miss stinky (back in) in seoul

Spring is for daffodils and demonstrations. 4.19 4.29 5.18 6.4 We work around the terminology of massacre and protest, riot and repression, with numbers and dates. The Human Rights Film Festival here in Seoul screened Burma VJs: Reporting from a Closed Country last weekend, the screen set up outside at Cheonggye Plaza in between the headquarters of the two most conservative daily newspapers - Chosun Ilbo and Donga Ilbo. (I kept giggling at the contrast between the looming buildings and the %$#@! lollipop unicorn horn that somehow got commissioned for this public plaza.)

Anyway, the documentary is incredible. "Sometimes I feel like the world has forgotten about us." It's been less than two years since the protests in Burma and I already had forgotten. The courage of everyday people, bystanders protecting protesters from thugs, monks protecting reporters from government intelligence. Shooting from backpacks, camcorders under armpits. There are bits of footage that would slip without a ripple into a Hollywood spy blockbuster, silhouettes and headsets, the ominously shrill ringing cellphone, code names, but this is real life and when the reporters complain that the satellite connection is too slow to upload, it's nothing and everything like Mission Impossible.

When the monk muses, "Suppose we invite the public directly to join? Would it be fruitful?" and then you see the people of Rangoon posted on their rooftops, clapping and cheering, and crowded on balconies with their hands linked, and in buses, and in streets, waving and smiling, you are smiling and clapping too. "Fear is so deep in everybody" but for a few days nobody is scared. The documentary ends the way we know, loudspeakers, soldiers, guns, dead bodies, arrests, the offices of Democratic Voice of Burma raided, "the scene is full of smoke and pigeons," and the last reporter with one of the last clutches of demonstrators puts away the video camera and just dials in for audio. The protesters are trapped, nowhere to go except against the soldiers and their guns, and we hear a voice call, "Those who are not afraid to die, come in front."

Two years ago because of someone else's thesis I thought a lot about Korean American identity and how it shifts and sometimes scatters upon contact with real! live! Korea! There are more of us now, diasporic Koreans, hyphenates coming to hang out with sourcelanders, enough so that yesterday someone from the Ministry of Justice ran me through a 15 minute phone survey of what life is like as overseas Korean back in Korea.

I'm not in Korea looking for my roots. Oh, I won't deny that my mitochondria tingle with genetic joy when my father points out the public bath he used to frequent as a 6 year old in post-Liberation pre-Korean War Seoul (the building now turned into a popular Chinese restaurant I think, or maybe a bunshik-jib) or my mother asks me to scream "halmoni" at the barbed wire fence between South and North Korea. But I'm much more interested in the Koreas that evolved after my parents skipped off to America. I'm in Korea investigating my alternate universe maybe, what could have been if I was raised amongst concrete beehives and 24 hour access to ice cream.

A lot do come in search of roots, but I suspect the common Korean explanation for my presence here as blood yearning for blood is a bit skimpy. (Sudden flashback to the Overseas Korean Foundation sponsored literature conference where suddenly every diasporic Korean writer was assumed to be a tragic figure crawling back to her motherland.) Sometimes we are curious, but not desperate, neh?

Canaries in the Motherland offers a convenient sampling of some of the other reasons to come. I think I attributed my arrival here to a desperate desire to order jjajjangmyun delivery to a park bench, but there is my cousin with his freshly renewed F4 (overseas Korean) visa just in case of the total collapse of the U.S financial sector, and some others (cough) who appear to be in search of spouses. Even my language acquisition was mostly practical and not motivated by a desire to read 토지 (Toji, the Land) or Joseon dynasty sijo. I just want to know how to argue with bureaucrats and make doctor's appointments and when it comes time for me to coddle my parents, be able to do that here, in Korea, in Korean.

I joke that I'm in Asia looking for Asian America. Specifically, the six Asian American communities with enough visibility in the San Francisco Bay Area that me and the other Chinese boy name generator felt compelled to engineer pan-Asian diversity in a certain art and essay contest: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. I came looking for us here, in Hanoi, in Fukuoka, in Bombay, in Taipei, in Manila, in Seoul. Reconstructing in some odd way, the Asian American communities, however splintered, of San Jose, Fremont, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, Oakland. I want to weave together Asia with silly zine projects and nudge the Korean hipsters to be less London-longing or New York-needy and take inspiration from closer archipelagos.

The awkward and to me awful term sometimes used to refer to the mostly rural-raised kids born to mostly Southeast Asian mothers and Korean fathers - Ko-sians - made it plain that my doctrine of Asian solidarity didn't really fly here. Asia, for Koreans, is over there, not as shiny, someplace to go on honeymoons and backpacking jaunts.

But when pressed, I justify my presence here in terms of Asia. I am curious about Asia. As an Asian American. So yeah, color me naive but that's what I say I'm doing.

Kim Dae Jung paying his respects to the widow (url courtesy of Mr. Free Jazz)

I am a former carrier of GSF1 and remain infected by GSF4 I think.

Geek Social Fallacies

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil

GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.

In its non-pathological form, GSF1 is benign, and even commendable: it is long past time we all grew up and stopped with the junior high popularity games. However, in its pathological form, GSF1 prevents its carrier from participating in -- or tolerating -- the exclusion of anyone from anything, be it a party, a comic book store, or a web forum, and no matter how obnoxious, offensive, or aromatic the prospective excludee may be.

As a result, nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate. If GSF1 exists in sufficient concentration -- and it usually does -- it is impossible to expel a person who actively detracts from every social event

Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive

Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:

"Wouldn't it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!"

If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.

I'm not sure where the impulse originates, to post about Roh Moo-hyun's suicide. Not a Kilroy was here, or the pundit's sprint to be the first to a particularly shiny insight. Not even to marvel at how news spread, a text message to me, a stunned squawk on Skype, then Google-assisted text messages to friends in the U.S., then five chat windows. How do you mourn a president? A president of a country I am not from but I live in. When Nixon died, we knew because the flag at school had been lowered and asked why. I wrote this back in 2003 in my chapter on his election: "It's unclear if Roh will be able to honor the trust of the millions of young people to keep politics clean, but what is not in doubt is the ability of those young people to put a president in the Blue House." My mom, who remained a Roh fan to the end, pishposhed the charges. $6 million? Chump change compared to what other presidents stuffed into their own pockets. How do you live without a legacy? (mind goes charging off into tangents wondering if Korea also has a system of presidential libraries and what GW Bush's reaction was)



Roh Moo-hyun as a kid

I would like to "ruin" Korea's "brand image" by staging some violently communicative protests in downtown Seoul. I'm a pacifist, or at least, I never got past six weeks of judo, so perhaps some members of the Society for Creative Anachronism can come over to Korea to joust their way past all those riot buses. Actually, combining cosplay and mass protest isn't the worst idea I've had today. Japan may be wacky, but Korea is wacky and wielding spears.

One of my most memorable displays of ignorance occurred on a road trip down to Guje Island a few years back, when I exclaimed over the greenness of a lawn. Turns out it was a rice paddy, but hey, I only grew up with cornfields.

안병석

so we all sortied into the spitting sky last night, a temporary mishmash of artists (gallery opening) and doctors (med-school friends). among the mix was a talented painter who bragged about his gold medal at the military olympics (Korean riflemen are better because they always had crap equipment and instead of the proper weapons Americans shoot with, are told to kill their enemies with BB guns) but in the next gulp of sentences insisted he was a hippie. now I imagine a platoon of sniper hippies, in mismatched military greatcoats, swarming down from their mountain roosts to riddle us all with their facial hair.

137 boxes of the 100+ (collective and cumulative) years of my family's existence in America were shipped to Korea, I had insomnia, we found my diapers in one of the 137 boxes (who keeps their child's cloth diapers for over 30 years? --beat-- right, my parents.), some secret stuff happened, some other stuff got declassified, I tried murdering Miss Panda again (by boat, bike, and intestinal bug) in Laos and Vietnam, and now I am staring down the moldy barrel of my thesis again for one last post-collegiate hurrah. Blogging as procrastination. Why don't more people do this?

::

Today while watching a Korean drama rerun over lunch, I commented that my fruit peeling skills were on par with the on-screen spoiled Seoul girl learning to rough it in the countryside. My father promptly suggested we buy a box of apples for me to practice on. Earlier, on parents' day, my mother was giggly and apologetic over her artistically hewn watermelon slices that were presented to Gomo and Gomobu. If we had actually done the TV series 작전! 일등 신랑감 만들기 (Operation Perfect Bridegroom) and its sequel 작전! 최고 며느리감 만들기 (Operation Perfect Daughter-in-Law) the season featuring yours truly would have stalled on the first challenge of proving marriageability by doing the flawlessly even, spiral, one-piece peel.

As we were ricocheting around inside the van on our way inside the DMZ to visit some painted maples (get your demilitarized maple syrup here!), the employee and the professor were reminiscing about their stretch in the military. "Yeah, grenades are the most fun." "Especially when you use them to fish."

So when we talk about overturning California's ballot initiative system is it because we are progressives? Also, after reading Xinran's The Good Women of China I did try to come up with what my tenets would be if I ran a Cultural Revolution. Because you know, I wage class warfare like a church mouse.

From Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories:

Faced with recurrent political apathy, progressivism has traditionally decried civic sloth and preached the gospel of public participation. Yet precisely at those moments when the citizenry is most eager and engaged, progressives are rarely pleased with the results. An energized populace is, unfortunately, empowered by popular sentiment and popular passion. Progressivism tends to be suspicious of such energy, thinking it usually badly informed and misdirected by clever manipulation.(187) Thus progressivism finds itself continually hoping for an active citizenry, but perpetually in fear that it will get what it wishes for.

We have seen this schizophrenia before. It is the simultaneous trust of the democratic process in the abstract coupled with a distrust of the same process when goaded and controlled by ordinary citizens. Populism's vision of normal politics is progressivism's nightmare -- a citizenry that sporadically takes power into its own hands without adequate preparation and sufficient education in proper values. Yet from populism's standpoint the progressive dream is hardly heavenly -- for it is premised on disdain and disrespect for popular will and civic energy. It is a participation with only idealized participants, a democratic culture without a demos.

A teenage orphan with a preposterously retentive memory and a knack for detailed explanation will naturally turn to tutoring to make his way in post-war Korea. For a while in the 1960s, my father taught the children of the head of the Seoul Customs office. Japanese cultural imports were all definitely illegal then, but a little wiggle-room for sporting matches meant that those recordings weren't immediately lobbed into the incinerator with Yojimbo. One night, the Seoul Customs officer took my dad to a warehouse full of confiscated goods, turned on the projector (no VHS, no Beta!), and for the rest of the night (in what I can only imagine as a neverending basement) until curfew lifted at daybreak, my dad watched film reels of Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance matches.

Also my dad recalls that ramen didn't arrive in Korea until his third year of university and that no one sold kimbap because rice was rationed.

from Girls and Warzones:

14: ...Yasushi Akashi's statement when he, as head of the UN mission in Cambodia, was approached by various governmental and NGO representatives about the physical and sexual violation of women and girls by UN troops. He responded he was 'not a puritan'; that 18-year-old, hot blooded soldiers had a right to drink a few beers and chase after 'young beautiful things of the opposite sex'.

17: 'Lin Lin' was thirteen years old when she was recruited by an agent for work in Thailand. Her father took $480 from the agent with the understanding that his daughter would pay the loan back out of her earnings. The agent took 'Lin Lin' to Bangkok, and three days later she was taken to the Ran Dee Prom brothel. 'Lin Lin' did not know what was going on until a man came into her room and started touching her breasts and body and then forced her to have sex. For the next two years, 'Lin Lin' worked in various parts of Thailand in four different brothels, all but one owned by the same family. The owners told her she would have to keep prostituting herself until she paid off her father's debt. Her clients, who often included the police, paid the owner $4 each time. If she refused a client's demands, she was slapped and threatened by the owner. She worked everyday except for the two days off each month she was allowed for her menstrual period. Once she had to borrow money to pay for medicine to treat a painful vaginal infection. This amount was added to her debt. On January 18, 1993 the Crime Suppression Division of the Thai police raided the brothel in which 'Lin Lin' worked, and she was taken to a shelter run by a local non-governmental organization. She was fifteen years old, had spent over two years of her young life in compulsory prostitution, and tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.

I have been very very slowly translating testimonies by former "comfort women," both for the book and subtitles. The explanation and the story are too damn familiar. And yet the Born into Brothels type of intervention seems more about the white knight in celluloid armor than anything else. Ach. I'm just a mole in her armchair at this point, part of the legions of the outraged from afar.

Love Songs from Chris 'The Falcon' Han on Vimeo.

Happy New Year to youse.

Amis on the morning after: “He stood brooding by his bed… The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

What I learned from Amis - being angsty is for teenagers but being drunk is wholly acceptable at any age.

“Excursions into the literature of a foreign country much resemble our travels abroad. Sights that are taken for granted by the inhabitants seem to us astonishing. ... In our desire to get at the heart of the country we seek out whatever it may be that is most unlike what we are used to, and declare this to be the very essence.” -Virgina Woolf

I stopped paying attention to Korea for a while there. The long sociological rambles with Mr. San Jose, the plans for self-appointed expertise with the Panda, my half-assembled thesis, all that sorta slunk off into a thicket of Harry Potter fan fiction (don't say it, I know it).

If we only notice what is different and never what is the same then New Yorkers live off of cut flowers and hair salons and my neighbors eat earrings, fuzzy bear hats, and disembodied leggings for breakfast. If New Zealand has 5000 sheep per capita, Korea must have 50,000 thousand hairclips per twentysomething.

Also, if high school movies set in America need cars, student stories here need the school 매점. The way my students describe the steamed veggie bun on sale at their middle school is positively Homeric.

at 11:44pm, the fellow in #303 fumbles his key into the lock, the coda to the 6:50am overture of plumbing. at 9:27am, the male half of the couple in #301 coughs, sneezes and the coughs again (the wall in my bedroom is rather thin). the barking section was introduced into #101 last week and now yips follow the chinese deliveryman as he shuffles up the stairs to #201. every once in a while, the couple in the building across the driveway leave their sliding doors open when they have sex and I blush. our building's an uncoordinated rendition of the scene in Delicatessan where every room is an organ pulsing to a single heartbeat.

if not unvarnished (we wrap our personas 'round ourselves like pashmina), the documentary A Complete History of My Sexual Failures does nudge one to think how a thorough accounting of the past might help with the present paralysis.

I've got a circa 1996 Bon Jovi on the computer wailing about how he'll be there for me, how he'll be the air for me, while I finally finish up grading essays on the failures of the Korean education system. (yes I'm assigning my students paper topics that will serve as the cannon fodder for my educational revolt)

Who knew the cure to my deep down funk was some hair metal ballads.