So all year long I played the kids indie music before class started – that is, until they started demanding all music and no lesson…

Anyway, they would ask me if I liked K-pop and I told them it wasn’t very original, of which some would get offended and some would agree.  I even tried to talk about how ART changes lives and makes us see the world in new ways, and that maybe some of their vocal and musical talent could be used to say something important, or to push their cultural heritage in new directions.

Well, this is an example of Korean pop music trying to push their cultural heritage in new directions.  I couldn’t make it to the end…

Believe it or not, this won some music award…and that snake charmer music in the beginning of the song is the Korean traditional instrument, the Taepyongso, which is very similar to the Cornetta China that John plays for his traditional Cuban Conga and Comparsa music.

It’s really too bad.  Some Korean music is hauntingly beautiful, and I’d like to hear more of it.  The traditional Korean vibrato singing called pansori that grates on so many western ears is at times really spooky and hauntingly beautiful.

Here’s a sample from the movie Sopyonje that is tonight’s movie fare.  Just the first few minutes of this movie can give you an idea of its expression of melancholy and han, and of its importance as an oral tradition.

and I can’t find the words for this…

The song she is singing is from a Korean folk tale about filial piety.  Sim Chong is a girl born to a blind man.  When her mother dies, shortly after her birth, her dying wish is that the girl becomes his eyes.  The father’s name is Sim.  The daughter’s name is Chong, which means eyes.  Chong becomes an accomplished seamstress and one day a noble woman is impressed by her industry and offers to adopt her, but she refuses out of loyalty to her father.

While she is being delayed by this woman, her blind father goes searching for her and stumbles in a creek.  He is rescued by a monk who tells him that if he donates 300 sacks of rice to the monastery, Buddha will restore his sight.  Sim vows to give the monastery rice and is warned he will receive terrible retribution if he breaks his promise.

Chong, fearing her father will die and knowing there is no way they can make enough money to purchase 300 sacks of rice, tells her father the noble woman has offered him the rice for allowing Chong to be her daughter.  To save her father, she sells herself to sailors to be sacrificed to appease the Gods of the sea whose storms are wrecking many ships.  When she walks overboard, the seas calm and the sailors are convinced it is because of her devotion to her father.

This film won best director at the 1993 Cannes film festival, btw…watching it made me wistful.  I am just a cultural tourist in this land.  There’s so much cultural heritage we adoptees have been severed from, but we’ve got han in spades.

I wish I could afford to go to more cultural concerts, before this legacy disappears.  Every now and then, I’ll pass a small shop with old people in it, and this kind of music will be playing, and I know that in a few short years this isn’t something anyone will experience just walking down a street.

Fortunately, some people in the country are trying to keep this tradition alive:

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Lately I’ve been singing this song in my head.

Hugely popular in the early MTV days, I heard the quintessential oriental chinky chink riff a lot and it was all in good fun and inspired instant pogo dancing.

But now that I’ve spent a month in my Korean apartment with no furniture, I’m beginning to think I’m turning Korean.  But Korean doesn’t fit in the song because of the syllable stress…

Something about being floor bound is changing my relationship with buildings.  If it’s even possible for this 4′-10 1/2″ person to feel smaller, I do.  And my 6′-0″ tall ceilings somehow seem like 8′-0″ tall ceilings as a result of being way way down here on the floor.

The inability to sit anywhere with legs dangling or at 90 degrees is forcing my body to fold up on itself, and vertical is such an effort that our natural inclination to economize movement forces one to choose to stay low and crawl to reach things.  I find myself squatting more and also reclining more.

I can’t remember what exact incident it was when I realized I must look like an adjumma, the particular way I was crouched, and then cracking up at my own image.  And my constant shedding is really a problem, because when you live at floor level, anything littering up the floor starts to bother you – a lot!

I can’t, honestly, say I’m enjoying it that much.  Sustaining crossed legs or switching extending one leg or having one knee up gets to be tiresome.  In my little Japanese upholstered half seat, it’s initially a relief to sit on something soft and lean back upon something that isn’t rigidly perpendicular, but even that requires a constant shifting of legs.  And then I slide.  And then I’m reclining again.  And then I’m sleeping.

From a motor/locomotion perspective, removing the subtleties of the range of movement that a body on two differently jointed legs makes, with all their pivot points, vs. a body resting on two seat bones, I suddenly feel like a weeble, whose major movement is wobbling from left cheek to right cheek.  Movement is like that of a sumo wrestler.  Arms provide relief by redistributing weight to hands on thighs or floor, also in movement like a sumo wrestler. (see the first few minutes of this video to know what I’m talking about!)

Forget about keeping your knees and ankles together daintily.  You need your hanbok skirt to cover up your vessel.  You also need a gravity inversion table to give your poor spine a stretch in another direction.

I can live like this for a little while, but I definitely need some furniture soon.  The problem with furniture is it kills the multi-functionality of a room, and Koreans traditionally lived in just one room with a separate kitchen.  The mattress folds up and gets put on a shelf or in a chest.  The dinner table folds up and goes on a shelf.  the seat cushions come out when the table comes out.  Today Korean apartments are much more like western homes, with a room for each member of the family if they can afford it.

Interestingly, the only people I’ve seen living like this are the people I replaced when looking at this apartment.  Most homes I’ve been in (granted I haven’t been in many) are fully western furnished.  People have beds, tables, chairs, and couches.  One time I asked someone if they slept on the floor and they were clearly offended, though floor mattresses are still easily obtainable for purchase , so I’m guessing that living close to the ground has low class connotations.  Or maybe it’s just Koreans have learned to like stretching their legs and backs.  Maybe it’s not only the improved diet, but also the western furniture which is making Koreans taller…

First of all, thank you John for getting me here in the first place.  Thank you Jane for helping me get-the-hell-out of Pyeongchon and for the rice cooker and humidifier.  Thanks for the starter pots and pans and dishes Dan.  Thanks for the refrigerator Willie!  Some day I hope to be as good of a friend to you guys as you are to me.  I’m lousy at being a friend, I know, but I am loyal.

I asked for a forbearance on my student loans and have spent most of it this month on housewares and now feel all my basic needs for living are met and fully functional.  There’s now a clothing rack in the closet, a shelf in the kitchen, a large steamer/fry/sauce pot, an electric kettle, a shower hose that doesn’t fall off, a blanket and pajamas, a shoe shelf, and everything I need to wash clothes, a can opener, various utensils, and food in the fridge.  Mrs. Kim approves.

It’s been fun wandering around my neighborhood each day as I discover some unmet need and venture out for the resulting shopping trip.

I try to purchase from smaller establishments but find they are mostly lacking what I need.  Some of these places I don’t understand how they can even feed themselves.   I went to the hardware store two minutes walk away, for example, and the guy was sleeping on the floor.  He’s always sleeping because he never has any business.  I had to pantomime that I needed a light bulb and he sold me one out of a box.  When I asked him how much I saw a momentary flash of deceit cross his face and it took him too long to tell me.   He ended up charging me 700 won.  I don’t know if he jacked up the price but almost hope he did.  The thought of 10-15 cents making a difference in his life seemed like a small price to pay. I’d go back, but most of what he sells I can’t use…

Seven Star asked me if there were any markets nearby.  I told him there was no traditional market, but that there are some small and mid-sized groceries.  He made a face and told me he would advise that I only shop at big chains and to save my money.  I think he’s wrong.  Just like in America, this might be true if I bought a lot of pre-packaged products, but since I hate most of that stuff it’s not a problem.

Seven Star also suspected the doorman wanted a bribe and told me my apartment mix-up was my fault because I was too trusting.  His lack of trust and blaming me for what I felt was just a misunderstanding sent me on a horrible tail-spin about the lack of trustworthiness in Korea.  But he also advised me to keep a baseball bat by my door and didn’t think anyplace but an officetel would be safe for a beautiful young woman. (ha!) So actually, I think Seven Star is just paranoid and maybe it isn’t all Korean people.  However, there’s not one neighborhood I’ve ever been in anywhere in Korea that doesn’t have locked gates and bars on all their first floors…

Mostly I end up at the DC department store.  I think the staff there thinks I’m crazy, as I’ve spent countless hours deliberating over things such as, do I want the purple dust pan with no rubber transition strip, or do I want the one that matches my broom but has that annoying cartoon on it or do I want the plain one that’s too small and not very ergonomic?  I am totally neurotic about these kind of things, especially given that it’s mostly cheap crap from China that ALL looks like junk!

Cute side story.  Mrs. Kim is in my apartment and sees my feather duster lying on the floor.  She takes it and starts sweeping the floor with it, approving that I have cleaning supplies and thinking it is some new kind of broom.  I shouldn’t have let her go on thinking a feather duster was a broom, but I didn’t know how to explain it to her.

This also reminds me of the time Y to my officetel and insisted on sweeping after we ate.  I handed her my full size standing broom, and she grabbed it about a foot away from the bristle head and was bent over, trying to use it like a short Asian broom, complaining about how it was a bad broom and hard to use. (the weight of the handle being so much more than the brush end which made it impossible to control)  All I could do was chuckle and  wonder what HER culture shock would be like if she had to live in America.  The thought of standing erect while sweeping was such a foreign concept to her she’d never entertained it – even when faced with the obvious misplaced physics of its use.

Today’s sojourn for a stool from which to wash my clothes took me past some street food vendors.  Let me tell you, there’s nothing better on a cold day than to stop and buy a roasted sweet potato from a little old man sitting in front of a charcoal fired metal drum roaster.  Smells wonderful.  Warms your hands and warms your insides.  I don’t like roasted chestnuts, but the roasted corn on the cob might seduce me one day on another trip.

Where I live is perpendicular to Yongsan military base and I walk the main arterial there some times.

Closer to the base the businesses are less retail and service oriented and there seem to be a lot of small scale factory operations that do things like make dduk or deok (rice cake – in this case it’s a paste that is rolled into pasta shapes and cut for purposes of boiling like dumplings – in other cases it is sweetened and possibly flavored with additions like nuts or bean paste and made into deserts)

I see several operations like this in basements in my neighborhood as well.  I also see a lot of taxi cabs.  The adjosshi that is my landlord’s husband is also a taxi driver.

The base is surrounded with what looks like 40ft. high freeway sound barriers or temporary construction walls and no way to look in, which is to be expected, but you’d think they could have provided some vegetation or something to ameliorate the starkness of such a wall.  There is a smaller alternative to DC that has simpler designed products that I like to go to that is on the way to Yongsan.

On the way home I stop and buy some banchan (side dishes) at a store and the woman is tickled with my cursive signature.  The banchan, btw, is excellent and thank God for that store, otherwise I would get no vegetables since the school cafeteria is no longer open and I’ve no idea how or the incliniation to prepare those dishes for only myself anyway.

Connecting the Yongsan area and Itaewon is antique street.  I bet there are close to 100 of these antique shops.  It’s a really bizarre thing seeing all these items – they’re large and heavy or strangely out of place and it’s hard to imagine them in a Korean apartment.  They might look okay in a large villa, and one can often see them as the main decor in some of the more eccentric and unfrequented bars and coffee shops run by bored Korean wives.  Each shop specializes in one thing or another, such as Rococco or Victorian Shabby Chic or Atomic Age.  They are very, very expensive and most of them have been imported from Europe.  I had a lot of fun checking out some mid-century modern from England, comparing it to American mid-century modern.  But the prices were almost double.

Looking for cheap storage solutions recently I began to realize that furniture in Korea is really, really expensive.  Plastic is used a lot and the particle board and papered stuff like one might find at Ikea is almost twice the price, and it tends to be quite ugly.  In fact, there is one guy on-line who imports Ikea and sells it at a really high mark-up.  The best prices for this garbage furniture can be found on-line at G-market.  But it’s really garbage and really over-priced.  (actually, some of it is inexpensive, but it’s thin and  basically disposable)

The beautiful interior design and decor you see in Korean movies and dramas is all boutique stuff, and I can’t imagine the price.   There truly truly is a huge class disparity here, and the problem is there’s nothing of quality available for the poor.

Supposedly, because the cost of disposal is so high, people will leave discarded furniture on the street and many poor people furnish their homes with this recycled stuff.  But I’ve yet to see anything that wasn’t broken, and the one time I saw a couch I was in a bind because I didn’t have anyone to help me drag it home.

Walking the other direction through Itaewon’s east side are every kind of international restaurant you could want: such as Turkish, African, Indian, Pakistani, Moroccan, Thai, Mexican, Uzbekistan, French, Belgian, Japanese, Italian, etc.  Starting with the more down-to-earth and least expensive and working its way to more refined and expensive the further you head east in the direction of the embassies.

Eating International in Korea is interesting because some of the dishes have become fusion dishes – due to either limitations on expensive items or to satisfy Korean palettes, I’m not sure – but they are sometimes spicier than you might be used to elsewhere on the planet.  There are often times a side dish or two thrown in, in deference to Korean culture and sometimes the side dishes are just out and out Korean side dishes.

Not only food but also retail gets progressively more expensive as you head east, and the shops are replaced with boutiques and then some pretty impressive architecture and the jim jil bangs get replaced with world class spas offering a full range of services such as mud baths and aroma therapy, etc.  The BMW dealership is in that direction as well.  And also busloads of tourists – but I don’t know what they could possibly be looking at up there.

Along with hip hop gear, leather, and shops catering to larger American sizes are lots of tailors.  I guess there’s over 1,200 shops in Itaewon, and they tend to be a bit pricier than other areas because they have more western made products for sale.  Levi’s, Calvin Klein, and Nike have stores here too.

Anyway, this place is interesting.  Now, I’ve got some clothing to learn to wash and hopefully this time I can do it without permanent wrinkles.

Day after relentless day I travel “home” to an empty apartment.  But after almost a year, the foreign landscape is becoming familiar, even though I am illiterate, deaf and dumb here, so I am becoming accustomed to this unhealthy isolation.

Yesterday I went and had an expensive breakfast at the American Diner and was delighted to be able to eavesdrop on a conversation about urban planning.

You don’t know how much you miss eavesdropping when you are denied that ability.

Always, always, I am always alone.   I am not sure if this is because I work at a publicly funded secondary  school and am therefore the only foreigner, or because Koreans are too busy to socialize, or if it’s only the Koreans at my particular Christian missionary school that fear socializing, or if it’s because I’m too unusual because I look too familiar and my presence makes me question their own expectations of what foreigners are supposed to be and why I am a foreigner and how they reconcile their own shame, or if it’s just too much work to try to communicate with me, or if it’s because I’m too strapped for money to afford the requisite trappings of socializing, or if it’s because in times of stress I retreat so I can lick my wounds to heal and begin again.  Probably all of the above.

Some days, I could go mad with the desire to just speak out loud to someone next to me or to turn and have someone next to me, but no one is there.  I am either surrounded by people who can’t and won’t talk to me or living a monk-like existence between my four walls.  Most days I have only images pouring in from my laptop or silent words pouring out from my fingers.  Sloppy, poorly formed, extemporaneous words, trying to process this experience.

And then, occasionally, I meet Jane for some adoption related excuse and we talk about friend things and I forget I’m standing in the presence of giants.  Next week? Jennifer Kwon Dobbs will be here and Jane’s table will turn into a think tank and I will be in the presence of not one, but two giants.  Watching them tackle ideas together is like witnessing live a CG simulation of a brain in seizure, the neurons firing so fast collapse is nearly imminent.  At their table, I am like a baby:  poorly versed in literature, zero exposure to adoption studies, only two years getting back on my bicycle writing anything, and all of it amateurish and as amateur.  I feel superficial and simple in their presence.  But still they welcome me.  And we drink makkolli and act foolish and blubber like friends do.

Take a few minutes to read this interview/discussion with Jane Jeong Trenka, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Su Yung Shin published in the Asian American Poetry and Writing on-line journal to see what I’m talking about:  the connections they make, the bravery of tackling subject matter holistically, their clarity of logic and humanity.   I am illuminated by their presence, and you will be too.

Thought I’d document my new puppet making process for you.

Over the past few months I’ve been collecting low-tech puppet-making materials…wow, that wig was expensive!

And here we are at stage 1:

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In the movie Henry and June, Uma Thurman was often accompanied by her puppet, Count Bruga.  For some reason, this spoke to me.  As Henry’s muse, her tortured manic soul seemed like a different person in the images of her and the puppet alone together.  So I’ve always wanted to make puppets for people to animate.  As extensions of ourselves, imagination and the world of dolls are repressed as we become adults, but isn’t that what we really need more of?

A teenage girl I know has been taken out of school for mental health issues, and so I thought maybe a marionette of herself would be a good companion to have.  So I’m making one for her and her sister.

When I tell people I like to make puppets, they instantly go on about using them for teaching or plays, etc.  But I’m not interested in sock puppets or entertainment.  I’m interested in exploring the abiding loneliness of existence and the ways in which we create alternate worlds.  The way we animate dolls and the meaning of dolls is of deep significance.

My moniker almost human is often mistaken as negative self commentary, but really it is a description of these bodies I feel the need to make.  I can’t help thinking that this sense I have of being without people and place is a feeling all people share, and that these bodies we inhabit or that we animate could be therapeutic for others as well.

I need to have someone teach me how to wash clothes.  I’ve washed clothes by hand before, but that was when I had a whole bathtub, so had no idea how to proceed here.  My first attempt mixed some soap powder with water in my little basin, but it was too much soap and couldn’t rinse it out enough…

I went and bought some bar laundry soap!  Works much better!  And I love the way it smells, too.  And a brush to go with the scrubbing board. For rinsing, I just spread the clothes out on the bathroom floor and hose them down a long time.  The problem is wringing.  I can’t do enough of it and then the clothing is permanently creased and no amount of flattening or ironing seems to get the creases out.  I was drying the clothes on my rack in the walk-in closet, but now I’m wondering if I should just dry it in the bathroom instead, and not wring it at all…The traditional method of Korean culture was to beat the dried clothes with sticks on a flat board.  I wonder if they wrung or didn’t wring first?

The clothes are cleaner than machine washed, but I also imagine they’ll get pretty beat-up looking fast and wonder if I should wash them inside-out…I know in the Caribbean they hung their clothes inside out due to the sun bleaching, but did they wash them inside out as well?  T-shirts don’t look so great after being hand washed.  In fact, I don’t think I’m going to buy anything made out of t-shirt material in general from now on:  they just pill up and get out of shape and get dingy too fast.  Comparing them to my one warm woven shirt after hand-washing, and the difference in looks and ease of cleaning is amazing.

It feels anachronistic, this hand washing, and that’s kind of fun.  If only I knew what I was doing!