growing

sun setting...nothing to see here, folks!

It's just a feeling, but I think that I'm outgrowing this blog. When I started getting beautiful emails and calls from you guys saying, "Congratulations! Are you really engaged?" I was really moved. But it also seemed like the right time to wrap up. It suggested that my readers are really my friends now. Which is maybe all I wanted all along.

I'm grateful for all your company during this period of change in my life. I started this blog to try out a journalistic voice, one that I'd always dreamed of using. After three years of law school, where I probably contributed to class discussion once a semester, giving myself permission to talk at length about anything felt new and exciting. It was like I was waking up from a deep sleep, and I wanted to tell someone all the vivid dreams I'd had for the past three years. You guys, my readers (all five of you!), were like my secret confessors.

But after almost two years, I've run out of confessions. This blog gave me the freedom to experiment, and without my even really noticing, my dreams became realities, step by step. I'm on the path to a stupidly happy career, I feel it in my gut, even if I can't tell you where it is yet. More unexpectedly, this blog brought me something I had no business getting - someone to spend my time with when I'm not obsessing about how to tell the perfect story. Just lucky, I guess.

I'm off to Australia to spend a few weeks with him while he's working. (Seven flights in two weeks, whoa!) I'd planned on blogging all about the trip, but just thinking about it bores me. I used to have a lot of conflicts that gave tension to my posts. Nowadays, I'm happy. It's as dull as bricks.

I feel like I have a lot less to say than I used to. And that's great. Thanks again to everyone for listening. (Of course, it's hard for me to let go, so I reserve the right to blog a little bit more.)

Korean Horror is so boring!

i've been googling myself again. I woke up with a strong desire to own suyeon.com. Unfortunately, it seems to be owned by a South Korean herbalist. A close second, Suyeon.kr, is the website of a 48-year old fine artist in Seoul.

But in the meantime, I found a synopsis of a Korean horror movie called "A Tale of Two Sisters," with plenty of scene stills. The younger sister in the movie is named Suyeon. She turns out to be a ghost by the middle of the film. Duh.

Why do my people have to excel at a genre that bores me? It would be like if my dad were a TV producer, and his greatest achievement were "The Golden Girls." Everyone would be coming up to me all the time, "Oh my God, I own the DVD box set of the entire series and I watch it every night!" and I would reply, "What's wrong with you?" In the same vein, when the film geek at the video store tells me how the latest Korean blood-and-guts blockbuster is totally awesome, I say, "Have you seen the latest Fatih Akin movie? Turkish-German assimilation is so fascinating."

But I will say that I LOVED 2007's "Secret Sunshine":



Lee Chang-dong is a filmmaker I would love to get wasted with. He really gets Korean women. And maybe if I got him drunk enough, I could get him to talk shit about Park Chan Wook.

next few weeks: destination DOWN UNDER!

hey! I have an assignment due for my writers studio class in an hour and a half - so of course I want to blog. My thoughts are on the exciting future, both short to mid to long term! The immediate and imminent present really can't compete.

First, I'm going to Australia for two and a half weeks! And when I say Australia, I mean the entire continent: Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne, and then a tail end visit to both Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand! It's going to be like cramming for exams, but instead of rules of incorporation, I'll be absorbing the flavor of a nation at quadruple speed. It's a good thing that I'll have excellent professional bon vivants by my side to show me how it's done. I'm told that in the first four days, there will be surfing in Perth, yachting in the Sydney Bay, and of course, just workaday lazing at the Sydney Opera House. Then something about a zoo in Perth? Of course, my obsession, like always, is finding Koreans who speak English with funny accents. If I witness it, I will be sure to get it on video.

I saw my mom today, and like a good Korean mom, yelled at me for being tanned and made me swear to buy Shiseido sunblock before going. She also told me, never smile too hard because you will wrinkle. This came up because my awesome friends Kenneth and Rich put out a video where I did a lot of talking, and I showed it to my mom today. Luckily there was no sound. But I laughed at something in the video, and my mom freaked out about how my brows were getting too furrowed, and made me promise never to make that face again.

I love my mom.

OK, now that I only have forty five minutes, I'm ready to start my assignment! Or maybe I'll wait five more minutes. Here, lemme post the video. (Isn't Kenneth ADORABLE!? I'm allowed to say that because I'm friends with his lady):



What do you think? I haven't heard it yet. I'm a little afraid to hear myself talk, to be honest. Just looking from the images, I can tell that I laughed way too much. I don't understand how everything could have been so hilarious, but apparently I was just dying the whole time. Strange.

every day this president makes me cry, i swear to god.

"Israel is an ally of the United States and will remain one. However, I believe that there are Israelis who want peace, and who are willing to make sacrifices if they believe there is a meaningful partnership on the others side."

bright today

My dad's construction project

This building is on Northern Blvd., off 153rd St. in Flushing.  It's just two blocks from the McGoldrick Branch of the Queens Public Library.  In the early '80s, I spent a lot of time in its children's section, where a librarian in a beautiful sari made me and my mom feel at home.  Now my dad is building offices for doctors and lawyers who will serve the Korean community who still live largely in Flushing.  It's a nice homecoming for my family.  My dad is building it with the help of his construction workers.  They're Korean, ethnic Koreans from China (who speak Korean but with a different accent), and latino, I think mainly Ecuadorean.  See, maintaining an ethnic community usually requires helping hands from people with many different backgrounds.  

This is only one of six construction projects my dad is working on.  With them, he's a part of a larger movement to reshape the Korean community's presence here in New York City.  Now, Koreans who moved here in the seventies and eighties are finally seeing the fruits of their efforts economically.  More broadly, they're more comfortable in the culture, especially with children who've entered American professional life, and who have fledgling American families of their own.  In Flushing, you can see small signs of this new confidence, and my father's work erecting shiny new buildings along Northern Blvd. is a part of it.  

dad, new years day

mom and dad, in their foyer


on my uncle's couch


dad and me (cousin jisang in background)

(photography: jane kim)

dinner at my parents' house

I had a long, long talk with my parents on Saturday night, and it reminded me of why I went to law school.  I went to law school because my dad said to.  I fought it and fought it, and then I gave in.  I didn't know it at the time, but he fought dirty - he twisted my arm, he screamed at me, he even cried. It was worse than a Korean soap opera.  

Luckily, going to law school was no tragedy for me.  I made great friends, and legal thinking turned out to be wonderful preparation for working in journalism.  If anything, it's my dad who ended up the loser, because I spent a lot of time hating him for his cruel tactics, even if it brought me to a good outcome. 

On Saturday night, I was talking to my parents about something else that's coming up in my life. I've chosen the one to spend the rest of my life with.  This blogger is getting hitched! (please don't call me lame and old) I already know my dad is against it, and it's in the same way he was adamant about me going to law school.  And my dad is no fool, so I've thought about his concerns. I've searched from the bottom of my heart, used every analytical technique, every statistical chart, every sage philosophy, and I've come up with the same answer - follow your best instinct.  And my instinct says that M is the one.  I've learned some things in law school, and one of them was how to make up my mind.  

The only question, a hard one, is whether I can be persuasive enough to bring my dad over to my side.  As dinner wound down, I told my dad that I'd thought about his concerns about M, and that I hadn't changed my mind.  He said he understood why I'd feel that way, because I was young and naive.  But he couldn't endorse the match because he was sure that M would lose interest in me once it stopped being easy.  Most of all, he said I didn't understand how men are.  I was struck by how sad and cynical he sounded - as if he were talking about himself.  

So I took a deep breath and I yelled at him.  I said, we are different from you.  You cannot predict the future.  This is an equal partnership.  Both of us enter because both of us win.  In law school, we called it a contract.  You only enter a contract if there's consideration.  I've done all the homework.  This is a safe bet in a market that is inherently volatile.  You are speaking from anecdotal data about M based on hearsay, myth, and CNN special reports written by people who graduated from college in 2007.  Meanwhile, I have what every specialist and expert and lawyer dreams of having: I have hard evidence.  I've logged hundreds of hours talking with the source himself.  I've looked into his eyes when he's said it.  I've seen how he's said it over the past year, how it's been constant and unwavering.  I've cross-examined him, presented him with every bad forecast, every counter-argument, and seen how he's performed.  I've got other eyewitness testimony - interviews with his best friends, his co-workers, his bosses, his family.  I've seen how he treats them, over time.  I've seen how he treats children.  I've seen how he treats himself.  Most of all, I've seen how he treats me.  You do not know any of this, and my argument is thus stronger than yours.  

At the end of this, my dad had nothing to say.  He looked a little lost.  So I hugged him and said, "Come ONNNNN, dad!"  He laughed and said, shrugging, "Well, it's your mom's decision, anyway."  Suyeon 1, dad 0.  Game on.  

"ending the long night of racial injustice..."

I'm listening to Bernice Johnson Reagan singing "There's a New World Coming,"  She's singing it strong.  And she's asking me, "Are you ready?"  

Happy Martin Luther King, Junior Day, y'all.  

what we talk about when we talk about abortion

Talking about abortion is like talking about war: it's totally boring about ninety-nine percent of the time.  As in all ideological controversies, the issue has consisted of two sides yapping at each other endlessly, not trying to hear a word of the other person's point of view.  It's worse than me yelling at my dad about American foreign policy.  

But also like war, talk starts getting interesting again when you hear that peace could be on its way.  Evangelical ministers have started preaching from the pulpit that they are "pro-life with a heavy heart," meaning that think abortion should be legal and available, though used in rare instances.  Megapastor Rick Warren was silent on abortion during this election cycle, when during the 2004 election he said that abortion was "non-negotiable" for evangelical voters.  

The most important piece of news, though, is something that's been true for a decade, according to the Pew Research Center: about a third of white evangelical voters say that abortion should sometimes or always be legal.  

All stories, I think, boil down to one person changing his mind.  Now, we've just need a few more evangelical hearts to shift - just eighteen percent more, to be exact - before we can put this issue to rest, and we can ally on more pressing issues like fighting domestic poverty, the human costs of war, and global epidemics.  

It's exciting to see change happening before my own eyes, especially since we've been in the wilderness for so long.  I'm glad that this issue might start holding my attention again.  

on inaugurals, reading, and writing

President Garfield viewing inauguration ceremonies, March 4, 1881.

I looked up from my reading today, stirred by the vision in the pages. James Garfield was preparing for his own inauguaral address by reading all the prior inaugurals. In his diary, he wrote his impressions. When he was drafting he lamented in his journal that he should have spent his time writing more and reading less. This self-lashing for bad time management was all too familiar, and I felt a kinship, even pity, for studious James Garfield, who was not making excuses, but grimly aware of the paradox he had set up for himself - how to imitate the inimitable.

Garfield was facing a point of no return: when to stop reading, and start writing. I recall a boy I knew in college who said, "I can never stop reading a book because every five minutes I stop to disagree and have my own thought." He probably read that in a book. This college boy went on to write a philosophy thesis that received high honors and received a fellowship to study abroad. Last I heard he had chosen to go to law school. This boy, now a man, likely treats his opponent's arguments like he read his books - a jump off point from which to advocate his own cause. James Garfield was doing the same when he spent long hours taking in the great and not-so-great inaugural addresses of his predecessors. His ultimate response response owed everything to the words that had come before it.  He spoke on a cold winter day in 1881, to a crowd filled with some who lived through the Civil War:

My countrymen, we do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers' God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation.

the kind of trashy pop culture i can get with

http://popseoul.com/

korean pop culture still retains that bubble gum sweetness that I know is a lie but gladly ingest.

Of Montreal, "Triphallus, To Punctuate," WNYC Studio, 12/16/08

It's a love song for a new year...happy new year! I'm a day late, but Of Montreal was two weeks early.

May 2009 bring lots of what you loved in 2008, less of what you hated, and more that hasn't occurred to you.

"you don't have to try to steal no nothing from my heart
bc for you anything u want is always free
texting yr freaky fantasies to my fone
black condoms on vanilla ice cream cones
now that i'm not a virgin to you you'll never walk alone

far beyond a self abusers shame i live to make you call my name

woo hooo hooo"

song starts at :25