t disturb the others as much as on a mattress. I know co-sleeping is still a matter of debate in the U.S. but I just have to jot down my thoughts on the matter.

1. It is not for everyone. I haven’t really had a good night of sleep since I had Aiden 6 years ago, but that also has to do with breastfeeding and with other work I was doing. My husband sleeps through it well though.
2. I find the arguments about co-sleeping somehow hampering the development of independence or damaging the child psychologically to be, well, bullshit. I agree with Dr. Sears on this: making the child feel safe and cared for will encourage independence. Aiden is incredibly independent, and part of that is his personality, but it is also because we make him feel safe enough to venture out and come back. KC slept with his parents and brother in one big room until he was quite old (9?) and still remembers waking up from nightmares, reaching out for his mother’s hand, and going right back to sleep. Co-sleeping is still pretty common here, for reasons of culture and space, and although I can see that there are different cultural understandings of “independence” I don’t see that they are so large that we should embrace a psychological theory that puts so much of this world into the category of deviant and psychologically doomed.
3. Personally I love sleeping with my children. We experimented with having Aiden sleep in his own room when he was young (because my pediatrician recommended it, he was anti-co-sleeping) and I got even less sleep because I was always going in to make sure he was still breathing, make sure he hadn’t been kidnapped, etc. I like having them next to me where I can see that they are safe and admire the beauty of their sleeping forms. I envy them for surrendering to sleep so completely and for being so ecstatic to wake in the morning.
4. As adults, don’t most of us prefer to sleep with someone else? Someone we love, with whom we feel comfortable and safe? Why wouldn’t that preference be stronger in children, and is preference something that needs to be weeded out from a young age?

built environment 1

Walking thoughts (I was going to make this “Walking in Seoul II” but it is more like “random thoughts about the built environment”)

Me: dark hair, dark eyes, glasses, MP3 dangling from my neck. My internal beat: newly downloaded song “Naughty Girl” by Beyonce. That Beyonce, she has some talent. I can walk really fast to this music, I can shove old ladies aside with abandon. That’s the thing that sets me apart in this picture -- the way I walk. Long Stride. Brisk Gait. What they call here “씩씩해” (I love that word.) A Whatchoolookinat kind of walk.

Uneven pavement. Construction. Each street corner could potentially end your life. Delivery men on scooters who could join Cirque du Soliel with their amazing balancing acts: I’ve seen them carrying an umbrella (in the rain), talking on the cell phone, balancing hot food AND still managing to weave through traffic all at once! Now that’s skill. Of course I’ve also seen them cleaning the blood off the street and the funeral procession coming to visit the markings on the street afterwards: “feet” “head” “motorcycle.” This man, he wanted to be a writer, a street artist, he wanted to make his mark on the world. Instead his life and body are reduced to painted descriptions, to be run over again and again.

City life: what an interesting textual and sensory jungle. This new apartment building is “More Human Than Human.” (I have to remember to take a picture of that sign.) People talking loudly into their cell-phones. The smells of sewers which for some reason are always placed at intersections. Tent “restaurants” ("포장마차") set up on the sidewalks and in alleys, emitting smells of ddokboki and soju, drunken laughter and “Aigu, what is to be done. It is too difficult.” Riding the subway in the morning you can smell the garlic and alcohol seeping from the pores of barely-sober men hanging onto the handles for dear life. Jackhammers. People gently pushing and shoving their way through the crowd. Honking. Smoking. In the morning, occasionally a puddle of vomit in the sidewalk. Dogs, usually no larger than my diaper bag, wearing fancy outfits and elaborately groomed. Old men and women picking up trash.

Buildings are a jumble of signs of all colors and sizes proclaiming their contents. Samsung Tower Real Estate + phone number + 4th floor. Idea Glasses + phone number + 3rd floor. Myung-Ga restaurant + phone number + 2nd floor. Character Dentist + phone number + 1st Floor. You get the idea. It is the visual equivalent of electric shock therapy. Or perhaps an experiment: how many colors and words can this young, music-video raised generation take in at one time! This old fogey sure has had trouble. When my reading speed was slower it took me too long to sort through all the text and the stimulation so I made an effort to tune out. Now I’m better at subconscious scanning.

Why all the signs? This is a walking city. In the U.S., if you suddenly break out in hives and need to see a dermatologist you look online, or in the yellow pages, or ask your friends for the name of a good one, look up the address, and drive there. It is a goal-based drive, point to point. Here you can just walk around until you find one. That’s precisely what I did -- just walked down the block looking at the buildings until I found one a stone’s throw from my apartment. The doctor wasn’t in so I continued on across the street and found another. Walked in and had allergy medicine in no time. Back home it was the trees and grass that got to me; here it is the dust. That, perhaps, and the air pollution.

We live in Gangnam (literally “South of the river”), which was farmland before the 1970s. Now it is high rises, gridded streets, Starbucks on every block, and rows and rows of apartments. Gangbuk (“North of the river”) is the older part of the city with a labyrinth of alleys and buildings from multiple areas (the occasional colonial building, rebuilt Chosun dynasty palaces, and many buildings from the 50s on. I know pockets of Gangbuk, which is where KC grew up, but in general it confuses me geographically and architecturally.

Gangnam doesn’t look that different from parts of Eastern Europe: rows and rows of concrete apartment blocks. We live in one of those rows, in fact -- a squat, unadorned block of concrete with cracks and fading paint. The first time my parents came to visit and saw our apartment they asked, “Is this subsidized housing?” No Mom, but thanks for the compliment. The cheapest and most efficient way to build, KC reminds me, for a country with few resources to spare. (aside: Look at Malaysia, I argue. They’re building like crazy but they add a little something here and there to give the high rises some aesthetic value, and to give them the flavor of more traditional Malaysian architecture.) Here in Seoul the beautiful mountains are being raised to fill up with more ugly apartments.

Seoul is a wonderful, safe, livable city, but it is not a beautiful city. Coming from the Land of Strip Malls I don’t know if I have any right to complain about the aesthetics of Seoul, but every time I go to a city with beautiful buildings, or see any of the older temples nestled in the mountains of Korea, I wonder what Seoul would look like with just a small attention to architectural beauty and more of an emphasis on retaining some of the traditional architectural forms. Stop cutting down mountains, for goodness sake! What would Tangun say???

That was my rant about aesthetics.

Fear... again

The reason for my recent silence: my fear rewrite, which has been kicking my ass lately. Warning: it is long. But not as long as it used to be.

박생광

Some images of painter 박생광's work.

incredible.

Anyone know where I can get good prints of this work here? I'm still slow at searches in Korean. I've also only found one book so far, and it was quite expensive.

Bugs and parasites

We have been at war with the mosquitos for weeks now. We keep thinking that soon it will be too cold for them, but they keep turning up, night after night, to torture us away from sleep. Are they living in the walls of our old building, as a friend suggested? Or coming in through some crack that I can’t find? Or infiltrating the apartment through the pipes and vents? The other night KC found a cockroach in the apartment, leading to yet another search for sources of entry or contamination. Could it be the boards rotting underneath our floor? Or somehow coming over from our neighbor’s place?

The other night I woke up twice thinking I would throw up, my mouth filled with saliva, sweating and shivering. Time to take the parasite medicine again, KC said. He grew up in a Korea where you took your parasite medicine once a year and they regularly examined students’ stools in school to make sure none of them had worms. Parasites, it seems, were a big problem back then. My in-laws, through habit, still take the medicine once a year, and the pediatrician tested my son for parasites at one point, so I guess the problem hasn’t really gone away.

After writing the above, I wondered if in fact taking parasite medication was a habit of older people, leftover from older times, so I asked around and found that it is still fairly common to take the medicine twice a year, at spring and fall. I even asked my pediatrician, who suggested that the whole family should take the medicine together spring and fall. She said that parasites are still commonly transmitted in schools. Eek.

I have gotten used to the idea of infestation and parasites, though they are still disturbing. I think of my experiences with bugs back home: ants, silverfish (in MD) and ladybugs (Ann Arbor). Lice and ticks were the big parasite-ish worry when I was young. I remember coming home from playing outside and having my mom comb through my hair, checking for lice and ticks.

I can no longer write the word “parasite” without thinking of William H. McNeil’s book Plagues and Peoples, a fascinating history of disease, or rather, a re-reading of history through the lens of disease. McNeil uses the term macro-parasitism to refer to the way in which the aristocratic land-owning class lived off the labor of the lower classes. Something one could feel easily here, I think, where there is such a sense of the privilege of the rich, where getting a job or finding out where the next subway station will be constructed is such a function of who you know, where you went to school, who your parents were, and how much money you have.

Bugs and parasites: interesting images of infiltration, of the enemy within, of danger lurking under the surface, of the mystery of our own bodies working against us. I don’t know if men feel this way, but it bothers me a lot that I don’t know what’s going on in my body. A friend recently had a miscarriage; her baby had died weeks before it was detected and she was so upset that she had been walking around, happily unaware that while she was preparing and glowing at the thought of a new child that child was already dead inside her. I understand that feeling; I remember seeing that ultrasound of the baby, heart beating, growing next to my ovary and threatening to rupture. How could I not know? How could I have packed those boxes, prepared my maternity clothes, wondered idly whether it was a boy or girl and not known that this wanted being was in danger and endangering me?

Time to go take the parasite medication. At least we don’t have bedbugs, like in New York. New Yorkers: stay home. I have enough bloodsucking bugs and parasites to deal with here.

Currently listening to: Beastie Boys Whatcha Want?

Wanted: Tooth Fairy

You know I’ve been busy if I haven’t been blogging. In the case of last week, I was so distracted by other things that my delinquency extended to the improper fulfillment of my tooth fairy duties, an event which snapped me out of the fog. Perhaps it was a cry for help.

I used to live like this all the time, wrapped up in my thinking world of papers and books, mind wrapped around this problem or that, or just holding onto a deadline and trying to push away the panic. I had forgotten about that state -- both the stress and the beauty of it. I was symphony of vibrations the other day -- buzzing from a bad cold, from lack of sleep, from the hum of too much caffeine and not enough to eat (too much coffee, at my current age, makes me nauseous, so I don’t eat, not a good thing to do when you’re breastfeeding... then I notice my hands are shaking and I’m tripping over things and holy cow! better get some food down the gullet!), the vibrations of the bus I was riding, my mind thinking back to high school physics, wondering if all these vibrations could harmonize somehow (is that the correct term?) and send me bouncing into orbit. That wouldn’t do; I had already invented all sorts of excuses for the tooth fairy neglecting Aiden’s tooth; what would I tell him if I -- I mean she -- forgot AGAIN?

I had forgotten this feeling of being so absorbed in something, working on something so obsessively for a prolonged period of time, and not getting enough sleep. You enter a weird place, everything seems a little unreal but also somehow ripe for interpretation and possibility. I found myself coming up with all sorts of new ideas but of course I was too tired to actually write them out. I had also forgotten how hard it is to be really productive for more than three hours a day. After three hours of writing I find myself lying on the floor giving one word answers to Aiden’s complicated questions. “Did the emperor lie to Anakin to make him become bad?” “Yes.”

In this state I found this post on all-nighters really moving, and was reminiscing about the days of student and consultant all-nighters.

All this writing (and, in the end, I couldn’t even make my deadline after 14 drafts of rewriting “Fear”) made me really miss the community aspects of being in school or at work. Even though much of grad school was spent alone in front of the computer, playing with my hair, resisting the call of minesweeper, and looking enviously at my cat nestled in the bed out and sleeping, there was always someone else I could call and talk to, or chat with, or send drafts to. I find myself trying to write stuff now and getting to that point where you start to hate the topic you’re writing about, no longer sure which way is up, and needing a sanity check. But... who can I ask? Poor Emily has borne the brunt of this neediness. But I can’t always rely on her, and I can’t always rely on myself. But who?

Entering the blogging world has restored my faith in people while also making me hungry to be a part of a community again. I never read blogs until I started my own; then naturally I had to check what else was out there (tangentially, I really appreciate Seoul Man’s research on the Korean blogs (1, 2, 3)out there. It takes a lot of effort to go through all those blogs and he’s done a great job). Being a bit isolated by language, culture, and just the fact of moving, it is easy to get to know people around you in anything but a superficial way. But reading people’s blogs sometimes you can cut through the weather and where are you from crap and see how others think, what is really on their minds and hearts.

And on top of that I have found that I, struggling with being a mom and thinking about whether to work, struggling with all this cultural stuff, figuring out how to think about what responsibility I have to use my education, am not so unusual. There are many women out there who like me are taking care of kids, living around the world, and trying to articulate the meaning and experience of it all. I often feel like I am a community of One, giving equal weight to problems of Identity and Potty Training, but I am not. It just feels that way at 3am when I am cleaning the pee off the floor and answer the call for more water, knowing I won’t be able to fall asleep again for 2 hours and by that time they’ll be waking up and demanding food.

Though in some sense, seeing all the great stuff that is out there has awakened an ambitious and competitive side of me that I had forgotten existed. I shouldn’t compare myself with those who have continued to work and think and be intellectually productive; I have taken myself out of that race. And yet I do compare myself and find myself coming up short. I don’t regret leaving the academic world but I still covet some part of that life, that part of myself. Writing my own blog is one thing; writing for others brings out the kind of anxiety of wanting to again be an insider but knowing I never will be. I have chosen a life outside of the U.S. (for now) and a life outside of the hierarchical ladder of _______(academia, consultancy, whatever). There are no clear steps or evaluations in doing what I’m doing, so I just have to make do by patting myself on the back every so often and over-interpreting whatever feedback I get.

Maybe I can get a job as a tooth fairy, but I’m going to need to work on my consistency first.

Currently listening to: Dream on (edit) by Depeche Mode