Places lived: 5 Bay Ridge, Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Seocho-gu, Seoul Seocho-gu, Seoul, same building but different apartment Bundang-gu, Seongnam City, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
Places worked: 2 Google and Samsung
Samsung job offers rejected: 1
Samsung job offers accepted: 1
Countries visited: 21 United States, India, Ghana, Hungary, Austria, Mexico, China, South Korea, Costa Rica, Israel, Trinidad and Tobago, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Sri Lanka
Countries visited for the first time: 15 United States, India, Mexico, China, South Korea, Japan were all repeats.
Countries lived in: 2
Percent of decade spent outside the US: 43
Houses purchased: 1
Cars purchased: 1
Master’s degrees acquired: 1
Landmark courses attended: 8 (including 1 in Thailand)
Alcoholic beverages consumed: 0
Family members born: 5 1 nephew, 3 nieces, and my daughter, though I didn’t know her at the time
In Korean dance, every movement, down to the fingertips, originates in the core of the body, an extension of the breath. This is called trunk dancing, as opposed to Indian or Southeast Asian styles of dance, whose isolated movements are known as branch and stem dancing.
I learned this idea years ago from Dong-Won Kim, a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. It comes to mind today, on my birthday, as I go with my family — wife, daughter, mother-in-law — to see Ma perform the complete Bach solo cello suites in Seoul. We do things together now, our movements swaying from the common core that is our family.
The roots
A year ago on my birthday, I wrote that it should be a year of putting down roots in Korea. A week ago, my new family moved in with me. And on Friday I’ll take my wife and daughter to America to meet my parents and siblings and all the kids. (Also to go to Disneyland, because Disneyland!)
Now that the roots are in and deepening, this can be the year of strengthening the trunk, of growing upward and outward together, of learning to sway in tandem. This is our new dance.
In practical terms, that means finishing all the little things still to be done in the apartment — organizing, hanging the pictures — and finding our new patterns together. These days, my daughter is learning to sleep by herself in her own bed instead of with her grandma, which means my mother-in-law can sleep on her own, in her room. I’m learning what all the stuff is in the back of the fridge, and how to cook again, this time for four. We’re drinking egg creams together.
It also means having our wedding, which comes in a couple of months. We’ll celebrate our new marriage, and our new family, with the people in our lives. From the roots, we will blossom outward.
Wind
Tonight’s concert was supposed to be outdoors, in the park, but Typhoon Lingling made other plans, and the performance was moved indoors. The storm passed yesterday afternoon, scattering leaves, but we watched the trees in our neighborhood dance and sway and hold strong.
This is the dance I’m learning. This is the family we’re creating. Winds will come, and we will dance in them. In this year of my life, that’s what I want to do. I want to delight in the dance.
And tonight, that means enjoying Bach’s sarabandes and courantes and gigues and allemandes. This will be my daughter’s first classical concert. I hope her concentration holds. And if it doesn’t, we can always leave early. The movement will come from the core. The trunk will drive the dance.
Three years ago today, I moved to Korea to find my home. When people asked my why Korea, I didn’t have an answer. But now I know. I had to come to Korea to find my home because this is where she was waiting for me.
In a few weeks, I’ll be moving to the new apartment in the suburbs that I’ll be sharing with my wife (the wedding is in November, but whatever), our five-year-old daughter, and my mother-in-law. I didn’t know when I came to Korea that this is where I was headed. I didn’t know, during all those tutoring sessions and summer immersion programs and language courses and master’s degree classes, that I was doing it all so I could explain the Tooth Fairy to my daughter in a moment of crisis. As my grandfather said, money for education is never wasted.
Early in our relationship, my wife started saying to me that she wanted to be my home. I’m not sure either of us fully understood what she meant. She saw I was lonely and that my family was far away, and she wanted to cook for me and invite me over on holidays so I’d be comfortable. That was all.
But underneath was something deeper. She was also looking for her home — looking for the happy family she dreamed of but had almost given up hope of ever having. That we would find these things in each other is still surprising.
Creating a blended family isn’t always easy (even if the name makes it sound like some kind of smoothie). It has taken tremendous trust from my wife to let me get close to her daughter. Our new family is a work in progress, as I guess every family always is.
But it turns out I’m pretty good at this dad stuff. And I really, really like it. I like sitting on the floor playing Legos with my little girl, singing “Peanut, peanut butter, and jelly,” holding her hand when we cross the street. I like coming home to my family in the evening, hearing my daughter call out for me when I come through the door, and letting the frustrations of the workday melt away as she shows me one of her penguins (nine so far) or plays “Jingle Bells” on the piano for me. Last Sunday we were all together in the kitchen, listening to Joni Mitchell and making donuts, and it was the best place to be in the world.
This is a new journey that’s just beginning. I don’t know where it will take us. But wherever we go, I’ll be home.
So there’s this guy. He lives way up above us. He has a white beard. We call him Father. He watches you all the time, and eventually, as the world grows cold and dark, he rewards those who have been good and punishes those who have been bad.
Just kidding! That whole Santa Claus thing is a myth! It’s just a story we tell kids to trick them into behaving and to have a little fun. We totally lied to you! The rewards came from us the whole time.
However …
There’s this other guy who lives above us and has a white beard, and we call him Father, and he watches you all the time, and eventually, as darkness closes in upon you, he will judge you. If you’ve been good, he will give you an eternal reward. If you’ve been bad, he will give you an eternal punishment. We have no evidence — unlike the other guy, you can’t even see this guy at the mall — but you must believe us this time. It’s super, super important and totally not a trick to get you to behave!
If you have ever been to a store in December in the United States (or a great many other countries), you have heard what I think of as the Retail Christmas Soundtrack: Last Christmas, All I Want for Christmas Is You, et. al. It’s mostly terrible. Even that John Lennon Christmas song is kind of terrible. Since I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, none of this stuff evokes childhood memories of gifts and treats. It just reminds me of sweating through my jacket in a long line in a dingy Duane-Reade or in the overcrowded, fluorescent-lit bowels of some now-defunct retail chain like Woolworth’s or Lechters.
It turns out there’s actually a lot of good Christmas music out there if you look a little, everything from jazz to soul to funk to folk to blues to reggae, some of it genuinely moving, some of it just fun. I’ve included stuff I think is actually worth listening to even if Christmas isn’t really your bag.
There’s the Nutcracker Suite, which is scientifically proven to be the best Christmas music there is. There’s a lot of jazz, like Oscar Peterson’s Christmas album and Ella Fitzgerald’s, which are good because everything Oscar or Ella ever did was good. There’s a lot of blues and a lot of soul, including James Brown’s weirdly compelling Christmas music. There’s that new John Legend album, which I like even though I don’t really like John Legend or Christmas music. There’s Chuck Berry. There’s Fiona Apple singing Frosty the Snowman. There is no Elvis, no Phil Spector, no Johnny Cash.
Alas, the playlist doesn’t include Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite, which is my favorite Christmas album. It has disappeared from Google Play Music, but can be found on YouTube. Sugar Rum Cherry, in particular, is amazing — Duke’s sexy, slinky take on the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Anyway, here’s my little gift to those who have a Google Play Music subscription. Enjoy!
Nebulizing in the Emergency Room at Gangnam Severance Hospital.
A few weeks ago, I was struck with a bout of pneumonia. After several days of fever and burning lungs that antibiotics couldn’t tackle, my girlfriend took me to the Emergency Room at Gangnam Severance Hospital on a Saturday night. They sent me home with a bag of drugs.
But by Sunday noon the fever was back up to 103.2 F (39.5 C). This time my girlfriend couldn’t come to me, but she called an ambulance, and back to the ER I went. I spent the next 28 hours there, and didn’t leave the hospital until the following Sunday. I spent another week at home recovering.
I’ve wanted to write something about what I went through, but I’m finding it difficult. Sickness, like dreams, is mostly interesting to the person experiencing it. Unpleasant as it was, it was nothing more than a few days in the hospital, a few days of feeling rotten and then less rotten. That it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through is maybe evidence of how lucky I’ve been in life. It was horrible, but I’m not sure it was interestingly horrible.
I’m also tired of thinking about it. I want to be well again, and mostly I am, though my lungs are still recovering. Maybe later, when this is fully behind me, I’ll be able to turn my hospitalization into amusing anecdotes. For now, it’s enough to say that it happened and that I’m OK again. And if you’re looking for things to do in Seoul, I don’t recommend pneumonia.
I tend to write about things in Korea that I like, or at least find interesting. It’s a fascinating place, and I’m in love with it.
But it does have its downsides. And this terrifying image of a face in a gas mask represents one of the worst: Korea’s fine dust.
Mise mise, named after the fine dust (mise meonji), is Korea’s most popular app for tracking air quality, and it says the fine dust is up to 171 micrograms per cubic meter, the ultra-fine dust up to 115. This is not good, not good at all. The air today was thick and visible, a fine gray-white murk, like breathing the Gowanus Canal. It wasn’t pleasant to be out in it. My throat’s been sore all day. When I stepped outside, I wore a face mask, and not one of those cute fabric fashion ones either, but something rated for keeping out fine dust. This is no joke.
I keep hoping this will get better as if by magic, but it probably won’t. Korea’s doing some things to mitigate the dust, but a lot of it comes over from China, and I think we’re a long way from solving this problem. It’s worst in the spring, but it’s not spring now, and the air is terrible, and the scary gas mask face.
This is what it’s like to be black in America, isn’t it? What it has always been like, at least since it stopped being worse. What it was like after Charleston, or after the church bombings during the civil rights movement. Or after the murders in Jeffersontown, which we mustn’t overlook. Except African-Americans live in the country that perpetrated their Holocaust, a country where denial of that Holocaust is still mainstream.
Trump’s response that it would have been better had there been an armed guard is, yes, absurd in the light of the four police officers who were wounded. But the madness of this idea goes so much deeper. Should any group that gathers to pray also arm itself? Who will pay for the armed guards, and what should happen to religious gatherings too poor to afford armed guards? Are minorities to blame if they don’t arm themselves against racist violence? Is the government so weak and inept that minorities must arm themselves for a race war? Would Trump and his supporters really feel better if mosques started stockpiling weapons?
Once again, an AR-15 is the tool of a terrorist massacre in America. Colt makes them. No one is talking about Colt. Colt is not a dirty word, but it should be. Colt should be held accountable. Its leaders and employees should be made uncomfortable all the time everywhere. It should be untenable for them to continue to do what they do.
The reason we can do nothing about Saudi Arabia’s murder and dismemberment (hopefully in that order) of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is the reason we can do nothing about mass murders committed with American guns. Weapons sales always come first.
I’m writing at a difficult moment. Today I woke up to the news that eleven Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh. I want to share this nice, happy thing in my life here in Korea because there is beauty and life in the world and I am committed to enjoying it. My first visit to Korea came less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, and many people asked me whether I still planned to come here and teach English for a year. My answer now was my answer then: as much as possible, I don’t ever want to let terrorists decide for me what to do or how to live.
Busloads of apples
Apple farmers selling their wares at the Yeongju Apple Festival.
Apple farmers line the streets, old ladies with paring knives handing out samples, crates of their wares spread out for sale. Young men with batons direct traffic into special designated parking areas, while bus after bus rumbles in, belching out Korean tour groups led by tinny amplified voices. There’s a stage set up and rows of white plastic chairs, but at noon the Yeongju Apple Festival is still not quite underway.
There are a lot of ways to know you love a person, but one way is when she looks at the Apple Festival, looks at you, and suggests you get out quickly and go somewhere else.
Autumn leaves
We’d come to Yeongju and Buseoksa Temple for the autumn leaves. We drove down on a Friday afternoon of spattering rain and dropping temperatures, crossing the Sobaeksan range in deep fog, but when we arrived at Road to Buseoksa Pension, the stars had come out. We were the only customers at a nearby restaurant, eating a dinner of fish and tofu while the owners and their friends grilled off-the-menu samgyeopsal in the other room.
In the morning we headed up to the temple, which boasts Shilla stone monuments and statuary, a Goryeo wooden building that’s among the oldest still standing in Korea, and spectacular views. It was interesting to see the unusual architecture of the Goryeo main temple hall, which has support structures that are related to, but different from, the typical Joseon Dynasty style you see nearly everywhere in Korea. Because there was so much destruction during the Imjin War in the late 16th century, examples of earlier architecture are rare.
Autumn view from Buseoksa Temple.The main temple hall, which dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty.
Here you can see the unusual support structure, quite different from the usual Joseon style found in most Korean temples.
The main columns have a “belly” shape, widening in the midsection and tapering again at the base.
Shilla stone Buddhas.More lovely fall colors from the temple.
We were lucky to get to the temple early. By the time we were leaving, around lunchtime, the busloads of tourists had turned this quiet autumnal refuge into a circus, or really just a low-grade Korean amusement park without any rides. It was time to get away.
Mountain mushrooms
Not far away, near Punggi, across from the Sosu Seoweon (Confucian academy), we saw a sign for a restaurant and decided to pull in. It was styled like an old hanok, and we were shown to a private room.
As we were entering, I saw — and smelled — a bubbling dish being brought to the next room over, a heady, rich brew of earthy mushrooms. “Whatever that is,” I said, “we’re ordering that.”
Wild mushroom jangol.
We had lucked into the last available seating at Dageum (다금), an apparently famous restaurant about which I can find nothing online. Not long after we arrived, two buses showed up, but with our private room, we hardly noticed the crowds. Each dish is handmade, and the man who runs the place goes out into the mountains to gather the wild ingredients. In the jangol, you could taste and savor each different type of mushroom: this one purple and astringent, that one almost like kelp, another woody and chewy. We had the jangol plus a wild mushroom pancake, plus a bunch of side dishes, all for 40,000 won.
Wild mushrooms gathered from the mountains.
We rounded out the day with a visit to Sosu Seowon, Korea’s oldest Confucian academy. Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism is no longer an active faith, and these places, which were always austere, are now a bit sad too. But the autumn leaves were just as beautiful there, and you could feel some sense of what it must have been like for the scholars to observe the passing of the seasons in this beautiful place dedicated to learning and practicing the virtuous life.
And then we drove home, back to Seoul, through the traffic and the city lights and up into an apartment tower, where we ordered in Chinese food.
I woke up this morning, far away in Korea, to horrifying news of anti-Semitic terrorism back home.
I haven’t yet got much to say about what happened, but I felt the need to respond to hate with tzedakah (charity). There’s little else I can do right now. In multiples of chai, I donated to these organizations:
HIAS “Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.” This is the organization whose mission of kindness drove the murderer to his vicious act. Anyone who knows our history as a people understands that we have been refugees, time and again. As the Torah says:
And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
ADL The Anti-Defamation League continues to fight anti-Semitism in America and around the world.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee The president has openly encouraged political violence, and his party has done nothing to stop him. The murders in Pittsburgh and the mailing of bombs to prominent democrats, including one to George Soros, a favorite target of anti-Semitic conspiracists, are of a piece. America’s anti-racist majority needs the political power the vulnerable instead of inciting violence against them.
Edit (October 29, 2018)
As we learn more, I found out there were two other congregations praying at the synagogue at the time of the attack. I’ve donated to both.
