I’m just too alone in this world.

So today is the first day of the second semester’s mid-terms and all the teachers went hiking.  Except me.

For some reason, this school doesn’t expect me to participate in any teacher group activities.  And I don’t bother, because as great as this assignment is – nobody at this school bothers to take ten seconds out to talk to me or include me in anything, so it’s a drag being with any of them.  As crappy an assignment as the ultra-conservative missionary school was, having a teacher there crush on me made for inclusion into every conversation (and drama) and I was expected to join in everything.

And while they are all complaining about having to do these “fun” activities, (another example of the idea of collective not being wonderful to all involved) I go home.  Only today I watched two movies while drinking makkolli and then, after opening my tin bank of 100 won coins with a can opener, hauling the 15 lbs of change down to the bank and netting 76,000 won, (people often comment on how I don’t take the time to unload my change when purchasing things, but saving change is just something I’ve always done as a welfare mom – it really comes in handy when, like this month, I accidentally sent too much to my American bank account)  I decided to take a stroll in my neighborhood and find some dinner out.

Here is the crappiest guard duty ever, standing by yourself in a glass box in the blazing sun all day.  There is a small military presence here, but I don’t know what they do and where they are located or why this one lone sentinel exists.

So this is fast-food, Korean style.  The ubiquitous kimbap shops all over Korea, from which foreigners eat half their meals at because it’s one of the few places that you are certain to not get turned away because you’re eating alone.  Plus it’s dirt cheap. But I took the photo of it just to show what hanguel overload can feel like when you’re illiterate and it takes you forever to sound out each word.

So this was my destination today, as I’ve been fascinated by the signage.  Most Korean restaurants specialize in one or two types of food, and it’s quite shocking to foreigners to have their sensibilities assaulted with, for example, a huge picture of a pig facing them when going to eat at a pork restaurant.  Koreans haven’t sanitized where their sources of food come from at all, which is a good thing.  But the specialization is kind of a bummer if you have a party of people who have specific tastes and could use a variety of foods on the menu.  But that’s not the group way here.  So fill up on banchan and pray there’s no animal products in the soup broth if you’re a vegetarian.

I’m not a vegetarian anymore (good thing, too, since vegetarian restaurants are hard to find in the country) and my choice today was:  shall I eat Billy or Donald today?

Oh! Here is my only constant companion, the spin                         ning bea   chball  again.

Been meaning to add this video, so this is as appropriate a time as any:

This blog very well may end soon, as my four year old Mac is about to kick the bucket…I’m constantly cleaning it up and rebooting to refresh the ram, but it sounds like death and the beach balls are making me want to get violent, since I’ve got so much to do and its all got to wait ’til the spinning stops…

Anyhow I’ve been meaning to try chevron forever and have determined that Billy tastes good.  It’s pretty lean, not too gamey, and holds up well to all those Korean spices.  It’s also supposed to help with virility (like I need that) and I hear it is used as a substitute when dog isn’t available…

Ordering went smoothly today, though  I’m just totally ashamed of myself, having been here a year and a half and I’m still at the level where I have to drag the owner outside and point to the picture of food I want.  This time I just pointed to the goat’s portrait and there weren’t a lot of choices, so there was no misunderstanding and no drama.  Thank God!

This was my other destination today, and why I grabbed the camera.  I’ve been wishing I had my camera with me every time I’ve passed this site, and I get here today and the sight is gone.  Bummer.  What it is, is a pumpkin patch.  Only all the pumpkins were growing ON the roof!  People will grow anything anywhere here.

Now slabs of wood might not be something that excites you guys, but I got all happy when I saw it, as it’s an indication of hand craft.  Sure enough, when I rounded the corner I saw this:

And what this is in front of is a little sign shop,

only these are hand carved calligraphic signs.  And, you can’t see it clearly in this photo, but there’s also some artwork mixing a kind of pop art with calligraphy and carving.  Very cool.

Next door a halmoni is doing food prep in a doorway.  Whenever business is slow, restaurant workers/owners can be seen cleaning, sorting, and preparing huge quantities of vegetables for banchan.  It’s usually a nice social activity – one that reminds me of the southern ladys I grew up with in my neighborhood, who would all snap beans together and gossip.  But this poor halmoni is doing it all by herself.

So we don’t have a lot of exotic fish and meat like Anyang did (though there is a place that has a fish truck (which looks like a pick-up truck with fitted tool boxes, only the they aren’t tool boxes but water-filled fish tanks) used to replenish the fresh fish swimming on display.  But here is our very own Boshintang restaurant.  Much nicer looking than the sad and dirty-looking ones in Seoul.  (Good god, this is turning into a 20 beachball post…grrr…)

There was one day I heard a REALLY horrific yelping of several mid-sized dogs coming from the general area, and I came over to investigate if they were slaughtering dogs right then and there.  But the yelping stopped by the time I got there.   I kind of am not against raising animals for meat, since a lot of animals we eat are very smart, sensitive, and could be pets.  But I also don’t want them to have lived in torture and neglect.  From the train I can see a dog farm on the way to Chuncheon, and it looks like pretty horrific conditions – raised metal pens too small for any exercise and probably very unsanitary.  And also the story is dog meat’s virility-producing powers is enhanced with adrenaline, so the dogs are beaten to death instead of killed quickly.  I guess the morbid part of me wanted to see if it was true or not.

The dog restaurant is actually in a nice little traditional building.

with a garden out back and lots of kimchi and gochujang fermenting.  I don’t see this with most restaurants, who either skip the clay pots or purchase their gochujang.  No dog pens in sight, but then again I am too short to see over walls.

After dinner I stopped at the little coffee/donut/toast shop and ordered cup binsu for dessert.  Last year ice cream helped me survive the Korean summer.  This year, it was pat bingsu.  Which is, for those of you who don’t know, milk, sugar, shaved ice, sweet red beans, fruit, tiny rice cakes (which taste like marshmallows but a little chewier) and topped off with cereal powder.  And that cereal powder is really yummy.  Like everything Korean, you’re supposed to mix it up until it’s an ugly, unappetizing-looking mess and then eat it.  Which I HATE doing and I always get comments from Koreans for not doing so.  But unlike the rest of the Korean food, I actually do mix this up.  Only I wish the cereal came on the side, as it’s nice as a topping and not mixed in.  This set me back 1,500 won, or about a buck and a quarter.  Usually it’s sold by the bowl and at least two people should share one.  In Seoul you can get fancy fresh fruit ones with various combinations, such as with vanilla yogurt or green tea, etc.  But it could set you back about 7 bucks since fruit is one of the most expensive items in groceries.

And finally, this is how a lot of Koreans treat the tops of their walls:  with jagged, broken bottles set in concrete.  A pretty effective no trespassing sign, I’d say.

OK.  I have to shut down again.  The beach balls  are why I watch as much bad t.v. as I do.

It lead me to my new favorite blog.  With way over 2 million hits since 2007 I guess I’m a little late on the uptake (since I get less literate with each year) but I guess better late than never.

What’s great about James Turnball’s blog is his sharp eye.  (and what better measure of a society than its advertising messages?)  And how vigilant he is.  He’s right on top of all the things that make me crazy here in Korea.  I don’t always agree with him, but his analysis is always well studied and not as bombastic as, say, Ask a Korean who, btw, drives me insane referring to himself in the third person…Turnball’s just SMART.  It’s a great blog not only for the writing, but also because the images he shares can tell you way more than those-other-bloggers rants can.  Plus, he’s not trying to be edgy or flex his pecs.  He’s just really interested in the world he lives in!  You should really peruse it if you’re interested in Korean society.

For the particular article above I was greatly behind his stance of not insulting the intelligence or diminishing Korean women, but on the other hand I also thought he was a little quick to denounce the commenter Jake’s interjection of western colonialism into the power dynamics of mixed race relationships in Korea, though I agree his agenda to stop the emasculating of Asian men went a little overboard this time.

I kind of thought they were both right, if that’s possible.  (Korea is SO COMPLICATED) —  Too bad I am too chicken shit to jump into the water there, as I know I can’t hold my own because I know I do the opposite of most comenters/debaters — I’m always trying to simplify instead of magnify details —  But I do like to follow his exploration of gender issues in Korea, am glad somebody’s willing to go there in detail, and wanted to turn you onto his blog

Turnball and his wife clearly have a relationship based on respect and he probably confabs with people whom he can carry on an intelligent discussion with.  But I think a lot of Korean women are confused (and who can blame them?) and maybe a lot simpler than the women he’s spoken with.  And it is these simpler women who may resemble what Jake alludes to.  And I’ve met so many Caucasian men here who DON’T resemble Turnball and can’t think beyond their zippers or admit their yellow fever.

My take on the willingness to date Caucasian men is because they treat women better.  Actually, Korean men seem very sweet, charming, and old-fashioned and westerners are very forward, a little crass, and move fast – but at the end of the day/month/year – they get more respect from Caucasian men.  And it’s because they come from a country and a culture where respect is required and women are more like equals so their expectations are refreshingly different.

Too bad I’ve been traumatized my whole life by men with yellow fever, otherwise maybe I could be happy being treated nice by a Caucasian here.

Oh wait.

I keep forgetting that here I’m not yellow enough even for an LBH…

Maybe I should consult with Turnball for the next TRACK campaign…

I just wasted countless hours not working this weekend and instead writing posts that will never meet the light of day. They all end up negative or are just too confusing. So many things about this place I’ll never comprehend.

You get here and you look around and say to yourself, “Where is this oppressive, group-think, ostracizing harsh society everyone talks about?” All around you is majestic nature, bright lights, big city, beautiful people, and shopping therapy wrapped in a pop music happy bubble. Except for the sea of black and brown hair, everything seems the same as any metropolis anywhere.  And you’re all happy to be on a new adventure, all optomistic and open to anything.

And then you go to your job and in short order you get whacked with a nail-studded 2×4 and jolted with an electric cattle prod and you remember: you can’t see discrimination, you can’t see racism, you can’t see political class or gender oppression, and you surely can’t see ideology. But oh, can you ever feel it.

And you find yourself wishing everyone wore clothing color-and-style coded according to Confucian status precepts, just to make understanding easier.  This must be how halmonis feel.

And then you tap into the media, because it’s your only company. And even though you love it and it’s never failed you, here it’s omnipresent. And you ask yourself that age-old question: Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?

In the case of Korea, I hope the answer is neither.

For instance, I never in a million years thought I’d get sick of looking at good design or style or fashion.  But when every other channel is selling some kind of image enhancement and there are so many fashion and style shows when you turn on the t.v. and flip channels, it’s just excessive.  I can’t stomach one more second of it, and this weekend I reached my maximum saturation point.  (I am now only watching History, Discovery, and National Geographic as a result.  And I’m really appalled how they’re half reality t.v. now…) The counting eyelid surgery game is boring now.  The ankle blister counting game is boring now.  The watching girls totter and almost fall off their fetish shoes is boring now.  The criticism of each other, the self-awareness and level of pretension is nauseating.  Watching everyone (mostly insecure girls) kill themselves to be stylish is just depressing.  The fare is plastic people, clowns, or pitiful people.  Take your pick.

And then the movie we watched this weekend was also like the straw that broke this camel’s back.  My girlfriends got it because a favorite drama actor was in it, and it was about this phenomenon here called a model bar – the male equivalent of a hostess bar.  We all thought it would be fun, but watching it our lungs and livers and intestines were bleeding.  The room was silent and grim after. It consisted mostly of pointless,* lifeless/artless sex, drinking, and chain smoking, repeat from * across.  In between is deceiving women, swindling women, beating the crap out of women, and then more *.  It wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen glimpses of before in almost every Korean movie – its just that it was all there was, and there was no relief from the misery. The misogyny in Korean movies is horrific to watch.  And the violence has to be without par anywhere.  Women aren’t just smacked.  Women are punched.  Straight dead center in the face.  And then kicked when they fall.  I hope to hell art is not imitating life in these films.  But I fear it is.  And with all the violent films with images of dead women, legs akimbo, slashed and covered in blood, I really really hope the art stays on the celluloid.

On the occasions I’ve spent the night in a love motel to work on TRACK things over a weekend, I got to watch Korean porn.  No apologies here, as anybody would be curious.  It was so horrible, I can’t express how horrible it was.  And it’s not that it was soft porn, and it’s not that it was low budget, or any of that.  It was just mechanical, uninspired, and uninformed.  It makes me not want to bother.  A girl would better spend her time doing her taxes.  This is in contrast to love on dramas, which consists of twenty missed connections, awkward professions of liking, and then a peck and hug and a wedding ceremony.  I hope all that tension would culminate in something better than the glimpse of Korean groping and huffing sex I saw, and which is pretty consistently portrayed on screen. I hope each child born had more interesting beginnings than that, but I’m seriously doubting it…

Now, I have seen moments of erotic behavior in movies.  But it’s rare.  I actually think the older films were better at it.  There is also an excessive amount of acquaintance rape in those old movies.  :(

How are women here supposed to deal with such a strong patriarchy and so many misogynistic messages and behavior all the time?  Well, it seems they are dealing with it by being the opposite of demure – sometimes to the point of obnoxious – and they aren’t marrying and they’re choosing careers instead of depending on men.   And/or they are making themselves into pretty doll vessels.  Because the easiest way to deal with the patriarchy is to enable it.

And when I think about women here, I don’t want them to have to pick either/or.  I just want them to have a lovely time.  Please, God, let them have a lovely time.

So now I no longer ask myself “Where is this oppressive, group-think, ostracizing, harsh society everyone talks about?”  It’s all around: under tons of makeup, stylish clothes, in the street, in the offices, in the alleys, in high tech gadgets, across big screens, and piped into my room.

You know, when I first got to Korea I thought I was going to be joining this  decades-old fight for adoptee rights.  But I was shocked to see how I am here on the ground floor:  of civil rights, worker rights, multi-culturalism, children’s rights, and women’s rights.  The economic miracle of Korea has been like giving a kid the keys to the family car:  they’re learning to drive sink or swim, but it’s terrifying, as they’ve not the experience and no skills or sensitivity with the accelerator and brake.  And I’m here and I should be excited, but instead I’ve got white knuckles.

I keep trying to find things to calm and comfort me, but always end up frustrated:  I can’t find the materials I need for my projects, the volunteer work I have to do brings me down, there is no espresso bar with scones in my small town, music venues are expensive and too far away, and my furniture is too compact to stretch out on.  And always I am isolated because I am a foreigner.

Crap.  Negative again.  Sorry.  I hate being stuck in this mode.

You know your idea of adoptees descending on the National Assembly may hold some potential. I wonder what they will do if some 25,000 adoptees all show up at once on the steps of the National Assembly with foreign medias? Can this be somehow organized?

No. Because most of the Korean Adoptee Diaspora is in shell shock and putting all their energy into daily coping in countries they still feel alien in or spitting out their parents adoptive rhetoric. Plus, it costs money to come to Korea. For many it only happens once or twice in a lifetime, and then it’s only a superficial homeland tour.

This idea has been bandied about before – with great, great, passion. But most adoptees are, naturally and understandably, NOT activists. Because reacting or being an upstart disrupts a long hard-fought peaceful (socially) existence. And adoptees also fear rejection to a greater degree than the general population and are less likely to position themselves where they can risk that in their families and communities.

You know, that is one of the exquisitely sick things about international adoption: it disperses and isolates. And for those populations like Minnesota or Sweden, they have a higher measure of community monitoring and rejection to deal with, so speaking up there means both higher external and internal censorship.

It also takes organization and money, and the major organizations with the largest adoptee base (because they can afford staff and services) has adoption industry money supporting them AND being on their board of directors. So they can’t bite the hand that feeds them and can’t be turned to for mobilization.

Non-profit organizations, in my opinion, are just like big business, only their books are cooked in such a way that nothing is called a “profit” but given a new name or allocated to a project which magically eats money. Charity is so often merely a front for preserving selfishness. And charity is great because you don’t have to pay taxes. But charities still manage to play dirty politics, and the money which might be called profit in a for-profit instead gets funneled into dirty politics.

The adoption industry calls itself a charity but runs like a shady business. A really smart shady business: that divides and conquers, infiltrates the opposition, adjusts swiftly to criticisms, has lawyers to make sure they use the most ambiguous language, and diversifies its operations. They are geniuses really, these international adoption agencies.

Here’s a a workshop offered by Holt from a seminar schedule for the adoption industry from 2008

http://www.jcics.org/AC2008_Schedule.htm#5A:%20Is%20Adoption%20PC

5A: Is Adoption PC? Anti-Intercountry Adoption Trends in the Media, Cyberspace and the Adoption Community
Susan Cox, Holt International Children’s Services, Inc., and Kathy Sacco, Family and Children’s Agency
Friday, April 11, 2008 (11:15 am – 12:30 pm)

Historically, adoption has been portrayed as a way of protecting and saving children from inadequate environments. Recently, there has been unprecedented criticism of intercountry adoption as an ethical practice. These criticisms have manifested themselves in the form of anti-adoption groups, websites, blogs, scholarly critiques and media representations. This presentation will provide an overview of anti-intercountry adoption trends and explore their substance and methods of dissemination. The presentation will include the emergence of the adult adoptee community and their impact on intercountry adoption. Finally, it will offer participants recommendations for responding to these message in the areas of public relations, policy and practice.

Clearly, they are afraid of the children they’ve shipped all over the world.

They watch everything we do. They even had an intranet website called “Rapid Information Process” devoted to tracking the opposition which stopped being active in 2009. (probably due to better technology)

So we are stuck awake while others sleep. What will it take to wake adoptees up? How do we reach them all over the globe? And how do we convince them that what happens in Korea has something to do with what happened to them? And that it can change for the better? It’s like broadcasting a television public service announcement to luddites. They won’t hear it because they’re not plugged in, and even if they were plugged in, the adoption industry and the power industry are best buddies.

Don’t tell me:  I don’t want to know.  Because odds are, some taxi driver or other stranger has told me that, and it’s bad enough I have to feel their negative emotions, much less know what they are saying to me.

After reading my fellow KAD’s recent post about being “…fucking angry at Korea,” I have to say that I don’t need to be reunited with my family or hear another KAD botch a suicide attempt to know all about Korea wanting us to be grateful for…FOR WHAT?  And yeah, it makes me angry.  And solemn.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons I’m wary of finding my family, and kind of glad I haven’t.  I have zero aspersions as to what a pandora’s box of unpredictable and complicated new and horrible pain it could bring up.  I have zero interest in adding new obligations of strangers to my life after having been forced as an adoptee to be dependent on strangers in a strange land.  I don’t know what is worse:  to be trapped and be too young to process and express your experience, or to be a free adult and too cognizant of every thing horribly not right.  It definitely sounds like assimilation failure hell.  And abandonment in your face hell.  And decades of living the wrong life and a future of living yet another wrong life hell.  And then to have both and have not one but two continents telling me I should be grateful…

And yet I press on, casting my net.  I recently paid someone to translate a letter to Korean American t.v. and radio stations, and have begun looking for my family back in America, on the slim chance they might have emigrated.  When I can remember to get to it, as I have to many projects going, I am going to start contacting all the Korean communities in North America and Australia.  That was last week.  Not a word back in response.  So much work ahead of me.

Why?  Why do I do this when I am so atypically NOT excited to search for more family?

Because I guess I have narcissist envy.

I want to see a god-damned reflection of myself.  Just once.

I missed Gayageum class today.  I had been up to the wee hours of the morning yet again, chasing my tail on the internet on some unresolved thing I wanted to write about and slept in too late, but was actually happy to not make the commute.  The previous week I had been so happy for an excuse to leave my sleeping guests, and when they expressed that it was too bad I couldn’t have stayed and slept in I told them that I hate being around sleeping people.  Because my sleep is never restful and I always wake up early and it’s hell being awake while others are blissfully dreaming.  It’s frustrating tip-toeing around them and lonelier than if it was just the empty space of four walls.  To be immobilized and gagged is the worst.

People think adoptees who are activists or writers or repatriating, etc. are defective.  They label us as angry, because they want to discount any criticisms we have.  I’m not fighting the angry label anymore:  God damn right I’m angry.

But I’m not defective.  I’m awake.

I’m awake among sleeping people.

Worse yet, I’m awake among people playing possom.  In America.  In Korea.  Only here, I am like a zombie, unable to speak, unable to express myself, unable to do as I please.  The adoption solution was supposed to be final.  We weren’t supposed to return from the dead.  We weren’t supposed to disturb the empty tomb.  We weren’t supposed to question our deaths.

My adoptee friends often say they wish they were still in the fog;  that they wish they weren’t aware of these issues, that life was easier before knowledge.  But if you can’t name your pain, then there’s no way to cope with it and you end up doing anything ANYTHING to stop it.  And you add to the statistics that KADs kill themselves at a rate 5 times higher than the non-adoptee population.

It’s a fucked up position to be in.  A real dilemma.  With no known solution.  Because we are the first to have to sort this shit out.

I just wish the whole world would realize that adoption is existential.  It fucks with everything important.  It annihilates identity that is essential to live.   Just ask all our dead KAD brothers and sisters.   Just ask all the KADs on meds or labeled with one wrong disorder or another.  You know there’s nothing wrong with any of us.  The only thing wrong with us is our basic human rights were denied and then suppressed.

And it just. never. ends.