Becoming what we're called.

cross-post from: http://saunamamas.blogspot.com/2008/09/becoming-what-were-called.html

I stole this title from an essay by Alice Walker about being called “dude.” I don’t really have any problem with the word “dude” but it is a lovely essay. But I am only slowly getting used to be being called “ajuma.” The title makes me cringe a bit, because I don’t want to be automatically incorporated into notions of bad driving, rabid consumption, visor-wearing, etc. (no offense Queen Min).

As some of you know, we have recently moved to China. I’ve written a bit on my own blog about how we’ve leveraged the knowledge and connections in the Korean community to hit the ground running here, but last week I really experienced the power of the ajuma network in particular.

Last Friday I took my older son Aiden for his school health check. The two of us moved as one wave towards the entrance of the school with all the other new students and their parents only to halt abruptly a few feet through the door as everyone in front of us stopped to survey the surroundings and figure out where to go. I said, “jian kang jian cha” to the matron standing there and she pointed me to one of the doors to the left. I went into a small room where parents and kids were crowded around a woman with a cashbox and a roster. The mom directly in front of me was a foreigner, I could tell, since her Chinese wasn’t smooth, but I didn’t know where she was from until the two kids next to her started arguing with each other in Korean. Look, I said to Aiden, Korean kids! He watched them from a position mostly hidden behind my body.

I had to fight my way into the cashier’s attention and by that time they were gone. I paid my money for “Jang Xiong Zai” and she told me where to go but I didn’t understand the directions. I figured I’d follow the flow of people, but after stepping out of the office I realized there was no flow, people were going in all different directions. I stood there in the lobby a little lost, Aiden looking at me with utter faith that I would figure things out. I waited until the people who had been behind us came out and asked them where we were supposed to go. That mom also didn’t know and went in to question the cashier again. She came back out and said something to me that I didn’t understand but I followed her and her daughter down the long hall into the gymnasium.

The gymnasium was set up with stations all around the perimeter: one table for blood, one for urine and stool samples, one for a vision test, one for blood pressure, etc. The room was full of kids, some with their parents and some in large groups with a teacher. I took my fa piao (receipt) and showed it to the people manning the front table who checked Jang Xiong Zai’s name off the list and gave me a stack of papers. She instructed me (I think) to visit each station and then bring the paper back to her.
At this point I began to feel like I could use an ally. Not that the situation itself called for any combat, but I felt I needed a cushion from the mass of people and noise. The Korean mom and her two kids were at the blood test station close to us so I went up to her and said, “최송하지만, 저희가 따라가도되요?" I picked the right person. She was surprised and a little confused to find that I spoke Korean, but not as surprised as people usually are in Korea. Her boys are twins, the same age as Aiden, but they tested into different grades, one into 3rd grade and one into 2nd grade (but not in the same class as Aiden). It turns out they live in the apartment complex next to us. (I REALLY met the right person.) The kids immediately started joking around and punching each other; they were already friends. They watched each other with fascination and a bit of pressure during the blood draw and none of them cried.

We went as a group through all the tests, meeting other Korean moms and their kids along the way. The twins’ family have lived in Shanghai for 2.5 years already and their mom (who had her youngest child, now 2, here in Shanghai) was familiar with medical terminology and the system of health checks. If I had been by myself I could have done it (I took Max for his kindergarten tests at the local hospital by myself and survived psychologically unscathed) but meeting her, the other moms, and those two boys made the process so much more comfortable. And it made the prospect of going to this new school seem far far better for Aiden. Standing in line for the chest x-rays the Korean moms and I were working out which taekwondo class to send the kids to and explaining which homework was supposed to be done during vacation. There was one pale little girl and her mom standing in line in front of me who was sort of caught in the middle of this group of Koreans.

After the health checks they came to our place to play with Legos and the Game Cube. We ordered 자장면 and spent hours talking about different schools, about language acquisition, about siblings and birth order, about raising boys, and other typical ajuma topics.

On Sunday we reported to the school for orientation. I met the twins’ mom in the room to pay for taekwondo and bus service. She had gotten there earlier and was waiting for me to sign up for taekwondo too. I went to pay for the bus first and found that Aiden’s name wasn’t on the list. The woman there told me that if he wasn’t on the list I must not have registered properly and he would be put on the waiting list. I started to get upset; I had told them we needed bus service, how could I possible take him to school every day and send Max on time too? The twins’ mom saw I was in trouble and came over to help me argue, and a few other moms followed. Them stepping in to do the talking for a little bit gave me some time to collect myself and recover my Chinese a bit; being upset doesn’t do anything for my language ability. Eventually I went to talk to the admissions director who knows me and she sent her assistant who told the bus people to let Aiden on the bus and that was that. More rigid here than in Korea and you have to know the right person to talk to; I have a lot to learn about negotiation.

But I was impressed by these Korean moms. They seem to speak Korean really well, they know how to finesse a situation, they know when to raise their voices and argue and they know when to sit back, smile, and pal around with the person. KC calls his “전투" Chinese (“combat” Chinese), not because it is necessarily confrontational but because it’s language learned in the trenches, necessary for negotiation but also ready to dig in until one side gets what it needs. Having just spent the last week relying on KC’s tutor to help us resolve issues with our shipment and our broken air conditioning, I was impressed.

We met Aiden’s teacher and received his uniform. It turns out that the pale girl who had been in the x-ray line in front of us is in Aiden’s class and I got to meet her parents who are Taiwanese but spent years living in Boston. I liked them very much and reflected that being in that bubble of Korean speakers had prevented me from making friends with anyone else -- we had spent all that time standing in line next to each other but didn’t actually meet until I was without my new entourage.

Tuesday was the second day of school, and after hammering out further bus problems on Monday we reported to our new bus stop at 7:20 sharp. The bus arrived and Aiden stepped on, then a mom and boy came running up from behind. What have we here? Another Korean! I spent about 20 minutes talking to that mom after the bus left; she had just moved to this side of town from Puxi and has lived in Shanghai for about a year, but was full of worries after switching her son’s school. I told her I had to go take a level test at Marine University where I had enrolled to take Chinese classes and somehow (did I convince her?) she decided to enroll too, so we met a third woman (also Korean, but young and relatively newly married, no kids) and went together. Then we had lunch and ended up talking for 5 hours afterwards. I introduced her to KC’s tutor, who came over to the apartment to teach KC, and she promptly hired KC’s tutor to hire her own children.

Next day. I had to pay the twins’ mom back some money I had borrowed to pay for bus service (yes, I was unprepared, despite finding nearly every day that I need to carry more cash because China is such a cash society) and I thought I should introduce the twins’ mom to the mom I had just met; their sons are in the same class. The three of us enrolled at Marine University were planning to meet and go and buy books together anyway so I asked the twins’ mom if she wanted to come to the meeting place and 인사 to the others. She ended up coming along for the ride and again we spent about five hours talking, adding another mom (whose son is also in the same 3rd grade class) around 11am. The group was snowballing, picking up new members here and there, and I was playing an active part in making that happen, hooking up the people I know and actively incorporating them. I felt empowered by the process; in less than a week I had found a community to fall back upon. After the bus problems I hadn’t had any big problems but the 3rd grade moms were having issues with uniforms, schedules, and classes and they set about pooling their resources to solve them.

This is the information gathering power of the ajuma network. It was a network I benefited from while I was living in Korea, without working very hard to create and sustain it. The neighborhood ajumas had already done all the footwork to figure out the best soccer programs, swimming lessons, teachers, the way to get certain homework assignments done, etc., and I just leeched the knowledge from then, offering my English expertise in return. Now I find myself here in China actively hooking up moms I know from different places who have similar anxieties or interests, building layers of a support system that help me deal with the largely unknown Chinese aspects of living here but also buffer me from those aspects. It is both a blessing and a source of danger, as it allows me to get a lot of things done in a short time (we’ve only been here a month) but decreases my need to interact with locals.

I guess I am an ajuma after all.

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!

moving headaches

One thing I remember about those first months in Seoul is how tired I was. All the stimulation of city life, the new smells and the constant push and pull of bodies, plus the fatigue from listening and speaking Korean all day long made me exhausted by 8pm every night.

The last month (has it been a month? geez) here has been like that. Been catching up on some rest. (Hear that, Ma? I really DO know how to sleep even when you don't remind me every day.)

But writing/blogging is a habit and once you fall out of it it is difficult to start up again. I owe some posts over at my other blogs but I figured I should write some updates.

Things have gone surprisingly smoothly... until this week. First our air conditioning broke, and fixing it has been less than straightforward, involving several different sets of repair personnel, negotiating with the real estate company and landlord about how the payments will be made, and relying on KC's fudao (tutor) to do a lot of translating. Going back and forth between Chinese, English, and Korean (with the real estate company) is taxing on my poor brain. It kind of short circuits. Luckily the heat has dropped off somewhat in the last week or so. Before that it was almost 100 (F) every day.

The big drama right now is with receiving our shipment of 745k of books, clothes, etc. It's been really hard to get a straight answer about where the stuff is and why it is not arriving. We were told that because of the Olympics it might take up to 2 months to arrive, so we weren't impatient, but suddenly the other day we got a phone call that because we had some candles and one bottle of children's paint (put in accidentally) in the shipment it had to be taken around the country and couldn't enter Shanghai, or something like that. They clearly inspected the boxes very carefully. Anyway, luckily the fudao was with me when they called because I didn't understand what was going on. They were asking us to come and pick the stuff up, but we understood that it would be delivered to us. Then they told us they would reimburse us for the cost of having a company pick it up but that we would have to arrange it. It was good to listen to her negotiate with them, to try to learn the style of negotiation. She argued that since we're foreigners we don't know anybody, we also don't know the details of where and when the shipment will arrive, and it doesn't make any sense that they should ask us to arrange it if they are going to pay for it anyway. They argued that they are not a Shanghai company, that we just have to ask the neighborhood people for a good company, etc. etc. Back and forth like that. The fudao said she didn't know how much to believe was true or whether they were trying to get more money. Anyway, we called the Korean company to pull some strings and get things moving, and they somehow got the company on this end to arrange shipment. I was expecting it yesterday. I waited all day. Then they called in the morning to say, "When are you going to pick it up?" So we went around again. Then they said, "Oh, ok, this company will deliver it, but I don't know when, will call you in 30 minutes." But didn't call. So we called them back. She said she called but we didn't answer. (bullshit) She gave us the number of a different company who would deliver it. We call them. They said they've had the stuff for DAYS. (WHAT? The other company said it just arrived. Who to believe?) They said, how about 10:00pm? We said, how about tomorrow morning? A price negotiation followed.

OK, so now I'm expecting it today, and the driver calls to say he couldn't cross the large road behind our apartment without a permit so he has to turn back. WHAT? Shouldn't they have thought about that ahead of time? They blame us for not telling them, we blame them, shouldn't they know these things, how would we know? We call Korea again, they advise us to get the stuff ASAP no matter what and we can work out being reimbursed later. So now they're supposed to deliver at 10pm tonight (you can enter the city without a permit at night) but they're going to charge double. Whatever. I just want my stuff now. We've been living with only 2 bowls for a month. Rice and soup have to go in the same bowl.

Max has been in preschool for about 2 weeks and is doing great. His teacher has sent me several detailed updates by email which I love; the updates were really thoughtful and observant. He's asked me a lot of interesting questions. He asked, "Are we Chinese now?" He's been inviting his teacher and friends over for brownies and sleepovers (we have an oven so we've made several batches of brownies, much to Max's delight). He asked me who is taking care of our apartment in Korea. He asked when we are going back to Korea.

Max has been doing an interesting thing lately. He will make up some nonsense phrase (like "moomamooma") and tell me it is Chinese for something (like "come over here"). He tells me this very authoritatively and seriously, makes me repeat it, and instructs me to study it. My Chinese is not great but it is good enough to know that he is not really speaking Chinese. I think it is a sign that he's engaged in listening to the language and interested in being able to speak it even if he cannot yet. It is also very very funny.

That's enough updates for now... need to call the moving company again. More on Aiden later.

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.)

My wish come true

So a while back I complained that there should be a Korea blog written by a group of women, and abracadabra, now there is.

I've been glancing now and then at the conversations about why ex-pats complain and why Koreans take the complaining badly, and starting to feel like part of the problem is the constant positioning of the "ex-pat/foreigner" against "the Koreans." Grouping people into categories can be useful to some extent, but there comes a point when the categories elide more careful analysis rather than encourage it. Anyway, that's part of the reason why we hope (we're still putting together the roster) our new blog will include a variety of people from different kinds of backgrounds: various Western ex-pats living in Korea, people in mixed marriages, Korean-Americans or other 교포, Korean-Japanese and adoptees, Koreans, etc. I don't know who will really write yet, this is just our tentative plan. Anyone who is interested in joining (and is female, since we do our blogging from the 목욕탕), let me know! (yunmay at gmail.com)

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.

***
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.

And then it was moving day.

I thought I would be more emotional when the day finally came, but by that point we had all driven ourselves to the point of exhaustion. When considering how I would write about it I could only come up with labor and delivery metaphors. I was more emotional about leaving Seoul before I had started to pack; once I became engrossed in the sheer labor of packing, changing addresses, making the rounds to say goodbye, and working on the logistics (insurance, banking, transportation, schools, etc.) of our arrival, I couldn't even think about the day after we arrived. I really was like being in labor again. I had prepared myself for labor like I prepared for athletic events and at some point I really lost track of the fact that a BABY would come out of it.

So here we are in our new home and my stomach is almost disbelievingly beginning to unclench. I’m still bracing for impact and now quite ready to let go, although everything has gone surprisingly smoothly.

Moving out of an apartment in Korea is pretty interesting in itself because of the jeonsae system and the way apartments rentals work. For those who don’t know, we pay a rather large amount of money here, called jeonsae (almost $200,000 for our apartment) when we enter the apartment. We then pay no monthly rent. When we leave, the owner returns this sum of money to us. (You can probably understand why many young couples or families depend on their parents for coming up with jeonsae -- the people who moved into our apartment when we left used their parents money, as did we.) Each resident has to acquire or bring his or her own appliances, which creates a lot of waste. We were mostly using my in-laws' old appliances and furniture, but we did have a nice newish refrigerator (3 years old), gas range, microwave, and air conditioner. Except for the refrigerator we wanted to give everything away, but even giving things away are difficult -- the air conditioner, for instance, requires someone to uninstall it and take care of the freon gas. The gas range requires calling someone from the gas company to come and disconnect the gas line which costs 15,000 won and is really silly, if you think about it, because the next tenant is just going to hook it up again as soon as they move in. We gave away a good amount of stuff and threw away just as much. That ended up taking as much time as the packing. We ended up having to airmail (at the last minute) another 75kg of clothes, books, and kitchen stuff because we were limited to carrying only 20kg per person on the plane and our two yo (beds, kind of) and bedding was already 40kg.

I wrote about customer service before, but the 빨리빨리mentality here can be very convenient for the consumer but hard when you're on the service end. We called the gas company to come and disconnect the gas around 9am and they said, "Well, it may take some time..." "시간 조금 걸리겠어요." I was thinking 2 days. They said 10 and the guy came before that. We realized, on the day we were vacating, that there was no way we would be able to meet the weight requirements with the amount of stuff we had left to bring with us so we called the shipping company to see if we could airmail a few more boxes. They came within a few hours, packed 3 more boxes of stuff, and took it away. (As a side note, the first of our airmail boxes arrived today. They stagger the shipments to avoid a lot of customs tax. The whole shipping process has been very pleasant.) All that was great. But during the time we were packing we had to show the apartment to possible tenants. The real estate agent would call and ask to show it right away, and I’d have to tell her I was out and wouldn’t be able to be back for another hour or two. They also had people wanting to come in and measure things so that as soon as we vacated they could start redoing the interior. (Another side note: I’m pretty sure this is why you’re not expected to clean the apartment when you leave. Most people will redo at least the wallpaper, if not the wallpaper and the floors. The next tenant in our place was redoing the floors and the kitchen sink area as well as the wallpaper. The interior company deposited bags of cement with an hour of us taking the last of our belongings out of the place.)

Our apartment transfer was at 8pm and we left the next morning. Despite having packed repeatedly and airmailed a second set of boxes on the last day, we still found ourselves with too much baggage to meet the weight restrictions. We usually ride the airport bus which stops very close to our apartment, but with this much luggage and our jeonsae money burning a hole in our pockets (the banks were closed when we received it so we couldn’t deposit it until they opened again at 9:30am) we checked in at the City Air Terminal. KC’s parents took the kids in a taxi KC and I drove our car loaded to the brim with bags. Since we were flying Asiana, we were able to check in all our bags at the Terminal before going through the immigration process there. We were lucky to get a very nice agent who let us get away some about 30 kg of extra luggage and we only ended up paying about 25,000 won. We then went to the bank at 9:30am and deposited the jeonsae (in 수표, kind of like a cashier’s check). Many people would do the transfer electronically but the new tenant’s parents are older and wanted to do things the old fashioned way. Then we rode the airport bus to Incheon airport.

KC’s parents were very sad. KC’s father has been pretty moody and 날카롭다 lately. They ended up watching the kids for most of the last few weeks while we were running around and packing. I think they were as exhausted as we were and feeling more sad about the move than we were. After 5 years of weeks filled with sword-fighting and feeding the kids their lives must seem suddenly very empty. They will visit in September while their apartment is being renovated, but we worry about how they will handle our leaving.

In the back of my mind I was worried that carrying so much luggage would get us into trouble with Chinese customs. But there too we had no problems. My dad met us at the airport, we met a driver he had arranged for us, and we headed to our new place. (Even though my dad no longer lives in Shanghai his knowledge of the place has been a great help.)

We rented our place through a Korean real estate agent. They had the keys and everything ready for us when we arrived. It’s a furnished apartment with ondol, and the phone, internet, etc. were already installed and working when we arrived. The agent took us to register at the local police station, which is required of all foreigners entering China (within 24 hours). (If you stay at a hotel they do it for you.) We made the first of many trips to Carrefour to get water, paper plates, cups, toilet paper, soap, etc. We’ve been here for about 5 days as I write this and I am already sick of Carrefour -- I’ve been there too many times -- but that first day I was so impressed. It’s like a cross between Target and Safeway, with a lot of foods I hadn’t had easy access to in Korea (oatmeal, blueberries, macaroni and cheese). The only drawback is that it doesn’t deliver, and for someone accustomed to Korean delivery systems, this is tricky indeed. We live very close by, but when you’re buying basic appliances (toaster, fan, large containers for toys, etc.) you can only carry so much. Plus the weather is really really hot.

That’s enough of an update for now, I suppose. More later on working the Korean network in Shanghai.

종합검사

We've spent much of the week fixing glasses, checking teeth, and getting shots before moving onto a new medical system. The things I like to put off until the last possible minute. Anyway, the other day KC and I went for 종합검사, which I will translate as "comprehensive tests" for now. Many companies in Korea offer these tests at reduced rates as part of their health benefits; ours was through our life insurance company (though you can also take them independently if you're willing to pay full price, which wasn't nearly as high as it would be in the U.S.). Anyway, we fasted from the evening before, and showed up rather grumpy from lack of coffee at 7am to begin the testing. I would estimate there were several hundred people there around the same time trying to get the tests done before a day of work. Because many do the tests through their company medical benefits, there's a good deal of bowing to coworkers and a little bit of fun at the expense of Manager Park who is having trouble with the respiration test.

First we filled out forms which ask about personal and family medical history as well as personal habits: smoking, drinking, consumption of fruits and vegetables, frequency of exercise, etc. The we went into the dressing rooms and donned color-coded robes: pink for women and blue for men, naturally. There were green and purple robes too, but I'm not sure what those colors indicated. Perhaps they were for people doing "Silver" or "Gold" levels of testing. We stuck with the basic package.

KC had done this before but it was new for me. We spent the next 2-3 hours (2 for him, 3 for me because women do more female-specific tests) going from station to station. It was very well organized. The room is organized into areas. You start out in one area, take all the tests in that area, and then a white-clad nurse directs you to the next area. Most of the tests are done in small offices, though a few are more public (the aforementioned respiration test, the blood test, the eye test, the blood pressure test). Despite the number of people the process worked very smoothly; it was a production line. I wondered a bit about what it must be like for the people who work there to be doing the same test a thousand times a day. They are very good; practice makes perfect. Nice to have blood drawn by someone who really knows how to do it fast and relatively painlessly; I'm a wuss about stuff like that.

I can't remember all the tests, but the ones I do remember: 2 sets of x-rays, ultrasounds of all major organs and uterus, mammogram (my first since I've been pregnant or breastfeeding for the last 9 years, and can I just say WHO THE HELL CREATED THAT MACHINE?), pap smear, blood test, urine test, vision test, hearing test, heart test, something about the distribution of muscle/fat/bone, and my favorite, the one where they stick a tube down your throat and into your stomach.

So for that last test they give you the option of being awake or knocked out, and since my in-laws said it was no big deal, I chose to stay awake. Let's just say it was not fun, and it took longer because it turns out I had something in my throat. The doctor said it was probably nothing, but didn't really tell me much about it (or even what it is called) when I asked; she just said I would get the results in two weeks.

You can add tests if you like (MRI, CAT scan, etc.) for an extra charge, of course. Some of the tests I didn't really need; I had already had thorough hearing and other ear-related tests earlier this year. But, like many of my other experiences with Korean medical care, I found the process fascinating -- the efficiency of the production line setup and the way the facility is geared, logistically and economically, to the accommodation of large masses of people. If I had been living in the U.S. I would have to go to a great deal of personal effort to have all these tests and, in the absence of problematic symptoms, would probably be denied access to some of them. But if I had asked a doctor there to explain what that growth in my throat is called and what the chances are that it's cancer, I'm sure she would have spent more time with me (I'm not trying to alarm my relatives who are reading this -- I'm sure it is not cancer. The doctor did say that was unlikely.).

Korea Days

A friend of mine calls me every once in a while and says, “I’ve had a Bad Korea Day.” I know what she means by this. She means that she caught a taxi to go somewhere and the driver didn’t understand her. Or she was trying to roam her phone at the airport, which she’s done a hundred times, but the rules have changed and suddenly she can’t because it’s not registered under her own name. Someone was unkind. She was annoyed by the twittering of the girls walking in the streets. She needed a new pair of shoes and nothing fit right. The bathroom didn’t have toilet paper. I’ve had these days too, I know what they’re like.

We have bad days in our home countries too, but then they’re just bad days. There’s nothing and nobody in particular to pin the blame on when frustration and anger arise from a succession of unexpectedly difficult or uncomfortable situations. And those situations aren’t exacerbated by miscommunication and cultural difference.

There’s been a discussion going around the Korea-related blogs about why ex-pat bloggers complain so much. I’m not sure that they do necessarily complain more than anyone else -- the feeling that the do may arise because people tend to read and remember sound bites and emotion-inducing rants rather than not long commentary. But this reminds me of something I had been writing (and never finished) in June. I don’t have time to edit so I’ll paste my notes in here.

Notes on being a “Korea” blogger

I began blogging about two years ago. At that point I had already lived here for three years and had built up, in my mind and heart, a collection of observations, theories, stories, and feelings about living abroad. I was just starting to assemble these into categories and attach tentative causal relations. My husband kept bugging me to write down the conversations were were having and I resisted just because I don’t like being told what to do even if the advice is good. But once I started writing things down I found the process cathartic. Writing gave me a chance to sift through, collate, and analyze what I had collected and to some extent order and unload the mental and emotional baggage.

I have become, by default, a “Korea” blogger (though not a very popular or prolific one) -- someone who blogs about “Korea.” And perhaps because my dissertation was supposed to be about late 19th and early 20th century missionaries’ production of secular knowledge (on “Korea,” on the “West,” on medicine, education, hygiene, etc.), it has always been in the back of my mind as I blogged that like the missionaries I am also engaged in knowledge production about Korea, about the U.S., about George Clooney, Bunco, and various other topics. That hasn’t stopped me from writing but it has often made me hesitate and feel uncomfortable with the process and with the label of “Korea” blogger.

I tend to blog about my experiences (rather more well-defined topics such as food, history, news, politics, teaching English, etc.), but when writing as an American living in a foreign country “experience” can be a charged category -- emotionally, politically, and socially. It is often very hard find the line between individual experience and cultural/social commentary. How significant is my individual experience (and my interpretation of it) and how much does it really speak to larger cultural or social trends?

Although the comment threads in any popular blog tend to disintegrate into “You’re an asshole,” “No you’re an asshole and an idiot,” conversations, if you can wade through all that without being sincerely disturbed about the human condition you can find a debate running about this tricky category of experience.

Let’s look at a (perhaps silly) example. A few weeks ago one of the writers in the group blog Marmot’s Hole (one of the most well-read English-language Korea blogs) blasted a piece written by Gabe Hudson in the NYT Magazine. Hudson’s piece was about living in high-tech Seoul and concluded with an incident in a restaurant in which a Korean man bothered Hudson and his Korean girlfriend while they were having dinner. The Marmot blogger commented, “Frankly, if I had a chance to contribute an article about Seoul to NYT Magazine, this probably wouldn’t be the topic I’d discuss, especially if I’d only been in country for a couple of months and knew nothing about the place, but hey, to each his own.” I quickly scanned the almost 300 comments. A good chunk are about how Hudson comes off as a prick (to say it nicely) in his article. But let’s look at the others:

1. Many comments dealt with the frequency of incidents in which interracial couples are harassed by locals. Many readers offered examples from their own experience, including amount of time spent in Korea and how often the harassment occurred. I see this as a collective assessment of how representative the situation is. One could also see this as a group effort to determine and define a sense of what Korea is like for those who don’t live here. One could also see this process as an attempt to construct a set of guidelines for what kinds of experiences count and what kinds don’t count when appealing to the label “Korea.”

2. Many comments, like the original blog post, dealt with the appropriateness of discussing this incident in NYT Magazine. If you’re given the chance to write about life in Seoul, why would you choose to write about this, to propagate this particular picture of what Korea and Koreans are like? Goes back to the process of assessment in #1 -- if the incident is representative that perhaps justifies calling attention to it in such a forum.

I suspect that some of the anger at Hudson himself has to do with the fact that he hadn’t built up any street cred in the ex-pat community. There are a good number of Korea bloggers out there, and many of them spend a lot of time and effort (as I do) picking and choosing which aspects of our lives here to discuss and not to discuss. To write for such a large audience and to do so with so little knowledge and through must seem like a slap in the face to those who have spent years developing a reputation of authority and knowledge in the blogging world.

3. Another set of comments have to do with whether these incidents are really one-sided or how much the incidents are somehow provoked by the couple in questions. These comments complicate the story and the possible conclusions. Hudson, as far as I can gather, doesn’t speak Korean and has only a recent and casual acquaintance with Korean culture and history. We don’t get the other party’s point of view, so we only assume (as Hudson did) that the other guy was mad because the relationship crossed racial lines, not because of something the couple did or said. But how trustworthy is Hudson’s account? How can we, the audience, be sure that the person describing the incident has captured all the relevant information?

4. There is a possible comparative stance that I didn’t see in my quick read but could have been easily made. Hudson alludes to it when he says that, “I should say that if I were in New York City and I saw a fellow American accosting a Korean man and his date this way, I’d want to break the American man’s face too.” These incidents happen in the U.S. too; my husband (before we met) dated a Belgian woman for several years and got harassed for it. Racism still exists in the U.S. too (isn’t that what Borat was about?) although as a society we have spent more time consciously combating it and we have more people of different colors and backgrounds to interact with on a daily basis.

This would naturally lead to the counter-argument: this is a post/blog on Korea, it doesn’t need to be comparative.

And the counter-counter-argument: that as an outsider commenting on Korea, the comparative stance is implied. Insert relevant arguments about differential power relations here.

5. That discussion may lead to the argument (made by at least one commentor) that this is racism which should always be noticed and censored. No matter what the context, shouldn’t we be vigilant and call attention to any incident, no matter how small or uncommon?

6. A reference to history: lingering anger at servicemen knocking up Korean women and abandoning them, attempting to explain the anger not as pure racism but as historically motivated. There’s a “don’t get on your high horse so quickly” kind of reminder here, which also serves to complicate any kind of emotion and make it not just rooted in the present but subject to the influences of historical consciousness. This move complicates emotion and actions in general, and also notions of responsibility on both sides. Is someone less accountable for their anger because of this history?

7. The contextualization of emotions such as anger, as well the knowledge that I blog partially to purge myself of emotional build-up, makes me think that an argument could be made about Hudson’s right to deal with this emotionally. I didn’t really see this but I can imagine the comment, “Why shouldn’t he write about something that clearly bothers him and that he has experienced?” Why should any experience be invalidated? He doesn’t claim this is universal or that Korea is a racist place, though by referring to the incident is not uncommon, as an example of a set of similar incidents, there is that sense of larger cultural criticism. The brute and angry quality of “break his face” in comparison with the rest of the piece marks the emotional significance of the incident for Hudson. He’s angry. As I would be. Does that mean it was ok for him to post in NYT Magazine, though? Which brings us back to point #2.

The vitriolic comment sections of this and any major blog underscore the emotionality of blogging. To take a more complicated example, in the discussions over the recent protests against President Lee Myung-bak and American beef (I would argue they are more about the former and not the latter), many commentors have blasted the protesters as illogical and too easily swayed by emotion. But what I found interesting is the emotion of the bloggers/commentors themselves -- the anger at the protesters, the furor at “Korean” systems and ways of thinking.

At this point the post starts to go in a different direction, but mainly I want to say this:
1. Blogging fulfills psychological needs. Hell, WRITING fills those needs. Analyze anyone's blog long enough and you can see their insecurities (as people quickly jumped on Hudson for presumed issues with his manliness or attractiveness) -- how often does the blogger assert his/her intelligence, education, knowledge, the validity of his/her experience? We write (OK, I write) to get a handle on the world around us/me, to gain a sense of control. I spend a lot of time doing it. I spend that time because I enjoy it and I need that catharsis.
2. There's a labeling issue. A "bad day" becomes a "bad Korea day." To steal a quote from my friend Emily (a psychologist, who uses examples like this all the time): "If you're getting a divorce and your mother is dying from cancer and you encounter someone who is mean, you feel furious at the mean person even though what you're really upset about is that you're getting divorced and your mom is dying." I'm not sure how she stays sane while doing that job. Being an ex-pat is much easier. But it's not easy, and it is easier to give that discomfort the name "Korea" rather than investigate more thoroughly.


Added later:
I may regret posting this and pull it down in a few hours (I have not slept much lately and am not firing on all cylinders, or whatever the metaphor is -- sleep deprivation messes up my language centers). The Korean has made the point that Korea, despite its futuristic look, has changed a great deal in the past few decades. My husband, who isn't THAT old, grew up with strict curfews, being tear gassed by riot police (accidentally, since he and his friends happened to be in the area at the time), with his mother being kidnapped and interrogated by the KIA for no good reason. I have met people who didn't realize that foreigners had the same blood types as Koreans and who really don't have much concept of what the rest of the world is like. And living in the U.S., a place which has been developed for a lot longer, I also meet people who don't know what the rest of the world is like. I've met college educated people who don't understand that Koreans and Chinese speak different languages. I would hope that we bloggers would be better ambassadors and producers of knowledge to bridge the gaps in language and experience (but as gord selller amoung others points out, most ex-pats aren't really aware of what Koreans themselves discuss).

Packing Notes

I shipped 714 kg to Shanghai yesterday. It should take 4-6 weeks to arrive; shipments are being delayed because of the Olympics and stricter controls.

I also threw out a great deal of paper. I went through the two remaining boxes of my PhD stuff and saved some of the articles but I am going to dump a bunch of articles I had collected on early Korean history, on archives and the historical record in Korea, and some other random stuff that I don't think I'll read again. If there's anyone (in Korea) who wants these I will send them to you -- I spent many hours copying these articles in libraries and in the National Archives and I can't quite bring myself to just dump them even though I no longer have any use for them.

This is my last week of teaching and it is also "health week": we all have to have our final doctor and dentist appointments, vaccinations, etc. Have to stock up on medication before we leave. Aiden's now on vacation (he ended up with pretty good marks for his first semester of second grade, despite the drama) so I'm also juggling his rather full social schedule. It's his last chance to play with all his Seoul friends before we leave so I'm not going to deny him anything at this point...

I wrote this when I couldn't sleep one night. I still owe a post on gender but I need a few hours to really write it well so please wait for that.

(http://printculture.com/item-2026.html)

1. A rock climbing move last used in the college Quad came in handy: one foot on the microwave and the other wedged into the handle of the refrigerator door allowed me to open a cabinet whose contents, untouched for the last three years, were a mystery. What I found: six large stoneware plates and bowls, six heavy stainless steel napkin holders, a special device for storing and pouring cooking oil, and a set of wine charms. Apparently when I moved here I thought I would be doing a lot of entertaining.

I had uncovered artifacts of the expectations I had when I moved to Korea. Or perhaps these are remnants of a previous life in which we threw parties, collected wine, and had an expandable kitchen table. My instinct (itself bred by five years of a more streamlined, humble lifestyle) was to donate these to charity. But then I thought: maybe my life in Shanghai won’t be like it is here. We will, after all, have an actual table with chairs. How can I know in advance the shape of the next stage?

2. I tend to obsess about categories of things — books, clothes, and toys mostly — but when I dig into the job at hand I realize (again) that half of what we own isn’t categorizable. The bits and pieces are what take the most time — the random pieces of fabric or paper I’ve collected, the electronic gadgets, the drawer of stickers, the lost puzzle pieces. Packing makes me believe I can put my life into a better, more efficient order, and then quickly makes me desperate for the less efficient but serviceable order I left behind by dumping everything out.

To escape the clutter I obsess about other things. I felt compelled to separate the Lego pieces by color before packing them. This took over a day and I ended up with in a nervous tic, but it was awfully satisfying to see order prevail in that microcosm of my life. The last time my friend Emily was faced with a move her form of denial took the form of the search for a perfect runner for her hall. She’d wake up in the middle of the night to look at candidates online. If I can just get this runner, everything will be fine. If I can just put these Lego pieces in order the rest of it will all follow.

"stupid" and other clarifications

I started to write a reply to Alex's comment on my last post, but it got long and convoluted and I thought I should clarify what I said about Aiden feeling "stupid" more publicly. I'm in the midst of packing and I haven't slept much and don't have time to edit this properly so my apologies in advance. (Alex: Welcome to my blog! )

Aiden's teacher never told him that he's stupid. He said that of himself because he has noticed that his Korean isn't as good as the other kids' Korean. I don't think the teacher would ever say that about him. I'm not all that happy with her as a teacher because I think she's more of a "bad cop" type teacher and that doesn't fit my parenting philosophy, but she's not really mean, just strict and not all that empathetic. My main beef with her is that she hits the kids on the hand with a ruler when they misbehave and that she doesn't give them much break time. If we were going to be around longer I might think about what recourse I have but the hitting, at least, is not that uncommon. For 2nd grade it is pretty rare, but not THAT rare, and so I don't know how effective protest would be. Some of the parents in another class have been unhappy with their teacher and they do complain to the school or to the teacher and sometimes the teacher will be fired or transfered to a different school or grade, so it is not like parents are completely powerless here.

Aiden saying that he feels stupid is complicated in ways I didn't really go into in the last post. First, he's a self conscious kid. He stands out in school because he is mixed and looks mixed. The attention he gets because of this is not negative attention -- mostly the other kids are fascinated with him and envious of his ability to speak English and opt out of hakwon. But he doesn't like to stick out so he gets flustered by that. He is also (and this is not to be underestimated) stressed out by the fact that we're moving to another country and he knows he must learn yet another language, when he feels that he is still mastering the 2 he knows now. Earlier in the year we were preparing him for school tests (to test into schools in Shanghai) and we started out preparing him for the Chinese test, which made all of us crazy so we gave it up and decided to put him in the English track. But just preparing for the English tests at the same time he was beginning a new grade, with a new teacher and a more rigorous set of expectations, was very stressful for him. It was a learning experience for all of us. In retrospect we made a lot of mistakes as parents during that time. We realized that Aiden needed to have a more consistent schedule and that we needed to spend more time with him on his Korean homework, instead of pushing English and Chinese so much so early. He's doing very well in Korean (he reads much faster than I do and his vocabulary is probably better because he is a good reader) and his English is also very good -- not as good as his peers in the U.S., but still very good. He can read Captain Underpants and some of the Magic Treehouse, but he prefers to read in Korean. His first grade teacher was the type that noted and praised him for going form 20% to 80% on his dictation test; the second grade teacher is the type that calls him to the front of the classroom during the first week of school and tells him his dictation score was not high enough so he needs to do extra homework every night (writing 10 difficult words) indefinitely. But to be fair to his 2nd grade teacher, after his dictation scores improved (which they did, dramatically, because of that extra homework), she praised him in front of the whole class. But he's the type (or perhaps it is the circumstance which renders him more thin-skinned) that is more scared and scarred by the failure than bolstered by the praise. Also, preparing him for the tests in Shanghai made him more conscious of his linguistic weaknesses (I was too much of a hard-ass in preparing him).
If I had to stay here long term, I'm not sure what kind of education I would choose for my kids. I don't like international school for many reasons: too expensive, not enough Korean, the kids tend to be priveledged and live in a bubble, etc. We moved to Korea so that the kids would be a part of this culture, not separate. But the stress of hakwon and the very competitive educational environment is really hard for the kids and it is difficult to opt out. I have been working on a follow-up to my description of first grade for several months now, but keep putting it aside because it is so hard for me to try and capture the ways in which the system is easy to criticize but also difficult to get out of. The values of the system begin to seep into your consciousness and affect the way you see the world and more than that, the way your children see themselves. Because I'm both a parent and a teacher I see it from both sides and that can be schizophrenic sometimes, but also highlights how complicated the issues are and how difficult it is to extrapolate from any individual experience. We had a great teacher in 1st grade, and perhaps because of that we were unprepared for this one, who isn't terrible, but whose particular brand of non-greatness manages to push on all the anxieties created by circumstance and personality and parenting failures and make them into something larger and scarier.

A few months ago there was a little stink in the blog world when Brian in Jeollado made some criticisms of the Marmot (criticisms I mostly agreed with) and I had intended to write something about my take on the Korea blogging world. Actually I've been working on that post for several months already. I'm not very fast, am I? But part of what I wanted to say is this: that for some reason or another the popular Korea bloggers are all men. Why that is I don't know. Sometimes I get really disgusted with the Marmot and many other blogs (not to name names) because they go from talking about the sorry state of gender relations in this country to verbally salivating over the bodies of this or that singer or model. A few other female Korea bloggers and I have lamented over this over coffee and discussed creating a group blog written only by women, but none of us really have the time it takes to make a good daily blog.

The other point I wanted to make is that the most popular blogs tend to be the daily blogs, the news blogs, the blogs which have the most definitive takes on events that are occuring. I understand the impulse to want immediate commentary and gratification, but in the main parts and in the comments there's a tendency towards quick conclusions and often quick hostility unmediated by a sense that maybe we don't know the whole story or that the solutions are not always that simple. I believe in criticism, and I read blogs to take the temperature of various social groups, but I truly admire the blogs that at least attempt to account for complexity and uncertaintly.

I will finish these posts (they will probably go up on printculture) sometime, but moving to another country is taking up all my psychological and physical energy right now.

For Alex (and anyone else in a cross-cultural marriage thinking about moving to Korea): it's not simple or easy. You have to have your goals in mind and be prepared to be flexible. But these last 5 years have been the most interesting and rewarding of my life. I do not regret any minute, and I think that this was the best risk I ever took. If you ever want to talk more specifically, send me an email: yunmay (at) gmail.com.

procrastination

I am supposed to be packing. Therefore it must be a good time to update my blog!

This morning we were skyping with my mom and talking about her 4th of July plans. I asked her if she was going to eat hot dogs. Max said, "What's a hot dog?"

Aiden has not been having an easy time in 2nd grade. His teacher is scary, very strict, and not very kind. He listed the reasons he doesn't like school to me:
1. He has to sit for 4 hours.
2. His current teacher only lets them go to the bathroom once an hour. Aiden tends to go frequently and its hard for him to hold it.
3. When there's a conflict between two kids, she scolds them both instead of trying to figure out who really had bad behavior.
4. I forgot what #4 was, but there was another reason.

Then the other night he told me that he sometimes doesn't understand what the teacher says, even though everybody else seems to. He said he must be a 멍청이 -- stupid, a dullard. He said "I'm an American who can't write in English well and a Chinese person who can't speak Chinese." I tried to reassure him that he is in fact very smart and that he will have gaps in his language because he's trying to learn more than one at a time, but that he's doing fine. But I felt horrible.

On that note, I'd better get packing again.

must read

H Saussy over at printculture has posted this on the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. since 9/11, and about concepts of freedom. Please click through and read it.

I am packing and not sleeping very well again. My SeokMun master tells me perhaps I don't understand some of the Korean concepts as well as I would like and that is preventing me from relaxing. I think moving probably has more to do with it. I do find it easier to try to focus on my body but it is still hard for me to maintain focus on breathing and on creating a "dan-jeon" -- rather like trying to concentrate on my gall bladder for a half an hour. I don't even know where my gall bladder is, come to think of it.

Trying to put together some thoughts on being a "Korea" blogger, as reluctant as I am to accept the label even in a post. More sometime this week. Writing is procrastination, I suppose. In the meantime I'll update my essay list on the sidebar.

Updates continued...

While my dad and I were opening bank accounts and checking out preschools KC had gone to meet some Korean students at CEIBS (China European International Business School). We had scheduled a 2:00 appointment to sign on an apartment near Pinghe in JinQiao. At 1:30 or so we were wrapping things up at Okiki and KC called to say that we needed to postpone the signing to 4; all the Koreans he had talked to were urging us to look at Lianyang again.

We had really liked Lianyang when we first looked there last October or November -- it just seemed like a vibrant, livable neighborhood, with a lot of foreigners but not just a foreigner area, and close to Century Park. But once we decided to go with Pinghe (instead of JinCai) we began looking at JinQiao for apartments because we wanted Aiden to be able to walk to school, as he does now. Long story short, we met KC back at Lianyang where a few of the Korean students helped us find a Korean real estate agent (two, actually) and we madly looked at apartments there.

We spent the next 5-6 hours looking there and meeting more Koreans through the two who accompanied us. It was the birthday of the wife of one guy and yet he still stayed with us for hours, advising us on what to look for and what to be wary of and introducing us to more people. One guy we met later has a son the same age as Aiden so I got to know a little bit about what programs are available for him: swimming, taekwondo, piano, in Korean or Chinese. He also helped us a lot with visa procedures -- I’ll probably have to write another post about this but I’m having a hell of a time getting our documents authorized in the U.S. and since the kids have two passports we’ve been going back and forth between which passport we should use for their visas, which makes a difference because of visa fees and document authorization. Anyway. They told me that language classes developed for English-speaking foreigners are about three times more expensive than Chinese classes for Koreans. These guys immediately started calling KC “hyung” and “da ge”; we were incorporated into the network right away and it was both helpful and psychologically reassuring. I could picture myself in that neighborhood, working the ajuma network, finding Korean playmates for the kids and finding about all the things I needed to find out through them. Between that group and the ShanghaiMamas I felt good about my prospects for hitting the ground running.

The Korean network feels qualitatively different and in writing this quick post (no editing, sorry) I’m trying to put my finger on why. Partially I’m sure it is because I’ve spent the last 5 years learning how to traverse the social networks here in Seoul, and I know how resourceful ajumas are and how much they rely upon word-of-mouth and the rapid spread of information to get things done. Partially it is because of the inescapable status relationships that come with the network. Because I’m coming from Seoul and I am a native English speaker I kind of know where I will fall in that network (many are coming to China with the goal of having their kids learn English -- they want to escape the Korean school system but can’t go to the U.S. or Canada).

The other big difference is that many of the Koreans are their on their own dime, as we are. Reading the English language ex-pat forums yield a lot of useful information but skewed towards people who are there on a fat package, with housing allowances, moving allowances, and often drivers. We are paying for all of this out of our own pockets so what we’re looking for is pretty different. Reading the Korean forums (I leave this to KC, mostly) on schools and neighborhoods has been really helpful. In any case, I feel lucky to have a number of different networks to fall back upon, and really grateful to all of those who have helped us out so far.

Anyway, at around 6pm we decided to make an offer on one apartment. It was in a complex that seemed great for families and the family with the kid Aiden’s age lives in the same complex. The students urged us to look at Yanlord Town too, although it was out of our budget. So we went for a quick look; it was a Tower Palace kind of feel, lots of marble, security codes for the elevators, that sort of thing. Not our style, but it was fun to look at. After looking in one building we descended to the parking garage to take a golf cart (there are men waiting to shuttle people from place to place in the parking garage) to another building on the other side of the complex. They have a car wash, playground, and swimming pool underground, which is why it is very attractive to people with families.

One of the things real estate agents told us to consider is who owns the apartment. Our first agent is from Shanghai and she urged us towards one apartment and not another because the owner of one was “not a Shanghai person, but living in Shanghai” and the owner of the other was “not a Shanghai person, and not living in Shanghai.” I forgot where that owner was from, but she said in case of problems, it might be hard to get the owner to respond.

The two apartments we ended up bidding on in Lianyang were both owned by Koreans living in Shanghai, which will good if we have any problems. Both apartments are ondol apartments -- that is, they both have heated floors. You know there are a lot of Koreans in the area when you can easily find an ondol apartment. Since we sleep on the floor this was important to us; also many people commented that because buildings are built more cheaply the wind and cold really come through the walls in the winter. Ondol apartments are more expensive but it was worth it for us.
The first apartment we bid on in Lianyang had beautiful interior decoration, including a bed built into a wall unit with night tables. This was the big issue, since we needed the bed taken out so that we could sleep on the floor. (We’re renting a furnished apartment.) The owner came and we debated about this until about 9pm, when we finally got to have dinner. It came down to the bed problem; because it was built to his specification it would be too hard to remove, he felt. We could certainly understand that.

The next day KC played golf with Dad while I went with Dad’s friend Annie to deposit 2 suitcases loaded with fall clothes, a few pans, some utensils, and books in their Marriott storage unit. It was nice to be back in Dad’s old stomping grounds, though they tell me the Marriott is losing a lot of business because of all the visa restrictions. Both suitcases were well over 15 years old and on their last legs but I hadn’t had time to repack the stuff into boxes so that I could take the suitcases back with me. We decided to go and buy 2 more cheap suitcases. We had just about finished that when KC called to tell me that the owner had talked with his interior design company and said the bed was not possible to disassemble in any easy way.

So after a quick but delicious lunch at Crystal Jade we went back to Lianyang to look at our second choice, which, upon further reflection, was probably a better choice. Different apartment complex, better floor plan, ugly furniture, but no bed in the master bedroom, just a mattress which the owner is happy to move to the guest room. Good thing again for my dad and his driver since we had to coordinate getting my dad to his 5:00 flight from Pudong while we had a 6:00 from Hongqiao. We were to leave at 4; at 4:05 the owner verbally agreed on the phone, we left the real estate agent with all the remaining cash we had and we hopped in the van and took off for the airport. We were at the gate by 5pm. I love Hongqiao airport. Since we’ve been back we’ve signed the final papers by fax. We’re set to move in on July 31. Mission accomplished; as Emily would say it was a “typical Jen and KC trip: a lot of running around, everything finished at the last minute.” Except that we usually eat a lot better -- we barely fit three meals in each day between the 12 hours of walking around and hopping into taxis. Now I just have to pack.

updates

The past six months or so have been hectic ones as we figured out whether we’d be able to move this year or not. Although we’ve made several trips back and forth to Shanghai I was reluctant to say too much without knowing for sure whether we’d move. But as of now everything is set: we plan to relocate to Shanghai on July 31st.

KC and I took a whirwind trip last week to finalize the apartment and schools. Since I never did write a summary of our April trip, here is what happened in brief:

Aiden tested at 3 schools: SMIC, Pinghe, and JinCai. SMIC is a school originally built for SMIC employees but now open to other students. It has both Chinese and English tracks. Its location is not ideal, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Both Pinghe and JinCai are Chinese private schools with international sections. In the months preceding the testing we thought we would have Aiden try to test into the Chinese tracks of these schools, but after ordering textbooks from Shanghai (you can do many things on the internet) we decided that was crazy and we were stressing Aiden out too much trying to prepare him in 3 languages, especially since he had just begun 2nd grade with a rather difficult and scary teacher here. We shifted to English preparation, which was more difficult than I anticipated. His math ability is above his grade level (he can do long division) but he does math in Korean. I hadn’t thought clearly about how much vocabulary he would have to know just to be able to solve math problems in English: product, sum, difference, greater than, less than, etc. Not to mention having to develop a grasp of non-metric measurements and American money (since they use American textbooks).

Although Aiden’s reading, speaking, and listening levels are all good his writing is not. His spelling is atrocious and he had never written anything close to an essay in English. We did a lot of preparation for that, on top of his school homework. For several months he was doing 2-3 hours of homework a night. It was not easy. (You see why I neglected my blog...)

Since the Korean school year starts in March but the Chinese school year, like the American one, goes September - June, we had to decide whether to put Aiden in 3rd grade (like his peers in the U.S.) or put him into 2nd grade. He will finish out the first half of 2nd grade here before we move. We decided pretty easily to put him into 2nd grade. I'm not in a hurry to advance him and especially with all the languages he's learning I'd rather he have some extra time to get familiar with the material.

Anyway, the tests went really well: he had 1.5 hour tests at SMIC and Pinghe and a long interview at JinCai. I have to say that I was very frustrated by the process because SMIC in particular was so unresponsive: they didn’t respond to emails, didn’t answer phone calls, and didn’t answer my questions, plus they were incredibly rigid about test dates. Since we had to fly from Korea to test I was quite unhappy about that. Micah Sittig, a teacher there and China-blogger, was very generous with help and advice about SMIC. Aiden passed the test there but was wait-listed because they don’t have room for him. While he was testing we looked at apartments in the area. The apartments were fine but we didn’t love the area, and there wasn’t any space in SMIC kindergarten for Max.

Next was Pinghe. I scheduled Aiden’s test for 9am on Friday morning, which was, in retrospect, a lucky thing. Pinghe had been quite responsive via email but told me several times they only had 1-2 spaces available so it was unlikely he would be admitted. Anyway, while Aiden tested we chatted up the Admissions Director who seems quite friendly, efficient, and well-organized, but doesn’t speak any English. My Chinese was put to the test. When she left the room at one point KC said, “Make sure you put on the application form that we both went to Stanford. This is Asia, those things matter.” I did add that information, but I also got to put that information into the conversation since the director mentioned that they had students attending Princeton and Stanford. Who knows if that’s what got him in, but he got in. I must have lived in Asia a long time to be pulling out my Stanford degree as leverage. But by 10:00 there was a line of people out the door waiting to talk to the director and get their kids in the school (the non-international section). In general we were impressed with Pinghe -- the school itself, with its lines of students and atmosphere felt like a Korean school. For someone coming from the States it probably would have felt very foreign but we liked it. We also liked that the international and regular students all take classes on the same campus. We felt that with a small international class Aiden would have a good chance to bond with his classmates but because they are housed in the same location he would also have more opportunity to speak Chinese while playing soccer or swimming (they have a swimming pool, another plus). Plus we liked the location. We looked at a lot of apartments in the area too, and found one we liked.
That afternoon we went to JinCai. The facility is nice and Ellen Huang, the principal, was the most helpful and personable during the whole process. Aiden really took a shine to her. I had been worried that he wouldn’t interview well because he tends to be shy, but he talked to her so much we had to tell him to stop talking so that we could ask her questions. JinCai’s location is the best -- in Lianyang area, which we love, but we didn’t like that the international and regular schools are located on separate campuses, and international program seems like it’s still finding its legs.

In short, we decided to go with Pinghe. Aiden got a great deal of praise and a few presents for his excellent performance during the whole process, which was not just stressful for him but for us as well. We had to have a few Mommy-Daddy conferences in which we rearranged his schedule and tried to find ways to balance out his responsibilities and make enough time for him to play and relax. After testing we have scaled back on a lot of the extra studying -- he’s doing almost no Chinese right now, and very little English. Right now he needs to focus on Korean; the other two he will pick up when we move. That probably sounds a little chaotic and crazy but it is more well thought out then I am capturing here. At least I hope so.

One interesting thing about China is that it seems like it is still primarily a cash society. At least, I had to pay Pinghe in person, in cash, which required another trip -- they don’t accept wire transfer. They were flexible with the dates, which was nice, but carrying a thick wad of RMB across the ocean was a little weird. We took the chance to look at apartments too. After the first day we were ready to sign on a place near Pinghe (5 minute walk) but we were thrown into a panic because we couldn’t find a place for Max. I had had trouble getting ahold of schools by phone and email and by the time we arrived in person most schools were closed for the summer and all the spots were filled. We tried to visit local schools but were informed that not all local schools can take international students -- only the ones given a special fee schedule for foreigners by the government. If we couldn’t find a place for Max we’d have to rethink the move. My dad had come back to help us on this trip, allowing us to use his old driver and his language skills, and that was invaluable. But by Thursday evening we (especially me, since I had dropped the ball on preschools) were feeling awful, wondering if we’d be able to move at all. It was a sleepless night.

Friday morning I had some gotten some responses from the ShanghaiMamas mailing list, giving me some great leads on preschools. I went to pay Pinghe in cash and my Dad again helped a lot with translations about visas, which is going to be a problem because of the recent visa issues with the government. They asked us to open a bank account through which to pay school fees, and again my dad was a big help.

I had heard from one school, a little farther than I had wanted to look, but they had one opening. So after going to Pinghe again to give them my new bank account information I went directly to the school with no appointment. The school, Okiki, has a surprisingly nice facility with indoor and outdoor playgrounds, and I like the bilingual structure of the classes. Like at FYKO, each class has two teachers, one English-speaking and one Chinese. The school day is a little longer than I would like (the kids take a nap there), Max would have to take a bus to school (which he does now, but I was hoping for a walkable distance), and it is not cheap. But I liked the teacher and the administrators and they were very accommodating so I took the spot.

To be continued...

Just Breathe

Also at: http://www.printculture.com/index.php?itemid=1991

I’m starting to really panic about moving. I wake up in the middle of the night, remembering the toughest moments of the adjustment to life in Seoul and blowing them up into imaginary future catastrophes.

Anyway, my husband has been studying a kind of breathing technique called “Seokmun Breathing Meditation” (석문호흡) for about eighteen months now. He started, not because of some deep interest in breathing or in the idea of storing and moving his qi, but because he noticed that after a heavy night of drinking the only person who could get up for a early round of golf (besides him) was a guy who does SeokMoon breathing. K is already a pretty strong, healthy person, but we both noticed a difference within six months or so: he seemed to have a healthy glow, his skin looks great, he sleeps really well, he’s able to handle stress better, and he feels healthier. Despite all that the party pooper in me resisted joining. But with less than two months left and the insomnia becoming increasingly debilitating I thought, What the hell.

I don’t have time (or the inclination at this moment) to write anything long, serious, or detailed about this school of breathing; what follows are just my notes and impressions from the first week.

There are fifteen stages to Seokmun Breathing Meditation. The first stage is called Wa-sik Su-ryeon (와식 수련) and involves learning how to breathe in a prone posture in order to create a Dan-jeon (단전), which, the book explains, is like a pitcher that holds qi. The Dan-jeon created in this stage is located about two finger widths below one’s belly button (but inside the body). After a series of warm-up exercises (stretching and kicking) we go through a series of eleven positions, called Haeng-gong (행공), for two minutes each. Some are easy; the first involves lying on the floor, arms at a 45-degree angle and palms up, legs no more than a shoulder width apart. Some are hard. The hardest one for me is number 8, pictured above. I can hold it for about a minute now and that’s taken a week or so. After Haeng-gong we lie in the first position for quite a long time and breathe. Many people fall asleep (though I have not yet). After than we do Hoe-geon-sul (회건술) which are sort of recovery exercises.

While doing each Haeng-gong position we’re supposed to focus on that spot below the belly button and imagine qi flowing like water towards that spot. We’re also supposed to focus on the breathing. The master says to relax the body and the consciousness; the body I can deal with but the consciousness part I find very difficult.

The first day the master evaluated my qi and put a small patch on the area where the Dan-jeon is supposed to be. He told me my qi is strong but very disorganized, which sounds about right. When I’m lying there trying to relax my thoughts are running a mile a minute, helter skelter, in all directions. I’m thinking about things I need to do, people I need to call or email. I’m calculating how much more time I need to hold the position. I’m timing the rest of my day, wondering if I should take the bus or a tax to my next destination. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to write in this post and the other posts I’ve been working on. I’m thinking about what to have for lunch. I’m wondering how long it will take for my skin to look better. I also catch myself wanting to outperform the others in the class and impress the instructor. Every few seconds I try to place my focus back on the Dan-jeon but then I start thinking about how weird it is to try to focus on a part of the body that I can’t feel. When I do focus on that spot, it feels like I’m sensing the body from the outside, not the inside. I have a mental picture of where it is but it doesn’t really correspond to the physical reality. Even my legs — a part of the body I’m more familiar with — are hard to feel when they are completely relaxed and not in pain. Without the sensory stimulation they become invisible to my consciousness.

I realized at one point that even though I’m not a particularly verbal person my thoughts are very verbal. I talk to myself a lot, automatically evaluating and analyzing things as if I’m going to write a blog post about them. I wonder if I was like that before blogging. It was too hard to replace the worded thoughts with a focus on some physical area which I cannot really perceive so I started repeating nonsense syllables (“om”) to shut out the mental chatter. That has helped.

So far all I can really say is this: I have been sleeping better. I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night but it is easier for me to push the panicky thoughts away. Perhaps somewhere down the line I’ll have more insight into the ways in which this practice affects my sense of the body, of consciousness, and of the relationships between mental and physical health, but for now being able to get a little more sleep is enough.

Goodbye, Seoul. And thank you.

I've decided to cross-post my printculture blogs, since some people don't click through. You can click here for the printculture version (the same for now, but sometimes I do after-post editing).

For a few years now we’ve had this bedtime ritual: we take turns saying five things we’re thankful for. As I sat down to write this I couldn’t remember why we began the practice; but looking back at my old blogs I see that it was a response to W’s increasing desire for the things (and brands) his friends had. I wanted to take some time each day to acknowledge and appreciate what we already had. His first list (made while in the bathroom brushing our teeth):

1. Mommy
2. Daddy
3. the toilet
4. the bathtub
5. his World Cup soccer ball

It is interesting to compare his lists from then and now. While I try to mix mine up every day he has developed a long litany that always includes God, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Earth, Star Wars, and his Nintendo Game Cube — got to cover all the bases, I suppose.

I wrote in my blog at the time about how hard it was to hold onto a feeling of thankfulness. Gratitude is often fleeting; the day seems to revolve not around appreciation but desire — what I want to do, to have, to eat, to feel. Even when we take time to name the things for which we are grateful it is hard to summon a deep emotional tribute to that which has become a normal, and thus largely invisible, part of life.

However, this ritual began at a moment in time in which the feeling of thankfulness was palpable and strong. We had been living in Seoul for about three years and I was just reaching the point of comfort. Around the year or two-year mark anxiety had been replaced with a feeling of relief whenever I could get through the day without serious misunderstanding or frustration, but by three years I had begun to really enjoy my life here. The glee that I felt being able to navigate certain procedures and social situations was accompanied by a feeling of pride in myself and a dawning comprehension of the way things worked. I had developed an instinct for Seoul, and in its early, fetal stages I wanted to hold onto and savor it, even show it off. (This explains why I began blogging at around the same time.) The bedtime ritual was as much for me as it was for W — a way of consciously inhabiting and extending a moment in time in which I could truly feel gratitude.

And now I’m getting ready to leave, and although I have barely begun to pack, feelings of thankfulness have emerged again, much sharper this time because of the accompanying sense of loss. From the mindset of planning, another move seemed like a good, logical idea, a way of opening more doors. But as the countdown has hit the one month mark I think not about what we will gain but about all that we will give up by leaving.

Although they have been the source of a great deal of hand-wringing and hair-pulling (as I’m sure I have been the source of the same for them), I’m thankful for my in-laws who have helped us enormously since we’ve been here. I’m thankful to have had a place to drop the kids on Sunday afternoon so that my husband and I could catch up on Battlestar Galactica, knowing they would be well-loved, well-fed, and possibly well-spoiled. It’s taken five years to learn how to avoid fighting with them but the bond that has developed between them and the kids is irreplaceable and could not have developed in several decades of living in different countries or cities. They have been a part of our daily life here, permanently woven into the children’s early memories.

I’m thankful for our apartment and neighborhood. Our apartment looks rather humble and small, but it has heated floors and lots of sunlight. I like being able to hear kids playing in the playground out front and walking to school past the back windows. I like the open halls in which I run into our neighbors. I appreciate the proximity to my in-laws’ place, the airport bus stop, the subway, restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, and banks. I like not living in a fortress and yet feeling safe — a part of the neighborhood rather than separate from it.

I’m thankful for my kids’ schools and teachers.. W counts his piano teacher as the adult he is the closest to after Mommy and Daddy. I will really miss M’s bilingual preschool (which W also attended), where the teachers spent a great deal of time holding M as he developed comfort with the place, allowing him to emerge as an loquacious, cake-loving charmer.

I’m thankful for the network of busy moms who have patiently explained to me that oil paper is tracing paper and sent me scanned copies of textbook pages when W has left his book at school.

I’m thankful for store workers that answer all my questions about what ingredients I need to buy for japchae and what size origami paper a 2nd grader needs to carry, who bow and smile to me when I encounter them on the sidewalk or the bus stop, and who ask me where I’ve been if they haven’t seen me in a while.

I’m thankful for my friends, American and Korean, who have put in the time and effort to build a friendship despite my continuing proclamations that we would leave “soon.”

I’m thankful for the city of Seoul (despite its often unpleasant smells), for its neighborhoods, safe atmosphere, and great public transportation. I’m thankful for an economic system that depends on volume, in which anything and everything can be delivered and goods ordered on the internet arrive within a day or two.

Despite being stared at I’m thankful that being an English-speaking foreigner mostly triggers envy and not disgust or anger.

I’m thankful for public baths.

I’m thankful for kimbab, bibimnaengmyeon, and galbitang. I’m thankful for neighborhood cafes, where I wrote most of my posts and spent a lot of money on coffee.

Goodbye Seoul. I’m glad I made a home here. I’m coming away with an expanded sense of what the good life might look like, and I won’t forget it. While I finalize details for our new apartment and schools, that sense of thankfulness becomes desire again as I try to find ways to fill the next stage of the journey with that which I appreciate in my life now.

Travel books

Couldn't finish my post in time so posted a piece on travel books written last year.

TWK 3, a quick note on customer service.

The third in the Traveling with Kids series.

And... a note on customer service here in Seoul.
Tuesday morning I dropped my phone, which isn’t an uncommon occurrence, but this time when I picked it up it was dead. It was a bad, hurried morning. I transfered the number to my old phone which has an unfortunate tendency to reboot over and over again, and considered my options. We’ll move in two months, no reason to buy a new phone. I could keep using the old one, but the rebooting is a pain and I would have to reenter all my phone numbers, which weren’t backed up.

Long story short, I took the phone to the Samsung customer service center, which turned out not to be very far from my apartment -- maybe a 10 minute taxi ride. They took my phone and maybe a half an hour later an engineer sadly informed me that I had destroyed two components, one of which they had in stock and one of which they would have to get from another service center. It wouldn’t be ready until late that day or the next morning. (It was about noon at that point.) I almost laughed -- I hadn’t expected to get it back so soon. Anyway, I picked up the phone the next morning, good as new.

Late last year I ordered an LG humidifier from a auction site. It arrived the next day, it worked for about 5 minutes and then quit. I thought, Shit, I don’t know how to return things bought via auction -- this had never happened before. KC called LG and a technician came out to my apartment about 40 minutes later. He tried to fix the humidifier but the board was broken, so he apologized, took the board, and told me he’d come back the next day with a new one. The next day he tried yet another one, but it also didn’t work. He apologized again and told me they would refund the money if I gave them a copy of the receipt and my bank account. Within two days the amount I had paid in the auction was refunded to my bank account.

After that I thought, “Well, I still need a humidifier and the LG one is the most popular, so I’ll order it again.” I ordered the same humidifier, again from an auction site, and this one worked for about 2 weeks before breaking. I called LG customer service again, and again a technician came about 40 minutes later. This time he took part of the humidifier and returned it the next day and it was worked fine since.

This is why people buy things from chaebols like LG and Samsung. Who can compete with that kind of service? You go to the Samsung customer service center and the people who work there are so polite and so proud of themselves for working for Samsung. The place is bursting with pride. It is a part of life here that is hard to imagine from living in the States.

I'll miss that customer service when we move to China.

TWK

Traveling with Kids 2 is up. Still jet-lagged.