Caveat: Among Quakers

As many of you know, by birth I am a Quaker (or half a Quaker, or maybe three quarters of one). I was not raised as an active Quaker, however – both due to my parents having fairly secular attitudes as well as because in my small childhood town in rural northern California, there was no local meetinghouse.
I was probably mostly aware of my Quaker heritage during the many visits to Southern California, where my paternal grandparents were. I remember attending meeting for worship a few times with my grandmother in the late 70s and early 80s.
One of the oldest and most influential meetings on the west coast is the Orange Grove Meeting in Pasadena. My father was born into that meeting, and my grandfather was active there even while also being part of the Temple City meeting which was adjunct to his farm-cum-school in Temple City.
My own strong association with Orange Grove was indirect, arising out of my employment by the Mexico City Meeting in 1986-87. Mexico City Friends and Orange Grove Friends were (and continue to be) tightly connected through historical, financial and spiritual ties. In fact, my uncle Allen (my father’s older brother) had worked for/with the Mexico City Meeting in the late 1950s.
Mexico City is the only time I was an official member of a meeting. The only other time I was a regular attender of a meeting was also in the context of working for a Quaker institution, when I was teaching high school Spanish and Social Studies at Moorestown Friends School in Moorestown, New Jersey. That was in 1996-97.
I did attend Orange Grove Meeting itself a few times in the early 2000s, but by then I was pretty sure I wasn’t a very good Quaker. I think I have a largely Quaker value system, but I have come to feel that being a typical “values but no doctrine” Quaker has too much of a whiff of hypocrisy for me to be comfortable in that role. The idea of a “church” where lip service is paid to a bible which is not really taken seriously (or even much read) can work fine for many people, but not for me. As I’ve written before, I appreciate Buddhism – at least the variety I have interacted with in Korea – because its adherents explicitly make clear that there is no need to believe anything, unlike Quakers who tend to sweep such discrepancies under the rug. As a committed antitranscendentalist (i.e. no miracles, no magic, period), that is the only kind of religion where I could possibly fit in.
Setting aside such digressions, I attended Quaker Meeting this morning at Orange Grove Friends Meeting. This is because my father has become an attender since he has taken on the role of on-site caretaker there (a role curiously similar to what my role had been at the Mexico City Meeting).
I have enough background with it to feel comfortable – even somewhat nostalgic. Curt and Mr Jin came too, and I’m sure it was several layers of culture shock for them, being not only alien religiously but populated almost exclusively by that weird, heterogeneous tribe of hippieish, dogmatically tolerant, political radicals such as commonly inhabit Quaker meetings. No amount of exposure to heterodox American culture as consumed outside the US could possibly prepare one for this type of American.
Their cultural discomfort afterward was strongly ameliorated by a very pleasant Korean-American Quaker lady named Kwang-hui, whose company I enjoyed and who served as a nice liaison between Koreanism and Quakerism. I was particularly pleased to find that her spoken Korean was much easier to comprehend for me than most varieties. I think that it is often the case that Koreans resident abroad adopt a somewhat simplified variety of Korean, with reduced usage of the many complex verbal periphrases and less “수능 [suneung]” vocabulary (what we would call “SAT vocab” in English, meaning “high-falutin” educated words, typically of Chinese etymology in Korean).
After the meeting we went to an allegedly Mexican restaurant across the street. North Pasadena in recent decades has evolved into largely hispanic neighborhood, so although the place was undeniably Mexican culturally, the cuisine is what I would term “LA generic fast food” – mostly burgers, sandwiches, tacos and burritos, with a few vegetarian entries as a nod to Pasadena’s vaguely upscale, granola-liberal character.
Despite that, being a family-run business meant the barbacoa tacos were pretty authentic, at least to Californio standards. I had one of those, and then a fish taco. These latter only exist where gringos do, when speaking of Mexico proper, but in Southern California they come close to being truly authentic local cuisine. Of course for the Koreans along, it was more immersion in the aspect of my own country that I love and miss most – its sheer perverse diversity. And that was the point. I am working hard to expose Curt and Jin to as much different stuff as possible given the narrow timeframe.
Overall, a nice morning. Then we drove down to the airport and here I am, writing this offline while sardined into another aluminum ovoid tube somewhere over Utah. I will post it once I am online again.
Tomorrow, I will go to Minnesota DMV and then the infamous storage unit. I not sure I will actually undertake the project to move and consolidate my stuff – it feels very overwhelming and frankly I’d rather be a tour guide to my friends.
[daily log: walking, ~2km]