It was really something, on the phone with the airline, negotiating my return to freedom* and being able to say, okay, fine, just book the ticket to the wrong city, please. I only felt free to do this because I knew I could call these fine young men, knew they would help me make the final SEA-PDX stretch happen. Somewhere along the line, I have managed to reach a critical mass of ease with these humans that has me willing to consciously indulge in actual imposition. Which I think might be a first. In my life.** (Notably, the two of them presented a united front in insisting that this was not an imposition, and giving me shit for calling it that, and acting all insulted and suggesting I lacked trust/was “weird” for conceiving of it that way. I argued that effectively committing someone to a six-hour drive without asking beforehand simply is, by definition, an act of imposition. The marker of special closeness in a relationship is that this imposition ends up feeling okay for both imposer and imposed-upon. Which, sure, pretty much turns it into a non-imposition in effect, but doesn’t change the facts we started out with.) (In close personal relationships, my desire to be acknowledged as right invariably trumps my desire to be perceived as pleasant, frequently leading to tedious and argumentative conversational asides. Even when I am trying to express gratitude.) (In my defense, though, I also often happen to be right.) (Just not likably so.) (I do sometimes wonder why people voluntarily put up with me.) (Probably because, unpleasantness of process aside, I am so reliably right.) (Ugh, West. Ugh.)

So, yes. What I mean to say is, Thank you, Ty and Matthew, for conceiving of this favor as a non-favor. I treasure your faces and appreciate your gameness.

Internet, I am really very pleased and excited to be getting back to Portland. I’ve missed it in ways and to a degree that were wholly unexpected. It’s been kind of a hard eight months. Fruitful, but hard. The days and weeks of silence on this blog have been fraught with half-formed realizations– and even, perhaps, a few fledgling epiphanies –about who I am and who I’ve been and who I want to be and the nature of aging and art and honesty and family and memory and responsibility and identity and emotion. All of which, inevitably, will prove deeply flawed and be heavily revised (and/or entirely thrown out) as I continue being, but many of which, also, have been surprisingly intense and uncharacteristically difficult in the making. It’s been kind of hard, not least because it’s been so undeniably indulgent, this very ‘intensity’ and ‘difficulty,’ and that, more than anything, embarrasses me. And so I go round and round and round again until I think, fuck it, fuck all of it, most of all fuck me, I should just embrace organized religion, maybe Buddhism or C.S. Lewis style Christianity, and/or go join some organization that directly helps feed the hungry. Then I watch another Korean children’s quiz show with my mother, who is addicted. (It’s a problem.) And continue to not actually do anything.

It is very important, Internet, to do things. Possibly most important. (Montaigne notwithstanding. We are none of us Montaigne.) That is the nutshell harvest of eight months of contemplation.

I am really very pleased and excited to get back to Portland, to sandwiches and summer and the selling of furniture, to drinks (a very big part of the problem these last eight months has, I think, been the utter lack of alcohol in my life; I don’t drink at all when I’m at home) and foliage and just a generally higher level of external stimuli. I think it will help my writing, I think it will help my general mental state, I think it will close a chapter which, while a critically necessary part of the unfolding narrative, is now ready to be closed. I am a person who, in the absence of chemical anti-depressants, needs jump-starts from time to time, and, weakness or no, I am overdue another beginning.

June 20th, Seattle-Portland. Ty and Matthew. 

I am really very pleased and excited. 

*Or, at least, a different kind of servitude, to rent and bills and my own highfalutin life goals rather than the glorious but volatile amalgam of inexplicable need and love that is my mother.

**The word ‘consciously’ is very key here. As much as I may hate it, it is certainly true that I have thoughtlessly and outrageously imposed on countless people over the almost-three decades of my existence. In fact, some of these people may be reading this sentence. Hey, you. How’ve you been? Sorry about that thing that time. Truly. My bad. 

Mother: “Oh yeah? What are you now, thirty? Thirty-one?”
Daughter: “Twenty-four.”
Mother: “Same thing.”

There are people who seem deeply disturbed by this state of affairs. My first Christmas in London, several fledgling friendships reached a kind of crisis point when it became known that I planned to spend the day alone. Panicked last-minute invitations to family gatherings were issued, and politely declined, and reissued, and declined again, and insistently pressed upon me. And declined again. One friend in particular was staunch in his apparent belief that a solitary Christmas would necessarily trigger a full-fledged suicidal episode. It was difficult explaining that the very thought of being an impromptu guest at a closely-knit family’s Holiday Gathering stressed me out a whole lot more than hanging out by myself, but I managed it, eventually, while also communicating my sincere gratitude for the invite. And I actually ended up having a very nice day, walking around a city that was gloriously, eerily, beautifully empty– a day I will remember forever.

It’s not that I don’t like Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or birthdays. I’ve had great ones, recently, with friends and without pressure. I enjoy a festive pine. Turkey is delicious, as is cake. Presents can be pleasing. It’s just that I also feel pretty okay when the traditional accoutrements of a given occasion don’t manifest. And I generally try to respect it when people I care about care deeply for one or another of these things. Hensley, for example, has a whole philosophy about the importance of celebration. We generally do a good job of meeting in the middle.

Anyway, one decidedly nice thing about my mother and my understanding re: ‘special occasions’ is that it works both ways: I get to be exactly as absent-minded/disinterested as she is. For example, yesterday was my birthday (29 now, American age!), and it passed pretty much without event. (The only break from routine was a drop-in from a family friend who knows about our lack of celebratory wherewithal. She brought a cake, so we had some cake, and that was very nice.) Now, today is Mother’s Day, and… nothing. In fact, neither one of us would even have known, except that I noticed a bunch of people posting about it on Facebook, and so I brought it up. This was the exchange:

Daughter: “Hey.”
Mother: “Hey.”
Daughter: “So it’s Mother’s Day today.”
Mother: “Oh yeah? Huh. What day is today?”
Daughter: “Um. The thirteenth?”
Mother: “No, of the week.”
Daughter: “Sunday.”
Mother: “Is that show I like on Sundays? With the children?”
Daughter: “No, that’s Wednesday.”
Mother: “Oh. Okay.”

So. In honor of my mother on this, her official day, a few more recent exchanges.

On Literature:

Mother: “What are you reading now?”
Daughter: “Moby Dick.”
Mother: “Why?”
Daughter: “Because I feel like I should. And it’s on my reading list.”
Mother: “Do you like it?”
Daughter: “It’s taking a little recalibrating, but yeah, so far. Did you?”
Mother: “Never read it.”
Daughter: “That’s outrageous. You’re supposed to be a lit professor.”
Mother: “Not anymore. Anyway, I know it’s about a whale.”
Daughter: “SPOILER ALERT.”
Mother: “And the guy, he really goes overboard, trying to kill it.”
Daughter: “Yeah, I haven’t gotten to that part yet, but yes, I believe the guy does.”
Mother: “I just think it’s a bit much.”
Daughter: “What is?”
Mother: “To get that angry at a whale.”
Daughter: “…”
Mother: “It was probably just minding its own business. It’s a whale.“
Daughter: “Is this why you didn’t read it?”
Mother: “Yes.”
Daughter: “Well, I’ll let you know, once I finish. Whether the whale deserved it.”
Mother: “Do.”

On Momo, and Love

Daughter (calling to Momo): “Come here, dummy!”
Mother: “Don’t call him that!”
Daughter:  ”Why not? He is!”
Mother: “He is not!”
Daughter: “He is, mother. I still love him. In fact, I think he’s the only dumb thing I’ve ever truly loved.”
Mother: “Fuck you and your love. He’s not dumb!”
Daughter: “He steps in his own pee and tracks it around the house. Happily.”
Mother:  ”He’s making a statement. He’s saying, Here’s what I think of your puppy pads and your house-breaking.”
Daughter: “That’s quite an interpretation.”
Mother: “That’s love.”

On Royalty, and Feminine Hygiene, and Sentiment, and Life

Mother (out of NOwhere, walking into the kitchen): “Why did Charles marry Diana, anyway?”
Daughter: “I don’t really know. I think it was arranged.”
Mother: “Why didn’t he marry the other one?”
Daughter: “I don’t know, mother. I think he did later. Like, recently.”
Mother: “That’s the one he wrote to while Diana was alive, and said he wanted to be her tampax or something.”
Daughter: “Her tampon. Yes. It was a tapped phone call.”
Mother: “Well, that’s not a very…literary sentiment, is it.”
Daughter: “No, I suppose not. Not in the classic sense. Does that disappoint you?”
Mother: “Mmmmmmm…yes. Yes, it does.”
Daughter: “You prefer your princes to have a little more class. “
Mother: “He’s not my prince, but yes, generally speaking. I don’t think that’s asking too much. Do you?”
Daughter: “I have no thoughts on the matter. I don’t even know why we’re talking about this.”
Mother: “What’s wrong with you? You always want to know why. There’s no why. We just are. It’s called life.“

First, a bit of background, since I don’t think I’ve actually gone into this at any length with anyone. Because it’s a drag, and upsetting in an ongoing sort of way. But here goes.

Because I am a U.S. citizen and an adult, the fact that my mother is Korean (and that I grew up here) means nothing in the eyes of the Korean government. There is no visa for me, so unless I get a job that issues a ‘work visa’ (not an option; I’ve always been part time, i.e. at the Herald or Newsweek, and/or freelance) I have to enter the country as a ‘tourist,’with a ninety-day limit on my stay. Which, you know, sucks, but boohoo. So it goes. No, the fucked-up part is that there is a special visa for people like me that allows virtually indefinite stays. A visa for people like me but not quite me. A special gyopo (American-of-Korean-descent) visa that I could get if my father had been Korean, too, or an American ‘of Korean descent.’ So, basically, the problem is that he was a big white dude from Ohio.

Way to go, dad. Clearly your fault.

For years now, I have been surrounded by people who have this special gyopo visa, people who get to stay. Most of them are completely fine, pleasant human beings whom I respect and enjoy. A few have become real friends– important ones. Others, though, continually give me pause about my own situation. These are the ones who have never been to Korea before, and are usually here to teach English for a year or so, dragging themselves to classes they don’t prepare for in between partying and drinking, all while ostensibly getting a sense of their ‘roots.’ All before they go back to their real lives back home, back in The West. In the bigger picture, they are nothing if not tourists– just tourists with a specific agenda. A subset of this group don’t even speak the language, though their parents presumably did, being ‘of Korean descent.’ Which is not necessarily their fault, sure. But then there are the ones who don’t bother to try and learn: the unengaged, unmotivated tourists. Which is just kind of gross.

The real problem, though, for me, is the handful of individuals belonging to this sub-subset who have sat across from me at various bars, minutes into our first interaction, drunkenly talking shit on Korea as a nation, on Korean culture at large, and on ‘Koreans’ as a people. (We are, apparently, “rude.”) They have said things to me, one ‘foreigner’ to another, like, “You know, I just don’t really like this country.” (‘This country.’) They have declared, loud, that they are only here to make money off the pathetic local English-language craze, and that they can’t wait to get back home, to America, or Canada, or Australia, or where the fuck ever. These are the assholes. And, you know, all of this is fine, too. Assholes get to have their opinions. Even racist, ignorant, self-hating assholes are entitled to their heritage-based visas. I only go on about it at such length because these encounters really add yet another edge to the surreality of my experience– this fact that my home has no place for me, no category. Sitting across the bar, never quite drunk enough, I can’t help but think: so this douchebag gets to belong here, but not me. This random foreigner who doesn’t want it, even. Not really. He/she gets to, because that fifty percent, that other parent, makes them more legitimately Korean than me. Officially.

BUT CAN THEY PRODUCE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENTIARY SUPPORT
OF A FOUNDATIONAL EXPERIENTIAL CLAIM TO KOREANNESS?

I THINK NOT.

YOU KNOW WHO CAN?

ME.

BEHOLD.

You’d think the mullets, at least, would move The Man. But, no. Nothing. It’s just, Oh, really? Your mother’s from here, living here, and getting older? You yourself were born here, educated here, shaped here as a human being? Eh. No, nope. No box to check for that.

My home, this home, has no interest in my mitigating circumstances. I don’t like this; I never will. But I’ve grown fairly used to it. It was most actively upsetting when I first realized it, almost exactly ten years ago now. I had just turned eighteen, and I needed to go back to the States to return to school. (Through age seventeen I was covered just by the fact of being under my mother’s guardianship.) At the airport, I was taken aside for having overstayed the 90 days I didn’t know I was limited to. It was a shitshow. Months later, I actually cried from sheer disbelief and frustration after my third trip to whatever customs/government office it was, where yet another bureaucrat made sympathy eyes at me as he shrugged his nothing-to-be-done shrug. I remember my mother pacing around the living room in the background, calling friends and lawyers and colleagues, raging at the fact that her daughter couldn’t just come home, and stay home, for as long as she liked. It was all very tumultuous.

Eventually, I decided to just make the best of it. With my mom’s blessing, I started using what money I was making to take an actual trip every three months, each time I had to leave the country. It was an attempt at self-hypnosis; bury the indignity and injustice (in my eyes) of being forced to leave by making myself want to leave. Cue: Egypt, Greece, Turkey, China, and many jaunts to Japan. And, you know, it pretty much worked. Without this fucked-up visa situation, I might never have been romanced by Mahmoud, the severely cross-eyed carpet salesman in Luxor. Without it, I doubt I would ever have had two a.m. beer and chicken-butt-on-a-stick (seriously, the butt-part of the chicken) with a bunch of drunk bus drivers in Zhangjiajie. These are things I am glad to have experienced.

That said, it still leaves me feeling a little hollow sometimes. That I’m not allowed to stay.

Last Sunday, because I don’t currently have the time or the resources for a fabulous hypnosis-trip, not-getting-to-stay looked like this: I woke up at five a.m. and drove to the airport. I got on the shortest international flight available, to Japan. Once aboard, I started a book. I got off in Fukuoka and was ushered through a series of back rooms connecting the arrivals level of Fukuoka Airport to the departures level. I got back on the same plane, now returning to Seoul. Once aboard, I finished the book. I deplaned and got my passport stamped with the all-important entry-visa, buying another ninety days for the price of the round-trip ticket. I got in my car and drove the hour and a half back home, arriving around two p.m.

This is a very strange thing to do. What I mean by that is not that it is an empirically unusual way to spend half a day, though it certainly is that, too. What I mean is that it feels strange, to spend so much time in cars and airports and planes and the whole hoopla of going through customs, twice, but to not actually be going anywhere.

The book I read to and from Japan was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, which was recommended to me and physically pressed into my hands with great enthusiasm the night before. It’s a novel, but a good deal more overtly contemplative than most of the fiction I’ve been reading recently. It’s been all about show-don’t-tell over here, a lot of advancing of action and building of character. This was a little what-does-it-all-mean-dear-reader, interspersed with epiphanies that sometimes felt a bit too Paulo Coelho to suit me. Still, an interesting book, very much worth reading, the kind you catch yourself thinking about afterwards. And now that I’ve digested a bit, I’m starting to realize that it’s not actually nearly as indulgent as it comes across at first– or rather, it indulges in a way that is layered and meaningful and effectively employs actual plot– and I’m not that mad at the Man Booker Prize for picking it.

Somewhere, the Man Booker people and Julian Barnes are heaving joint sighs of relief.

Anyway, part of what Sense of an Ending is about is the nature of memory and identity– the way we tell the story of ourselves to ourselves in order to construct a picture of self we can live with– and what it’s like when that falls apart in the face of incontrovertible external evidence to the contrary. It’s a bit of a leap, but that was the train of thought, combined with being on that strange day’s journey with no actual destination, that landed me here tonight, I think. It’s a jarring thing, sometimes, and interesting, to me, that I conceive of myself as so Korean, even as I so regularly live this reality of my non-Koreanness.

That’s all.

TUB: Well, I’m one episode behind,  but I liked that chick, the new one who married Renley and was like, it’s cool if you need my brother to come in and help you get it up. I’m down.

BED: She is down. That chick played Anne Boleyn in ‘The Tudors.’ She’s basically cornered the market on being hypersexual in period garb.

TUB: Was that show any good?

BED: I don’t know. I couldn’t watch it. I saw Jonathan Rhys Meyers one time in London and I can’t watch anything he’s in anymore because it stresses me out how tiny he is in real life.

TUB: But Anne Boleyn was like, a sexy fiend in it?

BED: Well, I mean, she pretty much single-handedly caused England’s break with the Catholic Church, so I’m thinking, yes.

TUB: She did?

BED: Yeah, dude. Do you not know about the whole Anne Boleyn situation?

TUB: Not really.

BED: !! I’m ashamed of you. But I will help you.

TUB: I would be eternally grateful.

BED: I’m qualified, too. I was super into the Tudors in tenth grade and read all these biographies, so I know what’s up. 

TUB: Of course you do.

BED: So, basically, Henry VIII came to the throne after his older brother Arthur died pretty young, and he married Arthur’s widow, who was Catherine of Aragon, from Spain, and Catherine was super Catholic, but they got a papal dispensation, I think, of some kind, like, annulling her first marriage, and she was older, but Henry’d been kind of in love with her forever, because he was always kind of jealous of Arthur…

–FIVE FULL MINUTES OF MUDDLED, BARELY COHERENT TUDOR HISTORY–

…and so they cut Anne Boleyn’s head off. After her came Jane Seymour, like, a day after the execution, and Jane Seymour actually gave Henry a son. Edward, maybe? There were a lot of Edwards. Anyway, maybe-Edward, by all accounts, was pretty fucking awesome, like, suuuuuper smart, good on a horse, etc., but then when he came to the throne as like, a twelve-year-old, he mysteriously got ill and died in crazy pain, only now, knowing what we know, we can tell from the accounts of his illness that he was pretty much poisoned. Game of Thrones style, for real. Very upsetting. And so then the throne went to Mary, who was first Catherine’s Catholic daughter, remember, and she became Bloody Mary, because she wouldn’t quit killing protestants. Just, all the time, willy nilly. She actually had a Spanish husband, Philip, who was hot, and she loved the shit out of him. He didn’t love her though, because she was ugly and a total drag, so he didn’t come around so much, but when he did he was very very nice to her, which everyone thought was very decent of him. But anyway after a few stillbirths she died childless and after that it was Elizabeth.

TUB: Like, Cate Blanchett Elizabeth?

BED: Yeah, like, Elizabethan Age Elizabeth. When Shakespeare started happening. She had a fucked-up childhood, too. But that’s a whole other story. I’ll tell you another time.

TUB: No, now! I’m enjoying bathtub story time!

BED: I’ve forgotten too many details. It’s getting all mixed up in my head. Just, the point is, British royalties is crazy for real. The whole nobility is, too. Even now. It’s awesome. If I could be any kind of fancy it would be that kind of fancy.

TUB: Word.

BED: They’re so fancy they just don’t give a fuck. They just stride up and down long majestic hallways of ancient portraits, all crazy looking and surrounded by packs of hunting dogs. Like that woman. The fancy one we like. The one who’s so good at looking crazy. Couture-crazy. What’s her name?

TUB: Tilda Swinton?

BED: YES. Remember? She’s like, the bluest of blue bloods. That’s why she’s so willowy and multilingual, with her multiple lovers. I feel like she’s really doing the whole life thing right. 

TUB: Yeah, dude. No one is better at being fancy and not giving a fuck. 

BED: Oh, Tilda. To be you.

TUB: Maybe we’ll magically find out one day that we’re actually royalty.

BED: Not gonna happen.

TUB: It could be like ‘Princess Diaries.’

BED: There’s just no way.

TUB: Why not? You’re definitely weird enough.

BED: Yeah, but I don’t have a single willowy bone in my body. Were I transported to the middle ages, I would definitely be a serf. A weird serf, maybe, but still the kind of woman who like, has a baby in the middle of plowing a field and then just swaddles it right up and carries on plowing.

TUB: But I just want Julie Andrews to show up and be like, “Surprise! You’re a princess!“

BED: I mean, it’s more possible for you than for me. You already are kind of a princess. And you totally have good facial bone structure.

TUB: I know, right?

BED: Not as good as Momo though. Hi Momo! Mooomooooo! Look at Momo.

TUB: …

BED: Are you looking?

TUB: I’m looking.

BED: What’s wrong with you? Isn’t he cute?

TUB: He’s a pee troll.

BED: Ugh. I told you, he’s not anymore. He’s like, 90 percent housebroken!

TUB: Whatever.

BED: You don’t love my dog enough.

TUB: That’s true.

BED: This is why we could never have children.

TUB: Yes, this is the reason. It’s the number one reason.

BED: You just wouldn’t love them enough.

TUB: But I’d know that you loved them too much. Evens out.

BED: I don’t think that’s how it works.

TUB: You don’t know, though. It could.

BED: I know you’d just be in the bathtub all the time. 

TUB: Like, go away, baby. Daddy’s taking a bath.

BED: Don’t be such an asshole, baby, with your hunger and your needs.

TUB: Don’t you know how important baths are, you silly baby?

BED: They’d grow up thinking ‘father’ meant ‘gay man in bathtub.”

TUB: Could be worse.

BED: This is why, Hensley.

TUB: You should just say that to everyone. ‘This is why we could never have children.’ All the time. In response to everything.

BED: I like that.

TUB: That’s how you should approach grad school. Someone in class is all, ‘I’m fascinated by the hermeneutics of whatever,’ and you’re like, ‘Well, this is why we could never have children.’

BED: Some dude’s like, ‘I kind of feel like having Mexican food for lunch,’ and I’m like, ‘This is why we could never have children.’

TUB: [uproarious laughter] Mexican food. 

BED: What!

TUB: Who thinks about Mexican food?

BED: What the hell are you talking about? Mexican food is everywhere. It’s all around us.

TUB: Whatever. This is a good plan. You’re going to meet your husband this way.

BED: Definitely. Remember that thing I sent you? Ann Arbor is #1 in the country for ‘Singles.’ Yahoo says so.

TUB: You’re single! What a coincidence!

BED: It’s true, I am totally A single. It’s my most important quality.

TUB: It’s basically in the bag.

BED: Definitely.

TUB: It’s pretty much happened already. 

BED: It bores me to even talk about it, really. All sorted. Old news.

TUB: [arranges wash cloth on his head] Do I look like a minstrel? Named D’Artagnan? Shall I play you a small ditty on my lute?

BED: D’Artagnan was a musketeer.

TUB: Fuck you, I know. But D’Artagnan is also a name, that could belong to a minstrel.

BED: But when a name is that recognizable in relation to a single well-known character, it’s silly to use it as a passing example. 

TUB: Your face is silly to use as a passing example.

BED: You’re a fool.

TUB: Your face i–

BED: My belly button itches.

TUB: GROSS!

BED: Why is that so spectacularly gross?

TUB: Why does it ITCH? 

BED: I don’t know! Why does anything ever itch?

TUB: In your case usually because you’re filthy!

BED: Fuck you! I’m not even that dirty today!

TUB: Sure, sure.

BED: Ugh. You’re the worst.

TUB: You like it.

BED: I don’t. Not at six in the morning. Tell me something interesting or I’m hanging up and going to sleep. Has anything interesting happened recently?

TUB: Well, yesterday I went on a date with a man and his siblings.

BED: That’s stranger than usual.

TUB: It wasn’t like, an official meet-the-family or anything. Just Mexican food with some siblings.

BED: See? Mexican food!

TUB: Yeah, yeah. [rearranges wash cloth on head and strikes a pose] Do you find me playful?

BED: I find you gross. You spend too. much. time in the bathtub. 

TUB: Shall I fashion it into a small hat?

BED: Please don’t.

TUB: [fashions wash cloth into small hat and manages, after several failed attempts, to perch it atop his head]

BED: Alright. Don’t move.

TUB: Why?

BED: I’m taking a screenshot. I’m going to show this abomination to the Internet.

TUB: [holds very, very still]

BED: Alright. Got it.

TUB: I don’t think you’re going to be able to capture how we got here, though. 

BED: I’m going to try.

TUB: There were too many jumps in topic.

BED: I’m hanging up. I have to write down some notes before I forget.

TUB: Okay, fine. I’ll talk to you later, West.

BED: Don’t stay in the tub too much longer.

TUB: I do what I want.

BED: Goodnight.

TUB: Goodnight.

Just a few days, Internet. Then it’s back on, like WHOA.

W: You know what I hate?

[beat]

H: The ocean?

W: Well, yes. Of course. But everybody sane should hate the ocean. The ocean is insane.

H: I know. I know. Like, five years ago you watched Blue Planet, and ever since then you’ve hated the ocean–

W: No, five years ago I watched the entirety of Blue Planet, stoned, in a row, and I don’t think I’ll ever be right again, because that is how in.sane. the ocean is. No one should ever be going in it. On it, maybe. Maybe. Sometimes. But never in it. Like, do you even know what goes on in certain like, swathes of–

H: Okay, so what do you hate.

W: Monkeys.

H: Monkeys.

W: Yes. I hate monkeys.

[H takes a seat on the edge of the bed]

H: Lay it on me.

W: Well, first of all, they’re so hectic. Just, really unpredictable.

H: Have you ever been around a monkey?

W: No, but you hear things.

H: That’s true. You do hear things.

W: And they’re not cute. I don’t know why people act like monkeys are cute.

H: Especially the ones with those noses. You know the ones, right?

W: Oh, I know the ones. And it really kind of stresses me out how strong they are. Do you know how strong they are?

H: They are too strong, is how strong they are.

W: Exactly. It’s creepy, and it makes me feel unsafe.

H: And they’re really aggressive, too, a lot of the time.

W: Ugh. The worst. I hope my life doesn’t ever involve monkeys.

H: I feel like that is an achievable goal.

W: Right?

H: Totally. Just don’t go to that island.* Have you heard about that island?

W: What? What island? What are you talking about?

H: There’s apparently this island where like, these monkeys are just around all the time, just hanging out in the trees and sauntering around town, just everywhere. And sometimes they harass people, but you can’t even do anything about it, because they’re like, protected by law. It’s possible that they’re like, holy monkeys, maybe?

W: OH MY GOD I think I have heard about that island, only my mind couldn’t wrap itself around the horror of it, so the knowledge was like, rejected by my brain. All I have left is images of these huge chimp-orangutan hybrids just lounging around, all sinister. Just watching people as they like, walk out of a coffee shop.

H: I am not about to fight a monkey for my coffee.

W: Just move. That is when it’s time to move away, people. When you have to fight a monkey for your coffee. That’s no life.

H: Word.

W: Yeah.

[silence]

H: Okay. So. Monkeys. They’re on the list.**

W: Yeah. Write it down.

[H taps on his iPhone.]

W: And email me the updated version, would you? Just so I don’t forget. Monkeys.

[tap tap tap]

H: Done. Are you ready to get up now?

W: Yeah. Yes. Definitely.

[beat]

W: Just give me five more minutes.

*After some cursory internet research, I have concluded that this island almost certainly does not exist, and is instead some amalgamation of several different real life places created by our panicked minds.

**Matthew and I have been compiling a Hate list. Other entries include, but are not limited to:

-Chairlessness (i.e. drum circles, mandatory floor-sitting of any kind)
-Skechers
-Science, Especially Chemistry
-People who talk about their life-changing trip to India TOO much
-Hangover Shame
-When no one acknowledges a thing that is definitely happening and definitely crazy (i.e. Courtney Cox’s face in Scre4m)
-The Ocean

All of which is completely fine. Who knows what the narrative trajectory of my twenties would have looked like had I returned to Wesleyan after my freshman year. Who cares, really. I like the way things have turned out, overall.

That said, one part of this ‘overall’ did involve me spending a not-insignificant chunk of my mid-to-late twenties feeling very very old almost all of the time. This is ridiculous, and something I harp on too much, but it’s also true, and something that has had possibly permanent impact on my personality. Which situation I need to keep an eye on, because even before I committed three years to a tiny campus of post-adolescents who often made me feel, through no fault of their own, like a pretty-alright but slightly-vulgar and out-of-touch second-aunt, I was never super age-appropriate. My party-pooping ways are old news. As early as fourth grade, I was already displaying a propensity towards dismissing the concerns of my peers as no more than youthful foibles.*

There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. Like, take this one surprisingly age-appropriate thing I did do, as a teen. For a good three, four years there, I obsessed over a prominent boy band. A prominent Korean boy band. Called “Shinhwa.” This is what they looked like at the time, around the turn of the millennium:

Hottttt.

I don’t really know how to accurately convey what I mean when I say ‘obsessed.’  I did not join their official fan club or attend their fan signings, but I did tape their television appearances and watch them over and over. It was complete devotion (I literally decoupaged a nightstand with one of their faces, cut out from various magazines and interweb print-outs) tempered by unromantic practicality (I never tried to see them in person, largely because I figured it might be weird for them, to be stalked by a big white chick). Even at the time I realized that this behavior was bizarre and uncharacteristic, for me, and this, in turn, made me both secretive and defiantly aggressive about it all. (It was a secret from everyone but my closest friends, on whom I aggressively and continuously pushed repeat viewings of and conversations about the taped ‘Shinhwa’ footage in my possession: talk shows, game shows, etc. Despite the fact that none of these close friends spoke Korean.)  And somewhere along the line, one of the members in particular won my embarrassed-yet-defiant heart completely. It was this one:

That dreamboat right there is nightstand-decoupage-face. (It occurs to me now that I have no clue what happened to that nightstand. I really hope it’s still rolling around somewhere on the Exeter campus, discomfiting rich adolescent preppy geniuses left and right.)

I also had another favorite, but that is less relevant right now, and I will leave it to you to guess which one.

Anyway, all of this was twelve, thirteen years ago, but OMG LOL GUESS WHAT. ‘Shinhwa’ is still totally together, and they just came back from a four-year hiatus (during which time they all completed their mandatory military service, Long Live The Motherland, etc. etc.) with a new album. This is what they look like now, early-to-mid thirties style:

More popped-collar denim than expected, perhaps, but a general improvement, I would say, especially in the hairdo department. And hardly aged at all. Because, you know. Asia. (Nightstand Hunk is marked again, for your convenience.) I have not done a very good job of keeping up with them, especially these last seven or eight years, and it’s kind of nice to see them again, around, putting out new music videos that are almost as nonsensical as those that were once so dear to me.

This “comeback,” however, is not why I bring this all up now. Nor is it my mission to simply find ever-more embarrassing things to share about myself on the Internet. That’s just a bonus. No, I bring this up because something happened today to make me feel older than ever before, and this something involved ‘Shinhwa.’ Which means one of the few things I could point to as evidence of the fact that I, too, was once a girl has become the very thing that makes me feel adult and jaded in a way few other things do. Now, ‘Shinhwa’ actually makes me feel how much I have aged in this real, palpable, undeniable, everyday way. Because, see, a few years ago, one of the members of Shinhwa MOVED INTO MY MOM’S APARTMENT BUILDING. 

Guess which one. You get one guess.

You are correct. It is He of the Decoupaged Nightstand.

I will not pretend to understand his hat, here. Or his sword. Or his bejeweled shoulder pad. And this alone, this inability to understand, would make me feel old anyway. That, I think, is a pretty common experience of aging. Right now, people the world over are thinking back on posters they had up as tweens and teens and cringing a little. Par for the course. What throws me is not this picture or my reactions to it. What throws me is the fact that I now run into my tween/teen poster in the stairwell, in our parking garage, in our alleyway, exchanging friendly nods and the occasional bit of neighborly chitchat (“I saw you on that talk show last night! You were very funny!” “Hey, thanks!”)– and, each time, I feel nothing. I mean, I like him fine, I wish him the best. He is an extremely polite, nice young man, and actually much more handsome in person wearing normal clothing than he is onscreen or in photographs. In fact, dude totally lives up to– nay, exceeds–  his nightstand. And you know, I honestly cannot imagine what I would have felt or done if he had moved in to this building 10+ years ago, at the height of my obsession. I might have puked, or fainted, Beatles-style. Over and over again. But now?

Nothing. Not just no puking or swooning– not even a quickening of the pulse. Nary a trace of excitement. He has graciously helped my mother carry heavy things from her car: nothing. He has casually bestowed his blinding Crest-Kid smile upon me as he heaved his mountain bike up onto his shoulder so I could squeeze past on the stairs: nothing. I have sat in his living room, visiting with his mother, and the foremost thought in my mind was: ‘This is so not how I would arrange this furniture.’

I just ran into him again this evening. He was jumping rope in the garage so as not to disturb his downstairs neighbors. I was taking out the trash. We smiled and nodded, then I came back to my computer, and went back to researching vacuum cleaners. Because this month I am on a quest to find the perfect vacuum cleaner, Internet. Something lightweight with powerful suction. I believe that it’s out there, and I am determined to make it mine. I am particularly intrigued by Dyson’s ‘Root Cyclone Technology,’ which I’ve been reading up on. Largely positive reviews. But then again, Japan, also, seems to be working some real vacuum magic these days, and I’ve always been kind of a fan. Of Japan, as a whole. Anyway, wherever this search takes me, I am ready to drop some real money on this purchase. Because I’ve been translating up a storm, and I’m worth it, Internet. I am.

Mid-research, though, on a major Korean search engine, as I typed in yet another vacuum model number, a flashing ad on the sidebar caught my eye– an ad with my nice, jump-roping neighbor’s nightstand face on it.

The top hat and the sword make me feel old. Interacting with the wearer/bearer of said hat/sword and doing it so casually makes me feel old. And you know, this obsession with vacuum cleaners, too, would be more than enough all on its own to give me pause. Not exactly a youthful pastime. The combination, though– the fact that I returned from a run-in with my own personal teenage heartthrob to bloodlessly continue researching my dream cleaning appliance– this makes me feel like I should just throw in the towel and accept that it’s over. Key brain centers have clearly atrophied. Space once reserved for male pop idol fantasies has now been given over to visions of front-loading washing machines. Although, from what I gather, top-loading has really made a comeback now that they have those models without the spindle-thing!

About this, I feel excitement.

There are ten million people living within Seoul’s city limits, and more than twice that in the metro area. Twenty-something million people. And of all the buildings in all the neighborhoods in all this huge, sprawling city, he had to move into this one.

A bit heavy-handed, even for the universe, but what can you do. Sometimes the message just is loud and clear.

Goodbye, Youth. At least we’ll always have that nightstand.

**This was, and is, an asshole move. Fourth grade or no.***

***At rest, I am still kind of an asshole.****

****But I am working on it. (And becoming increasingly neurotic as a result, as is evinced by my ever-further-nesting clauses/slashes/hyphens/parantheses [believe it or not this shit is usually cut by at least 50% before I click 'publish'], but so it goes.)

*Also, “foible.” Ha.

“HEY! YOU WANT ANYTHING FROM THE FARMER’S MARKET?”
“UH! FRUIT? SOME FRUIT? LIKE, A FEW APPLES?”
“OKAY!”

-3 HRS LATER-

“Why are you putting the fruit on the floor?”
“I want to take a picture.”
“To send to Matthew?”
“For the Internet. To share what ‘a few apples’ means to you.”
“Oh. Should I have bought more?”
“No, mother. This is plenty.”

-5 MINS LATER-

“What does that mean, ‘for the internet’?”
“Don’t worry about it.”

This is neither here nor there, but for those who have noticed the tomatoes: in Korea, people often treat tomatoes like fruit (i.e. eating them raw, with sugar). Which is what they are, technically. Although, actually, I once broke up with a Korean dude over the Tomato Question (it was a very very brief ‘relationship’), and he was staunchly tomato-as-vegetable.  The actual breakup occurred in a taxicab after I spent fifteen minutes trying to explain that the very category of ‘fruit,’ like any category, is a human construct defined by certain selected characteristics (and so, yes, open to revision), and that according to the current, generally agreed upon criteria of categorization, tomatoes=fruit. I even allowed that I myself tended to eat tomatoes the way one usually eats vegetables (i.e. with salt and pepper and other vegetables). To refute this, he then asked the cab driver what he thought a tomato was. The driver said Vegetable, Of Course, and then they both scoffed at the very notion that anyone would consider a tomato a fruit. And I understood that we were done.

Man, I haven’t thought about that guy in almost a decade. He was actually a very nice guy who deserved a much nicer girlfriend. I hope he’s doing well.

MY SUPERGENIUS PLAN IS WORKING.

THE ONLY PROBLEM? IT’S WORKING A LITTLE TOO WELL.

WEST: Mom?

CHUN: Go away.

WEST: I feel like you should eat.

CHUN: [holds up what remains of the squid carcass]

WEST: No, like, a meal.

CHUN: Go away.

WEST: Mom, seriously–

CHUN: This is a very important part. GO. AWAY.

WEST: It’s always a very important part.

CHUN: [stony silence]

WEST: Okay, fine, what’s happening now?

CHUN: [gesticulating at the screen] She must now sleep with the Chinese– thing, important person! Ambassador! She tried to kill herself but failed! She was caught! So now she must!

WEST: And who is she?

CHUN: She is the one who loves Heo-Joon! Her love is unrequited!

WEST: Why? He doesn’t love her back?

CHUN: He adores her! He loves her mind! But he is dutiful to his wife, who has given up so much! He is a very good man!

WEST: Oh, so this is the lady doctor you were talking about yesterday.

CHUN: Yes! The lady doctor!

WEST: The brave one who helps the lepers.

CHUN: Yes! 

WEST: So why does she have to sleep with the Chinese ambassador?

CHUN: Because! She came to Hanyang! And she was treating the poor people! For no money!

WEST: Well, that doesn’t seem like a very good reason to have to sleep with the Chinese ambassador.

CHUN: [throws an empty cigarette pack at her one and only daughter] GO! AWAY!

WEST: Okay…well…how about I bring you some food?

CHUN: DO WHAT YOU MUST. Just, PLEASE. LEAVE.

I’ve realized that I seem to do better when I write to you regularly, Internet. These missives were, in a  way, the engine of my summer and fall last year– the filter through which I processed all the road tripping and cargo-ship-riding. Since landing here, though, I’ve let you fall by the wayside, at first for this or that other nameable reason, then, later, these last few months, to better ignore the time as it passes, merges, one day indistinguishable from the next. Write daily, Sweat daily, Shower daily loses its power as a mantra when you remove all discernible meaning from the ‘daily’ part of the equation.

So! No more! Back on the blogging-wagon! Let us use what tools we have at our disposal, as embarrassingly narcissistic as they may be! Let us reinstitute the daily post! And, in so doing, let us breathe some meaning back into the 24-hour segment of time we call a ‘day’! Yes, let us! It’s Royal-We Time! Exclamation Points!!

Excellence abounds.

Let us begin, then, with another illustrated recap.
(A warning: This will, at times, be bleak. January in particular was especially grim.)

JANUARY

The New Year. Three 100Won coins fall out of my pocket in the bathroom one day, and I do not notice. (I probably did notice later. I assume I noticed. What I know for sure is that without really thinking about it at all, I just proceeded to live life around these three coins instead of picking them up.) Four days later, my mother sits me down to discuss What Might Be Wrong With Me. Why not just pick them up? We reach no definitive conclusions, but I do take a photograph to commemorate the occasion. (And I do pick them up, eventually, some time after that. I think because people were coming over? I mean, they’re not there anymore, and my mother was still in full protest mode, so I must have.)

I fly to Fukuoka, Japan and return on the same plane, for visa reasons. I am escorted through strange, empty back rooms in Fukuoka airport, including this surreal quarantine space, where I am left sitting next to a row of wheelchairs for some time before The Nice Lady With The Walkie Talkie returns.

I download and watch a kind of intense Korean period drama from beginning to end. In an early episode, a seemingly lowborn goatee’d dude is wounded and secretly nursed back to health by a seemingly highborn lady in a cave. Several episodes later, she gets wounded, and he nurses her back to health in a different cave. Also, her (COVERED!) boobs get blurred out, because Korea.

The baby below (also in the drama) and I feel similarly about both the lazy writing (TWO cave-healings in the span of three episodes?) and the unnecessary boob blurring.

It’s kind of a rough month, all in all. It is harder than anticipated to be a Full-Time Daughter again. For a number of reasons, almost of all of which are self-generated. But I have some good FaceTime chats with Simon, which help.

FEBRUARY

The first week of February I go on a “literary pilgrimage” organized by The Daesan Foundation, which institution I have done some work for in the past, to Kawabata’s ‘Snow Country,’ in Nigawa Prefecture. There are lectures and museums and incredible meals and historical sites and even a few moments of near transcendence what with the snow and the literary history.

But mostly, mostly, it’s a lot of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A13-8PMG9R8

And this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FBVF3PZt0g

Here are some (more) pictures:

Also in February, not long after I return, we get a puppy. I name him Momo, hoping he will have a similar effect on my mother as Michael Ende’s Momo did on her fellow villagers. (Momo is fucked-up awesome, and will be getting a post of his own soon.)

Then, literally two days after Momo arrives, Matthew comes to visit for his thirtieth birthday:

Then, literally two days after he arrives, as I attempt to explain that yes, it’s true, Koreans do sometimes eat dog, but we don’t usually eat our own dogs, and almost never tiny puppies, that just wouldn’t be sustainable, I get into grad school. Just like that. Just, in my inbox, at breakfast. Just, yup, sure, come on over, we’ll take you. Matthew and I celebrate all up and down this piece, like so:

And my personal favorite:

Then he leaves, on the 29th, and darkness descends once more.
(Not really, but, you know. It was a bummer to see him go.)

MARCH

To celebrate the coming of spring, some really chill babies come over and hang out on the kitchen table for a while.

Meanwhile, Momo, who is growing at a fearsome rate, reveals a fondness for collecting just one of every single pair of slippers in the house and arranging them about the living room. Between this, his toys, his treats, and the ‘puppy pads’ with which I am trying housebreak him, our usually pretty sane-looking apartment now resembles a war zone. Where the weapon of choice is tiny puddles of pee.

In this environment, I translate some 100 pages of infuriating nonsense, both academic and literary, to pull together funds for my now-imminent move to Ann Arbor. This is the bleakest of all, and has no photos to go with it, because Gross. In between yelling at my monitor and conducting tense phone calls with various editors about just how, exactly, I am supposed to magically turn garbage into not-garbage, and how even if I could do that, which maybe I can, a little, I still don’t think it’s ethical, I eat a ton of peanut butter straight out of the jar and relapse into sleeping exclusively during daylight hours. It is just gross. Although, actually, I guess there is a photo! Because in the middle of it all, I reach out to you, Internet, from the deepest depths of my morass of self loathing, and order this personalized mug:

It’s arrived, I’m told, and is waiting for me in Portland. By the point I get there (late June), hopefully I will no longer be so gross, and so able to appreciate it as a now-wholly-humorous manifestation of past angst.

That pretty much brings us up to date. Still doing final edits on the translations, but doing it in a saner fashion, with less peanut butter and more of my own writing also happening.

APRIL

And here we are.

This post has been a long one, I know, but it’s just so good to see you again, Internet.

Let’s talk again tomorrow.