My stomach's sayin' let's go, but my heart is saying no

I am desperate for gooey cookies right now. Cookies and cheap, good pizza. Pizza and a pesto chicken with sandwich with fresh mozerella and tomatoes from Gourmet Heaven.

A few bouts of indigestion have plagued me over the past week. My mouth has a inkling for spicy Korean peppers and sauces that my digestive tract just doesn't share. It put up a good fight these past two-and-a-half months, but in my final days here, it's started to peter out.

It's time to go home. To a few days of dry, gorgeous sunshine, In N Out burgers, old friends, and family. To a week of veggies and freshman on a Connecticut farm. To a semester of classes, meetings, and midnight coffee runs to power me through the night. To decide whether I'll do this all over again--in a different sort of way--in London come spring.

It's really time to go, my stomach warns me, grumbling--just now--over over the peppers I ate with dinner tonight.

It's time to go home for now, yes. I've spent all but two American dollars. I've finished the last of my gift shopping in a rushed afternoon. I've packed my bags and given the landlord my keys. I've had enough of matching couples, packed subways, and trash-filled streets; but, I haven't had enough of Seoul. I haven't had enough of Korea. I haven't seen enough of my hal muh ni(grandmother). I need to live here again.

Goodbye for now.

all up in my (camera's) grill

Notice to awkward Korean men in Hongdae clubs: I am not trying to take a picture of you. Get out of my face.


Intended Subjects: Me, Kaila


Intended Subject: Sketchy White Guy

a little anger

She looks like my grandmother.

Her white hair is permed. Her feet dangle a few inches aboves the ground when she sets her walker aside and sits down. Her smile--dentures and all--is beautiful.

They introduce me as "our American friend who speaks really good Korean." She smiles and nods.

We tour the home, walking upstairs, onto the balcony, then down to the gardens and rice fields. The heat is awful today and we end our tour sprawled out on the pyung san, a large platform raised about a foot above ground.

We go back in for lunch, noraebang(Korean karoke), and an exercise class that consists mainly of stretching and throwing a ball around the circle.

These gray-haired ladies are too shy to sing to prompts on the television screen, but they have a good time with the streches and games.

At four, we pack up, say our goodbyes to the hal muh nis(literally: grandmother, but it's a term used for any elderly woman), and hop into the van for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Seoul.

I wasn't at a nursing home. I was at a shelter for elderly former prostitutes in the outskirts of Seoul.

These women endure unbelievable social prejudice and stigma on every level. The Korean government--in official documents--has labeled prostitutes as a "possible class to abandon," casting them as criminals and providing them with minimal services. Hitting closer to home in this Neo-Confucian society, even the children many of these women sold their bodies to provide for abandon their mothers.

It's not too hard to let snide comments about whores slip through your lips. I've heard them too many times. I've seen the sterotypes paraded on stage in Korean musicals. I've read books like Belle DuJour's Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl that glamourize sex work.

None of them get reality right. For most prostitutes, this life is one ridden with lonliness and alienation--not platinum blond wigs or
major publishing deals.

That's why I cringe so often these days at the stereotypes of prostitutes so remarkably similar around the world whether in Steinback's East of Eden or in Korea's longest-running musical, Subway Line 1. Our popular culture paints the prostitute as a young, horny--and don't forget dumb--vixen parading her scantily-clad body on the city streets. But, here's the reality for you. What prostitutes around the world share is not beauty or personality traits, it's poverty. You can call for the legalization of sex work all you want, but I'll bet you won't see the daughters of middle-class lawyers joining the ranks of prostitutes if that day comes. Poverty--often coupled with the need to provide for children--is what draws women to prostitution. And here's another reality for you: prostitutes don't stay young forever and they don't have benefits or security when they're past their prime. The ones I met a few weeks ago are the very lucky.

Somehow, I think we'd hear a lot fewer jokes, see a lot fewer glamorous depictions if those who made them just had one chance to see what these women look like years down the line--not to different from their own grandmothers.

even dog owners eat dog meat

About one-third of them, actually, the Korea Times . reports.

Bo shin tang--dog meat--falls under a a food group loosely called "invigorating" foods which includes snakes and bear’s gall and some dishes that sound more appealing to Westerners like samgye-tang, a ginseng-and-rice chicken broth.

With its reputation for boosting sexual virility, bo shin tang particularly popular among men--especially right now during bok-nal(the hot days) when it's said that the summer heat depletes sexual energy. One salon.com article likens visits to back-alley bo shin tang restaurants to a trip to Hooters for American men.

Of course, not just any dogs are eaten! Those ones are specially bred. And while I have no plans to eat any bo shin tang while I'm here, before you start branding Koreans as cruel, heartless people, you best think about the last time you ate the holy cow.

Two of my three aunt/uncles here have dogs! One Mong-chee is a grouch who despises me and once tried to bite me while I was feeding him chicken from my hand. The other, Eh-nee(Konglish for Annie), is an adorable white-ish Yorkshire terrier with a sock fetish:

Is it enough to love?

In each issue of Newsweek, just a few pages past the table of contents, you’ll find a column called "My Turn." Submitted by anyone, everyone, these pieces address the classic college application essay prompt: tell us something about yourself.

I sent in an essay to Newsweek's "My Turn" high school essay contest my junior year of high school. Reading it now, the essay is a pretty cheesy, not-so-original piece about my relationship with my hal muh ni--but it ended up being selected as a runner-up winner. And, I think you'd agree, it's kind of sweet.

That essay, with its title lifted from the lyrics of an Avril Lavigne song, can be found online here

It's been nearly four years since I wrote the essay, two years since I began learning Korean. Expect a follow-up here soon.

In Korea: no white until after labor day

Rain pours down on the Korean peninsula from late June to late July during what Koreans call jang ma, the Korean rainy season. With violently pouring rain, humidity, and forty-minute body-to-body subway rides, it's not the best time of year to come to Seoul.

July becomes August and the weather takes an immediate and dramatic turn. Sunshine, blue skies, and intense heat have replaced gray skies and rain, though the humidity lingers. A new season of Korean weather, bok nal--the hot days--has begun. The first ten days of bok-nal are notoriously awful, so awful that many manufacturing companies--including Korean car companies Hyundai and KIA--close down rather than continue production at much slower levels.

And, in these first days of bok nal, I set out for work in a freshly-laundered white dress shirt. I start sweating the instant I step outside. It's thirty minutes on the subway and fifteen minutes walking. With those last ten minutes hiking up an extremely steep and extremely poorly-paved hill, I'm drenched in sweat by the time I ring the doorbell--not dripping, drenched. It's seeped through my shirt entirely and I look like I've been just come from a wet t-shirt contest. I walk in met by a dozen or so women and the giggling, the teasing begins.

Lesson: Do not wear thin white shirts during Seoul summers. If the rain doesn't get you in June or July, your own body will betray you later on, unable to withstand August heat.

We are the world...we are the children...we are the ones...

There is a certain innocence in the defiance of children. A certain purity in the simple notions of right and wrong that translate into those first steps of activism.

Never short of words, my Dad is, perhaps, a bit too fond of telling stories about his childhood growing up in Pacific Beach, a San Diego beach community. The time he let his parents drive away from a gas station when he know his toddler brother was still in the bathroom. The time a pretty girl rear-ended him, scratching up the back of his car and he told her not to worry about it, just because.

One of the recurring cast of characters in Dad's childhood myths is the Bottom Boys Marching Band. My Dad and Uncle(the one left behind at the gas station) both played french horn in this Boys Band that traveled around the country.

One time all the boys brought baby alligators back home from Florida. When some of the buggers fell out of the overhead compartment on the plane, it gave the stewardesses quite a scare.

More than one time, they played in Rose Parade.

And, one time, a bunch of these boys coming-of-age in 1950s Southern California decided to use a "Colored Only" bathroom in Georgia. "Don't use that one," an attendent shouted after them; but, as my Dad remembers the day, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

...............

I've been reading a young adult novel that was favorite of mine in middle school when I spent many lunch periods holed up in the library. A coming-of-age novel, The Year of Impossible Goodbyes, follows a young girl growing up in Pyongyang as Japanese colonial rule comes to and end and communist rule begins.

I stumbled across this passage. World War II is coming to an end as the Japanese make their last ditch efforts, drafting Korean school girls into the war effort:

"My class was ordered to sharpen these small pieces of glass and rock to throw at the white devils[Americans, duh]. Unhi and I tried to work side by side. When Narita Sensei told us how to make the pieces extra sharp, Unhi and I looked at each other, smiled, and nodded our heads in silent agreement. We bent over our heads over our work and reveled in our secret. We rubbed the pieces of glass and rock against the bricks and made them smooth and round...in our small way, we felt that we were doing something good."

definitely no godzilla

Some call music the universal language; others, mathematics.

But, here, I add another: the monster movie.

I went to watch a Korean movie at the movie theater for the first time tonight. I've gone to the movies a few times before, but just to see the American summer blockbuster fare: The Omen, Superman, Pirates of Caribbean, Fast and Furious 3.

Goemul--The Host--is the summer movie in Korea. It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, attracting full houses for two screenings that left crowds of viewers outside. They've been promoting it around Seoul ever since I arrived--huge banner posters have been everywhere in subway stations. Opening for wide release in South Korea last Thursday, the film brought in 2.7 million viewers in just four days, setting records by opening on the greatest number of screens (620), the highest number of reservations (99 percent), and as the quickest movie to break the 1 million viewer mark (three days). I knew all this going into the movie and had some pretty high expectations as I walked into Theater 6 ten minutes early.

[A brief note on Korean-English film title translations: they don't make sense. Goemul literally means monster. How they got "the host," I don't know. Another example: The direct translation of the Korean film Nae yeojachingureul sogae habnida is "Let Me Introduce You to My Girlfriend." What did they decide to call it in English?: Windstruck]

In Goemul, a ginormous mutant fish-monster emerges from the Han River(the Seoul river that bisects the city), and abducts the daughter of a food cart owner. The rest of the film follows the family as they try to rescue their daughter.

Doesn't sound too much different from movies you've seen before. But, it was so much more, so much better. It had all the basic elements of your typical monster movie, making it easy enough to follow even though I understood little of what was being said. I haven't been so engaged and entertained by a movie in a long while--so literally on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was jittery and jumping waiting for the slimy beast's next appearance for the whole two hours. I have some homework to do, so I'll let a Korea Times article do the rest of the talking:

Hugely satisfying and entertaining, Bong's film centres on the fight of the Park family to rescue its youngest member, Hyeon-seo, who has been kidnapped by a mutant monster emerging from the waters of the Han River in Seoul. However the film detaches itself from being a mere horror movie as burlesque and drama aptly contaminate the formula. ``Egregiously subverting its own genre while still delivering shocks at a pure genre level, and marbled with straight-faced character humour that constantly throws the viewer off-balance,'' epitomizes Elley, ``The Host is a bold game that looks headed to instant cult status.''

``The slapstick comedy elements in my film contribute to giving rhythm, but perhaps they also provide a more realistic side to the whole story,'' commented Bong on the genre-bending of his film, adding ``Slapstick humour in my films is never intended in the first place, as some gags just come out naturally, during the shooting.'' The French left-wing newspaper Liberation stressed this remarkable feature of Bong's style, as Didier Peron wrote, ``Contrary to Hollywood productions, the film allows itself relevant stylistic deviations and does not forcibly search for a happy ending.''

``In `The Host' I have worked mostly with actors with whom I had already worked in previous movies, such as Song Gang-ho, Park Hae-il and Bae Doo-na,'' said Bong on his cast, ``therefore, it was easier to share with them my ideas: when I was writing the script, I already thought of whom would play the roles; on set we had grown a strong relationship, with just one look they knew what I wanted, and vice versa.'' Song's mature performance drew special praise. ``He's the only contemporary Korean actor capable of playing with such conviction a character who seems to be permanently on the verge between ordinariness and slightly retarded.''

The full-blown achievements of The Host triggered praising comparisons, such as Isabelle Regnier's of the leading French newspaper Le Monde: ``Its author displays a brilliant critique of the contemporary epoch with inventiveness and exuberance that remind those of Kubrick's ``Doctor Strangelove.'''

``When I make a movie I never really calculate whether it is commercial or artistic,'' asserted Bong when asked about his ability to bridge mainstream formulas and creativity, ``to me there is no distinction between the two categories, I just try to make movies that I would like to watch as a spectator.''

The response in Cannes proved that Bong's method works, and might be taken as good premonition for The Host's commercial and critical future. Concluding his review on Screen Daily, Allan Hunter even conjectured that ``Someone is bound to consider 'The Host' as remake potential for a wider Western audience.'' In the meantime, the Korean release of Bong's film is scheduled for July, while international sales proceed at a brisk pace.

Want to read more: Unlike His Peers, the Director Bong Joon-Ho Likes Ideas and Metaphors