First time back to Seoul since the move

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multicultural living forum on Shanghai Family

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS is the forum for you!

Welcome to the forum, and post away!

The age of criticism

First, a belated response to some comments.

David, thanks for the warm comments. I hope you are all well, and that we'll be able to see each other soon -- maybe in HK or Shunde? We miss you all. I love seeing the pictures of Susie. No matter where you end up, I think hearing Korean from a young age will help her down the line, even if she doesn't continue with the language. I suspect that part of the reason I've been able to pick up Korean and Chinese relatively quickly is that I was exposed to Cantonese when I was young.

Micah, thanks for your comment! I agree with what you said about memorization. One of the reasons I'm content with Pinghe right now is because they do, through subjects taught in English with American texts, include more creative expression than I was expecting. Aiden's doing a speech to run for mayor of the class today, he made a poster to save the sharks before that, and made a model of ancient Egypt before that... those were the kinds of activitis I did in public school in the U.S., and I think I had a very good education. These projects involve some relatively long-term planning and a variety of forms of expression: verbal, 2-dimensional art, 3-dimensional art. I'm not sure what the U.S. is like these days (and of course the U.S. educational system is very regional); but while I think the U.S. in general is good with creative problem solving and critical thinking there seems to be strong distaste for memorization. And sometimes I think memorization is good. You've got to memorize the times tables. You've got to memorize spelling. And when it comes to learning a language you've got to do some memorization. Even in a speech, you've got to be able to hold the structure in your head and talk around it. So my comment about memorization wasn't to embrace it wholeheartedly, but to recognize (as someone who also has had a distaste for it pedagogically) that a little memorization can be a good thing. But I should have also commented that in his curriculum overall memorization has been accompanied by other more creative and critical techniques.

This is a bit tangential but I really like the writing textbook they are using. I've done a lot of teaching of writing (to graduate students and for younger children) and I was really impressed but the book. But (as I'm finding now) this kind of work (creative writing, projects like those described above) requires a lot of participation from the parents.

Some kids are more self-sufficient (most girls seem to be able to do these things by themselves, if my quick survey of the other moms counts as evidence) but with Aiden I have to spend a lot of time helping him break his projects (and test preparation) into steps, making him work on those things daily, helping him through the process of revision. As any writer knows, most of writing is being able to step back and think through a piece of work in multiple ways, to be able to sense structure and flow, and then to revise. Aiden’s a “let’s finish this quickly and play” kind of kid. Helping him with projects -- helping him tame his ideas and make them presentable and polished -- requires a lot of patience (I’m failing in that area) and attention. Memorization, from the parent’s perspective, is easier. It doesn’t require much thinking on the parent’s part. Maybe my standards are high (I don’t think they are) but this kind of schooling (assuming the projects are done at home -- the kids in American schools have very little homework) requires a lot more of the parent than the other kind does. I’m very glad that I’m not working and can spend this time with him, because he really needs the help. Max is a different animal. He sits next to us at the table and works with a great deal of concentration on his workbooks and drawings. I’m guessing that he’ll be able to do his work more independently. I don’t know how much of that is related to birth-order (he likes to do what his brother does, even if it means sitting at the table and “studying” for several hours every day) and how much is personality. Max has always been more detail-oriented, better with small-motor control, more into drawing. I’m teaching him to read Korean now and he’s catching on surprisingly quickly.

On another tangent, my blog and my other writing has suffered from this lack of time. I’m in school all morning and I have to save energy and patience to help Aiden with his homework all evening. I have a few hours in the afternoon to split between building my social relationships, doing household things, and working on my own long-term writing project. It tires me out.

What I’ve been meaning to write about: the age of criticism

Until a certain age Mommy and Daddy are just Mommy and Daddy, not People -- but the main sources of comfort, security, and knowledge of rules and boundaries. Kids Max’s age can’t think of their parents as people, they just are. But at some point kids start to realize that their parents are not perfect, that they can be criticized like anyone else. And once that criticism starts, it never stops, does it?

Aiden’s reaching the age of criticism. He’s old enough to have accumulated a large set of evidence -- make that grievances -- about the way that we treat him. He’s been around the block and seen the large discrepancies in the way people parent in different families and different places. I have taken care to explain to him (many times, I tend to run at the mouth) why I make certain decisions that are different from his friends’ parents: why he’s not allowed to watch much TV, why I won’t buy him a Nintendo DS, why we have to move, etc. There are unintended side effects to everything. A few weeks ago we met the daughter of a friend and after a few minutes Aiden sidled up to me and whispered, “Mom, that kid is really spoiled.” He then spent the rest of the evening making whispered analysis of all the ways in which the mom encouraged the kid’s spoiled behavior. So he’s able to see the ways in which parenting choices mold the behavior of children, and I think that’s generally a good thing (as long as he keeps it to himself in the name of politeness) but it’s also encouraged him to increasingly turn his critical eye on my parenting choices. Some days I’m feeling a little like a Big Three Executive meeting Congress. But with a little more to show, I hope.

The other day he was being extra fidgety with his Chinese tutor (who has learned that days when Aiden doesn’t have gym class are days in which he cannot sit still) and she jokingly said, “If you don’t listen to me maybe I should start hitting you.” He said, very seriously, “You can’t do that!” She said, “Your mom doesn’t hit you?” He said, “No, of course not! If she did I could leave and go to another family.”

Where did he get that idea? But this idea seems to have taken over his thinking. I guess I have, in retrospect, presented parenting, living, behavior, etc. as a series of choices, emphasizing the ways in which we can pick and choose how we want to be, and it makes sense I suppose to extend that to family. The other day he was complaining that an old reward system that had existed in Korea was no longer (I had taken advantage of the move and let it expire). I explained that since he was older he no longer needed to be rewarded for that particular behavior; he was mad and said, “I don’t want to be a part of the family anymore. I want to go to a different family!” I laughed at him. Not a nice laugh, I was pissed. “You want to leave your family over a piece of CANDY???” Because I forget that although he can be supremely rational about some things, he’s just an 8-year old, unable to look past the blow of a loss of a piece of candy and remember all the ways in which his family is really good.

In other kid news...
Both kids are speaking so well it is a little scary. Aiden now has character dictation once a week and they’ve progressed to some tough characters. His stroke order is more correct than mine, and he can now understand grammatical patterns without ever learning them as such. (It’s so different with the adult learner. Though I do remember finding myself using grammatical patterns I never learned in Korean; one day they just started emerging from my mouth. Surprised me as much as anybody else.) Max can now have short conversations in Chinese, and he speaks whole sentences easily.

I’m so jealous.

Aiden came home one day to tell me a story about an incident in gym class that included the following: “...and he hit me with the 쇠 hula hoop and then the 후반장 said, “下课了？“ And the teacher said, “没有。” It made me laugh. We tend to mix a lot of Korean and English at home, but that was the first time he threw some Chinese into the mix. It used to be Korean with a little English, then it was something like, “Mommy will you 고쳐this 장난감for me? 빨리!" (Max) And now it’s more like, “Mommy can we have some 계란for dinner?” Just a word here and there. Though they still tend to talk to each other in Korean. We’ll go back to Korea for a few weeks in January and I think their Korean ratio will rise at that time. I’m just playing with percentages now.

***

I’m not sure how long I can keep the Santa Claus charade up. I took them to see Santa at a fair at Concordia school last month and Aiden said with suspicion, “Is this the real Santa?” One of the volunteers said, “Is there any other kind?” Then just before we sat on Santa’s lap he asked me, “Can I speak to Santa in Korean?” I was mentally kicking myself for having told him last year that Santa can speak all languages in the world. The circumstances necessitating that declaration are fuzzy but I think it was probably because he wrote his letter in English and Korean last year. This year it was all in English. Anyway, I told him something lame like, “This is an English-speaking fair and for the sake of politeness maybe you should stick to English.” And then a week or so later we went to see the lighting ceremony at the Hongqiao Marriot where there was another Santa. Aiden said, “Mommy, this is a different Santa!” I think the jig is almost up.

From last year, here’s my post on “Lies I tell my kids.” It still makes me laugh.

Four Months in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three months in

We’ve just passed the three-month mark in Shanghai. I haven’t settled into much of a writing routine yet but I’m trying to continue to jot down notes on our language acquisition.

Max still hasn’t started to do much speaking. He had almost no exposure to Chinese in Korea so I know his listening time will be longer. He has surprised me by offering translations lately -- he’ll tell me “Mommy ‘gei wo’ means ‘give me.’ Gei wo blah blah” where blah blah is some Chinese-sounding thing he makes up and explains to me as “the ghost that killed the bad guy and has to hide under the table” or something like that. As far as I know translation is a different skill than being able to speak so I’m surprised to see him so actively translating. Perhaps this offers some insight into the way he thinks. I think of him as a very verbal kid, a kid who easily repeats what he hears, but looking back I guess he’s only repeating that which he thoroughly understands. That explains his recent Korean explosion, I suppose -- he’s finally verbalizing that which he had heard before but hadn’t understood well enough to say.
Max is also very conscious of who speaks what languages. He seems to categorize the kids in his class by what language they speak well and seems a little suspicious of being good friends with the kids who only speak Chinese -- at least, that’s how he sounds when to talks to me about them. But his teachers tell me he gets along well with everyone and he’s pretty chummy with a little Japanese-Chinese girl who doesn’t speak English. It’s hard to figure out how much weight to give his self-reporting.

Recently Max likes to say, "aiyah!" He says it very seriously and tells me that that is what his piano teacher says when she gets mad. Ha.

I forgot to write about this funny incident in my last post: Max takes piano lessons in school and told me, one day, that his teacher speaks a lot of Korean. I was surprised and asked him, “What Korean words does she say?” He said, “Do rae me fa so la ti do!”

One of Max’s best friends is a little girl named Julia who is black. Max has lived his whole life in Asia and hasn’t seen that many black people, so when we’d go out every time we’d see a black woman he’d tell me that she must be Julia’s mom, and any black kids must certainly be Julia’s siblings. Ha. Anyway, Julia’s mom and I had been exchanging text messages trying to get the kids together to play. (aside: One bad part about being a second child is that your social life always takes a back seat to your older sibling’s. I have been trying to make an effort to find Max a close circle of friends and give him more play dates.) We finally met on a school field trip and then they came over to our place to play afterwards. Julia’s mom is from South America and speaks Spanish, French, English, Chinese, and a little Portuguese. Her Chinese is very good and she’s doing a masters degree at a local university. It was very interesting to talk to her; she’s lived in Asia for a long time and her older son in particular has had a more difficult time finding friends because they stand out so much. Shanghai’s foreigner population feels much higher and more integrated than Seoul’s but most foreigners are white, Asian, or Indian. Her son is local school too (not the same one as Aiden) and it sounds like its been a rocky experience. Julia speaks very good English and Chinese and is quite the social butterfly in kindergarten, but her brother had some trouble with language confusion too. Julia’s mom used to have a good Korean friend (back in HK?) and was talking to me about how she reached out to some of the Korean moms here because she missed her Korean friend, but how hard it is to break into that social circle. I can totally understand that -- it took me a long time in Korea to really break in, even though I spoke Korean well. But I haven’t had any trouble here, I guess it is like riding a bike. I kind of know when to speak, when not too, what to say, how to time my approaches. Talking to her I thought that if we had a third kid I’m not sure how I’d introduce the languages -- three at a time? Or two first?

Aiden has just really started to speak: I see it and he is also reporting to me that he can now participate a little in Chinese during “tai quan dao”-- no longer “taekwondo.” He now will answer his tutor in Chinese. He has covered 30 chapters of their current textbook in class and can recite almost all of them by heart -- he’s got a good memory. I was a little uncertain about the value of so much memorization (especially since the text includes some pretty difficult and bizarre passages) but he does pull out relevant sentences and use them in real life.

We just returned from a weekend trip to Shunde in Guangdong, where my paternal grandmother is from. They speak Guangdonghua there which is totally different from mandarin. We were last there three years ago and Aiden played with a bunch of my cousin’s kids; at that time, they didn’t have any languages in common and communicated with body language and “argh, pew pew, zzzt,” etc -- fighting words, basically. This time they spoke putonghua (Mandarin) to each other -- we were all surprised and delighted to see how well Aiden could get along with putonghua, English, and body language. Aiden doesn’t know how to tease in Chinese but his textbook has a passage about a “mommy chicken” so “mommy chicken” became his new teasing insult, complete with chicken-like head bob.

Aiden’s progress is truly amazing, and his pronunciation is incredibly clear. I think I have pretty good pronunciation, but he puts me to shame. He has also really gotten the hang of pinyin and can spell correctly based on sound. He doesn’t always get the tones right though.

I heard guangdonghua when I was growing up because my parents spoke it to each other (mostly when they were trying to talk about me and my brothers without us understanding) and to their friends, and I always thought it was normal, and putonghua (Mandarin) was a sissy, wussy sounding dialect. Well, after not really hearing guangdonghua for many years I went to Hong Kong a few weeks ago and was shocked to find that guangdonghua is really, REALLY weird sounding. Actually, it sounds awful. It has a lot of sharp, guttural sounds. At first I was so surprised I couldn’t pick out any words. After a few days I started remembering some words. Then this weekend we were in Shunde with my relatives, all of whom were speaking guangdonghua (but speaking putonghua or English to me and KC) and I could pick out more words. Now that I’m learning putonghua I can start to translate word for word (when there is a word for word translation) and appreciate how different the dialects are. “Mei wenti” (putonghua) is “Mo wentai” (guangdonghua), but “xihuan” (putonghua) is “jongyi” (guangdonghua, my romanization). Totally different. Even though I’m a slacker student, putonghua is feeling more natural to me these days, and sometimes if I’ve been speaking Chinese I have trouble switching to Korean.

KC’s made a lot of progress. His ear has improved a lot so he can guess the general meaning of a lot of conversation despite having the least time to study (he’s still the worst one in the family). His knowledge of characters has helped a lot and also I think his general very utilitarian attitude -- he doesn’t try to sound perfect, he just tries to communicate. Shanghai people are pretty used to trying to figure out what others are saying despite differences in accent and in normal conversations I’ve found listeners to be pretty forgiving. I can make all sorts of mistakes (that will cause me to blush and hit myself on the head later) and they will still understand. Perfectionist tendencies must be pushed to the side during the beginning stages of language learning.

Starting now I'm making more of an effort to speak Korean at home. All of us have naturally begun speaking more English (and better English) as time has passed. I think we have to make a conscious effort to make Korean our home language before we get out of the habit of speaking it altogether. If we don't make a habit of speaking it we'll all forget it (especially the kids and I) pretty quickly.

Languages aside, I’m finding that three months in we’re still really adjusting. I know that the process takes a long time but I have to remind myself that even though we have a routine and things have gone smoothly that the psychological toll of moving to a new place (and a new country) is a long-term one. We’re all a little rough around the edges, we all have trouble holding our tempers, we all find ourselves less nice than usual. I’m usually the temperamental one and KC is usually pretty even-keeled, but we’ve both been equally affected and for myself, at least, I need more time to spend alone with my own thoughts so that I can be on better behavior with others. This is the tricky thing about moving -- it’s not a wound you can see or a hurt you can sense, but something that just makes you feel a little less like working and a kind of rawness that makes you get angry before you can think about why. I think that much of the dissatisfaction expats have with their new country of residence has to do with those unrecognized psychological discomforts than with something that is really there -- of course, there are difficult parts, but often the anger at those difficulties seems irrational or overblown. Another American friend of mine who also recently moved to Shanghai after living in Seoul for a long time told me she worries she is depressed. She doesn’t really want to go out, she’s happy to be alone, she just hasn’t been herself. I told her I think it’s just the move and to give it some time. I think it must be even harder when you’re older (she’s probably 20 years older than me) and have lived in the previous place longer.

Language notes

I am not exactly sure who reads this blog (beyond the friends and family who are compelled to read) but I suspect that a few stick around because they’re curious or interested in our little language experiments. What follows are my notes from the first two months of living here... not as organized as I would like, but I want to write as much as I can down.

As most readers know, my kids are 8 and 4 and bilingual (Korean and English). They both attended bilingual preschool/kindergarten and Aiden attended Korean elementary school for 1.5 years. The language they favor shifts over time; we’ve intentionally traveled a lot, spending at least a month or two in the U.S. each year. After one of those trips they will always speak a greater percentage of English to each other and in the house. As time goes on they’ll speak less, but it never disappears. We also mix languages a lot at home but so far neither of them have had trouble with language differentiation. They speak Korean to Korean speakers and English to English speakers. (Once one of them -- I think it was Aiden -- informed my in-laws that they were not allowed to travel to the U.S. because they didn’t speak English.) I have noticed that whenever we travel their languages get better, and always both languages at the same time, which is really extraordinary. Since been here Max’s Korean has skyrocketed; he is using expressions that I don’t know and up until recently has been speaking Korean almost exclusively at home.

I know that children listen a lot before they start speaking a new language (thanks to my friend Elaine who has schooled me with her extensive knowledge on language acquisition in children). Aiden took about a year of Chinese in Seoul, but not intensively. Only once or twice a week, and some Rosetta Stone at home (the frequency varied depending on how much other stuff he had going on.) He couldn’t speak much but I think he got the basics of pronunciation, pinyin, and his ability to listen was primed by these lessons. When we arrived here he still had a month before school started so I enrolled him in a 3-week Chinese class (two hours a day) at a local (Korean) hakwon. I put him in the beginner level so it was pretty easy for him. I didn’t push him much to speak, especially because I know he’s shy and I think he has to do things at his own pace. When you’re learning a language in a different country you have to force yourself to practice speaking, but when you live in the place where you need the language all the time, the sense of urgency comes with the air you breathe and the food you eat. Aiden’s been on the receiving end of my opinions about the importance of languages and he’s had experience translating for English-speakers in Korea, so he knows very well how important language study is. But this is the first time he’s in a place where he has to do the learning.

After a few weeks, I noticed that every now and then he’d pop out with a full sentence. One morning when he was having trouble waking me up he said, “我饿了。“ [I’m hungry.”] Then, when KC’s teacher came over one day, he said, “爸爸是学生。” [“Daddy is a student.”] When his friend Martin came to visit from Korea we took the kids to Yu Yuan, and afterwards they had fun looking at all the different vendors. When Martin couldn’t understand what they were saying he would call Aiden, who apparently could understand what the venders were saying.

Once Aiden started school the sense of urgency became more pronounced. Aiden is going to a Chinese bilingual private school with an international section; in practice that means that the kids in his class are from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or born in the U.S. to Chinese parents. The week before school started I took him to the campus for his health check and then again for orientation. Even though the school has an international section it is not really geared towards international people who don’t speak Chinese; there were no instructions in English and I felt relieved to be able to navigate using observation, common sense, my elementary Chinese skills, my Korean, and my charm. (OK, maybe not the last one. Though it does come in handy.) There were problems getting him on the bus roster, and problems getting the correct size uniform for him. During the first week of school, KC wanted to take him to meet the bus in the morning (KC had always been the one to take Aiden to school in the morning and relishes that time together) but Aiden said, “I think Mommy should take me, just in case there are problems with the bus Mommy can use her Chinese to fix them.” Watching me deal with all the problems was, in retrospect, really good for him because he could see how important the language skills were and he could see that even though I wasn’t fluent I could still figure out how to get things done. (I almost lost my cool during the bus debacle but luckily when some Korean moms stepped in to help I was able to calm myself down. Good thing. The kids are incredibly observant; I was able to provide a much better example by remaining calm). Aiden often praised my Chinese to others, which made me feel pretty proud.

I should also mention that Aiden is a big fan of the 마법천자문series (he’s read and re-read all 16 books that have come out) and because of that he’s able to recognize a good number of Chinese characters. He’s also a very visual learner.

In Aiden’s school some subjects (in his grade, Math) are taught in Chinese and others (social studies, science) are taught in English. In addition they have both Chinese and English (grammar, reading, etc.) and P.E./swimming/art/music are (I think) taught in both languages. They have quite a lot of Chinese, and most kids in the class can speak fluently. He is in second grade, but because his Chinese isn’t good he and two others go down to first grade for Chinese. There are some other kids in the class who go down to first grade for English.

The Chinese is intense. I had heard that in China first graders start with pinyin and not characters but the book Aiden’s school uses begins with characters and knowledge of pinyin is assumed (good thing he already learned it). They learn at a furious pace; I’d say about 6 characters a day (recognition, not writing). They have computer software they use to learn to recognize characters and learn to type the pinyin. The text is difficult -- I have trouble following it. That’s because it organizes the characters by pronunciation and not frequency of use or simplicity. Thus the vocabulary he is learning is quite difficult and not all that useful for every day conversation.

Every week the school sends home a progress report. After the second week the teachers reported that Aiden was having trouble concentrating in class and following the lessons in Chinese. KC’s tutor offered to teach him for 30-60 minutes every day, which we’ve done since then, and his progress has been dramatic. He can read an incredible number of characters and his comprehension has increased a great deal. Because the text is aimed at native speakers he is not progressing the way he would if he were in a class geared towards CSL (Chinese for Speakers of another Language) students but he’s keeping up now and I hope that his comprehension and speaking will follow. He also takes an extra CSL class once a week. (The school provides CSL and ESL classes for the many children who are in similar situations.) It’s only been two months, so we’ll see. The other day we were in a taxi together and he started to read the text on the back of the driver’s seat (explaining the cab company’s responsibilities, etc.); he also reads the ads in the elevator.

On the school bus, the teacher tells me that Aiden understands her. In our first month here, before Aiden started school, we also sent him to 3 weeks of Chinese classes at a local hakwon, 2 hours a day.

In retrospect the order and the timing seems right. Aiden’s time in the Korean school system, with its attention to etiquette/protocol and its more stricter structure of education, has primed him to be more comfortable in a Chinese school where they have a patriotic salute to the flag on the field every Monday morning and the class leader (반장) orders the class to greet the teacher and also does minor disciplining. I’m meeting a lot of Korean parents here whose kids started elementary school in Shanghai, attending American international schools. They worry that when the kids return to Korea they will be unable to adjust to Korean schools. I, on the other hand, have no doubt that after dealing with these kinds of schools, Aiden will do just fine in American school. (If he knew how much fun the American schools were he would refuse to go to his school.) He had enough exposure to Chinese and to Chinese characters before we came so he’s able to pick up the language quickly now. And because he’s such a strong visual learner with reading habits in two other languages already established it isn’t so confusing. He used to exclusively read Korean books for pleasure, but because he’s getting more English at school he now goes back and forth between Korean and English books. A lot of the same Korean moms are concerned that although their kids speak Korean at home they lack basic reading and writing skills. Those kids attend Korean school here on Saturdays. We thought about sending Aiden too, but it seemed too much. Since he got a good beginning with Korean while we were in Korea I think that as long as he keeps reading and speaking he’ll be fine.

A couple weeks ago he told me that my worry was right. “What worry?” I asked. “I think if I stay here for a long time I might forget Korean,” he said. Its easy to forget how much he hears and remembers the things I say. I told him that we would no longer do English and Chinese homework at home beyond what he was given from school (since I used to assign him additional homework) since he was studying those subjects at school. I told him that instead I wanted him to just keep on reading as many Korean books as possible and send email to his grandfather and friends in Korea.

Another note: we had the choice of moving him up to 3rd grade (he’s the right age for 3rd grade) but since he had only completed half of 2nd grade in Korea we decided to hold him back and have him start 2nd grade over again. I’m glad we did that. It makes things easier for him linguistically and skill-wise. I knew math would be taught in Chinese but felt pretty confident of Aiden’s ability to perform well since he was good at math and solving problems above grade level in Korea. They were just starting division in the 2nd semester of 2nd grade in Korea. But here they did division on the first day of 2nd grade, no review or anything. I’m not sure what they do for 3rd grade math. I wonder how this compares to the U.S.; it seems awfully fast to me.

Aiden’s school day is very long now; he comes home at 4:45 (compared to 12:40 in Korea). As soon as he comes home he does about an hour of Chinese with his tutor, then has dinner, then does about an hour of other homework. If there’s time he plays with Max and I let them watch Korean cartoons on skylife (another method of keeping up the Korean -- we usually don’t let them watch TV). It’s a long day, and when he’s really tired at night he talks about how hard it is and how little time he has to play. But in general he’s happy to go to school and he’s happy when he comes back. The school gives them a lot of breaks during the day, including 90 min or so for lunch, which means they have a lot of time to socialize. It’s a large school, and it is also a boarding school, so he comes home full of adventures exploring all the different parts of the school, trying to sneak (unsuccessfully) into the girls’ dorm, etc. And they also (much like Harry Potter) have teams that run across the grades to build interaction between older and younger kids. Aiden’s on the tiger team, and they compete periodically in academic and sports contests against the other teams. Social interaction is important to me for a lot of reasons, including: he’s a social kid and needs it, kids develop a lot of language skills socially, and I hope his social relationships will extend his relationship to Shanghai beyond our stay here.


Now for Max. Max started preschool in mid-August. His school is also bilingual; they spend half the day speaking Chinese and half the day speaking English, with both an English and Chinese teacher on hand all the time. The kids come from different backgrounds, some speak Chinese well but not English, some speak English well but not Chinese, and a few speak a third language at home (like Japanese). I haven’t expected him to be talking much yet, just listening, but he loves to sing and has been singing the “wo he ni” Olympic song from the first or second day of school -- not correctly, but he gets closer and closer all the time. And he also will suddenly come out with a sentence or phrase. We were eating dimsum with some friends and he suddenly said, “Kuai dian, kuai dian! That means ‘eat faster,’ mommy!” (He is a very slow eater, he probably hears that phrase a lot at mealtime.) He is also able to repeat, verbatim, sentences from Aiden’s Chinese textbook, because he hangs around and plays while Aiden studies with his tutor.

Unlike Aiden Max is an extremely auditory learner. He’s able to repeat what he hears very quickly and easily. (His teacher told me that from the first day he was telling the other students how he had lived in Korea for 5 years before moving to Shanghai. She said, “But you’re only 4 years old, how does that work?” He’s heard me explain to people that we lived in Seoul for 5 years before moving to Shanghai and is repeating what I said.) He loves to talk and sing and play with language. He likes to instruct me by making up Chinese words and making me repeat them and commanding me to memorize them by tomorrow. As I mentioned before, his Korean his become incredibly good in the last two months. I think everything he heard over the last 4 years is starting to trickle out of his mouth as he is finally able to put it into a coherent linguistic picture. He hasn’t started to speak much Chinese, at least not in front of me, but his burst of Korean is a sign that all the languages are improving, I think. He takes a nap at school and his teacher reports that when he wakes up he has long conversations with the little boy who sleeps next to him, Matthew. Matthew doesn’t speak English and Max doesn’t really speak Chinese, so they talk and gesture to each other and figure something out. At lunch time a non-English-speaking ayi helps feed them and clean them up; Max is a notoriously slow and picky eater and his teacher tells me that he has learned how to engage in negotiations with the ayi using “zui hou” (the last, as in “the last bite.”). Max is very conscious of who speaks Chinese and who speaks English; he’s able to categorize the kids in his class for me, and seems more skittish about interacting with the ones who only speak Chinese. He’s had less exposure to the language but he’s such a good verbal mimic that I think once his brain has absorbed enough of the language he’ll start to speak it freely. Will have to wait and see.

The danger with Max is with Korean. Unlike Aiden he can’t read; I’ve started to teach him hangeul at home but because he is not as visual it is slow going. He has just recently become more interested in learning letters, such a contrast from Aiden, who knew the alphabet at 18 months. Different kids, different learning styles. I am trying to make teaching Max hangeul a priority for our home work, because I want to make sure his Korean will survive. He spends hours examining the same books as his brother, wanting to imitate him in every way, and I should take advantage of that. Plus he notices that Aiden gets a lot of attention when he’s doing homework and even though Max is content to play by himself while I’m helping Aiden, he also (I found out recently) will apply himself to doing hangeul worksheets. We all sit at the table together, Aiden doing his homework, me helping him or studying Chinese, and Max tracing 가거고구그기, his face serious and focused. It helps that he (unlike Aiden) loves to draw and derives a great deal of pleasure from choosing a pencil or crayon to pen his masterpiece.

As for me, what can I say? I’ve taken a few weeks of classes now and they have helped a lot. Not because I’m a good student, but because listening to a language for 3 hours is very very good for developing that language. I don’t pay much attention to grammar and I’m lazy about reviewing, and I think that the reason is that to some extent I now trust my unconscious mind to work on my behalf even when I’m not telling it to. With Korean I noticed that at some point I began using patterns that I never fully understood in class or that I had never learned at all. At some point I developed an intuitive feel for where certain words belonged. Some people in my class are very insistent on getting an exact translation for each word, but I don’t try to translate that much, I prefer to listen to the teacher explain a word in Chinese and use it in a few example sentences. I get a better sense of how the word is used that way; sometimes translating imposes false categories or connotations on a word. And when there’s uncertainty it doesn’t bother me. I can’t remember if it used to bother me or not, but now if I don’t fully understand I just put it aside and move on. I trust that I will learn it from context eventually.

I spent the first (many) years learning Korean from books and in the classroom so going out into the field provoked a lot of anxiety -- I stressed about saying things wrong, about not understanding, about making stupid mistakes, about my brain freezing. But after Max was born I didn’t studying Korean from books or dictionaries, I just picked it up as I lived and listened, and I learned to work around words that I didn’t know. I think that’s the main reason I feel more comfortable being lazy this time around. I’ve lived here for two months and been able to get a lot of stuff done with what I knew and a good deal of help from people I was able to lean on. I try to speak as much Chinese as I can and don’t worry much about making mistakes. People understand anyway. When I don’t understand I can generally make a good guess from context. In two months (not really a long time!) my listening ability has improved a great deal. I took my mother-in-law for a foot massage last week and a TV program was playing; I was able to understand a great deal of the program (a sort of reality show about trying to reform a delinquent young man who was living off his mom).

I’ve noticed a shift in expressions; my teachers in Seoul were mostly from the North, and the Shanghai southerns speak a little differently even when they talk in Putonghua. They don’t use append er much; they say “yi dian” instead of “yi dianr” and “you bian” instead of “you bianr,” which has required some shift in my pronunciation habits. (I said “yi dianr” to Max and he said, “No, Mommy! It’s ‘yi dian’!”) People here don’t use “xing bu xing,” they say “ke yi ma?” Shanghai people also tend to pronounce “sh” as “s” and “zh” as “z,” so “Ni shou shenme?” is pronounced “Ni suo senme?” “sishi” is “sisi” and “wo zhidao” is “wozidao.” I’m appalled that I now hear this in my head even though for the most part I pronounce the sh and zh. If I can ever get to the point where I speak putonghua with some level of fluency it would be useful to learn Shanghai-hua, but right now it is completely incomprehensible.

KC’s also improved a lot, though he says, “When you’re starting from zero any improvement looks good.” His pronunciation has gotten a lot better and so has his listening comprehension. He studies a lot, especially on weekends, and it gives Aiden a great deal of pleasure to tell his dad how easy KC’s textbook is. Aiden really enjoys showing KC his own textbook and asking him to read it, which KC cannot (he can read it in Korean though). I think it’s good for the kids to see how seriously we both take learning the language and how much effort we both put into it. But it’s also good for Aiden to see how much harder it is for us because we’re older. Study languages when you’re young, folks!
A non-language note... Aiden gets more and more interesting to talk to the older he gets. Shortly after we moved I was talking about how even though moving is really different, I’m really glad to be able to experience different places and people and things, and how I didn’t want to live a boring life. He said, “I don’t want to live a boring life either, Mommy.” Perhaps that was peer pressure, but I think he meant it.

I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m tired in the evenings (all that conscious and subconscious language processing takes energy), but so far things have gone really well and I intend to keep observing and recording as much of the process of learning as I can. But sorry for the long pauses between posts... I was going to write more about how the kids have dealt with moving, but I think this post is long enough! For another time, perhaps.

Over at printculture, I put up a “Keeping up with the Kims.”

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?”

-------



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.