Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Winter of my discontent

My dad wrote me an email the other day that broke my heart. I sent him a quick note to ask how things were back home and he gave me the perfunctory and typical, nothing extraordinary and I suppose this is a good thing, a luxury even that no calamity is relevant in their lives; so for that I am very grateful. Then he ended with, "Just take care of yourself and give us a greeting once in awhile." A couple of years ago I may have thought that last bit was cute, not in the pejorative but in a very endearing way. Endearingly cute because of his use of the word greeting, the way a Martian might step from its UFO onto Planet Earth and reprise the phrase as its first communication attempt. It's just a funny salutation that is no longer colloquial except of course in email from my lovely father. But today isn't a couple of years ago so that last bit wasn't cute; instead, it ached and I felt a surge of guilt for being absent from my family's life for the last eight years. This isn't the first time I felt it but it is the first time I didn't rationalize it. Before I'd dilute the compunction with arguments about living life to the fullest, being young and unfettered; the time was now because if not now when? So I packed my bags and left because I wanted to conquer a new city apart from my family. A lot of that isn't illogical but that doesn't make it 100% ok so I conceded to the guilt and said ok, I'm a bad daughter.

My heart breaks more often now and I can't decide if I should ascribe this change to the season. Winter is generally a melancholy time for me; I'm certainly more plaintive and reflective especially as the calendar rounds out and I begin to sketch out my personal goals for the year. Maybe it's the weather. Damn, it's been cold. Snow in Danville? Get out of town! But I have a space heater and a pea coat and scarves in excess and warm socks and gloves and boots -- all arsenals against the biting cold but not everyone is as fortunate. Why was I given so much and what do I do with it? What good is thinking these things without putting thought to action? Guilt creeps in again; guilt for laziness; guilt for hoarding; guilt for hubris because isn't this blog pretty arrogant? Like I'm aware I should feel guilty and that self awareness gives me an allowance to not do anything. Someone once told me life shouldn't be a race to the bottom, time spent just getting by, doing the bare minimum, just scathing virtue. I think he's right; I know he's right. But I am a forgetter.  I dawdle through life, trundle through my days with TV and books and every once in awhile I'll come across something that makes me look up, a tincture, but it's short-lived and when I take stock of my time the proportion of amusement far outweigh the things that matter. I'm still unsure of what those things are but I am certain it isn't what I am doing.

I don't always feel this way. I'm a lot simpler in the summertime. I want to throw on mini skirts and high heels and drink pretty drinks. I don't want to talk about heavy things and I stay away from heavy books. I pick up soft reading like the Kite Runner and Shopaholic Takes Manhattan! It's great fun. My best friend and I tried really hard to extend the summer. We both agreed we weren't ready for the winter but seasons don't care for our opinion.

I threw on a light coat today fully aware that I'd freeze.  I thought it'd be a good way to prepare for my trip to Chicago later this month and New York in January. A lighter coat in SF cold would simulate a heavy coat in Chicago/NY cold. I am a ninja in training.

I'm reading the Winter of Our Discontent; it's filled with wonderful things. The book starts out third-person omniscient and switches to first-person narrated by the protagonist Ethan. I love his thoughts on Mary, his wife. See here: "I do love her, and that's odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else -- and I adore her." Is that not good? And here: "I thought of the most feminine story I ever heard. Two women meet. One cries, 'What have you done with your hair? It looks like a wig.' 'It is a wig.' 'Well, you'd never know it.' Maybe these are deeper responses than we know or have any right to know." I'm not sure why that last one warms my heart but it reminds me of my girl friends back home.

Before moving to SF, my favorite season used to be Autumn. Seattle is unreal in the Fall. The air has a taste, the trees a feeling and the city a smell. I'm not sure what my favorite season is anymore. I used to say I love cold weather but I don't think I can say that without equivocation because I've only visited the cold; if I had to shovel through it to start my day I might not be as romantic about it. But I guess it's no matter what I like; the intrusive winter is here and my mood is altered for the time. A part of me likes the brooding that comes with this season; it feels something like growing pains? Summer's great too. We all need cotton candy and ice cream and whim. I guess that's my biggest complaint about SF; we have no seasons. Maybe it's time for a change.

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on that note, i've started a new blog. this will be my last xanga post. =( you can find me at: christineyshin.wordpress.com.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

There's a concept in the Korean culture called jeong. I never knew how to explain it because there is no English equivalent but I'm going to attempt it here because I felt it so strongly on my trip. Loosely translated jeong is affection, a fond sentiment, an attachment for another—but it runs deeper.

Once I was folding a blanket with a friend. She held two corners while I had the opposite two ends. She tugged her right corner to cue me to bring my left corner up to match hers as we folded the blanket length-wise for the first crease. My right hand received the left corner of the blanket, her left received her right corner and we readjusted our grip. We each had two new corners. It was my turn and we had to fold the elongated fabric width-wise. Gripping my new corners, I walked toward her to achieve this shape. When I reached her end I had two options: I could hang on to my corners and collect her two or I could give my two corners to her. The person collecting the corners would finish the rest. This is all done in pantomime; no words are exchanged, just expressions on the face and small tugs for subtle cues. Which way should we fold? Should we go right to meet the left? Should we start with a wide fold or a lengthy fold? Who wants to approach whom to shorten the length? This is where jeong kicks in: we both want to go our respective lefts resulting in a twisted blanket not a folded one. So we try again, both reversing the direction at the same time twisting the blanket the other way. We laugh. We try again and again and the pantomime continues. Or when we're at the part where one of us has to approach the other to halve the length but neither budges thinking the other will move first. We laugh and at the same time move toward each other to meet in the middle.

This illustration resonates with me because as a child I used to fold blankets with my grandma and my mom and brother and my cousins. Koreans used to sleep on thick blankets not beds. This was so for my parent's generation too. Sleeping on blankets is moribund now and has been replaced with beds. Folding blankets is analogous to making a bed but it is so much more than that. The disparity between the two analogies may be jeong.

In Korea, there are small restaurants called bunshiks that sell quick bites and seat about a dozen or so patrons. Bunshiks may remind you of your mother's kitchen and is almost always run by ajumas (older Korean lady). When we need to get her attention to refill our side dishes or order more food we yell out "Imo!" which is "auntie" in Korean. Similarly, while shopping I bargained to cut down the price of a dress and referred to the shop owner as "unni" or "older sister." An elder entered the subway and I called him "harabeoji" or "grandpa" as I yielded my seat for him. There is no separate term for an elder person—just like you would your kin, you call every elder either grandma or grandpa. There is a unique relationship element in the Korean culture evinced by the language and words we use. For example, when I refer to my house or my mom I say "woori jib" or "woori umma" which translated is our house or our mom. The language is inherently intimate; jeong is built into our words.

In English grammar, a diminutive is a suffix that usually denotes affection. For example, take the suffix -ie­ and affix it to hot for hottie and the diminutive, -ie creates a moniker expressing affection. The diminutive -let­­ at the end of drop in droplet creates a softer sound and implies a smaller form of the root word the way piglet is often a younger, cuter, smaller pig. I think jeong is a diminutive, a softener, something that attaches and creates endearment. Korean people aren't ostensibly pleasant. We are naturally abrasive and hot tempered but jeong allows us to have a deep tolerance for abrasion and give an allowance to the quick tempered. It creates room for supplication and understanding and for a culture that is infamous for being quite the contrary this thing called jeong is pretty big.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Friends, Family, and All Things Seattle

Steinbeck distinguishes an American from the Americans, an individual from the group unit describing each as complete opposites. I understand this only because my speech and behavior change when I'm in the group, especially in my group. When I'm home I'm part of a unit of friends and my locution becomes a covey of words and phrases like "hella" and "party foul" and "like whatever" and "like duh" and "like really?" Essentially the word like is affixed to as many words possible but somehow the profundity of our conversations isn't compromised. We laugh and talk about shoes and boys and love and life and religion and politics. No stone is left unturned; we cover everything. And it seems that this is almost always done over food and drink.

Friday:

Friday is the first night; it was hardly a grand opening but that didn't matter. We wanted to try something different this time. Let's not go to Imo—we always go there! So we round up the troops and shoot for Ibiza for a friend of a friend of a friend's birthday party but of course we're scrambling to find parking right around the time the guestlist closes. We arrive, loiter and loiter, then judge the crowd standing in line. We compute a fun-value ratio in our heads and decide that our twenty is better spent at the spot we always, always go. So much for trying something different but it is no matter; we're all there, one unit, eating and drinking and laughing and talking. The night dwindles, evinced by subsiding chatter so the unit divides according to geography. I pair up with my Irene since we both live in the dirty south; we keep it real in the ghetto or something. I love the car rides down when it's just the two of us. The unit dynamic is always changing when one girl adds on or another one falls off but all permutations are equally effortless and amazing.

Irene, Toby Monster, Ginger, and Belvedere

Food and drink at Imos.

Saturday:

I crash at Irene's pad and she drops me off in the morning. Both parents are in the driveway. My dad is headed out the door to commence his golf day. My mom greets me and asks me what's wrong with my face (basically, you look like hell) and I tell her that I love her. She is kind, my mother. I'm not hungry but I know my mom wants to feed me so I eat anyway and we talk and talk and talk. We get bored. I'm stuffed. I suggest walking. We decided Wal Mart and we go. I bought dental floss but I didn't really need to. There is a strange need in our society to support action with reason and that reason must be clear and apparent. Our reason was no reason; we just wanted to hang out and that isn't reason enough so the dental floss served as the clear and apparent purpose.

Saturday was the big day: I was to meet "the girlfriend." After much internet stalking and extensive discussion with the parents, I finally met her. I asked my friend in jest if I should play the bitchy sister role to which she laughed and emphatically insisted I should. As much as I would have loved to I resisted and tried to make her as comfortable as I could. When my mom and I returned from our purpose-driven walk the couple was home. I gave my brother a big hug and proceeded to give her one too and I think that introduction might have been slightly awkward for her. Koreans don't really hug it out and we're naturally suspicious people so the gesture might have been overwhelming. My assumption could just be in my head but her hug was a slight lean forward, like an awkward dip followed by a polite hehe to assuage the surrounding discomfort. My dad calls and instructs us all to huddle into the Camry and meet him at the BBQ joint.

I have to say this about Korean BBQ: it's much more than food. There is so much going on. Two people are handling the tongs and frying up the meat. I'm shouting across the table at my mom to refill my dish with more of that potato action and beat sprout stuff while she's summoning the waiter to get us more water and side dishes. My brother is putting in a request for more pork belly and I'm stacking up my little ssam (lettuce wrap) with all sorts of goodness. Smoke's up. We're all sweating and smell like glorious meat. It's a battlefield that isn't bellicose. It does something amazing. We're all relevant at the table, we're all included. Language barriers are gone; in fact talking is minimal with the exception of, "Hey! Try that in your ssam, it's hella good! Make sure you get a dallop of dwenjang in there! Here, take this! Yo, hook it up with some more chadolbaegi." In my ssam, rice was forgone—not because I was being carb conscious but I didn't want to do a single bud injustice by diluting the taste and texture of everything else with the rice. Man, it was a good, good meal. Relationships are formed over good, good meals.

She's a beast.

That night, we were one unit at the War Room. Great times were had. I'll let the pictures speak:

@ Jeany's before War Room.

The masterpiece.

Take 1.

Take 2.

Jack in the Box (of course!)

Bahn and man purse.

Sunday:

I zip down Sunday morning in time to attend the morning service with my mom only to zip right back up to Seattle to resume the eating and playing and the doing of nothing with my girls. We feasted at Thai Tom's on the Ave and vacillated between Trophy Cupcakes or Molly Moon's. We decided that it was an ice cream day and drove out to Wallingford. Molly Moon's is akin to San Francisco's BiRite. They have similar flavors like Salted Caramel, Honey Lavender, and Maple Walnut. The story I'm about to tell is totally paraphrased and the accuracy of the dialogue is as veritable as any historical account from one person's angle but this is the gist:

Jeany: Yea, the Birthday Cake is good.

Sus: Oh no. I dunno what flavor to get. I'm mad at myself for wanting the Birthday Cake here.

Me: Haha, yea. I kinda want the Vanilla Bean but I feel like I should get something more exotic.

Sus: Yea…

Jane to Sus to Jeany to Me: What are you gonna get? I dunno, what are you gonna get? I dunno yet. I'm probably going to tryyyyy… mmmm… (Repeat x100)

Me: Hey, did you try the Birthday Cake yet?

Jane: Yea, it's good.

Me: Is it too sweet?

Jane: No, it's good.

Me: You're getting the Birthday Cake?

Sus: Yea.

Me: You tried it?

Sus: No, I'm trusting Jane.

Me: Ok.

With our scoops we walk outside. I take a bite from my scoop.

Me: Omg, It's soooo my birthday today!

Sus: Haha, I know! That's why I wanted Birthday Cake!

Me: Mmmmmmmm….

Me: You know… Dreyer's makes this. You can get it in the carton at the grocery.

Sus: Really?

Me: Yea, man.

Sus: Mm… is it good??

Me: It tastes like Birthday Cake.

And we both crack up and can't stop laughing. Tears are streaming my face and Jane and Jeany are flummoxed: What's so funny? Sus and I each attempt to explain the account but without success because we were still falling over laughing and gasping for air. If you (the reader) don't find this funny it's because it's not. Our conversation was so insignificant that it was hysterical and the beauty of it was that we both recognized at the same time how Napoleon Dynamite our dialogue was. It was great. We ended the day at Gas Works Park and I promised my mom I'd be home for dinner so the girls and I hugged it out and parted. I drove home.

The Ave.

Molly Moon's.

Gasworks Park.

View of Seattle from Gasworks Park.

I was a little late so everyone was waiting for me so I quickly changed and sat at the table. At first it was the three of us: my brother, the girlfriend, and me. My brother did most of the talking with the girlfriend filling in here and there; I grunted every now and then to make myself relevant. My mom and dad joined shortly after completing the party and the dinner was in full swing. I have to give it to the girl: she stood her own. She knows the rules and abides by them. She wasn't intrusive, she wasn't too shy or too chatty or too much of anything and I thought that was really smart. She understood that she was still a foreigner on our land and every mutter was being picked apart and analyzed. She was in the hot seat. This is a seat I do not want to sit in but I know I'll have to face it one day. My mom is really charming and she's good at making people feel at ease but the girlfriend is smart—she never deviated from neutral and kept a safe and boring cadence throughout dinner. Somehow we arrived (and lingered) on a slightly uncomfortable topic and I thought, ok how do I steer this back to a no hazard zone? Fortunately I didn't have to do anything. In the middle of my brother's two cents, my dad cuts in and goes, "Bap jo!" (Translation: give me my rice, woman!). The patriarch lives. The remark was an abrasion to my mother, a relief to the girlfriend, and comedy for me. My mom gave the pops stink eye for the duration of the night. I loved it.

Then.

It was such an amazing weekend, a great mix of friends and family. I'm back in San Francisco now and I can't help thinking how much I'd love to transport all of them here. My mom asks me if I'm ever going to move back and I really have no idea. Maybe? I love it out here and the longer I stay the more attached to this place I get. I feel like San Francisco exercises the individual in me while Seattle the collective and right now I kind of need to be apart. Either way, it's no quandary. I'm in a good position and am very grateful.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Obama's opus

It is a peculiar and funny thing when master and pet, usually a dog, begin to resemble one another. I'd suspect that the funnier peculiarity is that of dog morphing into man as this would be an impossibility since man is purportedly superior by a large margin and to witness this transformation in the way owner and pet walk and wear their hair is rather comical—or is the funnier peculiarity that of man looking like dog because there is an allegorical truth about man's nature. I think I will choose the former because the latter is a gross offense to a species that has done nothing but accompany without artifice and love without condition. Either way the metamorphosis is uncanny and amusing and has been reprised across all owners and owner's pets that there must be some logic behind it. I further suspect that dog begins to look like master because of the tone set at the top, in the household and inevitably the change will come in subtle, slow progressions the way lines are etched into an aging face, unnoticeably and quietly. 

I know nothing about sports. Cross-country was my only high school activity and if my selection of extra-curriculars is any indication I prefer individual sport over team. This pretty much eliminates all sports that I can watch recreationally save golf; that sport bores me to tears. I once tried to get really into basketball and sometimes I will because a friend's enthusiasm will be abundant and spill over to my lack of and fill me to the brim thereof resulting in a momentous occasion of cheering with beer and garlic fries. A catchy song needs a hook and sports for me had no hook. Recently, someone gave me a hook. He talked about football coaches and how a coaching style will permeate a team and you can witness this firsthand at a game: I thought of a maestro conducting a symphony, setting the tone for a composition. It occurred to me that the coaches aren't just barking like how a maestro isn't just waving a stick. A tone is set from atop and it percolates and seeps and touches.

I think he knows a thing or two about tones. In his first day of office, he froze the salaries of senior staff earning more than $100,000 a year. He said, "During this period of economic emergency, families are tightening their belts, and so should Washington. However long we are keepers of the public trust, we should never forget that we are here as public servants." Further, he signed an order prohibiting executive-branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists. Officials are prohibited from working on matters in which they have previously lobbied for and may not lobby for such matters even after their service in his administration. This smells awfully familiar. These provisions are redolent of those enacted in the accounting world post-Enron. It's about damn time for independence and I must say that I am excited; to that I might add that I'm generally not that excitable so to say that I am might be hyperbole but excitement is a relative thing. My mood has jumped from one bar to another one slightly above it and I call that spread excitement; this is no exaggeration. He is setting the tone for this year and the melody is quite titillating.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Saturday Mornings

I used to love Saturday mornings because of the cartoons. I'd get up as early as 6am to start watching seriatim—Jem and the Holograms, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Scooby Doo. And then we got Nintendo and Saturday mornings became competitive because my brother and I would race to wake up before the other to usurp the game console; neither wanted controller two, it was Mario or bust. Luigi never had a chance to win our hearts.

I still love Saturday mornings but for two other reasons: I wake up when I wake up and the Fillmore Farmer's Market. I love waking up to sunlight and not a ring tone.  I make sure my balcony blinds are turned in a direction so the rays stream straight at my face. Once sleep is broken, weekend or not, I always grab a clock to check the time and I almost always succeed in beating the hands at 9am. That's when the market starts.

I usually don't have cash on hand so I'll pull some out and hit up Starbucks first to break my twenty. With coffee and broken twenty, I'll do my first round at a bakery from Santa Rosa. The guy knows my favorite: white chocolate cranberry cookies. Who espoused these two? My God! The tart of cranberry coupled with the creamy of white chocolate were joined in perfect matrimony, much like coffee and books, coffee and writing, coffee and cigarettes, coffee and conversations. Actually, coffee is quite versatile when I think about it. If I get to the bakery stand too late, their white chocolates run out and I'll opt for the almond variety. The guy seems apologetic when he runs out because I think he knows how much I like them. He always says, "See you next week," and I really like that.

I walk between the two rows of booths lined along O'Farrell and compute a mental calculation of lunch menus in my head, workplace-conducive and Tupperware-friendly. I've been obsessed with cauliflower as of late so I bought a single crown and a couple stems of broccoli. I paid $2.50. I sampled some cheese at another stand and it was really good. More than taste it was texture. The cheese here wasn't grated perfectly or cubed in exact squares; it was flicked off of its block in small amorphous chunks the way Italians eat their cheese and I liked it. I scanned the other vendors; among them were more bakeries that had sweet looking delicacies but my fealty remains with the white chocolate purveyor. I once bought a macaroon from a different vendor and I felt like I was cheating on my bakery. The guilt made the pastry taste bitter. I was done here so I walked back into Starbucks and sat at my usual.

I avoid the tables if I can and try to snag a seat at the bar in front of the large window that stands between me and the farmer's market. My favorite position is three stools from the door. I like this seat because I can watch the economy outside at a good angle. It's a little past 9:30am but it feels like mid-afternoon with all of the activity, both inside of the coffee shop and outside at the market. I feel like a spy, as if I get to watch things from behind the curtain. From my vantage point, I can see all of the vendors' crates, some empty, some full. I see the vendors refilling their products from full crate to empty basket and I wonder about efficiency. Couldn't the vendor forgo the basket and place the crates directly on the tables thereby eliminating that extra step? But I suppose the baskets give the vegetables a rustic feel and I know that people like to feel and when people like, people buy.

I zoom out my attention from the crates and look at commerce in one big snapshot and the flower vendor catches my eye only because his output is so vibrant. I wonder how a color like that is achieved through a single seed. I'd imagine fashion trends emanate from the color of flowers. Who could have concocted a shade of royal purple, almost blue without first having seen the petals of a violet? Who could have designed a gorgeous, cotton sundress without having witnessed a dandelion? Surely not Donna Karen. I never really liked flowers but I'm beginning to.

On a side note, I've always been curious about florescent shades. How do they glow? I don't understand. Typically, things illuminate when juxtaposed against something dull, the contrast giving off an illusion of luminescence. Fluorescents glow without such contrast and I never understood it. I remember Crayola packaged a box of 8 crayons and labeled it Fluorescent and another box of 8 and called it Bold. I got these two boxes as a gift when I was about 8 and I was so fascinated with the first box because it glowed—in daylight! The Bold crayons worked better in a coloring book because I didn't have to press down so hard to make the colors actually show; the Fluorescents had limited utility because no matter how hard I pressed the colors came out muted and waxy but I loved them better anyway. I didn't want to waste them or ruin them with blunt tips so I just kept them in my box and filled my book with bold. I sharpened the hell out of those bolds and by the end of the year they were but mere stubs while my fluorescents stayed packaged and pretty. Speaking of sharpening, I would have sold my soul for a 64-kit Crayola box with the built-in sharpener. I wanted it so bad but my mom thought it was excess. I wanted desperately to use Cerulean and Magenta and Tangerine, not just blue, red, or orange.

The orange of a carrot at the farmer's market is not that orange and they have stems. I totally forgot carrots have stems! Green, bushy stems like the kind Bugs Bunny eats! I'm so used to them presented in cut-up slices in nicely packaged Eat Right bags sold along an assortment of veggie dip. What else am I forgetting?

It was unusually sunny today and I was getting hot sitting at the bar so I stepped out. I was heading home but I stopped to listen to a couple of songs from the live band. Man, they love what they do, you could tell. More than the melody, I enjoyed watching them play, the way the keyboarder glided from one end to the other while tapping his feet, the cellist plucking then strumming then plucking again, and the way the guy moved his hands, feet, body while banging on a hand drum. It all worked.

By the time I got home, it was afternoon. Saturday afternoons are great but it'll never trump Saturday morning. I guess I should make lunch now since lunch is what we do in the afternoon. Until next week…