coffee shop, part 1

A group of girls in their early 20s walk in; the clack of 10 peep-toe zipper high heels across exposed concrete announce their arrival.  A parade of black leggings and bare knees, shorts, and short skirts stalk by. They are all rhythmless angles and the silence of thighs that don’t rub together, too thin or splayed too far apart by bowleggedness to touch each other. V-neck t-shirts modestly cover flat chests to make up for all those miles of leg. Like a rainbow made of uniform blocks they advance, sometimes disrupting the standard rectangle of plain shirt with a breast pocket, or the occasional tiny flower/fruit/animal print. 4 out of 5 have dyed and/or permed hair, shades of brown trending towards orange at the lightest end of the scale. 

The parade stops. Handbags are thrown on chairs, cellphones scattered across two wooden tables next to the plate glass window facing the street. Some legs beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom, others pick their way around chairs and booths to make the groups’ order at the counter. The high pitched squeal of the cashier, “뭐 드릴까요?!” is countered by a response I can’t hear. Minutes later the group reassembles, spitting out rapid 반말 gossip like watermelon seeds as they wait for their coffee.  A vibrating buzzer rattles against the table. With five identical, ice-blended, 5,500 won mocha-frappa-what-the-fuck coffees topped with five identical mounds of whip cream and chocolate sauce, two packs of cigarettes, and four fashion magazines covering the surface of their table, they finally appear ready. 

For what?

They sip. They smoke. They turn glossy pages; envious or indifferent, inspired or so utterly bored that they keep turning just to pass the time. Some take out folding mirrors big as paperback novels, set them on the table, and apply full faces of makeup. Others, made up in full before leaving home, hold their cellphones over head at just the right angle and take self portraits. Inevitably, some of these self portraits will also become the picture takers’ cell phone wallpaper.

The scene goes on for hours. Eventually the coffee runs out, or the batteries run out, or the pages have all been turned and their boredom gets the best of the them. They rise, in pursuit of something else to consume. Maybe food, maybe clothes or cheep accessories from any of the glittering costume jewelry stands that line the sidewalks in Hongdae, Sinchon, and Edae. I am left behind, attempting to consume some pages of my own, though of a decidedly less glossy variety. The cafe is quite again.

backlog 1: April 10, 2009

Sakura season... poetry growing on trees. I’m glad I observed its progression so diligently. Spring at five in the morning was how the first tight fists of blossoms seemed to me on the dwarf cherries in Kyoto. Existence was yawning, shaking off the stiffness of winter and inching out the door before dawn. The earliest moments offered only the faintest suggestion of the riot of color and rebirth to follow... a knot of pink or orange on a gnarled gray-brown branch, the first tentative shoots of green probing their way towards the blue of the brand-new sky.  Set against the slopes of shrine roofs and temple gates the metaphor expanded.

The earth is older and newer in every moment than all the monumental human constructions we erect and admire. We are small, our attempts at creating beauty amateurish. We toil, we pray, we plan and build and die, leaving behind the best of our efforts for those who are to come, for them to marvel at and praise. We labor under the illusion of linear progression.   

Cherry blossoms know the truth. Awakening, ambling gently through a few weeks of splendor and dying before the season is out... they know no anxiety, they will not be rushed if tourists mistakenly arrive at five in the morning expecting something greater. 

There's always next year, after all.

Fresh life mingled with, complemented, and mocked the centuries old wood with silent, steady growth.

I came home to the streets of Seoul just as they burst into parallel clusters of pink and white, beautiful in their own way juxtaposed against the flashing neon of the hofs and noraebongs in Sinchon. My father arrived at the perfect moment, right on time to see the flowers at their high noon.

We walked around 한강 공원 on a Saturday filled with families and couples, cameras always at the ready, hoping to capture some emblematic freeze frame of a time that that would surely pass before we’d even realized (Sakura season, but also the awfully short time we had to spend together before his return home.) 

Barely a week later individual petals started to fall like snowflakes, or autumn leaves (is there  anything that is shed or falls in summer? I guess the rain, during 장마.) More couples, more cameras. 

The trees were casting off their morning-forged crown of blossoms in preparation for the summer afternoon to come. 

on the edge

I've been awfully sick for the last two or three days. Around 8 I finally got dressed and left the house, when Min rescued me from my homebody loneliness with medicine and Red Mango frozen yogurt. Hannah and Eunhi called earlier too, and one of the girls who lives in my house made me some special Korean tea that's supposedly good for throat aches. After crying to my mother early this morning over Skype about how much I miss my friends and family at home, I really felt like a tool. I do have good friends here, friends who will take care of me and go out of their way to make me feel better, friends who worry about me and love me and whom I love as well.

After Red Mango, Min drove us up a mountain. The streets narrowed rapidly to one lane, and we often had to slow down or pull over to squeeze past oncoming traffic. I felt light and relieved during the vertical climb, reveling in the chill of the night air as I opened my window to clear out the smell of his cigarette smoke. I had been indoors for far too many hours in a row.

We parked and walked a short way up a dark road, reenacting a scene from the terrible horror movie we saw together last week. Gasping and coughing with laughter, we stopped to gaze at the city spread out below us.

"Look out there. So many people. Some people are sleeping already, some people are eating. Some people are sick like you. Some people are having sex."

"A lot of people are having sex, probably." (I'm sure there's some other way of saying it but the way a lot of young people say 'have sex' in Korean is literally to do 'sex', as in, sex-hagoissuhyo.)

"Oh really?"

"Probably."

"And some people are dying. Other babies are being born.  All of these lives, everybody moving around and living together, living separately. Everybody living, living, living and then dying. Look there is Namsan. That way, way way way over there is Gangnam. I think that building there, the pretty one, it's Yongsan. I can't see Dongdaemun."

He sighed. I sighed, too. We walked back to the car. 

I'm home now, listening to Johnny Cash's "Hurt" and it's making me cry. I don't know why I've been so depressed lately, it might just be being sick. Usually I'm so good at spending time alone, but suddenly yesterday and today I feel awful and heavy, 답답해 for the Korean speakers in the house. There's never enough time, but I spend hours and hours sleeping and reading the news and staring at the Bible, unable to even open it. 

Truly, this is a record of the last two days, and in no way representative of how I've been feeling. Saturday I got out early and saw the changing of the guards outside of a palace, went to an art museum, went to a huge open air market for some eye shopping, did my homework in the sun on the roof terrace of a shopping mall, went out of town and met some friends for dinner, drank some tea, slept early. It was wonderful and enlivening and indulgent and productive and fascinating and I scribbled notes in my journal and I loved the strangers and the families I saw along the way. 

Terribly fickle, awfully moody. 

Strangers in a Less-than-strange Land

Un-zippering my winter coat and turning up the volume on my MP3 player, I am squeezed snugly into a subway car in Sinchon. The people on either side of me are equitably absent from the moment; watching television on tiny personal screens, text messaging friends, vacantly staring straight ahead to avoid eye contact. We touch elbows and hips, bump shoulder bags and smell each other’s dinner-and-soju-breath, but still we make deliberate efforts to maintain the illusions of isolated experience and personal space.

When I first arrived I thought of myself as a traveler in Seoul, rather than as someone who lived here. Every tiny moment shone with the allure of newness, and putting on headphones seemed like forfeiting the opportunity to have an important experience. 

Now that I’ve adjusted, the novelty of public transportation in a “foreign” place has worn off and I’ve started to think of my travel routines as mundane. I, too, have fallen comfortably into the Korean habit of ignoring the people just centimeters to my left and right, in favor of rocking out to my own personal soundtrack. It’s only natural that my relationships with the city and its inhabitants have matured and stabilized with time. In some ways, however, I look upon this latest “maturity” with a mournful longing for the feelings of wonder that have passed. 

I sometimes feel this way when I look at street signs or advertisements in Korean, too. Less that two years ago, hangeul was little more to me than a strange smattering of circles and squares. Incomprehensible, yes, but romantic and beautiful in a decorative way, as a constant reminder of the distance between my current location and my hometown. I love communicating in Korean now, love knowing more about the culture and the people than I ever did before because of being able to speak this language. That being said, there is still some tiny part of me that misses the feeling of being amazed and intrigued by a place that was once tantalizingly beyond my comprehension.

The cure to this boredom is to shirk thoughts of daily monotony and instead focus upon experiencing every new moment with the same wonder and humble excitement of a newcomer. This isn’t advice for travelers -- it’s advice for life. To fall into habits and feel bored with the routine is natural. It’s easy to succumb to our own restlessness and isolate ourselves from each other, even as we press against one another, elbow to hip, in a city so crowded as Seoul. A better way, though, is to take each habit-worn moment and reframe it as a precious, fleeting opportunity to interact with the people around us. 

We may never cross paths again, so what’s the harm in smiling? What’s the harm in laughing when the sway of the subway car sends us crashing into each other? Being familiar with a place or a pattern of life shouldn’t necessarily drain us of all awe. Instead, let us take off our headphones, turn off our personal televisions and engage each other joyfully and gratefully, even as we move about the most routine and uneventful moments in our lives.

(first article for the English-language newspaper at Ewha Women's University)

academia

wanderings:

insadong, around seollal. making tradition snacks.

hongdae hottdeuk guy. freeeee hottdeuk<33

french girl asking, "eulma yayo?" ("how much?")

buddhist temple in jongno. crazy ceremony i found in the middle of the night.

i started writing a long "what if" blog about the possibility of me becoming a professor, and then erased it. im not particularly interested in entertaining the what ifs, and im even less interested in airing publicly the extent to which my over-analytical mind runs me in circles right into the ground. certainly there are a plethora of other opportunities out there, but one possibility that keeps coming up is:

-graduating, still not knowing what the hell i want to do, defaulting into coming back to korea to finish learning korean

-graduate school in korea for what? history? literature?

-translation work/ becoming a professor here or in the US.

i'm not scared, it just seems like a cop out.

i have a lot of wandering still to do, more of asia, africa. europe. latin america.  in some ways roots are barely fathomable. the years in which i will drift from temporary life to temporary life stretch out before me like a carpet, or an ocean. or a great, gaping gulf. or a fantasy.

in other ways i'm perpetually preoccupied with the notion of my future family, where we'll live, the kind of schools my children will go to, raising them in my faith. 

it's the babies. babies and families about around here. they're everywhere, and they're so adorable and incredibly small and beautiful and full of promise, they make me imagine my own stomach swelled to accommodate someone half-me and half-my husband, about to live in the world.

anyway. academia. i really just want to effect more people than that, in a direct way. how can academia be the route to the most good? i love history but studying it like that, being the one writing the source material... it just appears to me as a very self indulgent work (valuable though that work may be.)

why korean class is excellent.

1. speaking class...

chinese kid i dont know: "i've gained, what... 2 kilograms? no. 20 kilograms since I came to Korea. "

teacher: "what? no no, you want to say 2 kilograms."

chinese kid: "no. no. 20? is it 20? (something in chinese to another chinese kid)" 

other kid: "yeah. yeah 20."

teacher: "what? why? why did you get so fat?"

(pause)

"that's really a lot! 20? how did you get SO FAT?" 

(entire class bursts out laughing, besides the teacher. really, why DID YOU GET SO FAT, YOUNG MAN? she was upset about it.)

2. grammar practice...

(the pattern was "first, a person does something. next, in sequential order, because the first thing was completed, the person did [or was able to do] the second thing." we had to use a famous person we all knew, so we chose Obama. totally wasn't my suggestion, fyi.)

teacher: "First, he puts on a suit."

kirk: "Then, he recieves a briefing."

yugi: "Then, he eats breakfast."

ruyu: "Then, he gets on an airplane."

ruyhun: "Then... he...taxis down the runway?" (laughter)

tara: "He takes a car from the runway." (laughter. "Where? Where is he?" teacher: "amazing! he's flying his own plane and driving his own car!"  laughter.)

oo soo: "Suddenly he has to go to the bathroom. Stop! Stop! he said! I ate breakfast and rode an airplane and I haven't been the the bathroom all day! stop! suddenly. suddenly. stomache. very sick. bathroom now. Suddenly." (explosive laughter. the teacher is crying its so funny. oo soo [우수] is a thirty-something jazz dance instructor from japan, mind you.)

olivier:  "then he meets with..." ("no no!" "why, come on?!" "olivier! he hasn't washed his hands!" "stop!" laughter.) "then he meets with the president of the UN." (lame. laughter stops.)

soong ji: "Then he takes a nap."

dema (in a thick russian accent) : "after the nap he meets a pretty girl and gives her his phone number." ("DEMA!" "he's married." teacher: "you're a bad person! he's the president of the united states.")

rawhenpon: "they decide to go on a date."

me: "he calls his wife and they all go out together. Dema. He's married!" (laughter.)

teacher: "and finally he washes his hands. you guys are dirty."

등등등

some thoughts:

korean pop music is bizarrely popular for how really terrible it is. The lyrics are often shockingly trite and simple, the beats are usually the opposite of innovative, and the singers are nothing to speak of as far as their actualy singing abilities are concerned. So why is it so popular?

The answer is noraebang. (maybe.)

If everyone likes the same songs (or at least knows all the words to the same songs) then noraebang is more easily facilitated and everyone can feel like part of one big tae-han-min-gook (대한민국, the Korean Peninsula, used as a synonym for the great big family of the Korean people) rather than a bunch of individuals with differentiated tastes.

in and out, in and out. in korea you are in, you are accepted, you are part of the family... or you're out and you're so far out there's no need to even identify who you are, you're simply out.

drinking is like this, eating is like this, jobs, friends, family... if i want to be in at noraebang (or, expanding this, in all of korea) i better know the words to this handful of songs (i better learn this crazy language, eat these intensely spicy foods, drink too much alcohol with new friends/co workers, follow these customs... etc.)

possibly this is completely wrong. i'm in a generalizing mindset because of MiSuda. 

It's amazing the degree to which most people seem to have sort of signed this social contract and agreed that yeah, the music might be bad, but it's korean music and dang it we're going to like it all together. (kimchi might be insane but we're all going to eat it three times a day, and so on.)

TV shows are like this too. (I don't really know that much about dramas yet, I'm talking about reality TV, talkshow/gameshow/ variety review type shows.)

There are (at most) 30 celebrities who basically comprise the entire face of Korean media. I don't know their names yet but they're everywhere all the time. You can switch from station to station and see the same people hosting a talk show, appearing on a game show, going on a trip with other celebrities and comedians, and interviewing some backwater haraboji about the jjigae he's been making for the last 50 years in Busan. They're one big media family and their antics are funny because the audience is automatically invested in and familiar with the regular cast of characters.

This isn't to say I don't have 60 terrible Korean pop songs on my iPod. I do. 

I also just ate some incredibly spicy fish head stew. with kimchi.

I, too, have become invested in whether or not a piggie-back riding Lee Hyori will be able to eat the dried apricot dangling from a tree on Sollal.

 I enjoy (love, am fascinated by) the customs and cultures and images that mark the edges of this place. I know they're media produced edges that don't naturally define anything but I still think they're indicitive of something about this place, even if it's an artificial sort of something foisted upon the Korean people by the people who produce what they're consuming.

Even that is something, right? That the broadcasting companies have so much control? 

I'm thinking a lot about my own involvement in the circus, too. of course. I had this moment when I felt like a zoo animal as I was signing an autograph last night, and it wasn't fun at all. what makes me special? what makes me worthwhile, what would inspire any korean person to think twice about asking for my signature? Mostly it's because in some small way, even if I'm the cousin by marriage who no one likes or something, I've joined the "family" and I am now "in" in a way I wasn't before. 

Or i'm lying to myself. Who knows. I'm praying a lot. We'll see.