I’ve been holding onto this post for a while, because it is not exactly the way I want to say it... but there are things I want to say... but I can’t work on it anymore. Got to work on some other things. So here it is.
It started with the Thomas trains. Somehow, even at the tender age of 2, those were much cooler than the Brio ones. After that, brief flirtations with Yu-Gi-Oh, bug fighters, and Potris (this one was interesting because he came home from school asking for some mispronunciation of the toy’s name, and we didn’t know what it was, and nobody at the toy and shoes stores knew what he was talking about either... finally I had to ask his teacher. It’s hard to be the cool kid when you don’t have any older siblings and you’re not allowed to watch TV...). Now of course, Star Wars. (aside... just have to pipe in here that Aiden, like his father, tends towards the obsessive...sometimes I wonder if other than his eyes if my genes had anything to contribute to that kid)
The character obsessions didn’t disturb me much. I just tried to make sure he had a variety of stuff that wasn’t branded (though it is hard to find things that AREN’T branded these days) and for some things, like his Thomas underwear, which really helped him potty train, I didn’t mind the character branding at all. But the other day we were playing Uno and he stopped me short by asking for a pair of Nike shoes.
Aiden’s always been picky about his shoes (see my post on Walking in Seoul), but Nike? We’ve branched into the abstract branding now -- the idea that some brand, some symbol, is innately cooler than the other. That somehow because most of his soccer team is wearing Nike soccer shoes (which cost about 50 bucks!) he needs them to fit in.
Peer Pressure has taken residence. He is renting ad space on his fort in the corner of the playroom.
I love to lay down with Aiden until he falls asleep at night. I hold his hand, or cuddle him, and the kid who answers “I don’t know” to all my probing questions about school and so forth during the day suddenly begins to talk about all sorts of strawberry fields and whatnot. His legs are resting, finally, but his brain is running helter skelter, and his words follow. The other day, he told me sleepily, “Mommy, I called you ‘Jennifer’ today at school [when I’m teaching the kids call me ‘Teacher Jennifer’] not because I don’t love you but because I thought they might make fun of me.... but now it’s just you and me and Max and I love you, Mommy.”
Anyway, I am a mommy who believes in the power of habit. So rather than lecturing him about peer pressure, or making his own decisions, or the importance of saving, or the value of money, or evil corporate empires, I instituted a new bedtime ritual. I told him, “Aiden, sometimes it is easy to focus on the things we don’t have, and forget all the wonderful things we have. So from now on, every night let’s talk about five things we’re thankful for.”
This first discussion was held in the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth, so his five things were:
1. Mommy
2. Daddy
3. the toilet
4. the bathtub
5. his World Cup soccer ball
After we’d been doing this for a few days, Max started to chime in, repeating whatever Aiden said. “I dakpul Mommy, I dakpul Daddy, I dakpul Episode” (that’s the Star Wars lego computer game... ).
Being thankful is often a fleeting thing, a feeling that occurs at odd times during the day, usually in response to some close call or perceived threat: “thank goodness he didn’t fall off that chair! Thank goodness I remembered to pay that bill! Thank goodness I found the Obi-Wan and Yoda mini-figs!” But it is rare to have a pure moment of thankfulness for the people in your life or the shape your life has taken. I think that most of us, not so different from children, are caught up in our own desires: I like those shoes she’s wearing. I would like to live in a bigger house with a white picket fence and Corian sinks. I want that job. I would like a different nose. I would like to make more money. I wish I could speak 5 languages. I want that person to envy me. We’re not so different from kids, thinking about the next step, the next line on our resume, the next purchase, the time in the hazy future when people who were popular in high school will look upon us with the awe and respect we deserve.
Although it adds more time to our bedtime ritual (by this time of night mommy is usually quite cranky) (you may think, hey, it adds, what, 5 minutes? But actually it goes on quite a bit longer. NOTHING Aiden does takes 5 minutes), carving out this space, separate from the daily ups and downs of ego and social acceptance, to say thanks has been really been good for us -- not just Aiden, but for me too. Just taking a moment to acknowledge all the good things in my life helps me, a little, during the day, to avoid getting caught up in the petty details and desires. It has been a nightly equivalent of leaving the U.S. to live in another country, a stepping out of the mainstream track that allows me to look back upon my life and reflect.
We’ve been living in Korea for three years now. I think no matter where you move, it takes about 2 years to settle in. And three years to become thankful for the way in which this new place has reshaped your life.
There are so many things I miss about the U.S.: our friends and families, really good reuben sandwiches, big playgrounds that aren’t crowded, Halloween and the Fourth of July. But looking at my boys and our life here, I am so thankful for the decision that brought us here, and changed our lives.
It all started over a cup of coffee at our local Ann Arbor Starbucks. I had been there to work on a paper -- fueled to boldness by caffeine, grand theories and sweeping, compelling narratives were pouring from my fingertips. Taking advantage of Aiden’s temporary absence at preschool, KC and I were trying to fit our lives into those few precious moments without a child around. KC stopped by to talk and share a latte, so we could have some adult conversation. As always, we began talking about Aiden, and the child we hoped to have in the next year or so, and the kind of lives we wanted them to have. We had always talked about having our children live part of their lives in Asia, and how important it was to us that they spoked several languages, knew their grandparents, and knew their parents’ cultures from personal experience. And suddenly we both realized -- the future is now. We have the opportunity now, we have the time, and our parents aren’t getting any younger. The kids will be the right age to pick up a new language. What’s stopping us?
It was like the moment after he proposed. What had been theoretical, something for the future, suddenly appeared right in front of our noses, demanding details and decisions. When? Soon. How long would we be this free? Me in school, about to do a dissertation, him with his own company, able to make his own decisions. His parents aging but healthy in Seoul. Our kids -- one in preschool, one non-existent. .We jumped off the cliff and decided to leave in June, 6 months later.
It was so hard to leave Ann Arbor; it was such a difficult time in my life. We had such good friends there, Aiden went to a wonderful school, we loved our house and neighborhood, and KC got to play a lot of cheap golf. We had a wonderful, relaxed lifestyle. I was doing my PhD, he was working on his company. We were on track to get all the things we wanted: professional success, a comfortable life. As one of our friends asked, “Why go there and throw all that away? Why take that risk, for less money and less security?”
Michigan was full of open spaces, wide skies, long expanses of green grass. But we wanted to open something in our and our kids’ lives. To provide them with more languages, more cultural familiarity, so that they would have more freedom, more choices available to them in their lives. Our parents opened doors for us by raising us totally or partially in the States; we wanted to open doors for our kids by returning to Asia.
But those first months were suffocating. I had never lived in the city, was exhausted and irritated by the small spaces, the constant crowds always bumping and rubbing against me, our claustrophobic apartment, the oppressive heat. The constant noise, the signs everywhere, the pressure of people’s gazes studying me, the effort to speak and listen to Korean all day long exhausted me. Nothing was straightforward and I found myself going back and forth to the Immigration Office (way out in another part of the city, requiring 2 subway rides and a labyrinthine 20 minute walk in the heat) to the straighten out visa problems. I had to figure out how to the work the hospital system to make sure my body was healing from surgery and to take care of all the viruses Aiden kept getting (guess the viruses in Seoul are different that those in the U.S... and 14 million people are spreading them around... his little body was a hot target). Banking required special stamps and books and straightening out our family registry, since everything here references your family tree.
Although we moved to open up opportunities, those first few months were claustrophobic, oppressive, suffocating. Sometime I will write more about that, but not now.
But the hard part passed, and we have settled in. I cried the first time our saw our tiny apartment, but I have grown to like it here, not to be weighed down by so many things that I never use. I have grown to like the feeling of having something close to what we really need, and of throwing things away periodically, like a snake shedding its skin.
I’m thankful for every day that our kids get to spend with their aging grandparents. Even though they drive me nuts sometimes, I’m so grateful that they get to see these kids grow up for a little while, and in a place where they are comfortable and respected. I remember, growing up in the U.S., being so embarrassed by my grandparents, because they didn’t know how to behave or talk like everyone else, they chewed loudly, and they farted loudly. I never got to see them in the context of their own world, with their friends, where they knew more than me. KC’s father loves to take Aiden to the mountain with him and introduce his grandson to his buddies, who go hiking every week. He loves to show off his knowledge of Korea and of Seoul.
I’m thankful that I can stay home with Max. I haven’t written much about Max yet... from this blog it may seem to all of you that I only think about Aiden. Actually, Max has been a real challenge -- he’s a really sensitive kid. One of the reasons I get so frustrated with Aiden is because I’m actually frustrated with Max but I end up lashing out at Aiden. Anyway, more on Max at another time. But Max is growing up really well now, he’s becoming a very funny little character with quite a personality, and he’s so happy and secure. He still has his crazy moments, but he’s come a long way. I think he really needed to be raised with his mommy always around, always ready to hold him close or nurse him or comfort him. I think the last two years I’ve basically spent just holding him. And it was worth it.
I’m thankful that I left the PhD program. I feel like most of us live our lives on invisible tracks -- you keep going, doing what you think you’re supposed to do, not thinking about whether you want to do it or not. Especially if, like me, your parents kept pushing you forward when you were young, filling any hesitation or boredom with educational workbooks, writing summer school, and piano lessons. It is easy to keep taking the next logical step: high school to college, college to grad school, this award or that, to a professional career and a white picket fence. That is not a bad life -- a life of social and professional respect, of enough money, of comfortable possessions. It was the path of least resistance to stay, to keep on going on those invisible tracks that we all follow without thinking... once you get started, and it beckons with the promise of respect and security, it’s hard to think seriously about other options. But I left, and rather than feel like some sort of failure it has been a liberation. I’ve enjoyed being able to spend the time with my kids without the additional stress, and I have really enjoyed being able to spend time on things I always wanted to do but felt I couldn’t: learning Chinese, reading non-academic things, and writing. I still feel, in some sense, that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but for now I’m comfortable with not knowing and enjoying the adventure. My life has not been the linear, progressive, positivistic narrative I once imagined... perhaps I embraced postmodernism first theoretically and then later in my personal life... ;-)
I’m thankful for all the good people we have met here: Aiden’s friends and their parents, my Chinese teacher, other ex-pat friends, our Kindermusik teacher, KC’s business and golf friends. Each of these people come with their own stories, which I don’t have room for (hey, I met my Chinese teacher in the public bath...) but I am thankful every day for their presence in our lives.
Leaving the U.S. and taking a bit of a bizarre track has made KC and I see the world a little bit differently than most others, I think, and perhaps made us a little... idiosyncratic. Weird, perhaps. But having this shared experience, this shared adventure, this common perspective from which we study those around us has made us even closer in a way that we weren’t before. Somehow this coming and going, this crossing of borders, and the encountering and re-encountering of the same people, has given us strong ideas about the way we want to raise our kids and also the things we want in our own lives. So we're weird together, and I'm thankful for the way that our meanderings have cemented in us such a strong sense of the rightness of what we're doing, how we're living, and how we're raising our kids.
Putting aside for a moment the long philosophical questions about living the “good life,” the trick, it seems to me, is to somehow be able to live in the moment, appreciating the beauty and splendor and gifts as they occur, and yet also somehow place these in some sort of framework which provides meaning to the overall direction and expanse of your life. No mean trick, if you ask me. I’m a high-level person, not good with details. Give me a history book and I can tell you about the themes, the ideas, the significance -- but not the dates, the people, the microcosmic aspects. And I like aesthetic things, I like things to be beautiful, not messy. In mah jhong I almost never win because I go for the big hands, all the same suit, not wanting to settle for a mishmash of ugly things.
But somehow in these past three years, leaving the US and leaving the PhD has given me, temporarily at least, a sense of that micro and macro good life. The details of this life are still wonderfully strange enough to lend a glint of fascination to the everyday, and the freedom of embarking on this strange journey has opened, even in this crowded land, a sense of wide number of roads available in this world. Who knows which one we’ll travel next.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Ex-pat stories
One of the most convenient aspects of life in Seoul is its delivery system. Almost everything can be delivered, and delivered quickly. I go to buy groceries at the grocery store a few minutes’ walk from our apartment, but rather than hauling the heavy purchases back, I have them delivered to my apartment. I order everything from books to cosmetics on the internet and usually these are delivered, free of charge, within one or two days. If you really want something quickly, you can order “quick” delivery, and your things will arrive an hour or two. KC does this when he orders computers, so he can enjoy the ecstasy of instant gratification. When I needed to pick up an album from the photographer and was too tired to trek across town to get it, I asked him to send it to me that way. It only cost a few dollars and arrived in an hour. When I arrived at the Immigration Office (90 min journey from my apartment) to renew my visa missing one of the documents, the officer said, no problem. I left my passport and foreigner’s card there, faxed the missing document, and she sent my passport and foreigner’s card through a delivery service. Even the American Embassy sent Max’s new passport that way, saving us a painful trip to the Embassy.
And, of course, there’s the food. OH, the food. Chinese food is the fastest, arriving sometimes only 5 minutes after I ordered it, leading me to wonder how they cook it so fast. Pizza takes a little longer, maybe a half an hour. You can order beer and friend chicken, or kimpap and soup. For many months after Max’s birth, I had soup delivered daily to the apartment at 6am so I wouldn’t have to cook breakfast. All these services are either free or dirt cheap. Although food is expensive here, labor is cheap, and service important. With so many people and so many stores, competition is fierce, and consumers like me take advantage.
But, alas, if you don’t speak Korean it is hard to enjoy this aspect of Seoul life. Some, like my Chinese friend Helen, memorize one key sentence of Korean: “This is apartment 1407. Please send me one large pepperoni pizza.” She calls the number, says her one sentence, and hangs up, because after all, she can’t understand anything the other person says.
Helen’s friend, let’s call her Mary, does the same thing. Every week, when she needs her cheese fix (funny, those cravings for cheese), she calls the number, says her one sentence, hangs up, and a little while later the pizza arrives. One day Mary’s Korean friend comes to visit and Mary says, “Oh good! YOU can order the pizza this time.” So Mary’s friend calls the number, and the person on the phone says, “FIANLLY, someone who can speak Korean! Will you tell that American that this is NOT a pizza place?!?!” Turns out that all this time, Mary had been calling someone’s house, and that person had ordered the pizza for her...
And, of course, there’s the food. OH, the food. Chinese food is the fastest, arriving sometimes only 5 minutes after I ordered it, leading me to wonder how they cook it so fast. Pizza takes a little longer, maybe a half an hour. You can order beer and friend chicken, or kimpap and soup. For many months after Max’s birth, I had soup delivered daily to the apartment at 6am so I wouldn’t have to cook breakfast. All these services are either free or dirt cheap. Although food is expensive here, labor is cheap, and service important. With so many people and so many stores, competition is fierce, and consumers like me take advantage.
But, alas, if you don’t speak Korean it is hard to enjoy this aspect of Seoul life. Some, like my Chinese friend Helen, memorize one key sentence of Korean: “This is apartment 1407. Please send me one large pepperoni pizza.” She calls the number, says her one sentence, and hangs up, because after all, she can’t understand anything the other person says.
Helen’s friend, let’s call her Mary, does the same thing. Every week, when she needs her cheese fix (funny, those cravings for cheese), she calls the number, says her one sentence, hangs up, and a little while later the pizza arrives. One day Mary’s Korean friend comes to visit and Mary says, “Oh good! YOU can order the pizza this time.” So Mary’s friend calls the number, and the person on the phone says, “FIANLLY, someone who can speak Korean! Will you tell that American that this is NOT a pizza place?!?!” Turns out that all this time, Mary had been calling someone’s house, and that person had ordered the pizza for her...
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Self-monitoring
Part 1: different systems
My friend Emily was here this last month, visiting Asia for the first time. She got to experience, for a time, what it is to live here -- staying with us, going to Aiden’s school to help me teach, sightseeing, eating Korean food, throwing away food garbage, paying outrageous prices for fruit, and being the only white person in the vicinity.
She was at the gym on her last day here, running the treadmill and lifting weights, and an older man approached her. “You’re exercising too fast,” he chastized her. “Slow down!”
I had warned her about this. One of the hardest things to learn in another culture is what is OK to say and what is rude. In Korea, it is completely fine and normal to comment on other people’s appearance: “You have gained weight,” “Do you know you have a pimple on your forehead?” or sometimes women will just come over and brush lint or dandruff off my shirt. It is also OK for an older person to give constructive advice based on his or her wealth of knowledge derived from age: “Your baby should be wearing more clothes.” “Don’t use your MP3 player near your belly when you are pregnant.” “Eating kimchee prevents cancer.” Or: “Don’t exercise so fast.”
Even though I warned her, she was unable to follow through with the standard response: a “yes” followed by a bow of the head as acknowledgment, promptly followed by incident amnesia. Instead, she gave him that kind of smile/grimace which is technically a smile but communicates, “Fuck off.” As she said later, still filled with anger, “It took all my control not to scream, ‘I was a varsity athlete in college and am the only one in this gym breaking a sweat you #W$%#$%^%’!”
That’s the hard part of this whole cultural intermingling: if they receive you, its on their own terms, and if you respond, it is on your own terms. It is hard to break out of these, even when you know what’s happening. I’m sure that man was trying to break the ice, trying to be friendly and welcoming. And Emily wanted to me civil and kind and friendly as well, but her upbringing and personality made it almost impossible to provide the kind of response that he would have expected.
I run into this almost everyday. I’m pretty good now at feigning the smile and nod, except when it comes to my own father-in-law. I remember a conversation with my friend Nicole, who has been living here for 2 years, complaining about how people comment on appearance. “How is that not rude??” she asked. The only way I could think to explain it is that in the U.S., if you were talking with your boss, exchanging ideas about something, and your boss said something that you thought was ridiculous, you could say, strongly, “I completely disagree and think your approach is wrong,” though depending on your work and your boss your response could range from “That’s complete bullshit” to a more placating, “Perhaps we should consider different options.”
But in Korea, disagreeing with someone of higher status is trickier, and a strong response would most likely be taken as impolite. But here, commenting on some factual part of a person’s appearance -- “you look tired,” “you’ve gained weight” “you’re breaking out” -- is not considered rude. Whereas in the U.S., even if someone gained 100 pounds, you most likely wouldn’t comment. Different systems.
Part 2: living in a fishbowl
When we first moved here, I always felt that I stuck out, that people were watching me, remarking on my foreignness. I don’t know if that was the case or if my psychological paranoia was just a manifestation of the social awkwardness I felt (as my friend Ezra used to say, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”). On the one hand, being an American (because other nationalities don’t have the same power) here can give you a sense of privilege, of power, of uniqueness that you don’t have when you’re just another person at the mall California. You’ve become exotic. It is my impression that many Americans, especially English teachers (I’m sorry in advance if I piss people off) come here to escape something in the U.S., and sometimes that something is just a feeling of mediocrity. Here, you are Someone. Often an Enviable Someone.
But there are a bunch of other power issues. Being a foreigner gives me power because Koreans are very sensitive to how other nations see them. One day I came upon some middle school boys writing graffiti on the side of our building and I scolded them, first in Korean, and then in English, partly because I was upset and fumbling for words and therefore not being my most articulate self in Korean, but also because I knew if I made clear that I was a foreigner my words (and the experience as a whole) would probably have more weight. I even told them that a foreigner seeing what they were doing would consider them ignorant and this country as an ignorant one (though inside myself I was thinking of all the graffiti in places like New York, and how the US is home to the art of graffiti and knowing I was grossly exaggerating....) Bad person. But hopefully they won't do it again.
But you are also representative -- not just an American but sometimes The American, somehow standing in for all that is good or bad about the U.S. in general. For the many Koreans who have never been to the U.S. and have had limited access to foreigners, your small habits and idiosyncrasies will fill in the largely absent pieces of a larger picture of what Americans Are Like. (And remember that a large part of the ex-pat community is made up of the military.)
Sometimes, after the excitement of being unique wears off, people get sick of being remarked upon. I am reminded of a story of a woman who was tired of people pointing at her and saying “외국사람" (“foreigner”) so she began pointing back and shouting, “한국사람" (“Korean”).
And the Korean Americans who come have a tough time -- they are not marked much by their appearance (especially now that fashion and facial features have changed so much here), often are just as lost and confused as other foreigners, and yet people expect them to act like Koreans and fit in socially and linguistically.
How does all this affect an ex-pat’s ego? Or my kids’ ego? After a while you get used to being the odd one, but you can also become addicted to that feeling of being special -- the one trusted as an expert on the English language (although you can’t spell worth a damn, and know nothing about grammar), the one given superstar status by virtue of having attended a Name University. After living in a place where you are the Special One, it can be hard to leave. Now, I walk around without much self-consciousness, but I still get more attention by virtue of being different. Shopkeepers remember me, awakening from their dazed reverie to ask me how long I’ve been here and compliment my Korean, and my students’ mothers stop me in the street to talk to me and thank me. After such attention, how can you go back to being an average Jane who has to bag her own groceries and pump her own gas just like everyone else?
Part 3: opting out
But there’s another side to being an American in Seoul: being able to opt out of the perpetual sizing-up that goes on in every social situation.
You know what I mean. You enter a store, and secretly, furtively, you are sizing up everyone around you. Are these people better than I? Are they better looking, cooler, are their children better behaved? We all do it. Maybe women do it more than men?? Even in a place of absolute self-confidence and pride, isn’t there a little part of you that listens to the woman behind you in line, talking loudly about her vacation in Cabo, that thinks, “She’s SO showing off for everyone else. Does she think we care? I’m so glad I don’t feel that insecure.”
Although I stand out, it’s nice to enter a building and check out the Sizing-Up process from a position a bit removed. I can enter a nice cafe in wrinkled clothes and sneakers and not feel too awkwardly underdressed, because, hey, I’m American. I can study the women with their strappy high heels and Bling, preening and fawning over each other and be amused in my private little world. Or just interested, because in some ways the preening and fawning is the same here, and in some ways it isn’t. With women of a certain age and class, there’s a lot of “Oh, I’m so tired, the kids have been so hard, and I should exercise but it’s too hot and my mother-in-law has been working me so hard...” complaining, followed by the requisite, “Wow, you poor thing, you’ve had it really bad, you need to rest...” type sympathy. This type of conversation makes me realize how socially unacceptable it is to complain in the U.S.
Part 4: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
I went to school here with an Irish guy named Eamon who lived in Korea for 4 years, teaching English. He liked to mess around with people sometimes, especially after he shaved his head -- he’d tell them he was a Buddhist monk or some other concoction. He grew tired of the same questions, over and over again: “Where are you from? Are you an English teacher? Do you like Korea? Do you like kimchee? Do you like Korean girls? Are you married? Are you a Christian?”
One day he was standing around, thinking his own thoughts, waiting for a bus when he caught a Korean guy staring at him, not too far away. Inwardly he sighed and prepared himself for the onslaught of the same questions. But he was annoyed, and wanted to be left alone, to be just an anonymous person waiting for a bus. So he put on his headphones and scowled a bit, and turned away.
Then the guy began to approach, trying to catch Eamon’s eye. Eamon’s scowl deepened, until it was a “fuck off” kind of face, and the guy hesistated, but then kept approaching.
As he neared Eamon, he leaned in close and whispered, “Your fly is open.”
Lest we lose sight of the fact... sometimes a person is just a person. The people are not all out to get you.
My friend Emily was here this last month, visiting Asia for the first time. She got to experience, for a time, what it is to live here -- staying with us, going to Aiden’s school to help me teach, sightseeing, eating Korean food, throwing away food garbage, paying outrageous prices for fruit, and being the only white person in the vicinity.
She was at the gym on her last day here, running the treadmill and lifting weights, and an older man approached her. “You’re exercising too fast,” he chastized her. “Slow down!”
I had warned her about this. One of the hardest things to learn in another culture is what is OK to say and what is rude. In Korea, it is completely fine and normal to comment on other people’s appearance: “You have gained weight,” “Do you know you have a pimple on your forehead?” or sometimes women will just come over and brush lint or dandruff off my shirt. It is also OK for an older person to give constructive advice based on his or her wealth of knowledge derived from age: “Your baby should be wearing more clothes.” “Don’t use your MP3 player near your belly when you are pregnant.” “Eating kimchee prevents cancer.” Or: “Don’t exercise so fast.”
Even though I warned her, she was unable to follow through with the standard response: a “yes” followed by a bow of the head as acknowledgment, promptly followed by incident amnesia. Instead, she gave him that kind of smile/grimace which is technically a smile but communicates, “Fuck off.” As she said later, still filled with anger, “It took all my control not to scream, ‘I was a varsity athlete in college and am the only one in this gym breaking a sweat you #W$%#$%^%’!”
That’s the hard part of this whole cultural intermingling: if they receive you, its on their own terms, and if you respond, it is on your own terms. It is hard to break out of these, even when you know what’s happening. I’m sure that man was trying to break the ice, trying to be friendly and welcoming. And Emily wanted to me civil and kind and friendly as well, but her upbringing and personality made it almost impossible to provide the kind of response that he would have expected.
I run into this almost everyday. I’m pretty good now at feigning the smile and nod, except when it comes to my own father-in-law. I remember a conversation with my friend Nicole, who has been living here for 2 years, complaining about how people comment on appearance. “How is that not rude??” she asked. The only way I could think to explain it is that in the U.S., if you were talking with your boss, exchanging ideas about something, and your boss said something that you thought was ridiculous, you could say, strongly, “I completely disagree and think your approach is wrong,” though depending on your work and your boss your response could range from “That’s complete bullshit” to a more placating, “Perhaps we should consider different options.”
But in Korea, disagreeing with someone of higher status is trickier, and a strong response would most likely be taken as impolite. But here, commenting on some factual part of a person’s appearance -- “you look tired,” “you’ve gained weight” “you’re breaking out” -- is not considered rude. Whereas in the U.S., even if someone gained 100 pounds, you most likely wouldn’t comment. Different systems.
Part 2: living in a fishbowl
When we first moved here, I always felt that I stuck out, that people were watching me, remarking on my foreignness. I don’t know if that was the case or if my psychological paranoia was just a manifestation of the social awkwardness I felt (as my friend Ezra used to say, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”). On the one hand, being an American (because other nationalities don’t have the same power) here can give you a sense of privilege, of power, of uniqueness that you don’t have when you’re just another person at the mall California. You’ve become exotic. It is my impression that many Americans, especially English teachers (I’m sorry in advance if I piss people off) come here to escape something in the U.S., and sometimes that something is just a feeling of mediocrity. Here, you are Someone. Often an Enviable Someone.
But there are a bunch of other power issues. Being a foreigner gives me power because Koreans are very sensitive to how other nations see them. One day I came upon some middle school boys writing graffiti on the side of our building and I scolded them, first in Korean, and then in English, partly because I was upset and fumbling for words and therefore not being my most articulate self in Korean, but also because I knew if I made clear that I was a foreigner my words (and the experience as a whole) would probably have more weight. I even told them that a foreigner seeing what they were doing would consider them ignorant and this country as an ignorant one (though inside myself I was thinking of all the graffiti in places like New York, and how the US is home to the art of graffiti and knowing I was grossly exaggerating....) Bad person. But hopefully they won't do it again.
But you are also representative -- not just an American but sometimes The American, somehow standing in for all that is good or bad about the U.S. in general. For the many Koreans who have never been to the U.S. and have had limited access to foreigners, your small habits and idiosyncrasies will fill in the largely absent pieces of a larger picture of what Americans Are Like. (And remember that a large part of the ex-pat community is made up of the military.)
Sometimes, after the excitement of being unique wears off, people get sick of being remarked upon. I am reminded of a story of a woman who was tired of people pointing at her and saying “외국사람" (“foreigner”) so she began pointing back and shouting, “한국사람" (“Korean”).
And the Korean Americans who come have a tough time -- they are not marked much by their appearance (especially now that fashion and facial features have changed so much here), often are just as lost and confused as other foreigners, and yet people expect them to act like Koreans and fit in socially and linguistically.
How does all this affect an ex-pat’s ego? Or my kids’ ego? After a while you get used to being the odd one, but you can also become addicted to that feeling of being special -- the one trusted as an expert on the English language (although you can’t spell worth a damn, and know nothing about grammar), the one given superstar status by virtue of having attended a Name University. After living in a place where you are the Special One, it can be hard to leave. Now, I walk around without much self-consciousness, but I still get more attention by virtue of being different. Shopkeepers remember me, awakening from their dazed reverie to ask me how long I’ve been here and compliment my Korean, and my students’ mothers stop me in the street to talk to me and thank me. After such attention, how can you go back to being an average Jane who has to bag her own groceries and pump her own gas just like everyone else?
Part 3: opting out
But there’s another side to being an American in Seoul: being able to opt out of the perpetual sizing-up that goes on in every social situation.
You know what I mean. You enter a store, and secretly, furtively, you are sizing up everyone around you. Are these people better than I? Are they better looking, cooler, are their children better behaved? We all do it. Maybe women do it more than men?? Even in a place of absolute self-confidence and pride, isn’t there a little part of you that listens to the woman behind you in line, talking loudly about her vacation in Cabo, that thinks, “She’s SO showing off for everyone else. Does she think we care? I’m so glad I don’t feel that insecure.”
Although I stand out, it’s nice to enter a building and check out the Sizing-Up process from a position a bit removed. I can enter a nice cafe in wrinkled clothes and sneakers and not feel too awkwardly underdressed, because, hey, I’m American. I can study the women with their strappy high heels and Bling, preening and fawning over each other and be amused in my private little world. Or just interested, because in some ways the preening and fawning is the same here, and in some ways it isn’t. With women of a certain age and class, there’s a lot of “Oh, I’m so tired, the kids have been so hard, and I should exercise but it’s too hot and my mother-in-law has been working me so hard...” complaining, followed by the requisite, “Wow, you poor thing, you’ve had it really bad, you need to rest...” type sympathy. This type of conversation makes me realize how socially unacceptable it is to complain in the U.S.
Part 4: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
I went to school here with an Irish guy named Eamon who lived in Korea for 4 years, teaching English. He liked to mess around with people sometimes, especially after he shaved his head -- he’d tell them he was a Buddhist monk or some other concoction. He grew tired of the same questions, over and over again: “Where are you from? Are you an English teacher? Do you like Korea? Do you like kimchee? Do you like Korean girls? Are you married? Are you a Christian?”
One day he was standing around, thinking his own thoughts, waiting for a bus when he caught a Korean guy staring at him, not too far away. Inwardly he sighed and prepared himself for the onslaught of the same questions. But he was annoyed, and wanted to be left alone, to be just an anonymous person waiting for a bus. So he put on his headphones and scowled a bit, and turned away.
Then the guy began to approach, trying to catch Eamon’s eye. Eamon’s scowl deepened, until it was a “fuck off” kind of face, and the guy hesistated, but then kept approaching.
As he neared Eamon, he leaned in close and whispered, “Your fly is open.”
Lest we lose sight of the fact... sometimes a person is just a person. The people are not all out to get you.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Independence Day
OK. I know I’m late for an Independence Day post. I missed July 4th, both blog-wise as well as culturally. But I figure I can get a little slack here, since Korea’s Independence Day is August 15th so I can pick and choose my holidays at my convenience. Kind of like how I excuse being late with my New Year’s cards because Chinese New Year is in January or February. (Though I’m usually late for that one too... around St. Patrick’s Day I give up.)
This year the idea of independence is bittersweet. Not only am I missing the fireworks for at least the third year in the row, but I have also lately begun to morn the independence which is coming, slowly, like the drips of mustard off a hot dog, from Aiden.
We’ve been having our share of struggles lately, Aiden and I. He is very much like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes -- wrapped up in his own little world of battles with bad guys and the constant threat of monsters or dramatic death. His concept of death, though, is not so threatening -- he thinks it is easy to slip into death, but that the good guys will somehow come back to life. I’m always answering questions like, “Mommy, of I drink the bathwater will I die? Mommy, if it rains too much I’ll die, right?” His world doesn’t have many shades of gray.
He is a social kid, with a great imagination and an ability to play by himself that I’m always grateful for when he pops out of bed at 5am. But when it comes to accomplishing tasks in an orderly and efficient fashion he is, shall we say, out to lunch. This morning he was running late for the bus, particularly because he needed to have a last minute poop. “Don’t forget to wash your hands!” I yell at him. The bathroom is suspiciously quiet -- no noise of running water. “Aiden, are you washing your hands?” “Yes, Mommy, I’m shooting my hands with water from the water gun.”
Ah, Foucault, when did I become the instrument of discipline and punishment? I used to be such a good postmodern disobedient, throwing about terms like “deconstruction” and “reading against the grain.” Suddenly I am The Man, armed with my Skinner Boxes of Positive Reinforcement: charts and checklists of Aiden’s duties so he can check them off, a sticker chart where he gets a sticker every time he does something the first time I ask, etc. I deliver long lectures (actually, having Max has been really helpful, because Aiden gets to experience how it feels when someone doesn’t listen to him...) where I implore him to listen better. I have replaced my over-the-shoulder commands with the power of the Gaze: kneeling in front of him and making him look me in the eye. Here I am, promoting modernity, with its rigid schedules and sense of time and attention to productive efficiency.
I am the source of any and all efficiency in the day. I am a streamlined, multi-tasking machine. I can carry on this dialogue with Aiden while conducting delicate negotiations with Max over changing his diaper (“Do you want Mommy to change your diaper or Daddy to change your diaper? Do you want to change your diaper now or in two minutes?” Gotta give choices. Otherwise I have to chase him around and deal with “No” and kicking and crying.) And do the dishes and laundry and everything else.
Aiden, on the other hand, will always take the most indirect method to do something. Brushing his teeth involves light saber battles and a tour of the apartment (“how many times do I have to tell you to brush at the sink?”). Putting on his clothes involves throwing the articles up in the air or at Max, or putting them on in different ways so that he has more than two arms, etc. (“Aiden where do your clothes go? Fold up your pajamas!”) And he always has to ask me where his clothes are, even though he knows perfectly well where they are. (“Mommy, where are my clothes?” “Where do you THINK your clothes are?” “Oh, that’s right.”)
So there’s actually a kind of double disciplining going on here: I am disciplining and training myself as much as I am him. Gone are the halcyon days of solitaire, grande lattes, and reading in bed until noon. Gone are the days of writing e-mails to professors in limerick. Gone are the days of 20 minute showers and performing experiments on font size. Now the only surreptitious pleasures I allow myself are applying wrinkle cream and reading people.com. The Jennifer who used to paint and spend hours rewriting papers has been replaced by a robot who tracks her kid’s progress in his math workbooks with Tayloristic zeal.
And yet, at night I take out those Calvin and Hobbes comics and laugh, and write about those little Aiden moments -- not the big talks about sex or life or drugs, not the moment he wins the PGA tour (KC is planning that moment as we speak), not his first step (already forgotten) or first word (ditto). Rather, I cradle in my memory those moments when he’s sitting upside-down on the sofa, bottom in the air, staring into space. Or when he tells me he likes the song Bang-a-Gong by T. Rex but he doesn’t know what it means. I love the fact that he can make sense of the world in his odd way, with no pressure to sum everything up, with no pressure to define who he is. He can gain a morning’s pleasure from a pair of chopsticks, or by becoming a Blob under the blanket and just moving threateningly around the apartment. He just is, butt in the air, focused on the next moment’s adventure, excited to wake up in the morning and surrendering so completely to sleep at night.
And having reached such a high level of training and efficiency, this is the world I have lost irrevocably. I can no longer hear Santa’s bells ring or go into Narnia. My world’s lurking dangers and secret places provide me little pleasure, and my imaginary friends have all become investment bankers. After 28 years of suburban life, my way of dealing with the bustle and competitive pressures of city life is to buckle and strain and transmit these pressures downward, to Aiden, rather than protect him from them.
It is getting late, and Aiden should be in bed, and I have asked him 5 times to put his pajamas on. But he and Max have hidden naked under the covers, giggling and shaking with anticipation for the moment when they are discovered (even though their feet have poked through the other side). I bite my tongue and stand back for a minute, letting the anticipation build. “Where are Aiden and Max? I can’t find them anywhere! Did they go for a ride? Did they hop on a space shuttle?” Suddenly they pop out, shrieking and squealing, Aiden with his skinny, muscular little boy body, hair about two months past needing to be cut, and Max with his protruding belly and his huge dimples. Bedtime can wait a few minutes. Although I can’t give up the training, I need to figure how to how to train both him and myself to keep the world of schedules and efficiency in the background of life, without dismantling the serendipitous daydreams that come to us, moment by moment.
This year the idea of independence is bittersweet. Not only am I missing the fireworks for at least the third year in the row, but I have also lately begun to morn the independence which is coming, slowly, like the drips of mustard off a hot dog, from Aiden.
We’ve been having our share of struggles lately, Aiden and I. He is very much like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes -- wrapped up in his own little world of battles with bad guys and the constant threat of monsters or dramatic death. His concept of death, though, is not so threatening -- he thinks it is easy to slip into death, but that the good guys will somehow come back to life. I’m always answering questions like, “Mommy, of I drink the bathwater will I die? Mommy, if it rains too much I’ll die, right?” His world doesn’t have many shades of gray.
He is a social kid, with a great imagination and an ability to play by himself that I’m always grateful for when he pops out of bed at 5am. But when it comes to accomplishing tasks in an orderly and efficient fashion he is, shall we say, out to lunch. This morning he was running late for the bus, particularly because he needed to have a last minute poop. “Don’t forget to wash your hands!” I yell at him. The bathroom is suspiciously quiet -- no noise of running water. “Aiden, are you washing your hands?” “Yes, Mommy, I’m shooting my hands with water from the water gun.”
Ah, Foucault, when did I become the instrument of discipline and punishment? I used to be such a good postmodern disobedient, throwing about terms like “deconstruction” and “reading against the grain.” Suddenly I am The Man, armed with my Skinner Boxes of Positive Reinforcement: charts and checklists of Aiden’s duties so he can check them off, a sticker chart where he gets a sticker every time he does something the first time I ask, etc. I deliver long lectures (actually, having Max has been really helpful, because Aiden gets to experience how it feels when someone doesn’t listen to him...) where I implore him to listen better. I have replaced my over-the-shoulder commands with the power of the Gaze: kneeling in front of him and making him look me in the eye. Here I am, promoting modernity, with its rigid schedules and sense of time and attention to productive efficiency.
I am the source of any and all efficiency in the day. I am a streamlined, multi-tasking machine. I can carry on this dialogue with Aiden while conducting delicate negotiations with Max over changing his diaper (“Do you want Mommy to change your diaper or Daddy to change your diaper? Do you want to change your diaper now or in two minutes?” Gotta give choices. Otherwise I have to chase him around and deal with “No” and kicking and crying.) And do the dishes and laundry and everything else.
Aiden, on the other hand, will always take the most indirect method to do something. Brushing his teeth involves light saber battles and a tour of the apartment (“how many times do I have to tell you to brush at the sink?”). Putting on his clothes involves throwing the articles up in the air or at Max, or putting them on in different ways so that he has more than two arms, etc. (“Aiden where do your clothes go? Fold up your pajamas!”) And he always has to ask me where his clothes are, even though he knows perfectly well where they are. (“Mommy, where are my clothes?” “Where do you THINK your clothes are?” “Oh, that’s right.”)
So there’s actually a kind of double disciplining going on here: I am disciplining and training myself as much as I am him. Gone are the halcyon days of solitaire, grande lattes, and reading in bed until noon. Gone are the days of writing e-mails to professors in limerick. Gone are the days of 20 minute showers and performing experiments on font size. Now the only surreptitious pleasures I allow myself are applying wrinkle cream and reading people.com. The Jennifer who used to paint and spend hours rewriting papers has been replaced by a robot who tracks her kid’s progress in his math workbooks with Tayloristic zeal.
And yet, at night I take out those Calvin and Hobbes comics and laugh, and write about those little Aiden moments -- not the big talks about sex or life or drugs, not the moment he wins the PGA tour (KC is planning that moment as we speak), not his first step (already forgotten) or first word (ditto). Rather, I cradle in my memory those moments when he’s sitting upside-down on the sofa, bottom in the air, staring into space. Or when he tells me he likes the song Bang-a-Gong by T. Rex but he doesn’t know what it means. I love the fact that he can make sense of the world in his odd way, with no pressure to sum everything up, with no pressure to define who he is. He can gain a morning’s pleasure from a pair of chopsticks, or by becoming a Blob under the blanket and just moving threateningly around the apartment. He just is, butt in the air, focused on the next moment’s adventure, excited to wake up in the morning and surrendering so completely to sleep at night.
And having reached such a high level of training and efficiency, this is the world I have lost irrevocably. I can no longer hear Santa’s bells ring or go into Narnia. My world’s lurking dangers and secret places provide me little pleasure, and my imaginary friends have all become investment bankers. After 28 years of suburban life, my way of dealing with the bustle and competitive pressures of city life is to buckle and strain and transmit these pressures downward, to Aiden, rather than protect him from them.
It is getting late, and Aiden should be in bed, and I have asked him 5 times to put his pajamas on. But he and Max have hidden naked under the covers, giggling and shaking with anticipation for the moment when they are discovered (even though their feet have poked through the other side). I bite my tongue and stand back for a minute, letting the anticipation build. “Where are Aiden and Max? I can’t find them anywhere! Did they go for a ride? Did they hop on a space shuttle?” Suddenly they pop out, shrieking and squealing, Aiden with his skinny, muscular little boy body, hair about two months past needing to be cut, and Max with his protruding belly and his huge dimples. Bedtime can wait a few minutes. Although I can’t give up the training, I need to figure how to how to train both him and myself to keep the world of schedules and efficiency in the background of life, without dismantling the serendipitous daydreams that come to us, moment by moment.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Stories to embarass Aiden when he's older...#5
Aiden mixes up words sometimes.. perhaps he takes after K.C.?
My friend Nicole gave Aiden a brown Bionicle (Lego-type toy) for Christmas. For some reason, he kept mixing up the words "Bionicle" and "diarrhea," so he kept asking me, "Mommy, where is my brown diarrhea?"
My friend Nicole gave Aiden a brown Bionicle (Lego-type toy) for Christmas. For some reason, he kept mixing up the words "Bionicle" and "diarrhea," so he kept asking me, "Mommy, where is my brown diarrhea?"
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
flashes of anger
“Hurry up!” I call to Aiden, although I have promised myself I would try not to tell him to hurry all the time. It is almost 2 and my in-laws will be here any minute. Aiden, in his usual fashion, has taken the most indirect route possible from the bedroom to the door, hurdling over various toys, stepping on more toys, knocking some papers off my desk, scattering his pajamas and dropping his socks along the way. Is it impossible for a 5-year old to do anything efficiently?
I am getting stressed out, even though we aren’t really late for anything important -- but I know how much my in-laws hate it when we’re not ready on time. Old people. They don’t have anything to do, and yet they are so attached to their schedules. My mom says that old people are just like toddlers, except no one wants to kidnap them. I am frantically throwing toys in their boxes and shoving dirty dishes out of sight. When my in-laws come, I need to keep of the appearance of being at least somewhat neat, although this is next to impossible with two kids. They are like little monkeys, scattering lego pieces all over the floor and hiding food in odd places. I find caches of important documents and spoons and overdue DVDs hidden in the nooks and crannies of our apartment. I know my in-laws know how messy we are although they pretend to ignore the fact.
I remember my first meetings with my in-laws: decked out in my finest clothes, new heels, and stockings, with what I hoped was a happy, friendly smile plastered on my face, back straight as a ruler, knees firmly pressed together. We bowed and smiled and gestured at each other, trying to make the best of things, me trying to convince them and myself that having Korean in-laws would be just fine, and that I could win them over; they, probably trying to convince themselves that this American girl would not be a complete disaster. I think they’re reasoning went something like this: She’s not really American, her parents are Chinese, so she’s really Chinese. And Chinese is close to Korean, so she’ll be able to understand us... right?
I finally manage to get my kids ready, and my in-laws show up, right on time, of course. I see my mother in-law scan the messy floor (didn’t have time to vacuum and mop) and my wrinkled shirt, but she doesn’t say anything. I make the kids bow and greet them, though it takes Aiden several tries because he’s determined to be silly and use his duck voice, and then he keeps dramatically falling down at the end of the bow. Anything Max does is cute, so my in-laws eat up his greeting even though he barely looks at them and is playing with his penis the whole time. My father-in-law chides Aiden for not doing his bow properly, “Aiden. Do it straight! Look me in the eye and don’t wiggle! Why can’t you do it right?” Having worked his way out of the bare rubble of the Korean War to feed and clothe his brothers and sisters, then his own children, winning them a better life, he can’t let any opportunity go to teach us all something. At 5, Aiden has now grown tall and mature enough to be the newest target of his grandfather’s improvement projects. So every encounter with him is now a teaching moment -- a chance for his grandfather to point out how Aiden could be more polite, know more math, exercise more, save money, and conserve electricity. Aiden has quickly learned to ignore what his grandfather says, which makes his bowing sloppier than ever, which unfortunately reflects poorly on my skills as a mother, making this simple, daily greeting scene even more stressful for me. I’m shooting threatening faces at Aiden behind my father-in-law’s back, but he gleefully ignores those too, caught up in some invisible light saber battle, spit shooting out of his mouth as he “ppeww chang zhhjjjj arghs” his way across the room, escaping from his enemies.
I greet them with a bow and ask them if they’ve eaten, and if they want any coffee. My father-in-law seems annoyed at the question (of course they’ve eaten), but he would also be annoyed if I didn’t ask it -- it’s the polite thing to say. My mother-in-law is kinder, tells me that they’re fine and fusses over me a little, telling me I look tired and worrying that the kids are wearing me out. I tell her not to worry; I’m fine. This is the script we run through to show concern for each other: I ask them about their meals and their health, they fuss over me, I reassure them. My father-in-law’s grumpiness is part of the script too, he wants to believe it is his role to take care of us and not vice-versa. And yet he wants me to act out my role of the daughter-in-law. This script that we follow is so laden with expectations on both sides, sometimes it exhausts me, unraveling the nuances of each action, each question asked or not asked, and weighing the correct response.
In the beginning, we started with grand gestures. I was over the moon, and prepared to adapt to their world, to learn Korean and act as Korean as I could. I listened with sympathy to KC’s stories of his father’s life, which emerged slowly, one by one, as we cuddled and grew closer night after night. These were family matters, family tragedies, not to be shared with just anyone. When the Korean War began in 1950, KC’s father was only 18, and he and his younger siblings were stuck on one side of the bridge while his parents were on the other. His family was split not only physically but ideologically: KC’s grandfather had been a prominant landowner and member of the aristocracy, making the family an enemy of the Communists; KC’s father’s second brother was a general in the Communist army, making the Nationalists suspicious of the family. KC’s father, suddenly forced to care for his four younger siblings (his youngest brother was just a baby) with no money, went to friends for help, but most were too afraid to help him. He was thrown in an internment camp and sentenced to death, but escaped that punishment at the last minute through some technicality. He briefly saw his mother in the internment camp, but never found out what happened to her, or his father. After the war KC’s father worked odd jobs to survive and raise his siblings. He married, but still under suspicion by the then dictatorial “democratic” regime because of his brother’s Communism, he was under surveillance by the KIA (Korean CIA). His wife died of breast cancer when KC was 11, and lost KC’s sister several years later. Only in recent years, since the government has become less repressive, do KC’s father and aunts and uncles gather carefully together to celebrate holidays and birthday. And that’s just some of it... How much more can one family deal with? It was easy to feel sympathy from afar, for my heart to go out to a person with such a hard life, whose life has brought little happiness and much struggle. I understand where his annoying idiosyncrasies come from, and to some extent admired the strength and determination which allowed him to survive so much. I intended to be a balm for them in their old age, to serve them and make their lives easy, to be the daughter-in-law they had hoped for. It was too late to change them, I thought. It is not my place to try to convert them to feminism. I could be a feminist and still be a good daughter-in-law, I thought. I understood that I was not just a daughter-in-law, I was KC’s wife.
KC -- the pride and joy of his father’s life -- the fruit of all his pain -- the one who went to the U.S., the one who got his PhD from Stanford, the one who got married and had two sons. I know how much KC’s successes mean to him. I understand that he can’t normally express happiness or live in the moment because his whole life has been one back-stabbing after another, a constant struggle to prepare for the next blow. He has survived because he has trained himself to look gift-horses in the mouth, to prepare for the worst-case scenario, to be wary of the powerful and always, always, to push and prepare his son.
But his son lives in a different world. KC’s father was only able to finish high school because of the war. KC has a PhD. KC has lived in the US for 18 years, apart from his family.
KC has come back to Korea now, an act which excites and disturbs his father to no end. To have lived 18 years without your own children, with few relatives in this world -- how does that feel? To be alone as you grow old, seeing your friends with their own grandchildren, having nothing to fill the time. But, for KC’s father, the U.S. represented freedom, safety, and success. Freedom from the government of Korea (which he still doesn’t trust) and the burden of the family history; safety from war; success in education and business.
Although I didn’t cook and didn’t do much cleaning, my in-laws treated me as they felt a daughter-in-law should be treated. My mother-in-law bought me nice clothes and suits, and put make-up on my face as she would a little doll. She used her savings to buy me a Cartier watch and three sets of jewelry (diamond, sapphire, and ruby) as wedding gifts. I was shocked by this generosity: this may be common in Korea, but I don’t even wear jewelry. What was I to do with such gifts? They were beyond my style of living and incomprehensible to me.
This unexpected generosity caused the first of many subtle negotiations between our parents. My in-laws assumed that such gift-giving was traditional in China as well, as indeed I believe it is. But my parents, though raised in China, had very practical American wedding expectations. The gave us some money and one of their old cars to use, but of what use is jewelry? I had to diplomatically suggest to my mother that she buy KC a similar watch, so the families could consider themselves even. These things are not logical: even though both families think of themselves as open-minded and generous, in the back of their minds the demon of “are they looking down upon us?” lurks. Each gesture, each word is interpreted differently, so even though we think we’re on the same page, often we’re not.
Our parents’ first meeting, two days before the wedding, illustrates this perfectly. We chose a steakhouse as a “neutral” location. My mother wore a nice suit; KC’s mother wore a dress and shiny jewelry. Our waiter, who looked like a Iowa farmboy, broke the ice; he had spent 4 years teaching English in Korea and spoke Korean quite well. “What, you don’t speak Chinese?” joked my father. Turns out he spoke some Chinese too. Both sets of parents smiled woodenly, eyes wandering, wondering where to look, fiddling with their silverware. KC hurriedly ordered some wine.
Wine glass in hand, KC’s father gave the first toast. “gombei!” (“cheers”). Unfortunately, in Chinese, “ganbei” means you have to drain your glass. My father, in surprise, drained his glass; my father-in-law, seeing this, quickly followed suit. Glasses were refilled, my father-in-law offering another “gombei”; miscommunication again draining both glasses and ushering in drunkeness. My father-in-law’s English suddenly improved and soon he and my father were crudely communicating by writing Chinese characters on a napkin. My father refilled my father-in-law’s glass, suggesting “no ganbei this time.” Finally the varying meaning of “ganbei” in the two languages is discovered and everyone had a good sloshy laugh.
We gotten beyond the formulaic greetings and are now heading out the door to the car. My father-in-law, hating any waste of time, has already taken off down the hall taking some recycling with him. I hate taking out the garbage but I know, or at least believe, one of the reasons he so ostentatiously takes out some of our garbage every time he visits is to make a point about a.) how efficiently he uses his time and b.) how slovenly we are. The boys and my mother-in-law follow slowly behind him, Max stopping to try out all the neighbors’ bikes in the hall, Aiden having to return to the apartment because he realizes he has to pee, even though I asked him not 5 minutes ago and he said he didn’t have to go.
In the car I am nervous; I am still not used to driving in Seoul, and having my in-laws in the car makes me more nervous. My father-in-law is the worse kind of backseat driver, suddenly yelling, “stop stop!” or dramatically drawing in his breath; otherwise offering helpful advice, “you don’t have your hands at 10:00 and 2:00 -- that’s why you turn so clumsily.”
The conversation turns to Aiden’s taekwondo. I used to take him to class, but after Max’s birth, KC’s father took over that job. I was grateful to them for their help, though I missed seeing for myself what was going on. The things that I would see as important were not the same things that KC’s father would see. Aiden had been unhappy at taekwondo recently, and I had finally found out that his instructor had changed, and that he didn’t like the new instructor as much as the old one. I am annoyed that KC’s father didn’t mention this to me. I ask KC’s father, “Why didn’t you mention me that his instructor changed?” This is not a rude question in English, but unfortunately I translate it directly into Korean, not realizing that this particular phrasing sound rude and accusatory. KC’s father explodes at me. “What am I, your servant boy?” He recovers quickly, realizing by my face that I had not intentionally meant to be rude. He tries to cover up by giving me a lecture on my tone and phrasing. But I am shocked by his anger, and angry myself. I WAS annoyed, and was not trying to be really polite, but I wasn’t trying to be rude either. I’m doing my best here. I don’t HAVE to speak Korean. Of course I will make mistakes. His lecture only makes me angrier. I’m not Korean, why should I bow and smile and mimic subserviance? How Korean do you want me to be?
In a few moments our years of small eruptions, of assumptions and miscommunications and good intentions, of small pricks and simmering frustrations has emerged like lava from a volcano, rushing towards the surface, filling the car with its suffocating smoke.
I am getting stressed out, even though we aren’t really late for anything important -- but I know how much my in-laws hate it when we’re not ready on time. Old people. They don’t have anything to do, and yet they are so attached to their schedules. My mom says that old people are just like toddlers, except no one wants to kidnap them. I am frantically throwing toys in their boxes and shoving dirty dishes out of sight. When my in-laws come, I need to keep of the appearance of being at least somewhat neat, although this is next to impossible with two kids. They are like little monkeys, scattering lego pieces all over the floor and hiding food in odd places. I find caches of important documents and spoons and overdue DVDs hidden in the nooks and crannies of our apartment. I know my in-laws know how messy we are although they pretend to ignore the fact.
I remember my first meetings with my in-laws: decked out in my finest clothes, new heels, and stockings, with what I hoped was a happy, friendly smile plastered on my face, back straight as a ruler, knees firmly pressed together. We bowed and smiled and gestured at each other, trying to make the best of things, me trying to convince them and myself that having Korean in-laws would be just fine, and that I could win them over; they, probably trying to convince themselves that this American girl would not be a complete disaster. I think they’re reasoning went something like this: She’s not really American, her parents are Chinese, so she’s really Chinese. And Chinese is close to Korean, so she’ll be able to understand us... right?
I finally manage to get my kids ready, and my in-laws show up, right on time, of course. I see my mother in-law scan the messy floor (didn’t have time to vacuum and mop) and my wrinkled shirt, but she doesn’t say anything. I make the kids bow and greet them, though it takes Aiden several tries because he’s determined to be silly and use his duck voice, and then he keeps dramatically falling down at the end of the bow. Anything Max does is cute, so my in-laws eat up his greeting even though he barely looks at them and is playing with his penis the whole time. My father-in-law chides Aiden for not doing his bow properly, “Aiden. Do it straight! Look me in the eye and don’t wiggle! Why can’t you do it right?” Having worked his way out of the bare rubble of the Korean War to feed and clothe his brothers and sisters, then his own children, winning them a better life, he can’t let any opportunity go to teach us all something. At 5, Aiden has now grown tall and mature enough to be the newest target of his grandfather’s improvement projects. So every encounter with him is now a teaching moment -- a chance for his grandfather to point out how Aiden could be more polite, know more math, exercise more, save money, and conserve electricity. Aiden has quickly learned to ignore what his grandfather says, which makes his bowing sloppier than ever, which unfortunately reflects poorly on my skills as a mother, making this simple, daily greeting scene even more stressful for me. I’m shooting threatening faces at Aiden behind my father-in-law’s back, but he gleefully ignores those too, caught up in some invisible light saber battle, spit shooting out of his mouth as he “ppeww chang zhhjjjj arghs” his way across the room, escaping from his enemies.
I greet them with a bow and ask them if they’ve eaten, and if they want any coffee. My father-in-law seems annoyed at the question (of course they’ve eaten), but he would also be annoyed if I didn’t ask it -- it’s the polite thing to say. My mother-in-law is kinder, tells me that they’re fine and fusses over me a little, telling me I look tired and worrying that the kids are wearing me out. I tell her not to worry; I’m fine. This is the script we run through to show concern for each other: I ask them about their meals and their health, they fuss over me, I reassure them. My father-in-law’s grumpiness is part of the script too, he wants to believe it is his role to take care of us and not vice-versa. And yet he wants me to act out my role of the daughter-in-law. This script that we follow is so laden with expectations on both sides, sometimes it exhausts me, unraveling the nuances of each action, each question asked or not asked, and weighing the correct response.
In the beginning, we started with grand gestures. I was over the moon, and prepared to adapt to their world, to learn Korean and act as Korean as I could. I listened with sympathy to KC’s stories of his father’s life, which emerged slowly, one by one, as we cuddled and grew closer night after night. These were family matters, family tragedies, not to be shared with just anyone. When the Korean War began in 1950, KC’s father was only 18, and he and his younger siblings were stuck on one side of the bridge while his parents were on the other. His family was split not only physically but ideologically: KC’s grandfather had been a prominant landowner and member of the aristocracy, making the family an enemy of the Communists; KC’s father’s second brother was a general in the Communist army, making the Nationalists suspicious of the family. KC’s father, suddenly forced to care for his four younger siblings (his youngest brother was just a baby) with no money, went to friends for help, but most were too afraid to help him. He was thrown in an internment camp and sentenced to death, but escaped that punishment at the last minute through some technicality. He briefly saw his mother in the internment camp, but never found out what happened to her, or his father. After the war KC’s father worked odd jobs to survive and raise his siblings. He married, but still under suspicion by the then dictatorial “democratic” regime because of his brother’s Communism, he was under surveillance by the KIA (Korean CIA). His wife died of breast cancer when KC was 11, and lost KC’s sister several years later. Only in recent years, since the government has become less repressive, do KC’s father and aunts and uncles gather carefully together to celebrate holidays and birthday. And that’s just some of it... How much more can one family deal with? It was easy to feel sympathy from afar, for my heart to go out to a person with such a hard life, whose life has brought little happiness and much struggle. I understand where his annoying idiosyncrasies come from, and to some extent admired the strength and determination which allowed him to survive so much. I intended to be a balm for them in their old age, to serve them and make their lives easy, to be the daughter-in-law they had hoped for. It was too late to change them, I thought. It is not my place to try to convert them to feminism. I could be a feminist and still be a good daughter-in-law, I thought. I understood that I was not just a daughter-in-law, I was KC’s wife.
KC -- the pride and joy of his father’s life -- the fruit of all his pain -- the one who went to the U.S., the one who got his PhD from Stanford, the one who got married and had two sons. I know how much KC’s successes mean to him. I understand that he can’t normally express happiness or live in the moment because his whole life has been one back-stabbing after another, a constant struggle to prepare for the next blow. He has survived because he has trained himself to look gift-horses in the mouth, to prepare for the worst-case scenario, to be wary of the powerful and always, always, to push and prepare his son.
But his son lives in a different world. KC’s father was only able to finish high school because of the war. KC has a PhD. KC has lived in the US for 18 years, apart from his family.
KC has come back to Korea now, an act which excites and disturbs his father to no end. To have lived 18 years without your own children, with few relatives in this world -- how does that feel? To be alone as you grow old, seeing your friends with their own grandchildren, having nothing to fill the time. But, for KC’s father, the U.S. represented freedom, safety, and success. Freedom from the government of Korea (which he still doesn’t trust) and the burden of the family history; safety from war; success in education and business.
Although I didn’t cook and didn’t do much cleaning, my in-laws treated me as they felt a daughter-in-law should be treated. My mother-in-law bought me nice clothes and suits, and put make-up on my face as she would a little doll. She used her savings to buy me a Cartier watch and three sets of jewelry (diamond, sapphire, and ruby) as wedding gifts. I was shocked by this generosity: this may be common in Korea, but I don’t even wear jewelry. What was I to do with such gifts? They were beyond my style of living and incomprehensible to me.
This unexpected generosity caused the first of many subtle negotiations between our parents. My in-laws assumed that such gift-giving was traditional in China as well, as indeed I believe it is. But my parents, though raised in China, had very practical American wedding expectations. The gave us some money and one of their old cars to use, but of what use is jewelry? I had to diplomatically suggest to my mother that she buy KC a similar watch, so the families could consider themselves even. These things are not logical: even though both families think of themselves as open-minded and generous, in the back of their minds the demon of “are they looking down upon us?” lurks. Each gesture, each word is interpreted differently, so even though we think we’re on the same page, often we’re not.
Our parents’ first meeting, two days before the wedding, illustrates this perfectly. We chose a steakhouse as a “neutral” location. My mother wore a nice suit; KC’s mother wore a dress and shiny jewelry. Our waiter, who looked like a Iowa farmboy, broke the ice; he had spent 4 years teaching English in Korea and spoke Korean quite well. “What, you don’t speak Chinese?” joked my father. Turns out he spoke some Chinese too. Both sets of parents smiled woodenly, eyes wandering, wondering where to look, fiddling with their silverware. KC hurriedly ordered some wine.
Wine glass in hand, KC’s father gave the first toast. “gombei!” (“cheers”). Unfortunately, in Chinese, “ganbei” means you have to drain your glass. My father, in surprise, drained his glass; my father-in-law, seeing this, quickly followed suit. Glasses were refilled, my father-in-law offering another “gombei”; miscommunication again draining both glasses and ushering in drunkeness. My father-in-law’s English suddenly improved and soon he and my father were crudely communicating by writing Chinese characters on a napkin. My father refilled my father-in-law’s glass, suggesting “no ganbei this time.” Finally the varying meaning of “ganbei” in the two languages is discovered and everyone had a good sloshy laugh.
We gotten beyond the formulaic greetings and are now heading out the door to the car. My father-in-law, hating any waste of time, has already taken off down the hall taking some recycling with him. I hate taking out the garbage but I know, or at least believe, one of the reasons he so ostentatiously takes out some of our garbage every time he visits is to make a point about a.) how efficiently he uses his time and b.) how slovenly we are. The boys and my mother-in-law follow slowly behind him, Max stopping to try out all the neighbors’ bikes in the hall, Aiden having to return to the apartment because he realizes he has to pee, even though I asked him not 5 minutes ago and he said he didn’t have to go.
In the car I am nervous; I am still not used to driving in Seoul, and having my in-laws in the car makes me more nervous. My father-in-law is the worse kind of backseat driver, suddenly yelling, “stop stop!” or dramatically drawing in his breath; otherwise offering helpful advice, “you don’t have your hands at 10:00 and 2:00 -- that’s why you turn so clumsily.”
The conversation turns to Aiden’s taekwondo. I used to take him to class, but after Max’s birth, KC’s father took over that job. I was grateful to them for their help, though I missed seeing for myself what was going on. The things that I would see as important were not the same things that KC’s father would see. Aiden had been unhappy at taekwondo recently, and I had finally found out that his instructor had changed, and that he didn’t like the new instructor as much as the old one. I am annoyed that KC’s father didn’t mention this to me. I ask KC’s father, “Why didn’t you mention me that his instructor changed?” This is not a rude question in English, but unfortunately I translate it directly into Korean, not realizing that this particular phrasing sound rude and accusatory. KC’s father explodes at me. “What am I, your servant boy?” He recovers quickly, realizing by my face that I had not intentionally meant to be rude. He tries to cover up by giving me a lecture on my tone and phrasing. But I am shocked by his anger, and angry myself. I WAS annoyed, and was not trying to be really polite, but I wasn’t trying to be rude either. I’m doing my best here. I don’t HAVE to speak Korean. Of course I will make mistakes. His lecture only makes me angrier. I’m not Korean, why should I bow and smile and mimic subserviance? How Korean do you want me to be?
In a few moments our years of small eruptions, of assumptions and miscommunications and good intentions, of small pricks and simmering frustrations has emerged like lava from a volcano, rushing towards the surface, filling the car with its suffocating smoke.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
KCisms
"does this haircut make me look viral?" (virile)
"OK, smarty panty"
"that's my athletic foot" (athlete's foot)
"survival of the fitness"
"OK, smarty panty"
"that's my athletic foot" (athlete's foot)
"survival of the fitness"
Thursday, June 29, 2006
thanks
Thanks to all of you who have sent me e-mail and told me you're reading this... everyone needs an audience, whether the audience is your mom, your boss, God, Tim Gunn, or the Jones next door. Audiences keep us fighting entropy, keep us from sinking into midnight chocolate binges, trashy novels and overdoses of reality TV.
I'm teaching some 9-year olds these days, about which I have another post in progress. But I told their moms that my main goal is to make them producers and not just consumers -- as they read, I want them to keep asking questions, to think creatively about the world, to make cartoons and journal entries and web pages and funny pamplets. So I am trying to take my own advice here and be like a kid again, making stuff. Making stuff only my mom would hang on the refrigerator, but perhaps it'll save me from slothdom.
I'm teaching some 9-year olds these days, about which I have another post in progress. But I told their moms that my main goal is to make them producers and not just consumers -- as they read, I want them to keep asking questions, to think creatively about the world, to make cartoons and journal entries and web pages and funny pamplets. So I am trying to take my own advice here and be like a kid again, making stuff. Making stuff only my mom would hang on the refrigerator, but perhaps it'll save me from slothdom.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Fear
I remember a few years back, after we had moved to Korea, flipping channels to find something interesting to watch and coming across a horrible episode of the Oprah Winfrey show. The episode was about a boy who had been murdered in a bathroom while on a trip with his family to some park or campground. His aunt had taken him to the bathroom, but since he was 9, he didn’t want to go in the women’s bathroom with her, so she took him to the men’s bathroom and stood outside the door while he went in. While he was in the bathroom a man stabbed him to death. Having children of my own, this was so awful to listen to that I can barely write the words even now. But perhaps worse than that was the conclusion that Oprah and the other members drew -- that we all, as parents, should never let our children go to the bathroom by themselves, even if they are 9 years old and don’t want to go to the women’s bathroom. Even if other women don’t like having older boys in the women’s bathroom. We must control all sources of risk, without sense of proportion. And it is the mothers/parents who are responsible, individually, for protecting the children.
When I hear things about the US these days, and when I visit, I feel like the U.S. is becoming a culture of fear, obsessed with prophylactics. But somehow the prophylactics start as “shoulds” and “don’ts” -- admonishments and cautions to be internalized by all responsible individuals -- and end up as laws, part of the system that holds us all into place and governs individual behaviors. Seat belt laws, smoking laws, leash laws, laws about bringing peanuts to school. Everything, it feels to me, is put upon the individual or the legal system. There’s no sense of the social body, of the whole “it takes a village” community. People are so scared to tell others how to be behave or think that every admonishment, every piece of advice, has to be prefaced by some horror story of “I know someone who died because...” or it has to be law.
I feel this so strongly every time I enter the U.S. because Korea is so different. In the winter, kids go “sledding” on a patch of ice near our apartment, but it is not downhill sledding. The kids sit on a square piece of wood and push themselves around with sticks that have nails in the end to provide a point to stick in the ice. When I first saw that -- and remember that in Seoul any place is a crowded place -- I thought, “my god, someone’s going to get an eye poked out!” This would NEVER fly in the U.S. And for good reason. But there’s lots of that stuff going on, and people watch out and tell the kids what to do. That doesn’t mean that accidents don’t occur (and perhaps this was not the best example) but the point is that the knee jerk reaction here is not to put all the onus on the individual or on the law, but rather on the group of people involved in a collective sense.
I went to a talk at an American Women’s Club meeting last year, and the speaker (Michael Breen who wrote The Koreans) said something about how Korea has very low trust. And I disagree -- I think you have to make a distinction. Koreans don’t trust the government and people in power (with good reason... hard memories of the colonial era, of Park Chung-Hee, etc.) but they trust other people in general, even strangers. On the other hand, it seems to me, Americans don’t trust strangers but they, in general, trust authority figures and the government. In Korea, people don’t drink the water even though the government says the water is drinkable, because nobody believes the government. But if a few ajumas say that doing taekwondo at an early age stunts growth, somehow a lot of people believe that. (Before you all jump all over me I do realize I’m conflating a bunch of social groups here... what and who ajumas believe is different than young people, men, educated people, etc...And I’m also ignoring the fact that almost anything on TV is taken as fact by many many people.) In the U.S., my sense is that even if we believe that President Bush is stupid, we have faith in the system that supports him, so that when he says something like “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” we tend to believe him. (And apparently people STILL believe that, which is very scary indeed.) But if some stranger at the check-out counter told you that gymnastics stunts a kid’s growth you’d probably ask your doctor before you disenrolled your kid from Marva tots. (As I write this I’m thinking of how the system in Korea DOESN’T support itself... you couldn’t ask your doctor about the taekwondo argument because you only have 5 minutes to talk to him during your kid’s annual checkup.)
Now, my perspective is skewed for many reasons. First, because my mother is a total control freak and plans her life around minimizing risk. “Don’t drive on the beltway, Jennifer, it’s too dangerous. Always park in the same space at the mall so you don’t lose your car. Leave for the airport 3 hours ahead of time just in case. Throw it away if it’s past the expiration date.” etc. etc... Maybe she should have her own talk show. She can tell a lot of horror stories about e. coli and traffic accidents. She spends so much time minimizing her risks (and mine too) I'm not sure she has time to live her life. (Ma, hope you’re not reading this...)
And also, Korea feels a lot safer than the U.S. I don’t know if it is safer, but it feels that way. Of course, I don’t understand all of the news. And perhaps some of the bad stuff is underrported. Or perhaps it is overreported or sensationalized in the U.S. It’s funny, how differently people see danger. When I mentioned to someone in the U.S. that I live in Korea, she said, “Oh my, aren’t you afraid living so close to North Korea? I’ve been reading such scary things about that place.” And I told her that I don’t really think about it, and that to me and many people here, life in the U.S. is scarier -- all we hear about are school shootings, kidnappings, terror alerts, rapes, inner city crime.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Do one thing every day that scares you." It is one thing to be cautious, but where is the line between caution and having one's life regulated by fear?
When I hear things about the US these days, and when I visit, I feel like the U.S. is becoming a culture of fear, obsessed with prophylactics. But somehow the prophylactics start as “shoulds” and “don’ts” -- admonishments and cautions to be internalized by all responsible individuals -- and end up as laws, part of the system that holds us all into place and governs individual behaviors. Seat belt laws, smoking laws, leash laws, laws about bringing peanuts to school. Everything, it feels to me, is put upon the individual or the legal system. There’s no sense of the social body, of the whole “it takes a village” community. People are so scared to tell others how to be behave or think that every admonishment, every piece of advice, has to be prefaced by some horror story of “I know someone who died because...” or it has to be law.
I feel this so strongly every time I enter the U.S. because Korea is so different. In the winter, kids go “sledding” on a patch of ice near our apartment, but it is not downhill sledding. The kids sit on a square piece of wood and push themselves around with sticks that have nails in the end to provide a point to stick in the ice. When I first saw that -- and remember that in Seoul any place is a crowded place -- I thought, “my god, someone’s going to get an eye poked out!” This would NEVER fly in the U.S. And for good reason. But there’s lots of that stuff going on, and people watch out and tell the kids what to do. That doesn’t mean that accidents don’t occur (and perhaps this was not the best example) but the point is that the knee jerk reaction here is not to put all the onus on the individual or on the law, but rather on the group of people involved in a collective sense.
I went to a talk at an American Women’s Club meeting last year, and the speaker (Michael Breen who wrote The Koreans) said something about how Korea has very low trust. And I disagree -- I think you have to make a distinction. Koreans don’t trust the government and people in power (with good reason... hard memories of the colonial era, of Park Chung-Hee, etc.) but they trust other people in general, even strangers. On the other hand, it seems to me, Americans don’t trust strangers but they, in general, trust authority figures and the government. In Korea, people don’t drink the water even though the government says the water is drinkable, because nobody believes the government. But if a few ajumas say that doing taekwondo at an early age stunts growth, somehow a lot of people believe that. (Before you all jump all over me I do realize I’m conflating a bunch of social groups here... what and who ajumas believe is different than young people, men, educated people, etc...And I’m also ignoring the fact that almost anything on TV is taken as fact by many many people.) In the U.S., my sense is that even if we believe that President Bush is stupid, we have faith in the system that supports him, so that when he says something like “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” we tend to believe him. (And apparently people STILL believe that, which is very scary indeed.) But if some stranger at the check-out counter told you that gymnastics stunts a kid’s growth you’d probably ask your doctor before you disenrolled your kid from Marva tots. (As I write this I’m thinking of how the system in Korea DOESN’T support itself... you couldn’t ask your doctor about the taekwondo argument because you only have 5 minutes to talk to him during your kid’s annual checkup.)
Now, my perspective is skewed for many reasons. First, because my mother is a total control freak and plans her life around minimizing risk. “Don’t drive on the beltway, Jennifer, it’s too dangerous. Always park in the same space at the mall so you don’t lose your car. Leave for the airport 3 hours ahead of time just in case. Throw it away if it’s past the expiration date.” etc. etc... Maybe she should have her own talk show. She can tell a lot of horror stories about e. coli and traffic accidents. She spends so much time minimizing her risks (and mine too) I'm not sure she has time to live her life. (Ma, hope you’re not reading this...)
And also, Korea feels a lot safer than the U.S. I don’t know if it is safer, but it feels that way. Of course, I don’t understand all of the news. And perhaps some of the bad stuff is underrported. Or perhaps it is overreported or sensationalized in the U.S. It’s funny, how differently people see danger. When I mentioned to someone in the U.S. that I live in Korea, she said, “Oh my, aren’t you afraid living so close to North Korea? I’ve been reading such scary things about that place.” And I told her that I don’t really think about it, and that to me and many people here, life in the U.S. is scarier -- all we hear about are school shootings, kidnappings, terror alerts, rapes, inner city crime.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Do one thing every day that scares you." It is one thing to be cautious, but where is the line between caution and having one's life regulated by fear?
Monday, June 26, 2006
Whack-a-mole
I haven’t updated this blog for almost two weeks. I have actually been writing... just nothing of high enough quality to put up here. And my standards are pretty low. I wonder: is my schizophrenic way of writing these days a product of our media saturated, channel-flipping culture? Or just a product of the way I increasingly multi-task through my own life?
If I step back and think, I can’t believe I am suddenly thrity something with two kids. White hair count: 3. Those of you who know me as a parent know that with one kid, I was still on top of things, I could do my PhD work at night while nursing Aiden every two hours and raise Aiden during the day and almost never let him watch TV and only be minimally crazy. Of course I had many accidents melting breast pumps and putting watches through the laundry and bumping into door frames (damn those things, why do they MOVE so?) but those are the logical consequences of sleep deprivation.
But with two kids, even without a PhD committee regularly e-mailing me about how I’m a delinquent, I find myself playing whack-a-mole. You know that game, where moles pop out of holes at random times, and you have to whack them with a big puffy hammer? Well, that’s what having two kids is like. Mommy, he’s hitting me! Mommy, where is Anakin’s light saber? Mommy, Max peed on the floor! Mommy, I’m hungry!
So I finally get why people let their kids watch TV. I’m trying to make dinner and the sword fighting is producing too many casualties in the living room and I turn on the Little Einsteins and ABRACADABRA! Quiet. Peace. Dinner is served. Once you’ve gotten a taste for that magic bullet it is hard to put it aside and put on your referee pants again.
So during the day, I rarely have a complete thought. Our conversations (when KC is around) are always like this:
Me: Aiden has 2 cavities. It’s going to cost 300,000 won to...
Aiden: Mommy! Max hit me!
KC: wow, is that for just a filling or is the nerve..
Me: Aiden, did you hear how you interrupted mommy? Say sorry. It’s for the filling. He can’t tell from he X-
Ray if it’s hitting the nerve or not, it’s too close, so they..
Aiden: sorry mommy.
Max: nurt!
Me: they have to start to drill and look...
Max: NURT! NURT!!
Me: Max, use your nice words.
Max: Nurt peez.
KC: OK. Oh shoot, I forgot to tell you, I ..
Aiden: Mommy, who is stronger, Anakin or Count Dooku?
Me: Aiden, did you hear how you interrupted...
Aiden: sorry Daddy.
KC: I forgot what I was going to say.
It’s hard to have a conversation... and keep track of the important things which were on my mind. It is equally hard to keep track of the single thoughts that run through my head. I find myself going into the kitchen for something... and forgetting what it was. One day I lost a carton of milk. How can you lose a carton of milk? By the time I found it it had gone bad.
When I finally have a moment to myself it’s like being a kid in the candy aisle again. When I was a kid we were only allowed to have candy once a week, on Saturday, so my brothers and I would spend a lot of time deliberating: which one will last the longest? Which one can I tear into little pieces to spread the pleasure over several hours? Now, when I have “free” time, I want it to count. I want to vegetate and watch TV, but that would be a waste. I want to write, but ideas don’t come that easily, and if I am staring at a blank screen for a few minutes, I feel I’m wasting precious time when I could be studying Chinese or making treasure hunts or doing Pilates. This is why I have a hundred incomplete files of ideas... fragments, fleeting thoughts, momentary inspirations, flirtations with serious writing.
And there’s always the threat looming in my mind... that once I get going Max will wake up to “nurt” or the North Koreans will attack or something.
So I’m sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, sweating nervously, because Max will wake up at any minute and I have 4 windows of essays open, plus my e-mail (which is already on a triage system -- my inbox is pushing 800 messages -- yikes!), plus I’m bidding on things on eBay, and googling girls I hated in junior high (note to self: stay away from google. It doesn’t tell you anything you want to know. I tried googling myself and all I learned was that there is a porn star named Jennifer Lee who is apparently much more popular than I)...
And in the back of my mind: Am I living it right?
But now Max is awake so these thoughts must be put aside again.
If I step back and think, I can’t believe I am suddenly thrity something with two kids. White hair count: 3. Those of you who know me as a parent know that with one kid, I was still on top of things, I could do my PhD work at night while nursing Aiden every two hours and raise Aiden during the day and almost never let him watch TV and only be minimally crazy. Of course I had many accidents melting breast pumps and putting watches through the laundry and bumping into door frames (damn those things, why do they MOVE so?) but those are the logical consequences of sleep deprivation.
But with two kids, even without a PhD committee regularly e-mailing me about how I’m a delinquent, I find myself playing whack-a-mole. You know that game, where moles pop out of holes at random times, and you have to whack them with a big puffy hammer? Well, that’s what having two kids is like. Mommy, he’s hitting me! Mommy, where is Anakin’s light saber? Mommy, Max peed on the floor! Mommy, I’m hungry!
So I finally get why people let their kids watch TV. I’m trying to make dinner and the sword fighting is producing too many casualties in the living room and I turn on the Little Einsteins and ABRACADABRA! Quiet. Peace. Dinner is served. Once you’ve gotten a taste for that magic bullet it is hard to put it aside and put on your referee pants again.
So during the day, I rarely have a complete thought. Our conversations (when KC is around) are always like this:
Me: Aiden has 2 cavities. It’s going to cost 300,000 won to...
Aiden: Mommy! Max hit me!
KC: wow, is that for just a filling or is the nerve..
Me: Aiden, did you hear how you interrupted mommy? Say sorry. It’s for the filling. He can’t tell from he X-
Ray if it’s hitting the nerve or not, it’s too close, so they..
Aiden: sorry mommy.
Max: nurt!
Me: they have to start to drill and look...
Max: NURT! NURT!!
Me: Max, use your nice words.
Max: Nurt peez.
KC: OK. Oh shoot, I forgot to tell you, I ..
Aiden: Mommy, who is stronger, Anakin or Count Dooku?
Me: Aiden, did you hear how you interrupted...
Aiden: sorry Daddy.
KC: I forgot what I was going to say.
It’s hard to have a conversation... and keep track of the important things which were on my mind. It is equally hard to keep track of the single thoughts that run through my head. I find myself going into the kitchen for something... and forgetting what it was. One day I lost a carton of milk. How can you lose a carton of milk? By the time I found it it had gone bad.
When I finally have a moment to myself it’s like being a kid in the candy aisle again. When I was a kid we were only allowed to have candy once a week, on Saturday, so my brothers and I would spend a lot of time deliberating: which one will last the longest? Which one can I tear into little pieces to spread the pleasure over several hours? Now, when I have “free” time, I want it to count. I want to vegetate and watch TV, but that would be a waste. I want to write, but ideas don’t come that easily, and if I am staring at a blank screen for a few minutes, I feel I’m wasting precious time when I could be studying Chinese or making treasure hunts or doing Pilates. This is why I have a hundred incomplete files of ideas... fragments, fleeting thoughts, momentary inspirations, flirtations with serious writing.
And there’s always the threat looming in my mind... that once I get going Max will wake up to “nurt” or the North Koreans will attack or something.
So I’m sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, sweating nervously, because Max will wake up at any minute and I have 4 windows of essays open, plus my e-mail (which is already on a triage system -- my inbox is pushing 800 messages -- yikes!), plus I’m bidding on things on eBay, and googling girls I hated in junior high (note to self: stay away from google. It doesn’t tell you anything you want to know. I tried googling myself and all I learned was that there is a porn star named Jennifer Lee who is apparently much more popular than I)...
And in the back of my mind: Am I living it right?
But now Max is awake so these thoughts must be put aside again.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Go Reds
I'm sitting at home at 11pm watching the Korea v. Togo game and the Korean team just made a goal. The apartment is vibrating with people stomping and screaming, "Dae Han Min Gook!" Reminds me to the primal scream at Stanford. I can hear people screaming from other buildings too.
Stories to embarass Aiden when he's older...#4
Aiden is like a teenager sometimes. He believes his illiterate little friends and discounts what his mommy says, leading to some bizarre beliefs.
But sometimes it’s a matter of choosing which adult to believe. In these cases, he bases his beliefs on height.
One day he came home and urgently asked me, “Mommy, who is taller, you or Teacher Leo?”
His thinking goes like this: the older you are the taller you get, and the older you are the smarter you are, therefore the taller you are the smarter you are. KC likes this argument because it means he’s smarter than I.
But sometimes it’s a matter of choosing which adult to believe. In these cases, he bases his beliefs on height.
One day he came home and urgently asked me, “Mommy, who is taller, you or Teacher Leo?”
His thinking goes like this: the older you are the taller you get, and the older you are the smarter you are, therefore the taller you are the smarter you are. KC likes this argument because it means he’s smarter than I.
Stories to embarass Aiden when he's older...#3
Little boys like to keep a handle on their penises at all times. I guess it is a nice thing to hold on to, much like I twirl my hair when nervous or bored. My friend Albertine always said playing with one’s hair was a form of masturbation.
Anyway. One day we were all eating breakfast, KC and I were talking about something or other, and Aiden was sitting quietly, one hand gripping his spoon and the other playing with himself through his underwear.
Suddenly, Aiden said, alarmed, “Daddy! There’s SOMETHING HERE!”
KC was cool. I would have laughed. He calmly explained that what he was feeling was completely natural, and look! Here's another one. "These are your balls. Can you say balls?"
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Body Language: adventures in learning Korean
I’ve been wanting to write something about the irony that when I began learning Korean, I had to rely on body language to communicate, but now that my Korean is good, my body language is a liability. My facial expressions and the way I gesture gets me into trouble by adding strange and unintended nuance to what I’m saying. And because my Korean is good, people react unconsciously to the gestures and think I’m angry or disturbed or acting very mannish. It doesn’t happen all the time, but enough to burst my little bubble of Korean-speaking confidence. This is another essay (actually just one version of it-- I’ve written about 20 drafts and this is somewhere in the middle) that I’ve been trying to work on, but it seems to be going in a bunch of different directions so I haven’t finished it. Some drafts end up talking more about power, some about anger and frustration, some about the way that language is taught, some about how our bodies do communications duty for us, consciously or unconsciously, every day. I’d appreciate any comments, here or by e-mail...
-------------------
The noisy garrulousness of my two boys has become supplemented by the noisiness of body language. I’m teaching 10-month old Max some baby signs to help him communicate as he delivers his first misshapen words and Aiden is learning a little sign language in school. “Mommy,” he informed me with perfect seriousness, “Some people can’t talk, so they use their hands.” To my little boy, who speaks perfect English and Korean, as well as a “little bit of Shanghai and Tokyo,” and who is almost never quiet, even in his sleep, silence must be the most frustrating and confusing state of being.
Aiden, highly vocal, struggles to make meaning out of gesture as he practices his sign language. Max, on the other hand, substitutes his ever-handy chubby pointer finger and a universal “guh” for pretty much any request: point and “guh”: I want that. I want to go there. Feed me that. I want to be held. I watch the boys as I’m studying my Korean vocabulary, and suddenly I see myself now, and at the beginning of my journey learning Korean.
On my first trip to Seoul, when I met my future in-laws, I communicated so much with smiling and bowing that my face and back were almost always sore. Not having the means to understand the conversations around me, I focused on sitting up straight and keeping my knees together. Out on the street and away from the in-laws’ gaze, I quickly became fluent in pointing, nodding, and raising my eyebrows. Luckily I had more than my pointer finger at my disposal; calculators, maps, dictionaries, and drawings become new appendages, as indispensable as my right thumb. The crux of a conversation became distilled into one momentary gesture – the wave of a hand, a sudden smile of recognition, the shake of a head, a look of confusion. So much of my emotion, experience, and consciousness became unsayable, inexpressible. My education, the subtle nuances of my personality, were erased. I had no choice but to communicate with my body, but because I had no language, all was forgiven. Like a baby, I could only communicate crudely with the tools I had.
Now the situation is different. The other day I was striding around the city, realizing I had been studying Korean off and on for almost 10 years and feeling finally smug and confident in my life here in Seoul. I stopped to buy fruit from a man on the street near my apartment. But between his dialect and my head cold I couldn’t figure out exactly what he was saying. I furrowed my brow to show my confusion and said, “네?" He responded, but again I couldn’t understand. I furrowed my brow and frowned and said “네?" again. To my surprise, he became agitated, defensive and angry, and yelled something at me. Baffled by this whole exchange, I ran home to call my husband.
“Oh yeah, that’s really offensive,” he said.
“What is?” I asked, exasperated.
“When you scrunch up your face and say ‘네?’ like that,” he said, like it was obvious. “To a Korean you look like you’re angry or in a bad mood or something.”
“What???? Why didn’t you tell me before?” I said, thinking, geez, how long have I been walking around offending people without knowing?
“Well before, people couldn’t understand what you were saying. Now your Korean is good and you have problems with nuance.”
The problem, I realize now, is with body language. When studying Korean in the States all those years, I was focused on grammar and vocabulary, sentence structure and levels of politeness -- I learned to speak and forgot that communication is about more than language. Now, like Aiden, I need to learn how to speak with word and gesture.
When I think about it, I learned Korean in two distinct cultural milieus: with Korean Americans, and with my husband’s geeky Korean friends.
When I returned to the States after my first trip to Korea, I was very ambitious and decided to add a Korean class to my already-full class schedule. Little did I know that the class would be all Korean-Americans, who for the most part spoke Korean pretty well -- well enough to amuse the class with pull-my-finger jokes, drinking anecdotes, and bilingual jokes (why is Korean tissue bigger than American tissue? Because it’s 휴지(hugee)!). Although we were speaking a different language, we were all firmly planted in the same American college culture, with a mostly common sense of humor and common body of knowledge.
My other source of Korean knowledge came from hanging out with my husband’s mostly male friends -- Koreans (from Korea) getting graduate degrees in computer science. Their conversations were always of the formula: “blah blah blah compiler blah blah blah java [drag on cigarette] blah blah [shot of soju] C++ blah blah…” so even though I knew next to no Korean I could still follow what they said. In this setting, even knowing the somewhat tedious subject of their conversation (at that time, the hot topic was C++ vs. Java and which courses to take) I felt I had entered into a mysterious society of bows and gestures -- friendships were cemented over the proper positioning of one’s glass relative to another’s, turning one’s head to take a shot, all sorts of titles and names, and careful attention to filling someone else’s cup.
Korean, as a language, has a great deal of subtle expressions of formality and emotion built into it. KC’s officemates used to think that he never said goodbye, because his conversations always came to an abrupt halt. There was none of the “ok... long pause...well... sounds good... talk to you later... bye... bye” that you often hear signal the end of an English conversation. Korean intonation, which sounds mostly flat at first, is also very subtle and gives me problems. When I’m trying to sound definite and confident I end up sounding aggressive and defiant, especially for a woman, but that’s what happens when your formative language years are spent with a bunch of drunken guys who firmly believe in the merits of Java.
But gesture is equally subtle. My friends always complain that my mother-in-law never smiles or changes expression, and I think that most Americans’ initial impression of Koreans is that they’re emotionally stiff and hard to read. After two years here I’ve gotten used to this and was surprised, upon returning to the U.S., at how much people’s facial contortions irked me. Watching Julia Roberts, or even my mother, tell a story made my own face hurt.
The other day my father-in-law offers to help me carry something and I tell him, with serious expression, quinchanayo (it’s ok) firmly, with a rising second syllable, to indicate that I’m sure, but to him this intonation sounds aggressive and annoyed. Even though my accent is good my American inflection and facial expression imbues the sentence with an unintended meaning. Or, another time, upon finding out that my son’s taekwondo instructor had been changed, I directly translate, “Why didn’t you tell me?” to “왜 얘기 하지않으셨어요?" which, unfortunately, is a very rude way to phrase the question in Korean, although it’s OK in English. Even though my father-in-law is well aware that I am not Korean, he reacts unconsciously with a burst of anger, “What am I, your errand boy?” It’s at moments like these that I despair of ever being able to speak Korean truly well.
And the the frustration turns to anger. Defiantly, I think, “how Korean do you want me to be?” I’m not Korean. I’m doing my best. I’m American, and I’m a smart, strong woman, and I don’t need to conform to your stereotypes. I’ve come here to live in another culture, spent years studying the language, am raising my boys straddled across a cultural divide. Don’t push me. I don’t HAVE to speak Korean. I don’t HAVE to try to assimilate. I can easily be a loud, pushy American. Don’t. Piss. Me. Off.
Speaking Korean gives me power -- power to move freely in this place, power to win the respect of strangers. If I could master Korean nuance perfectly I could have more power. I could speak like a Korean woman, sounding submissive and plaintive at the right times in order to get what I want, but to get this power I would have to give up some long-standing sense of American feminist behavior.
All these adventures in learning Korean has made me realize that learning a language not just about learning words and grammar or even culture, but it’s about learning to conform to certain available roles and expectations. We all have a certain freedom within those roles and rules, but at some point, you hit unconscious habits and walls. Our bodies do communications duty for us every day, with or without our consent.
-------------------
The noisy garrulousness of my two boys has become supplemented by the noisiness of body language. I’m teaching 10-month old Max some baby signs to help him communicate as he delivers his first misshapen words and Aiden is learning a little sign language in school. “Mommy,” he informed me with perfect seriousness, “Some people can’t talk, so they use their hands.” To my little boy, who speaks perfect English and Korean, as well as a “little bit of Shanghai and Tokyo,” and who is almost never quiet, even in his sleep, silence must be the most frustrating and confusing state of being.
Aiden, highly vocal, struggles to make meaning out of gesture as he practices his sign language. Max, on the other hand, substitutes his ever-handy chubby pointer finger and a universal “guh” for pretty much any request: point and “guh”: I want that. I want to go there. Feed me that. I want to be held. I watch the boys as I’m studying my Korean vocabulary, and suddenly I see myself now, and at the beginning of my journey learning Korean.
On my first trip to Seoul, when I met my future in-laws, I communicated so much with smiling and bowing that my face and back were almost always sore. Not having the means to understand the conversations around me, I focused on sitting up straight and keeping my knees together. Out on the street and away from the in-laws’ gaze, I quickly became fluent in pointing, nodding, and raising my eyebrows. Luckily I had more than my pointer finger at my disposal; calculators, maps, dictionaries, and drawings become new appendages, as indispensable as my right thumb. The crux of a conversation became distilled into one momentary gesture – the wave of a hand, a sudden smile of recognition, the shake of a head, a look of confusion. So much of my emotion, experience, and consciousness became unsayable, inexpressible. My education, the subtle nuances of my personality, were erased. I had no choice but to communicate with my body, but because I had no language, all was forgiven. Like a baby, I could only communicate crudely with the tools I had.
Now the situation is different. The other day I was striding around the city, realizing I had been studying Korean off and on for almost 10 years and feeling finally smug and confident in my life here in Seoul. I stopped to buy fruit from a man on the street near my apartment. But between his dialect and my head cold I couldn’t figure out exactly what he was saying. I furrowed my brow to show my confusion and said, “네?" He responded, but again I couldn’t understand. I furrowed my brow and frowned and said “네?" again. To my surprise, he became agitated, defensive and angry, and yelled something at me. Baffled by this whole exchange, I ran home to call my husband.
“Oh yeah, that’s really offensive,” he said.
“What is?” I asked, exasperated.
“When you scrunch up your face and say ‘네?’ like that,” he said, like it was obvious. “To a Korean you look like you’re angry or in a bad mood or something.”
“What???? Why didn’t you tell me before?” I said, thinking, geez, how long have I been walking around offending people without knowing?
“Well before, people couldn’t understand what you were saying. Now your Korean is good and you have problems with nuance.”
The problem, I realize now, is with body language. When studying Korean in the States all those years, I was focused on grammar and vocabulary, sentence structure and levels of politeness -- I learned to speak and forgot that communication is about more than language. Now, like Aiden, I need to learn how to speak with word and gesture.
When I think about it, I learned Korean in two distinct cultural milieus: with Korean Americans, and with my husband’s geeky Korean friends.
When I returned to the States after my first trip to Korea, I was very ambitious and decided to add a Korean class to my already-full class schedule. Little did I know that the class would be all Korean-Americans, who for the most part spoke Korean pretty well -- well enough to amuse the class with pull-my-finger jokes, drinking anecdotes, and bilingual jokes (why is Korean tissue bigger than American tissue? Because it’s 휴지(hugee)!). Although we were speaking a different language, we were all firmly planted in the same American college culture, with a mostly common sense of humor and common body of knowledge.
My other source of Korean knowledge came from hanging out with my husband’s mostly male friends -- Koreans (from Korea) getting graduate degrees in computer science. Their conversations were always of the formula: “blah blah blah compiler blah blah blah java [drag on cigarette] blah blah [shot of soju] C++ blah blah…” so even though I knew next to no Korean I could still follow what they said. In this setting, even knowing the somewhat tedious subject of their conversation (at that time, the hot topic was C++ vs. Java and which courses to take) I felt I had entered into a mysterious society of bows and gestures -- friendships were cemented over the proper positioning of one’s glass relative to another’s, turning one’s head to take a shot, all sorts of titles and names, and careful attention to filling someone else’s cup.
Korean, as a language, has a great deal of subtle expressions of formality and emotion built into it. KC’s officemates used to think that he never said goodbye, because his conversations always came to an abrupt halt. There was none of the “ok... long pause...well... sounds good... talk to you later... bye... bye” that you often hear signal the end of an English conversation. Korean intonation, which sounds mostly flat at first, is also very subtle and gives me problems. When I’m trying to sound definite and confident I end up sounding aggressive and defiant, especially for a woman, but that’s what happens when your formative language years are spent with a bunch of drunken guys who firmly believe in the merits of Java.
But gesture is equally subtle. My friends always complain that my mother-in-law never smiles or changes expression, and I think that most Americans’ initial impression of Koreans is that they’re emotionally stiff and hard to read. After two years here I’ve gotten used to this and was surprised, upon returning to the U.S., at how much people’s facial contortions irked me. Watching Julia Roberts, or even my mother, tell a story made my own face hurt.
The other day my father-in-law offers to help me carry something and I tell him, with serious expression, quinchanayo (it’s ok) firmly, with a rising second syllable, to indicate that I’m sure, but to him this intonation sounds aggressive and annoyed. Even though my accent is good my American inflection and facial expression imbues the sentence with an unintended meaning. Or, another time, upon finding out that my son’s taekwondo instructor had been changed, I directly translate, “Why didn’t you tell me?” to “왜 얘기 하지않으셨어요?" which, unfortunately, is a very rude way to phrase the question in Korean, although it’s OK in English. Even though my father-in-law is well aware that I am not Korean, he reacts unconsciously with a burst of anger, “What am I, your errand boy?” It’s at moments like these that I despair of ever being able to speak Korean truly well.
And the the frustration turns to anger. Defiantly, I think, “how Korean do you want me to be?” I’m not Korean. I’m doing my best. I’m American, and I’m a smart, strong woman, and I don’t need to conform to your stereotypes. I’ve come here to live in another culture, spent years studying the language, am raising my boys straddled across a cultural divide. Don’t push me. I don’t HAVE to speak Korean. I don’t HAVE to try to assimilate. I can easily be a loud, pushy American. Don’t. Piss. Me. Off.
Speaking Korean gives me power -- power to move freely in this place, power to win the respect of strangers. If I could master Korean nuance perfectly I could have more power. I could speak like a Korean woman, sounding submissive and plaintive at the right times in order to get what I want, but to get this power I would have to give up some long-standing sense of American feminist behavior.
All these adventures in learning Korean has made me realize that learning a language not just about learning words and grammar or even culture, but it’s about learning to conform to certain available roles and expectations. We all have a certain freedom within those roles and rules, but at some point, you hit unconscious habits and walls. Our bodies do communications duty for us every day, with or without our consent.
Stories to embarrass Aiden... 2: fewer pain sensors
I had been talking up our trip to California for months, getting the boys all excited about going to the beach, going to Legoland, playing outside in the sunshine. The weather in Seoul was still bordering on winter and the kids where itching to hit the playground.
So they suffered through the long flight from Seoul to Tokyo and then Tokyo to LA. We rested in LA for a few hours then commenced our 6 hour drive to the Bay Area. We arrived to: RAIN.
Then we had a few hectic days of greeting friends and getting the kids measured for tuxes and other wedding preparations. All this time I kept promising them: “The sun will come out soon and we’ll go to the playground! This is California, after all.” Still more RAIN.
By this time, the kids were going nuts, dragged from one “let’s meet mommy and daddy’s old friends” meal to another. Finally, the sun came out for a few hours and we sprinted to the playground.
Aiden was like the tazmanian devil, throwing himself down slides and leaping off jungle gyms. He’s usually a pretty mellow kid, as 5-year-olds go, but he was on fire. It was like he had spent the last month in solitary confinement. One father of a toddler asked me, “uhh... is he always like this?”
One serious (and, I think, frightened) mommy’s comment: “I think that perhaps he has fewer pain sensors than most people.”
So they suffered through the long flight from Seoul to Tokyo and then Tokyo to LA. We rested in LA for a few hours then commenced our 6 hour drive to the Bay Area. We arrived to: RAIN.
Then we had a few hectic days of greeting friends and getting the kids measured for tuxes and other wedding preparations. All this time I kept promising them: “The sun will come out soon and we’ll go to the playground! This is California, after all.” Still more RAIN.
By this time, the kids were going nuts, dragged from one “let’s meet mommy and daddy’s old friends” meal to another. Finally, the sun came out for a few hours and we sprinted to the playground.
Aiden was like the tazmanian devil, throwing himself down slides and leaping off jungle gyms. He’s usually a pretty mellow kid, as 5-year-olds go, but he was on fire. It was like he had spent the last month in solitary confinement. One father of a toddler asked me, “uhh... is he always like this?”
One serious (and, I think, frightened) mommy’s comment: “I think that perhaps he has fewer pain sensors than most people.”
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Mysteries of Korea #1
KC and I recently joined a health club. We thought about joining the same health club about two years ago, but balked at the price. Then about a month ago we looked into it again, and thought, “Hey, that’s cheap!” The price hasn’t changed (except maybe to go up), but our conception of the price has.
We’ve been living in Seoul for almost 3 years now and the Korean economy is still a mystery to me. Food is outrageously expensive, and local produce is more expensive than imported produce. How is that possible? I used to spend 100 dollars a week on groceries in the US, to feed the three of us (KC, me, Aiden) three meals a day. Now, KC eats out two meals a day and Aiden eats out one meal a day, but I spend close to 100 dollars a week just on fruit. FRUIT!!! And I rarely buy meat or fish because it is too expensive. How is it that a country that is surrounded by water on three sides can have such expensive seafood?
And yet, if you order food (other than pizza -- pizza has cheese which is very expensive), this food is quite cheap, delicious, and is delivered free in a short time. Chinese food or kimpap, will arrive in 10-20 minutes and be cheaper than cooking yourself. Not only do these restaurants have to pay for real estate and ingredients, but they also have to employ delivery men. How do they stay afloat?
Same thing at the salon. Here I go to one of the nicer places to get a haircut, and it costs me 18 bucks. They have someone to wait on me and bring me tea while I wait, someone to wash my hair, someone to stand on the side while the guy is cutting my hair and hand him stuff (much like a nurse would for a surgeon), someone to dry my hair so the main guy doesn’t have to do it. And you don’t even tip!
Starbucks is the most expensive in Korea. A tall latte here is almost 4 dollars -- more expensive than in Tokyo. This is why whenever I go back to the US I always want to go have coffee.
People here make a smaller salary than in the US. Housing is ridiculously expensive (to buy or tiny apartment would cost you about $600,000 US), gas is 3 times higher than the US, and educational expenses are quite high. Hakwon (the tutoring institutions) which almost all kids attend are outrageously expensive -- and in competitive areas like where we live, many people spend $3,000 US a month on the kid’s education. How is this possible? And people are carrying around Louis Vuitton bags.
Well, I may be skulking around Seoul wearing my cheap Gap tee-shirt and sending my kid to taekwondo (only $80 a month), but on the other hand we travel to the US twice a year and China and other places as well... you can buy a lot of designer handbags for that cost. So I guess my own spending habits are as mysterious as everyone else’s.
We’ve been living in Seoul for almost 3 years now and the Korean economy is still a mystery to me. Food is outrageously expensive, and local produce is more expensive than imported produce. How is that possible? I used to spend 100 dollars a week on groceries in the US, to feed the three of us (KC, me, Aiden) three meals a day. Now, KC eats out two meals a day and Aiden eats out one meal a day, but I spend close to 100 dollars a week just on fruit. FRUIT!!! And I rarely buy meat or fish because it is too expensive. How is it that a country that is surrounded by water on three sides can have such expensive seafood?
And yet, if you order food (other than pizza -- pizza has cheese which is very expensive), this food is quite cheap, delicious, and is delivered free in a short time. Chinese food or kimpap, will arrive in 10-20 minutes and be cheaper than cooking yourself. Not only do these restaurants have to pay for real estate and ingredients, but they also have to employ delivery men. How do they stay afloat?
Same thing at the salon. Here I go to one of the nicer places to get a haircut, and it costs me 18 bucks. They have someone to wait on me and bring me tea while I wait, someone to wash my hair, someone to stand on the side while the guy is cutting my hair and hand him stuff (much like a nurse would for a surgeon), someone to dry my hair so the main guy doesn’t have to do it. And you don’t even tip!
Starbucks is the most expensive in Korea. A tall latte here is almost 4 dollars -- more expensive than in Tokyo. This is why whenever I go back to the US I always want to go have coffee.
People here make a smaller salary than in the US. Housing is ridiculously expensive (to buy or tiny apartment would cost you about $600,000 US), gas is 3 times higher than the US, and educational expenses are quite high. Hakwon (the tutoring institutions) which almost all kids attend are outrageously expensive -- and in competitive areas like where we live, many people spend $3,000 US a month on the kid’s education. How is this possible? And people are carrying around Louis Vuitton bags.
Well, I may be skulking around Seoul wearing my cheap Gap tee-shirt and sending my kid to taekwondo (only $80 a month), but on the other hand we travel to the US twice a year and China and other places as well... you can buy a lot of designer handbags for that cost. So I guess my own spending habits are as mysterious as everyone else’s.
Stories to embarass Aiden when he's older...#1
Aiden used to be such a bad sleeper -- at 16 months he was still getting up every 2 hours to nurse. He used to hold his eyes open with his fingers because he hated to sleep so much. So I’m very thankful that at 5 is has become a very good sleeper. Too good, in fact. He conks out by 7:30 or 8 every night and is dead to the world until 5 or 6am. But that is the problem. He consumes a lot of liquid before he goes to bed, and after going through many months of waking up to soggy sheets and blankets when he was younger, we’ve developed a ritual of making Aiden pee once before we go to bed. We carry him to the bathroom and hold his penis for him so that his pee doesn’t spray all over the place.
The problem is that sometimes he needs to go before we take him to the bathroom, or once again afterwards. He wakes up and stumbles around, too discombobulated to figure out where he is. Sometimes I’m sitting in the living room watching TV and I hear a loud THUMP. THUMP. THUMP sound from the bedroom. Is it a poltergeist? Is someone hammering? No. It is Aiden repeatedly running into the door, since in his sleep-addled state he is unable to figure out how to turn the knob.
Sometimes in this state he makes it out of the room but gets confused during the five foot walk to the bathroom, pulls down his pants and pees in some random corner of the living room. Sometimes he makes it to the bathroom but mistakes some other appliance (or the floor) for the toilet and lets loose.
One day I was getting ready for bed and sat down on the toilet to do my own business when in stumbled Aiden, eyes half closed, pants already down. Without registering that the bathroom was already occupied, he let loose a stream of warm pee -- on me. I started screaming, which startled him awake, but he couldn’t stop. And then I realized: I live with three Penises. And: golden showers are really not worth the hype.
The problem is that sometimes he needs to go before we take him to the bathroom, or once again afterwards. He wakes up and stumbles around, too discombobulated to figure out where he is. Sometimes I’m sitting in the living room watching TV and I hear a loud THUMP. THUMP. THUMP sound from the bedroom. Is it a poltergeist? Is someone hammering? No. It is Aiden repeatedly running into the door, since in his sleep-addled state he is unable to figure out how to turn the knob.
Sometimes in this state he makes it out of the room but gets confused during the five foot walk to the bathroom, pulls down his pants and pees in some random corner of the living room. Sometimes he makes it to the bathroom but mistakes some other appliance (or the floor) for the toilet and lets loose.
One day I was getting ready for bed and sat down on the toilet to do my own business when in stumbled Aiden, eyes half closed, pants already down. Without registering that the bathroom was already occupied, he let loose a stream of warm pee -- on me. I started screaming, which startled him awake, but he couldn’t stop. And then I realized: I live with three Penises. And: golden showers are really not worth the hype.
Monday, June 05, 2006
parking/engineering?
Behold, one of the wonders of life in Seoul. Parking.This is the lot in front of our apartment. These apartments were built in the 1980s when not many people had cars and this area was in the far outskirts of the city. Seoul has expanded incredibly since then, and we're now surrounded by newer apartment buildings with underground garage parking. Our little lot, forced to accomodate so many cars, wtinesses amazing engineering feats every days as people try to pack the maximum number of cars into the small space...
The parking lot provided endless entertainment when we first moved here. The cars parked bumper-to-bumper are all in neutral, so you can push them around if you need to get out of a space. If the parking lot has any incline, there are rocks and bricks available to keep the cars from rolling away. The other picture here is KC and Aiden pushing one of the cars so we can get our car out (actually, my in-laws' car -- we don't have a car).
Anyway, I avoid all this parking by taking public transportation... though these days many places (including Starbucks and our doctor) have valet parking so normal people don't have to deal with the headache of parking.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
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