The Older Side of 30

Recently I finished watching “9 End 2 Outs” — a great K-drama romantic comedy that I highly recommend. It was cute and funny, and the two lead characters were likeable and convincing. (Despite the picture and the repeated baseball analogies, only one of the main characters actually plays baseball.) The story focuses on Hong Nan Hee (played by actress Soo Ae), who works as an editor at a small publishing company but longs to be a writer. She is about to turn 30, and is frustrated by her lack of accomplishments in both the professional and romantic spheres of her life.

This theme of not having achieved more of one’s dreams, and the accompanying envy of people who have, was definitely one that I can relate to. In her job, Nan Hee has to work with an insufferably confident writer who is much younger than Nan Hee (and who also tries to steal Nan Hee’s ballplayer boyfriend). Although I have never reacted quite the way that Nan Hee does (watch the series to find out; it’s a great scene!), I have certainly wanted to.

Like Nan Hee (and many others), I always saw 30 as a convenient milestone by which to judge my accomplishments. When I was in my twenties I set goals for myself in terms of what kind of title and salary I wanted to have when by the time I was 30, based on what I thought it meant to be successful at the time. Even as I struggled when life took me in different directions than I had planned, I always thought that by the time I was 30 I would finally be established. Looking back, I think that part of the reason for my confidence was that 30 always seemed so far away.

However, I’ve been *cough* on the older side of 30 for a few years now, and instead of feeling established and grounded, I often feel rootless and empty. At one point Nan Hee rhetorically asks herself what she’s been doing for the past ten years, because she has so little to show for it. Well, these days I have been asking myself much the same thing. Part of my answer is because my goals have shifted, and I am chasing different dreams than those that I held ten years ago. In some ways it’s like starting over — I’m trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle and not only do the pieces refuse to fit, but the picture on the box that I’m trying to match keeps on changing.

Near the end of the series, one of the characters pulls out a box of letters that she had been holding onto for ten years. It turns out that at the age of 20, each person in their group of friends had written a letter to their future 30-year-old self. While the contents of people’s letters aren’t shared with the viewers, it is clear that reading their letters has a profound impact on everyone. I wonder what those letters said, or more to the point, I wonder what a letter from my 20-year-old self to my 30-year-old self would have said.

As I’ve written before, one of my old professors was fond of saying that we are more human “becomings” than human “beings,” because we will always be a work-in-progress. We are each the product of all our prior experiences, no matter what our current age. I do think that we develop multi-faceted identities, and that over the years certain parts of our selves will settle down and the changes will be more subtle, but fundamentally we are dynamic human beings with the capacity to grow and change and learn.

This blog is many things, among them a kind of letter, or rather a collection of letters, to my future self. If it survives that long, perhaps ten years from now I will look back and remember: This is what I thought. This is what I wrote. This is who I was.

I wonder who the person looking back and reading it will be.

K-Drama As Soju

These past

few days

I’ve been

drowning

my sorrows

in K-dramas

because I don’t have

any soju. In all of these shows

there is at least one scene where

someone attempts to submerge

her misery in alcohol, so for now

I am content to live vicariously

through silly TV shows. Because

however we choose to try and

escape the reality of our current

lives, everything that we hate or

fear will be there waiting for us

when we return.

Beyond Black and White

When I was in high school and looking at colleges, I recall being invited to several minority recruiting events. I rarely went, mostly because I wasn’t interested in the schools that were hosting them. However, I did receive an invitation to attend a “diversity outreach” event at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college that seemed similar to a few other schools that I was considering. It looked interesting and my parents agreed to take me, so I signed up.

As soon as we got there I realized my mistake, and wanted nothing more than to

K-Drama As Window

Let me first say that I would not have considered myself a likely candidate for K-dramas. Except for maybe two guilty pleasures that I sometimes watch on DVD, I don’t watch television. We don’t have “fancy” TV (i.e. cable or satellite), and for a few years, we didn’t even have a working television set at all. (This was when the television set that we got for free suddenly stopped working. We were too lazy to get rid of it and too cheap to replace it, and every so often we would click the remote to see if it had magically fixed itself so that we could rent a movie. Alas, it never did.) Add to this the fact that I hate watching anything that is remotely scary, violent, depressing, or “too close to home,” and you can understand why I frequently am left with nothing to watch.

But a few days ago I (finally) finished watching the Korean drama Delightful Girl Choon Hyang, and have been oddly affected by it in ways that I certainly hadn’t anticipated. I had never watched a K-drama before and it took me a little bit to get used to. For one thing, it consists of 17 one-hour episodes, and so the pacing was a little slower than I was used to. It’s supposed to be funny, but there were times when I wasn’t sure if I was laughing with it or laughing at it. (Of course, laughing at something is fun too.) Despite the subtitles, this is pure romantic comedy, not art cinema.

However, my main surprise was at how often I tried to mentally insert myself into its depiction of modern-day life in Korea. If I had grown up in Korea, would I have gone to a high school like that? Would I have worn uniforms that were that… pink? What kind of job would I have? What kind of food would I like? Would I eat spicy rice cakes without complaining that they were too spicy? What kind of house would I live in? And what would my family be like?

For the record, I am keenly aware that this is television and not real life. It is a Korean-movie-industry version of life that is probably about as accurate as our Hollywood versions of American life. The characters are supposed to be funny, and thus are caricatures and exaggerations rather than realistic portrayals. Plus, this particular show is an updated version of a traditional Korean folk tale, so for the most part the dramatic arc of the storyline was already determined.

But it was still something. When I visited Korea a few years ago I was painfully aware that I was there as a tourist. I didn’t know anyone there, and so I didn’t see inside people’s families and lives in this kind of detail. I never saw the inside of an actual house or school. Even though my Korean is functionally nonexistent not advanced enough so that watching Korean TV helps my language ability in any real way, I still saw relationships develop and took note of the terms of address and speech levels that people used.

K-dramas might be a distorted fun-house kind of window into modern life in Korea, but they are one of the few windows that I have. Short of going back to Korea and actually living there, watching funny TV shows seems to be the closest I can get to finding out what it would be like to have grown up in Korea.

And I think that’s pretty sad.

This post was made possible by Mee Hee and crunchyroll — thanks!

A Post For MN

Dear MN,

Even though we’ve never met in person, I admire the love and dedication that you show for LN. It is clear from your writing that there is no one you love more than your little one, and no one she loves more than you. I look forward to reading about the Little Butterfly and how she is doing, and laugh out loud at the funny and cute things that she says. If I am ever lucky enough to have a daughter like LN, I only hope that I can be as good a mama as you.

I love your writing, and how the emotions and honesty spill forth from your words. Because of your amazing storytelling skills I feel like I am right there with you, sharing in both the frustrations of what you’re going through right now and the joys of having such a sweet daughter. I know that these days must feel incredibly tough, but I am confident that you will have happier stories to tell in the future. You are one smart and strong Kimchi Mama, and your love for LN will conquer all!

상실

These days, I am…

… not very articulate.

… dreaming of faraway places.

… rooting for Obama.

… struggling to learn Korean.

… (still) watching Delightful Girl Choon Hyang.

… thoroughly sick of this weather.

… trying to kick my daily caffeine habit.

… tired of thinking about adoption.

… jealous of anyone who has the luxury of not thinking about adoption.

… researching digital cameras.

… impatient.

… craving 순두부 찌개.

… full of contemplation.

… frustrated that I can’t get any of my thoughts into a coherent written form.

… resigned to sharing a list of Facebook-like statuses and calling it a blog post.

Celebrating the Year of the Rat

I hope that people who celebrated the lunar New Year yesterday had a good time. Since I’ve already confessed to most of my cooking inadequacies in a previous post, I’ll go ahead and share that for lunch yesterday I dumped a can of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Noodle into a bowl, threw in some 떡, and crumbled some toasted seaweed on top. Tah-dah! 떡국, the Korean rice cake soup that is

Operation Identity and Adopting From Vietnam

From the Ethica web site via Borrowed Notes:

Operation Identity: Cooperating to Protect the Identity of Vietnamese Orphans

Trish Maskew, President of Ethica, recently returned from Vietnam. While in Hanoi, she met with the U.S. Embassy staff, who revealed something that is terribly shocking and upon which Ethica feels compelled to act. U.S. Embassy staff revealed that approximately 85% of the children being placed for adoption now are reportedly abandoned. 85%! The Embassy strongly believes that most of these “abandonments” are in fact staged abandonments. And indeed, the history of the past 10-15 years lends credence to that belief.

The importance of identifying information to adopted persons cannot be overstated. Every adopted person, no matter who they are or who they were born to should know their origins if at all possible. When adoptees for generations have discussed their pain about the lack of info, and their longing for more, there can be no doubt that for the children this is one of the most important things about any adoption. Indeed in the last 15 years there has been a huge push to open adoptions to address the harm that secrecy causes. And yet, in Vietnam evidence suggests that someone is depriving them of this most essential of life’s information. Who is doing it? We don’t know; there are several possibilities discussed in more depth below. It is our sincere hope that no agency or agency contractor is doing so intentionally, and we believe that not all, or even most, agencies are. But these questions must be answered.

Some, who want to wish away the red flags here, are going to say things like, “well all the children in China are abandoned.” Yes, for very specific legal reasons that do not, and have never, applied to Vietnam. Some will say, “erasing their identities is better than their staying in orphanages.” For some adopted persons that might be true, but the problem is that this practice might develop for one truly troublesome reason–to avoid scrutiny about how children come into care. It can be used to cover up abuses like the purchase of children and abduction, and while this is the worst case scenario that we all hope is not happening, it is not one that officials are willing to ignore.

This is not the time for wishful thinking. Simply put, Vietnam adoptions are at risk and there is no practice that will so quickly close a country to adoption as this one. This very practice was the death knell for Cambodia. Virtually every child there had no identifying information. And the investigations that broke through the veil of secrecy showed that the information was available, and it wasn’t good.

People often say, when discussing adoption abuses, that the government should close down the unethical people, not the country. This is a stance almost all can agree on in principle. But when a practice develops that creates a black hole from which the government can’t get the information to do that, they may determine that there is no choice but to close the country to all adoptions because of the serious abuses that might be happening. If we want to prevent that from happening, the Vietnamese adoption community must work together now to promote transparency.

Ethica is launching a project to encourage transparency in Vietnam adoptions. Called “Operation Identity: Cooperating to Preserve the Identity of Vietnamese Orphans,” the goal is to make known the actual numbers of abandonments and to draw attention to the very real effects these practices can have on children, and the secondary effect it could have on the future of Vietnamese adoptions.

All emphasis is mine. You can read the rest of the news release here.

EDITED TO ADD: This was just a repost of the Ethica news release, because I think that this is incredibly important and wanted to make sure that people were aware of the situation. I have a LOT of thoughts on this but they aren’t coming together in a coherent fashion right now. So for commentary, please see:

• My right to know at Harlow’s Monkey
• Operation Identity at Borrowed Notes
• Operation Identity at Ethnically Incorrect Daughter

Cookin’

My parents rarely made or ate Korean food while I was growing up. Occasionally we would have steak tips on the grill with barbecue sauce from a bottle that said “Korean-style barbecue sauce.” We called this “bulgogi” in our house, and it was a long time before I realized that

Tagged!

It would seem that I have officially been tagged for the first time ever, and with a meme that I haven’t seen before. (Thanks junemoon!) Since this one doesn’t involve revealing large amounts of personal information, I’ll play. Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Regarding books that are within arms’ reach of where I’m sitting, I have my choice of any number of Korean language books, or Lonely Planet Korea.

So without further ado, I present to you this information about Namhansanseong Provincial Park (남한산성 도립공원), 20 kilometers southeast of downtown Seoul, courtesy of Lonely Planet:

In 1636 King Injo fled to this fortress when the Manchus from China invaded and occupied Seoul. After a siege of 45 days, the king surrendered and was forced to accept Manchu suzerainty. To ensure that he did, his son was kept hostage in China for eight years.

Here’s a picture of the Namhansanseong Gate courtesy of Wikipedia:

I tag anyone reading this who has never, ever been tagged before. (Yes, LB, this means you!)