Category: Banalities & Journaling

The morning dawned to lightning and thunder. Thunderstorms are more rare in Korea (at least Seoul) than in the American midwest, but more frequent than in California, where they’re almost unheard of, especially in the north where I grew up.

I love thunderstorms.

Today, my 3rd day back at work, isn’t going to inolve being at work – it’s a national holiday: liberation day. It’s essentially what we call VJ day in the US. The flags are out, and I have a day to work on recuperating from the atrocious jetlag I’m experiencing. I always have bad jetlag, though I did a kind of experiment this time that I’ll report on in a different entry, such that my jetlag going east was less than usual (but not my return jetlag going west).

I’m still working on that Korean art history book I mentioned a while back. The image at left is a fabulous painting from 김홍도 [Kim Hong-do] (also known as Danwon, 1745 – 1816) titled 주상관매도 [jusang gwanmaedo] (English title given is “looking at plum trees from a boat” – not sure if that’s really a translation or a re-titling).

At 9 am this morning, I got a phone call from a number that wasn’t in my list of contacts in my phone – so I didn’t know who it was. Often I don’t answer these, as they’re often people selling things – Korean cellphones receive a lot of spam and marketing calls.

But for some reason I answered. A child, speaking mostly in Korean. And, “It’s Jenny!” And, “…teacher!…”

Obviously, this was one of my students, calling me. Many of my colleagues of the foreigner-teacher persuasion are highly critical or sceptical of giving out one’s cellphone number to one’s students. I always do. I don’t mind the occasional random call, and mostly even the youngest ones have pretty good phone etiquette, although obviously it’s the case I have no idea what they’re saying to me half the time if, like this one, they are speaking mostly Korean.

This girl was chattering way. I had no idea which “Jenny,” this was, of the many Jennys I’ve had as a student. I caught the phrase “보고 싶어” which means “[I] miss [you].” So that indicated a past student rather than a current one, probably. Still, I was racking my brain, as I tried to figure out what I was agreeing to. Her English was quite limited, but she clearly was a student who was used to chattering away at me in Korean and expecting me to understand – some students in the lower grades are like that: they don’t really internalize the idea that I’m not fully understanding them. The opposite of middle-schoolers, who often fail to internalize that I do in fact understand substantial bits of their talk, despite repeated evidence to the contrary.

As I finally extracted myself from the muddle of a conversation, I realized who it was: Yedam. A second grader who left Karma a month or two ago.

When I got to work, I told my coworker Gina about the call. Gina had been Yedam’s homeroom teacher. “Guess who called me?” I asked her.

“Yedam,” she grinned. “She called me too.”

“I think she misses Karma,” I commented.

There is an ephemerality to teaching, as the students come and go, sometimes so quickly but with such a strong impression during the time you know them. I have always had a weird attraction to what I think of as the “ephemeral arts”: doodles, sandcastles, etc. But I had a sudden insight that this ephemerality might be what draws me to teaching, too.

Apropos of ephemerality, if not exactly topical: a picture of my stepson Jeffrey from Minneapolis, 1993.

I love this picture. My visit back to the US was too short to really connect with everyone that much, but it was worth it in that I did get to connect with a lot of people.

Dateline: Ilsan

I had a moment of true panic during my trip. I was in the TSA line at LAX. I was holding my passport. Normally when I’m travelling I carry my passport with my Alien Resident Card (“ARC” – which is what I need to show I’m a resident of Korea with a valid visa, when I land) tucked inside. So, I’m getting my passport ready to show to the inspector-person at the head of the line before the scanning machines, and there’s no ARC! Total panic. It’s not in my wallet (its other resting place). It’s not in the pocket where I’ve been carrying my passport. It’s not in my bag. I step out of the line and search thoroughly. Utterly gone!

This is a moment of true panic.

And as I’m searching through the various compartments of my backpack for the second time, a nice Israeli man (I can tell by the passport in his own hand) comes up to me and says, “did you drop this?” It’s my ARC.

“Where was it?” I ask, thankfully taking it.

“On the floor right over there,” he points, a few meters back in the line. Damn!

Well that was a close call. I normally don’t lose stuff that way. I’m pretty organized, and a pretty efficient traveller. That was… unpleasant.

The pseudo-panic occurred this evening. Just now. Despite my commitment to stay awake and get into the new time-zone, I had drifted off to sleep. I woke up sweltering. My air-conditioner was off. Hmm. Everything was off. Everything. I had no electricity.

Actually, power failures are pretty rare in Ilsan, in my experience. I was puzzled. I looked out the window. It was dusk. The building across from mine had lights on. Not a neighborhood outage, then.

I stepped into the hallway outside my apartment. The hall lights were on. Uh oh – it’s something in my apartment.

I dug out the circuit breaker box in the back of my closet (I had it buried with stuff). But playing with unfamiliar switches (by feel – it was dark in the closet) yielded no result. Argh. I couldn’t conceptualize spending my first night back in Korea with no electricity. That seemed very… unfair.

I put on some shoes and shuffled downstairs. “제 방에 전기가 없어요,” I told the friendly man in the watchman’s room/office thing. I wasn’t speaking great Korean, but it got the point across. He asked something, confirmational. So I confirmed, “네. 다 없어요” Is this even the right way to say that? Didn’t matter, he’d understood. He furrowed his brow. He studied his CCTV monitors for a second. He called somebody – the maintenance guy, I realized. He knew my room number – the watchmen guys all know me – I try to chat with them sometimes.

He told me to go back up to my room and wait – it took me a minute to understand that’s what he was asking. I’d only just arrived back in Korea, and I was groggy and feeling disoriented. I went back up, and propped my apartment door open. I tried to pick up the explosive disaster that was my apartment – I’d discombobulated my possessions during my packing routine at my departure, two weeks ago, as I always do, and upon my return, I’d merely layered my unpacking over that, and done a load of laundry and cluttered my sink.

After about 5 minutes the maintenance guy showed up. He had a flashlight. Actually, so did I – why didn’t I think of that? He looked around. “No power,” he observed, in English. I nodded. He shined his light on the circuit breaker box. He played with the switches for what seemed a long time. On. Off. This one on. That one off. And suddenly, the power came back. Hmm.

And so I had power. I thanked him. He nodded, grinning, and left.

OK. All better. I tried to stay up again.

Dateline: Los Angeles

…

I'm leaving for Seoul in a few hours. I'm looking forward to being "home." Weird that Ilsan is home, now – but it is. Los Angeles is interesting and I'm happy to have visited my friends and relatives, but I appreciate my "home" in Ilsan.

Besides, my little apartment there has air conditioning. My dad's house does not, and it's very hot right now.

Dateline: Los Angeles

…

I was running errands this morning and drove through Burbank and Glendale. There are a lot of memories attached to the places in these locations, so driving along the freeway is like thumbing through a scrapbook.

I've been trying to shop for books for teaching US style curriculum to lower grades, for several friends of mine. They would be used for essentially immersion-style (ESL) teaching with Korean kids, as opposed to the more conventional (and more popular) EFL, where Korean is often leveraged as the "L1" (jargon from the language-teaching field) to teach about English.

Immersion style teaching is much more difficult, but it's very rewarding when applied successfully.

Finding the types of books used in US classrooms is surprisingly difficult – at least in retail. I'm sure there are ways to order them, online, but there seems to be no retail market. What I've had to settle on buying is textbooks and materials targeted at the homeschool market in the US.

I also found an alligator puppet. How can this be bad? I bought it.

Dateline: Phoenix

…

I had a rather domestic day. I ran one errand in the morning and then spent the day watching my younger nephew, Dylan (starting 3rd grade this fall), since he's still on summer vacation, although his older brother Jameson has already started 6th grade.

Dylan and I finished a wooden model boat he was working on – I glued on some sails and tied some string. We played with his legos. And then he announced he wanted to learn hangeul. That was interesting, that he was interested, but his attention only lasted for about 10 minutes. And then he announced he was bored and decided to watch television.

Now, I've said before, I don't own a television, in Korea. Mostly, I watch some shows on my computer: streaming programs such as Jon Stewart's Daily Show, for example; downloaded TV series or movies; download Korean programming with subtitles. But I don't watch much. And… I don't get to see the commercials.

Wow, the commercials. I watched a little bit of the Olympics while at Mark and Amy's in Minnesota, but watching afternoon children's TV is a whole different level of commercials.

Dylan was fixated by a Nickelodeon show called Rags. It actually wasn't bad – I thought some of my students would be interested in it, the same way they're rapt by High School Musical, for example. I liked how the show inverted the Cinderella plot and updated it in a vaguely plausible way. And then we watched animated Lego Ninjago characters, which was entertaining.

Dateline: Phoenix

Today was my nephew Jameson’s first day of sixth grade. So he got to choose the menu for dinner. Guess what we had? Bulgogi – my sister cooked it, from scratch. She’s pretty good at Korean cooking.

Phoneix is hot. It was 112 F (45 C) when I drove in at 5 pm today.

I spent the day with my dad, going through some boxes of his cousin Larry’s stuff. We found some old photos. Some seem quite historical, in a family-history sort of way.

Here’s a few I thought were interesting. Most of them are at the San Marino house.

This first is from the ealy 1960’s. It my grandfather John and grandmother Alice, their daughter Freda (my dad’s sister) and her first husband Ron. Seated are my great-grandfather John Way Sr and my great-grandmother Isabel, and the two little ones are my cousins Sylvia and Trevor.

Here is one of my aunt Janet, her mom my grandmother Alice, and great-grandmother Isabel. I’m guessing it’s the late 1950’s or early 60’s.

Here’s a slightly more recent picture. It’s from a giant family reunion (my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary) that was held at the San Marino house in the summer of 1981. There are a lot of people in this picture. I will only note that I’m in it, and that at the time I was 15 years old – it looks a little bit like I’m having some kind of side-conversation with my cousin Kamala, over my cousin Jori’s shoulder.

The next picture is from that same summer event in 1981, but now it’s mostly of my aunt Janet and my two cousins, Kamala and Joyce, but it’s actually a not-bad picture of me standing off by myself to the right.

The last two pictures may not be in San Marino. My dad thinks they’re in the ancestral home outside of Pittsburgh. It’s possible. It’s my great-grandmother Isabel Stewart Way with her mother, whose name I don’t know. Given the apparent ages and the supposed Pittsburgh setting, that would make the photo dating from the 1910‘s – i.e., it’s about 100 years old.

Here’s another picture from the same 1910’s setting, of Isabel and her mother and her daughter Katherine Ellen Way (“Kit”) as a small child, who was my dad’s cousin Larry’s mom.

My brother likes to fix things. My dad brought down a very annoying meme-object from my cousin Larry’s house, known as “Big Mouth Billy Bass.” Andrew fixed it by making a new power cord for it. He then placed it in the kitchen. When my dad came through the kitchen in the middle of the night, the Bass began to sing, as activated by the motion sensor.

This startled my dad. He unplugged it. This morning, with total aplomb, my dad explained, and concluded, “Weirdness prevails.” This is a typical sort of pronouncement from Phil.

Dateline: Los Angeles

…

I slept too lightly. Wake up, sleep an hour, wake up, sleep an hour. Like that. There was a cat that came onto the bed and made a half-hearted effort to shred my right leg. That was probably meant to be sociable or friendly. I miss my old cat, Bernie, sometimes.

Not sure what's on the plan, today. I'll follow whatever my dad suggests, mostly. More later.

Dateline: Los Angeles

…

Coming to L.A. is, of course, another homecoming: the familiar street on the hill at my dad’s house in Highland Park; the cluttered house, occupied by cats and friends and a nearly infinite amount of stuff. I spent a lot of time here, in the decade before coming to Korea.

I’m tired. I’ll be driving my dad’s cousin’s truck. Larry Macomber was not just my dad’s cousin – he was an adoptive brother, raised in the same family as my dad, and in the same generation. Larry passed away just a few weeks ago, and so my father was up in Northern California sorting through Larry’s possessions, and one thing he has, until it can be sold, is Larry’s truck. So I get to drive it. Cheaper than a rental car – but being a giant Chevy Silverado truck, its fuel milage will be so poor that the gas cost will make using the truck pretty comparable to renting a car. But I get to sit up high and look down on other cars, like a true American.

Here’s a picture my dad found, that I took a picture of, with Larry in a Ford Model A (a particular hobby of my father’s and Larry’s too). I think the date is early 1960’s.

The house in the background is the now lost San Marino house (on the edge of Pasadena), where my grandfather grew up. L.A. – and specifically, the northwest reaches of the San Gabriel Valley – more than any other place, is my patria, by the etymological meaning of the word: the land of my father, my father’s father, and his father, too.

Dateline: Minneapolis, Minnesota

I woke up early this morning after staying up too late, last night, talking. I drove back across Wisconsin to Minneapolis. I’m feeling very hectic about the things I meant to do in Minneapolis before departing on my flight to L.A. later this afternoon. Hopefully I can get things done.

Minneapolis always feels so much like coming home, to me – perhaps more than any other place except Hometown 1.0: Arcata. It’s definitely where I intend to return if/when I move back to the states ending my expat’s life.

OK – I’m off to run errands and fly away.

I spent a good portion of the day talking. Talking with friends, talking with my stepson, catching up on things, reflecting, verbally, on this life I've chosen for myself. Talking too much, I guess.

One thing that I always notice when I go visiting like this, is that I begin to spin stories (not fictions – I'm meaning, here, true stories, but nonetheless for all that, stories) about the "why" of what I'm doing – my abandonment of my well-paying career in computers for a peculiar, low-paid expat's life as an ESL teacher is almost as deeply puzzling to my American compatriots as it is to my Korean ones.

And the conclusions, with this transoceanic perspective, are mostly affirmational: I chose my current lifestyle with extreme care and deliberation, with the intent to solve very specific deficits in my previous life. My entire life is a carefully constructed edifice with the chief intent of helping me to find greater satisfaction and contentment and "meaning" for myself.

Well, that sounds self-congratulatory. I don't mean to. But it's true I've had many very difficult times, in the past, so I feel some sense of accomplishment in the current state of things. Nothing's perfect, and on any given day, I may be moody or discouraged or annoyed, but it's so far from the crisis-driven defeatism of years past.

I went to my storage unit and confronted my possessions. I’m not sure I need them. But I’m not ready to assume I’m permanently expatriate, yet, although I obviously have tendencies in that direction. Given that, I guess I feel there’s some value in keeping it all – in convenience if not in strictly financial terms.

The stuff is in good condition – dry and musty, but full of dust and cobwebs and somewhat jumbled. It’s a bit like visiting a neglected attic.

My friends and I went out to a very authentic Mexican place in a nearby strip mall – it felt like a quintessentially American experience. It’s definitely one thing I miss.

Dateline: Los Angeles

I’m at LAX. Not visiting, yet. Just passing through, waiting for my flight to Minneapolis in a little while. I’ll come back to L.A. next week.

That was a very long and somewhat unpleasant flight. I watched two movies as I wasn’t really able to sleep. The first was one called Medianeras, a rather philosphical, internetty rom-com from Argentina – yes, you can find movies like that on trans-Pacific Korean Airlines flights, nowadays, I guess. I liked it. And then I saw John Carter, which I’d been curious to see but not curious to enough to go see it, when it came out. As an interpretation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book, it was much better than I expected. Still, a shallow space-action movie – but that’s all the original was meant to be.