october 19, 2015

three things i did well today:

one. i kept calm when i had a hundred different things thrown my way at work. i'm decently proud of this one. when the storm came, i wanted to take my computer and my tea and hide out in one of the tiny rooms with the door locked even though our doors don't have locks, but i resisted the impulse. mostly because i needed two screens to do my work. it still counts.

two. i made good on a long ago promise made to buy someone dinner. a yummy dinner, at that.

three. i made not one but four cups of tea. green tea. (which i strongly dislike.) because i'm sick. so the thing i did well here was: take care of my throat.

today i had trouble focusing at work because i kept getting distracted by my recent typical-millennial internal dilemmas about work and meaningful work and whether or not i should be where i am now and what does it all mean anyway. but that's ridiculous, i think, because God did not mess up, of course i should be here where i am now of course i am in the right place for the right now.

i bought old postcards at a quaint little bookstore in the mission today in san francisco. 85 cents each. i half-wondered if they were actually old or if they were just reprints, copies, made this year with an old date stamped on them to make them appealing to people like me who like old things or who want to like old things. i picked three cards after sorting through that whole box on the counter. one was a 1985 cover of the new yorker (the magazine) - it was a man and a woman leaning against the wall of a rooftop and against each other and looking out and up in to the new york night skyline.

another was an (allegedly) old photograph of a group of fancy looking women, glamorously dressed and fabulously made up, sitting around in an elegant room. there's one lady at the forefront of the scene wearing a gigantic bonnet - no that's not right, those are the old-fashioned quaint little ones with the ribbon underneath i believe - a gigantic sun hat and a coat that's more sophisticated than any i can ever aspire to - and she's got a little smirk on her face and she's walking away from the room like she's thinking she has better places to be. or maybe that was just how she smiled. anyway, i liked that one for some reason. or no, i liked it for no reason, i think. we're allowed to just like things without having any particular reason for liking them, right?

the last one had a man leaning his bike against a signpost in a grassy field with nothing else around except a little old building. one of the pictures that made me pause as i was thumbing through the box of cards. i turned it over. photograph was taken in essex, many decades ago. made sense that i stopped at this one.

i took BART home and halfway home i was hit with the thought i wonder if the man next to me thinks i'm afraid of him thinks i'm racist because my body is tilted away from him. i was consciously tilted away from him because i'm sick and visibly and audibly sick and coughing and wheezing like a hideous gremlin and i didn't want to gross him out or get him sick. but then that other possibility hit me and regardless of whether he was actually thinking that or not or even paying attention to the gross coughing grampus on his left it made me wonder what it must be like to wonder such things about other people and what they are thinking about you because of the colour of your skin and the way you look talk dress sound smell appear

i tilted my body to face directly forward so i was parallel with him. in that moment i think i thought i would rather have this man think i am not racist and risk getting him sick with my germs than let him think whatever he wanted to think knowing that i've spared him a horrid throat cold. i wonder what that says about me.

i think i am incredibly self-absorbed.

either way, he got off at the next stop anyway, leaving me to my coughing and my self-absorption.

the bubble always pops eventually

as an undergrad, berkeley was an explosion of happiness and excitement and freedom and learning. four years of college, which i like to think i excelled at. kick ass, take names, et cetera, et cetera. i skipped through campus as if i owned the place with my northface backpack, flip flops and cal crewneck, jamba juice strawberries wild in one hand and A paper in the other. i pored over my beloved victorians and scribbled insightful notes like "symbolism for industrialization" in the margins and forced my roommates to listen to me read dickens out loud to them for class assignments (one of us enjoyed this particular experience, two did not). i stayed up late the nights before papers were due and felt the 2am despair of writer's block and the 6am euphoria of hitting "print." i wrestled with the mysteries of black holes (literal mysteries, since i never understood the lectures) one day and the rhythms of middle english the next. along the way, i met some of the kindest, smartest, most motivated, most fearless people i have ever met in my twenty-one long years (cough) - people who were well on track to change the world in a positive way.

all of these things are great things. i understand that getting to spend four years at a top institution reading my way through the literary canon and being surrounded by thousands of extraordinarily driven people was a wonderful privilege. i appreciate the many opportunities that were thrown wide open to me because i was a student at this school. berkeley is a special place. i believe i am incredibly lucky to have passed through its gates.

but. oh, but! there is a downside to going to a top-notch school filled with so many highly motivated people. there is a downside, and the downside is this: you live for four years in what i'll call the Bubble of Insanely High Motivation, a bubble in which everything and everyone is going at warp speed. and you never recognize just how fast everyone is moving because you are in the middle of everyone and you are just going with the flow and you are moving forward and life is exciting and you are twenty-one and invincible and you and everyone else around you are going to make a difference. you are going to be a somebody.

it's only when this bubble pops that you realize you were in a bubble in the first place. for me, this was several months after i walked across that massive stage at greek theater, where the likes of zooey deschanel and jason mraz had danced around and sung a few months earlier and where ed sheeran and sara bareilles were to sing a few months later, and turned my tassel from the left to the right. in other words, several months into my current job - my first real full-time job - when i realized that what i was doing was not what i wanted to be doing for the rest of my life (shocker!) and the job i was getting good at was not necessarily the job i wanted to get good at.

then i realized that the anxiety that i had been trying to outrun for the past couple of years and thought i had successfully left behind in the dust had actually caught up to me. had blown past me and waited around the next corner for me to run smack into it. that anxiety that i have to remind myself that every twenty-something experiences of not knowing what i wanted to do with my life.

when you go to a school like berkeley for four years, a school with a ridiculously high concentration of budding entrepreneurs, engineering geniuses, future policy makers, and brilliant writers, you can't help but feel constant pressure. everyone around you, it seems, knows exactly what they want to do and how they are going to get there. everyone has a game plan, a perfectly concocted exit strategy that will take them from A to B to C to D and so on until they reach Z, which is a nobel prize, or a seat in congress, or a network of successful orphanages in africa, depending on who you talk to.

now that the bubble has popped i am beginning to realize that i whizzed along at warp speed in college but never figured out my own exit strategy, the what-next of life after graduation. or rather, the exit strategy i came up with may not be the right exit strategy after all. i am learning in my first job that there are some things i like about public relations and some things i don't like, and i am realizing that maybe this initial, perfectly crafted and polished plan of pursuing a meteoric career in public relations may not actually be what i want.

this scares me a decent amount. mostly because it means i have to backtrack a bit. backtracking is not something i enjoy doing. backtracking means saying, "just kidding, i thought i was going in the right direction but it looks like i made a wrong turn. sorry everyone, let's turn around and hike back those five miles to the fork. also, i drank what was left of our collective water supply. please don't hate me." backtracking means reverse progress. backtracking means slowing down. and it's hard to slow down and turn around when it seems like everyone you know is moving forward.

but here is what else i am learning out of college: i am much younger than i think i am. life is not a race and there is no hurry to move forward and move up. who ever said life was a race? no one? okay, so maybe i made that one up and tricked myself into believing it was true. but life is so much larger than this tiny sliver that i can comprehend of it at twenty-one. not everyone has a game plan. it is, indeed, okay to slow down and turn around.

if my application to get a work visa to stay at my current agency isn't granted, i will head to boston this fall to get a master's in public relations at boston university's college of communication - my backup plan. i don't think i want to pursue a lifelong career in comms... that is strange to think about. (i applied to schools back before i was thinking about all of these things. now here i am. life is weird.) but if i do go to boston, i know i will get to live in a new and beautiful city for a year, have the chance to work and study in los angeles for a semester, meet new people, and take several more steps toward figuring out what i enjoy doing and what i don't. and that sounds pretty great to me.

the more i think about it, the more i realize how lucky i am to be able to worry about what i want to do. so many others don't have that luxury. so many others have their futures carved out for them by poverty or injustice or oppression or pressure from their families. how fortunate i am that i can worry about these things. how silly of me that i actually do. how truly, truly first-world my problems are.

i think i'm giving up making game plans for a while. it just takes too much energy -- energy i'd rather spend doing fun things or burning calories from all the ramen i eat. because there are, of course, some things that haven't changed much at all since college.

that one day when i was about three

his english name was lawrence. i always thought lawrence was an impossible name for a baby, the kind of name that people grow into and receive as a mark of adulthood when they reach the age of eighteen. like maybe when they're born they're really just 'law' and when they get older they get to add the 'rence' and become lawrence.

it was a name my little brother never got to grow into, because he died when he was one, leaving my parents with one short year's worth of memories of gurgly laughter and chubby hands grabbing, and me with only photographs and faint recollections of fleeting moments.

that one day, when i was about three -- i don't remember what season it was -- the doorbell rang and my parents' friends, the percys, were standing on the doorstep. they hugged my mother and then she looked down at me and told me i was going to go to their house to play with nicole and joe for the day. why mummy? because lawrence is feeling poorly and mummy and daddy have to take him to the hospital so you'll be a good girl and go with uncle simon and auntie helen, won't you?

and you can stay for tea, said auntie helen. we're having bangers and mash today, your favourite. okay.

when i arrived at the percys' house, nicole, who was two whole years older than me and went to school, let me use her red colouring pencil to draw a big heart on a sheet of paper to give to my mother. that's a really good heart, she said, and i felt very proud but i was too shy to say thank you.

we had the promised bangers and mash for dinner and then nicole and joe and i watched who wants to be a millionaire in the living room until auntie helen came in and told me she was going to take me home now. after i finished putting on my coat she looked at me sadly -- at least, i assume she looked sad, but i don't remember how her face looked just then -- and told me i would have to be a brave girl and comfort my mum and dad when i got home because they would be very sad. okay, i said.

when i got home, my mother was crying. auntie helen hugged her and said she was so sorry and i didn't understand what she had done to make my mother cry so much. and then my mother hugged me, so tight that i wanted to tell her mum you're squishing me but i didn't have the breath to say so.

i didn't understand the weight of that one day and how that one day would ripple forward and touch all the other days to come until i became much older. when, as a teenager, i began to understand this idea of putting yourself into another person's shoes. and when i tried on my mum's shoes for the first time, and thought about what it must be like to be a mother and to have your beautiful son, who you think is the most perfect little baby boy in the whole world, taken away from you.

that's when i began to understand. i asked her about it one day when i was in high school and she cried, and she immediately ran to her dresser drawer and brought back a picture of little lawrence. i think she was almost relieved to know that i still remembered him and thought of him too. and i had to soberly chastise myself for ever wondering if she did. i can never fully be healed from the scar that his death left as long as i live, she told me, but she said it in korean and in the fluidity of her first language it sounded even more painful, and that's when i began to understand not just what it means to be a mother who has lost her son but to be a mother.

***

you look back on that conversation, a few more years later, when you yourself have crossed over that threshold into adulthood - or you think you have, which may be an entirely different thing - and when you find yourself only a few years younger than your mother was when she married your father - -

you look back on that conversation from that moment in high school, and a whole host of other conversations and moments come to the very forefront of your mind, now under the almost fierce illumination of all of the meaning and intensity of emotion in your mother's voice, that one day when you were in high school. all of the times you walked out the door to meet a friend and your dad tells you have fun and watch out for cars and the times you smile and roll your eyes and say i will dad, see you later, and the other times when you just roll your eyes and say when have i ever not looked out for cars; all of the times when your younger sister was sick and your dad was somehow mad at your mum for it like it was her fault instead of being concerned and nice like a normal dad; all of the times your mum worried about how skinny your other younger sister was and how poorly she ate and how much she obsessed over her health. and that one time, that one time you haven't thought of for so long but now remember, when your mum told you in a quiet little, confiding voice, that when eugenie and izzie were little babies, appa would walk into their rooms at night and bend close to their beds and check that they were still breathing

all of these moments illuminated and all, now, comprehensible because of that one day when you were about three.

because this is what it means to be a mother and this is what it means to be a father and this is how it hurts to lose a child and how it hurts and hurts and hurts and some days it hurts less than others but it always hurts.

and umma and appa i'm sorry that it took me so long to walk in your shoes and to figure it out and to understand that you were never obsessive, or mad, or annoying -- you were always just remembering that one day and afraid that you would have to live it again.

i promise i will always watch out for cars, appa, and i'll always dress warmly when it's cold out, umma, because as much as it is in my power i don't want you to live that day ever again, for as long as you live.

an interrogation

this winter break, my mum told me she's a christian now. she said it casually, yes of course i am, in reply to a hesitantly asked question in the kitchen.

"WHAT?!" i shouted, perplexed. "how come you didn't tell me?!" the biggest decision she'd ever make in her life and an answer to a prayer prayed only for eleven whole years and she didn't think to share this with me of her own accord. alright, cool. "when did this happen??"

"what do you mean, 'when did this happen,' i've believed in God for like a year now." she was almost annoyingly unruffled, stirring jjigae on the stove top. i kind of wanted to swat her on the head for taking this so complacently, but there was no good swatting material in sight.

"did you like, pray the salvation prayer and ask jesus to come into your life and everything?"

"yurie-yah, if you believe in God, like i do, you're a christian. and i believe now. i've seen him take care of our family this past year -- that had to be him, i'm sure of it. knowing that gives me a lot of peace. i've been happier now. you've seen it."

"do you... do you believe in jesus? and that God sent him to die for your sins and he was crucified and then raised back to life? do you believe all of that?" always double checking, of course.

"yah, i told you i believe all of it now."

"..." this was my response as i tried to take it all in, thrown off by this incredible example of nonchalance. while i was musing, my mum started up again.

"but you know," and here she turned and gave me a joky smile, the kind she gives me whenever she's about to say something she knows is going to ruffle me, "i was always a goooood person to begin with."

"no, NO, that's the exact opposite of what christianity is about! you weren't a good person. you are a sinner!" i almost yelled it at her, half exasperated and half amused. i knew she was teasing, or at least, i really really hoped she was.

"i know, i know, i'm just kidding." she has been my mother for twenty one years but she still gets a kick out of winding me up. something tells me this will not change. i tried again.

"do you ever read the Bible?"

"eh. i've always hated reading."

"umma!!" groaning at the thought of her fragile salvation. lord, have mercy.

"i read the verses that my friends send me on kakao talk...does that count?" her eyes were laughing, rainbow-shaped and crinkled at the sides.

i was not to be deterred. i tried to steer back the conversation to the important topic at hand and, resuming my most earnest and grown-up tone, i asked another question: "do you believe you're going to heaven when you die?"

my mum's response to that one came easily, "of course i'm going." she paused, and then: "especially since junghoon-ee's there too."

she smiled -- there's no other word for it but serenely -- at me. no teasing this time. i smiled too, silenced out of my questions for the time being.

i always thought that when the day came that my mum finally told me she was a christian, i would weep and weep and weep with joy. instead what i got was this bizarre, bemused back-and-forth with her, daughter interrogating mother to triple check that she was for real. (i guess the things we look forward to the most usually end up happening in a manner entirely unaligned with our expectations.) even after all my persistent questioning, i'm still not sure, exactly. not sure how much she knows and understands, not sure how she interacts with God, not sure how she pursues him in her daily life.

but there are other things of which i am dazedly, joyfully sure. sure that the same mum who used to try and prevent me from going to church in high school now believes in God with a beautiful, childlike certainty. sure that the mum who once told me never to expect to convert our family to christianity now talks of how God has been watching over our family all along and prays for the rest of them to be saved. sure that the worried, anxious mum of last year now has faith, joy, and peace that things will be okay for our family -- a peace that can only come from the Lord.

and most of all, i am sure that He is faithful and good and that He has heard every single prayer that has ever been lifted up for my mother, my father, and my sisters. may His name be glorified through this household in the days and years to come.


but do not forget this one thing, dear friends: with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. the Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. - 2 peter 3:8-9