Category: Personal

Some of the funniest stuff out of Korea. Enjoy.

In a New York Times op-ed, David Brooks talks about the world of distractions we live in, our inability to say no to them despite lots of scolding, and what to do about it. He suggests following our passions, the things that absorb us. He quotes child psychologist Adam Phillips:

You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite.

This goes against what we are often told, which is that we should get to know ourselves. Instead, Brooks (through Phillips) suggests that we should look outside ourselves. Instead of asking, “Who am I? What do I want?” we could ask, “What delights me? What am I interested in?” And even more worthwhile would be to get together with others and talk about these things. As Brooks has it, “the free digression of conversation will provide occasions in which people are surprised by their own minds.”

Feeling overwhelmed by distractions? Whether this is the right solution, it’s certainly one that sounds like fun. Finding the things that absorb you is a good way to live. Find places where you can play with what delights you, and where you can try out new things to see if they might. Meetup.com is a great place to start. Find yourself a joy, and a community that shares that joy.

“May you achieve just enough success to keep you from giving up and finding satisfaction elsewhere, but never enough success to truly relax.”

This is the first curse on The Toast’s list of powerful modern curses. It’s a chilling list — the sorts of things we tend to fear most. These are the backside of all that personal growth chatter that tells us to find the work we love, follow our passions, engage with our romantic partners, and generally be wonderful people who do great things. 

Sometimes, though, that’s not where we’re at. We ebb and flow. We work day jobs whose primary purpose is to pay for food and shelter and a moderate amount of entertainment. We slog our way through fallow periods that seem to have no real value, and it’s possible that we won’t even look back on them and see how they were actually teaching us valuable lessons. 

But if these are your biggest fears, then you’re doing OK. If you’re afraid of being misunderstood at work, that means you have a job. If you’re afraid of growing distant from those you love, that means you have love. These are top-of-the-Maslow-heap fears. These are not the fears of street orphans in Ghana. And if you’re doing OK, that means you’ve got the capacity to do something more, along with the freedom to blow it off for now. 

Not everything has to be building to something else. We live in the mess of real life, if we’re not afraid to tune it out. I find myself reminded these days of the value of staying in the moment, of living for today, because this is my actual life. I work in an office where people misunderstand me. I make mistakes in my relationship with my girlfriend. I have a nervous fear that I’m forgetting to do something important, and several pounds to lose. I stumble. A lot. This is my life, and it’s real, and it’s imperfect, and it’s good. I should probably show up for it.

It’s been a while. What have I been up to? Along with reading a lot of critical theory (ah, course work!), I’ve published an article in the Asia Pacific Affairs Council (APAC) Journal, published by Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. You can find it on page 8. I tell the story of a North Korean defector and how her life on the margins of several Northeast Asian societies is emblematic of the challenges these refugees face.

At the Killington Grand in Vermont, where Google New York sends us on our annual ski trip, the party in the evening usually ends up happening in the outdoor hot tubs. They’re adjacent to the outdoor pool, which is warm but not hot.

As I watched more and more people (including myself) crowd into the hot tubs, I began to think of them as being sort of like New York: clearly where the party’s at, but uncomfortably crowded and probably filthy. The big pool, meanwhile, was like Vermont: not as much fun, and definitely colder, but kind of OK once you get used to it — and there was so much space!

Whenever I was in the hot tub, being mashed against a concrete wall by whoever had just plunged in, I would think about making my way out to that big pool, though I knew it would be cold at first, and maybe a bit lonely. And after I hit the pool and got comfortable again, in a little while I would look at how much fun they were having in the hot tubs and decide to plunge back in.

I suppose New York is like that: it’s crowded and exhausting, but every time I leave it, I decompress for a while, but then I just want to plunge back into the hot water.

I once heard a North Korean defector say that the thing he missed most about his home country was his girlfriend. A defector friend of mine has been able to speak to her sister by Chinese cell phone from time to time, but hasn’t been able to see her sister or her father for years.

For defectors, of course, there’s no hope of family reunions through legal means. The highly theatrical family reunions between North and South Koreans are for family members who were separated during the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. Time and again, North Korea has raised the hopes of these separated family members that they might be able to spend a few hours with their loved ones, only to dash them at the last minute. And now, having offered the reunions in the first place, North Korea is once again threatening to cancel them.

North Korea is notorious for using families as a political weapon. Its system of punishing families to the third generation for the (perceived) crimes of an individual is a powerful tool of manipulation and repression that extends well beyond North Korea’s borders, preventing North Korean defectors from speaking out publicly or forming coherent political identities in South Korea and elsewhere.

In taunting the aging survivors of the Korean War once again, North Korea’s regime is further demonstrating its profound inhumanity. These people are not criminals — not even in the warped perception of the North Korean government. They are simply pawns, individuals whose feelings matter only insofar as they can be used for the regime’s political purposes. Their personal human suffering is irrelevant. It is hard to countenance a regime that shows such utter contempt for its own citizens.

The new Netflix documentary about Mitt Romney, Mitt, is a good reminder of what Obama said back in 2004 when he electrified the country at the Democratic National Convention: that there is no red or blue America, but the United States of America.

The documentary mostly stays away from politics, focusing on Mitt the man, and on his family, as they go through the hard experience of two presidential campaigns. Still, there was enough there to remind me why I voted against Mitt Romney: his comment about the 47 percent of Americans who are takers, his sense that Democrats simply don’t understand how hard it is to start a business, his sincere belief that we’re headed off a tax-and-spend cliff that will destroy America, his willingness to chase the president on Benghazi and other non-issues to try to win points.

What stands out strongly, though, is that Mitt Romney, his family and his supporters are fundamentally good people who wish America well. I don’t know if that’s true of everyone in the Republican party, but it seems to be true of the Romneys. There’s a moment on election day when the campaign plane lands, and they look out the window to see that a nearby parking garage is packed with people. I thought to myself, How can all those people be so wrong? They want Mitt to win as much as I wanted Obama to win, maybe more. And they’re right about some things. They’re probably right that small businesses get taxed too much. If their whole campaign had been about how to lower taxes on small businesses, instead of all the things it became about, they might have done better.

No matter our politics, we do need to remember that those people are human beings who worry about their country, their futures, their families. They disagree with me, and I think I’m right and they’re wrong about a number of things, but they deserve respect. Democrats shouldn’t make the mistake Mitt Romney did in writing off 47 percent of this country as racist, anti-gay, gun-toting, Obama-hating, or anything else. We shouldn’t write off 1 percent of this country as callous plutocrats. Writing off human beings is easy and dangerous.

My latest term paper, “Swiss Gods Don’t Like Rice Cake: Authentic Paths to the Korean Divine” is now online. This one has pictures! Enjoy.

“It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.”

So say Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in an opinion piece in the New York Times. In a take that’s not surprising for Amy Chua, success is defined largely as financial success, decorated with other external signs of achievement: the authors note all those Jewish Nobel laureates and Mormon CEOs.

Further down, they note — in kind of a surprise move for Chua — that Asian-Amerian students have the lowest self-esteem of any group. The authors even quote Amy Tan describing her inability to please her parents as “a horrible feeling.”

In the end, despite messages to the contrary proclaiming that you can have it all, you will inevitably make compromises in life: current happiness at the expense of later financial security, current education at the expense of more time with family, etc.

Finding the priorities that are right for you is no simple matter, but it’s worth thinking broadly about what success means to you. What is your big win? A fat salary? Recognition in your field? Following your bliss? Security? It’s a lot easier to succeed when you know what you’re trying to succeed at.

It’s 7 on a frozen morning, snow still on the ground from a blizzard a few days ago. You’re in your car, going somewhere important. You turn down one of those narrow residential streets in Brooklyn, only to find that traffic is at a standstill.

And so, you honk.

Then you honk again.

Because that honking is going to remind some driver up ahead — you can’t see because there’s a large truck between you and whatever is causing the delay — that roads are for driving, not parking. Your honking is going to make the difference for everyone. Never mind that it’s going to wake 50 people who need to rest before they get up on a freezing morning to go somewhere important. Waking those people up is totally worth it because you’re fixing traffic. Whatever that delay is up ahead, your honk will help the people involved to solve the problem. It’s like you’re cheering them on! Without you, that traffic snarl would never have gotten fixed, and I might have slept all through the quiet morning.

Honker, you’re an American hero.