gangnam

to walk through gangnam at eight pm in the winter is to walk through a world in limbo between day and night. not the actual hour of dusk after the sunset, with an orange purple sky overhead and the last shafts of yellow sunlight fading; not a literal transition between day and night, because gangnam decides for itself when the night begins, independent of the movements of the sun. at eight pm, the sky overhead is an indisputably dark blue-black, the clouds a dark grey, but the shops and the stalls and the food stands are lit up so dizzyingly bright, that as you walk down the main street your senses are confused.

you weave your way through the crowd mechanically -- this many years of living in this particular city, you have cultivated a talent for finding the cracks in the masses and slipping through them easily -- hands deep in big wool pockets, chin almost touching neck, nose buried in the thick scarf your sister gave you for christmas. your ears just poking out above, accosted by sounds of hot honey-filled rice cakes sizzling in oil at food stands; kpop song after kpop song blaring from store speakers; the chatter of people walking past, with the occasional snatch of english abruptly catching your ear amidst the flow of korean. at eight pm, all of gangnam comes out in eager pursuit of fun.

delicately painted faces pass you on either side as you walk. perfect, uniform eyeliner -- no wingtips in this country, just a finely drawn straight black line beneath a slim semi-circle of a not-too-bright eyeshadow -- and thick, straight pencilled brows, after the fashion of the stars. you wonder how every girl at home learns to draw their faces so perfectly, so uniformly; you feel conscious of the unsubtle wingtips at the edge of your own eyelids, the lack of blush on your cheeks. you shrug to yourself; one more way in which you stick out, one more clue for people to guess you are not totally native.

in this bitter cold winter in korea, you are surrounded by puffy north face parkas no matter which part of the infinite mass you are zigzagging steadily through at any one moment. atop skinny legs encased in skinny jeans, they make their wearers look like giant mushrooms, or jellyfish. you feel, yet again, the uniformity of this country, this city, pressing on you from all sides. it is relentless, and you feel keenly how much power the god of homogeneity wields here. there is proof of it in the countless plastic surgery clinics lining the wide street, with unabashed signs lit up as brightly as those of the shops around them. these are the places where people go to change their faces, as easily as they might go to a hair salon to change their hair. imperfect individuals walk in, blandly beautiful duplicates walk out.

you walk through gangnam, this hub of korea's youth and money and intelligence and beauty and excitement, and the weight of this sameness is inescapable. for all of its colour and its noise and its life, it seems to you a monotonous place. in fact, all this colour, this noise, this life -- you wonder if it is not just a cover up for the dreary reality of the monotony underneath.

dazzling lights, pounding music, ceaseless buzz. for just one moment you let yourself buy into it all. you acknowledge to yourself -- if it is a cover up, it's a pretty dang good one.

kcl diaries: sketches from the tube

A man in a suit sat down in the empty seat next to me and unconsciously covered the armrest between our seats with his broad, striped suit jacket. I was displeased. I wanted to rest my elbow on that armrest and here it was suddenly draped in the pompous flap of a businessman’s suit. Not wanting to ask him directly to move it, I spent the next three minutes casually trying to push his jacket off the armrest with my elbow. After a concentrated effort during which I tried to look as oblivious as possible, my elbow finally staked a claim for itself on the arm. Aha! I allowed myself a small triumphant smile. Then we arrived at the next station, and in the two seconds that I removed my elbow to scratch my nose, the pompous suit jacket also removed itself and was replaced by a chubby, dimpled arm belonging to a large woman who comfortably took over possession of the recently conquered territory without so much as a “How d’you do?”

***

While changing lines at Green Park Station, two boys who didn’t quite reach my shoulder whizzed past us through the station on rollerskates. They looked free and blithe and invincible in a way only little boys who are daring enough to ride the Tube in rollerskates can look, and as they skated ahead, weaving through the crowd of suits and summer dresses, their lively figures made a pleasing contrast to the tall sedate shapes walking briskly around them.

We saw them again when we arrived at the platform for the Piccadilly line, as they skated over to us to ask, “Is this train going to Hyde Park Corner?” Yes it is, we told them, and they contentedly retreated a little way from us to wait near the edge of the platform for the train. They stood there in their rollerskates, looking as if they might at any moment roll over onto the tracks, but they were unconscious of any cause for fear. Finding no room for itself in the boys’ minds, fear chose instead to settle on everyone around the youngsters, and my friends and I watched the rollerskaters anxiously while they chatted in still-unbroken voices with each other. When the train pulled in, they clambered onto it cheerfully, quite unaware of the sea of hands behind them, stretched out in case they needed a steadying push. The doors closed, all the suits and summer dresses and rollerskates safely on board, and the whole carriage sighed a collective sigh of relief.

***

I changed lines at Green Park from Piccadilly to Jubilee, with three stops to go until Southwark. The train was mostly empty, and I absorbed myself in my phone. When the doors opened at Westminster I was jolted out of my self-imposed isolation and panicked, thinking I’d missed my stop. I ran off the train discomposed, and as I watched the train pull out behind me, I realized I had alighted two stations too early. Why is my response to panic always to run and never to freeze? I spun around in the middle of the station and tried to look cool as I walked sheepishly past everyone else who had got off and back to the platform to wait for the next train. After about five minutes, the train pulled in, and I climbed into a carriage overcrowded with sweaty bodies that made me think longingly of the cool, empty train I had pointlessly left minutes before.

***

I sat down diagonally across from a young girl and her brother. The girl looked at me and leaned over to her brother to whisper something, and they both stared at me and smirked. I matched their stare and shoved my earphones into my ears, feeling both amused and frustrated with myself for caring enough to glare back at them. They continued to stare and smirk and nod their heads knowingly, and I found myself wondering what could possibly be so entertaining about my person at that moment. In a fit of immaturity I rolled my eyes at them. I immediately felt as though I was about two inches tall, and decided to stop paying attention to the giggles coming from my two o’clock before I could go any lower in my own eyes. I was glad to get off a few stations later, glad to escape the tween-shaped reminders of my own self-consciousness.

kcl diaries: little ghosts

South Woodford - the east London suburb I grew up in - is a quiet neighbourhood, free of the sometimes-oppressive crowds of central London. And yet every time I go back to visit, it seems to me brimming with life. There are people, people, everywhere, but, oh- they are invisible to everyone else. You see, Woodford is peopled with the cheerful ghosts of my happy childhood years, and every time I go back they are always there to welcome me. I am jostled at every turn by a little figure in a blue and white checkered school uniform dress with her black hair in two little plaits, or by her friends, racing down the street to see who would be the "rotten egg" for that afternoon. Little ghost Yuries greet me at every new street - there's one reading by the alligator bookshelf just inside the big windows of the library, there's another queueing to buy an ice lolly from the ice cream van, there's one excitedly rushing to push a child-sized shopping trolley inside Waitrose, and - hallo, what have we here? - Yurie and a whole army of merry little ghosts marching out of the Pizza Express, proudly carrying the pizzas they each made all by themselves on what was undoubtedly the best class trip ever.

It's impossible that going back to visit Woodford can be anything other than a happy experience for me when the place is crowded with the memories and people (both invisible and visible) of my happy early years. We are drawn to revisit places of personal joys, not necessarily with the expectation that we will experience the same feelings and relive everything over when we go back, but because just being there is joy enough. I know that I am privileged to have been able to visit so many times since moving away permanently, and each visit is like walking through the pages of a giant photo album of my childhood, except that the subjects in the pictures cannot be seen with the eye, and all the pages from different years blur together.

It is selfish of me, but I am glad to come back and find that things are mostly the same. That most of my friends and their families still live at the same address, that the Churchfields schoolchildren still wear the same uniform that I did, that the Odeon is still where people watch their movies, that the South Woodford tube station is still mostly empty and peaceful. But really, it would be ridiculous to have expected anything else. Children have been walking down Churchfields Road to go to school every morning for generations, and I'm certain the Odeon and most of the pubs are older than I am. When it comes down to it, my nine years in Woodford was just a passing through, of sorts, just a blip on the life and history of the place, and though my life changed radically and brought me to all sorts of unexpected places (I still marvel, now and then, that I ended up in California) after I left, the life of Woodford continued on in the same trajectory it has followed for years and will continue to follow. Which, as I said, is only cause for happiness for me. It is nice to come back to the familiar.

Most of all though, I am glad that the friendships I developed in Woodford are still intact ten years after I left. That it is not just little ghosts I come back to, but real, flesh-and-blood friends with whom I can catch up on our experiences of the past four, five, seven, ten years, and in whom I can still see the kindred spirit that caused us to first say to each other, "Want to play a game with me?" in the school playground all those years ago.

kcl diaries: what an opportunity

Today marks the exciting milestone of one full week in London.

It has been a constantly moving kaleidoscope of new faces, historic places, green parks, landmarks, Shakespeare, and sentences that don't always end in rhyme.

Over the course of seven (well, technically eight, or seven-and-a-half, counting the first Sunday) days, I have soaked in the beauty of London's parks and gardens, revelled in the historicity of the city, stood in the very hall Twelfth Night was performed in by Shakespeare's company four centuries ago, walked along Chancery Lane, squinted studiously at portraits of the dead and great Tudors, accidentally followed a girl in my building into her flat, danced for three hours on a boat along the Thames with complete strangers, and climbed on a jungle gym only allowed for children under 11 years old while judging parents looked on. I have been to see one spectacular performance of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre, during which I felt I was a part of the play myself, and I have also been to see Despicable Me 2 at the Odeon at Marble Arch. I laughed much more than I expected to at the former, and I teared up at the end of the latter. I have explained in class why I think portrayals of Lady Macbeth that show her as vulnerable are better, and I have listened as others disagreed with me. I've been to more pubs than I've ever been to in my life, and I have learned all over again what an exhilarating and broadening experience it is to meet people from all around the world, and to have talks with them that are peppered with foreign slang and exclamations of wonder and delight as each person contributes different coloured pieces of their home countries into the mosaic of our conversation.

And it's only been one week.

Yesterday, I met up with an old friend, whom I met for the first and last time on a single day in Korea four years ago when he was travelling around East Asia and a mutual friend connected us, asking me to show him around Seoul (and who might be reading this right now). He told me that since we first/last met, he had become a Christian, and shared with me his crazy, beautiful, inexpressibly encouraging testimony. We then talked for a while about our churches, our ways of ministering to others, our blessings, and our struggles. I mentioned how I felt it to be challenging being away from my Christ-centred community, even after just one week, and how unused to it I was. "All of a sudden I am constantly surrounded by and only interacting with people who don't know Christ," I told him.

"What an opportunity!" he replied.

How right he is, and how I hope that I may not waste it. His three words have lodged in my head over the past twenty-four hours, and I will take them to be the mantra of my remaining five weeks (only five?) here. In more ways than one, what an opportunity it is to be here. An opportunity to learn, grow, absorb, discover and re-discover. But of course and above all, in the way he meant it: to share the love of Christ with the people I meet here and be a light for him in this city.

And now: Shakespeare calls.

kcl diaries: london is crazy innit

It is a strange and wonderful feeling to be back in the city I called home for the first nine years of my life. ("Strange" and "wonderful" being two adjectives I find myself using together frequently, probably because I find that many strange things are often also wonderful.) Having lived those nine years in a pleasant little pocket of suburbia and never in the city itself I feel new and unfamiliar with my surroundings while still feeling very much at home.

I thought all the websites and emails were exaggerating when they said King's is in the heart of London, but it really is. After I arrived at my dorm yesterday I went for a wander which took me first to the King's Waterloo Campus and then up and down and across the Thames. Meandering through Southbank brought on that odd mixture of the joy of coming home to the familiar and the wonder of discovering new places. And Sunday afternoon was a beautiful day for wandering Southbank - ceaseless activity, rows and rows of old books and prints for sale, clusters of large crowds around street performers, children running and shrieking through water fountains, queues for ice cream vans and Mexican food (although the quality of the Mexican food here must be doubted until proven definitively yummy), a giant upside down purple cow (gotta check out Udderbelly if I can!), and a delightfully chaotic jumble of multilingual babble.

A walk across Hungerford Bridge brought me to a garden I cannot remember the name of, only that it was filled with happy couples and families lying on the grass, a monument to those who fought in the Battle of Britain, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and back across to the Big Eye. The last time I was in the Big Eye was 2009 and I remember being particularly grumpy and sullen that day. Happy memories! And then jet lag took over so I dragged myself through the streets, past Waterloo Station and the Old Vic and - home.

On the way back I stopped at Sainsbury's and had a friendly conversation with the cheery guy who rang up my purchases. He asked how my day had been and I told him I'd just flown in from California, I grew up here but moved to Korea, I go to university in Berkeley, and, sorry, what's that? which city do I like best? San Francisco, I said, and my reply came very easily without my really thinking about it. - What d'you like about San Francisco? he asked me. - Oh, I like the people and the atmosphere, it's free and it's fresh and it's ... mellow. - Relaxed, yeah? London is crazy, innit? he laughed, have a good stay, take care.

London is crazy, but Mad-Hatter-March-Hare-tea-party kind of crazy, the kind that makes you say, "Yes, please, I'd love some dubious-looking tea poured by a narcoleptic dormouse!" And San Francisco/Berkeley is the place I like best, but we'll see what my answer to the Sainsbury's guy is after six weeks. If every day is as happy as these past two have been, then this is looking to be the most brilliant of summers. And with every passing hour, every new person from a foreign country I meet, every glance up from my computer out the window to the night lights of London, I am increasingly grateful to be here. My hope is that as I discover more of this city and understand more fully the blessing of being here, I will through it all continue also to be discovering more of the one who holds this city in His hands and understanding more fully the joy of knowing Him. Please keep me in your prayers! I already feel the challenges of being away from the community I call my brothers and sisters in Christ. But I know He is with me in London as He is with me in Berkeley.

a letter of instructions - to myself - for 2013

To my Self,

Please pay attention and read carefully. I didn’t want to write out a list of New Year’s resolutions (though I do have a few) this time, so I didn’t. Here instead are some simple instructions concerning your behaviour and your attitude for you to follow in 2013, and, hopefully, throughout rest of your life too. But we’ll just worry about 2013 for now.

1. Don’t make New Year’s resolutions you know you can’t keep. “Lose 20 pounds” would be a good example of such a resolution. I don’t understand why you insist on setting yourself up for failure in this manner but I am sure it is unhealthy. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, grammatically. That last line might be a quote from a movie, but I can’t remember and frankly I don’t care.

2. Stop freaking out about your future and moaning that you don’t know what you are going to do with your life. You are halfway through your junior year in college, you are going to graduate next year, and then, yes, you WILL go out into what people call the real world (apparently the world you have been living in for the past nineteen years is just an excellent fake, rather like the fake Michael Kors bag your mum gave you which she insisted was “the really good kind of fake”), so the sooner you suck it up, the better. Take active steps to discover what you like doing and what you are good at this year, and start making some real plans – either for grad school or for working. And pray. Hard.

3. Travel more. Use your breaks to go and visit other states, take advantage of the fact that you can’t go home during spring and thanksgiving because for you a plane ticket home costs as much as a California resident’s semesterly tuition at Berkeley (that may or may not be a slight exaggeration), take advantage of the fact that you even have such things as spring breaks, since you won’t starting in 2014 (wait, that’s next year, $#%&!). Unless you decide to go to grad school (see #2). So go places, do things, visit friends, make new ones, take hideously cringe-worthy tourist pictures and pretend you have no shame. (Or just admit that you really don’t have any.)

4. Read more. Read to make yourself a better person, a more empathic person, a more nonsensical person, a more believe-in-the-impossible kind of person. Read to educate yourself. Read to travel to the places inaccessible through Korean Air, even though after years of flying only Korean Air you firmly believe that it is the most superior form of cross-continental travel. Read to go backwards and forwards in time, since you unfortunately do not possess a TARDIS which can help you do that in real life. Read to fall in love. Read to meet people who aggravate you so much you wish you could throw the book at them, except that wouldn’t even hypothetically be possible because they would be inside the book itself (I think you still have some unresolved anger issues with Briony Tallis from Atonement). Read to be rebuked, inspired, humbled, and moved to tears. Read because you love reading. Most importantly, read yo’ Bible and do what it says.

5. Write more. Seven-year-old Yurie would be ashamed of the way you -- making excuses and being embarrassed by your own words. Most of whatever you write is and will turn out to be complete nonsense, but that doesn’t matter. Be bold and be unashamed, be the opposite of idle, whatever that is, and whether you post your writing publicly or keep it private on your hard drive or in a notebook or on a napkin, give shape and form to the various thoughts meandering around in your jumbled up head. Post in your blog more often; it’s okay that nobody reads it because you need to learn how to write selfishly, for yourself, before you attempt to write for others. Write because you enjoy writing and it brings you peace and purpose. Write because writing is one of a dismally short list of skills you possess and can use in the workplace. Write to remember. Write to forget. Write to express yourself and write to shape yourself. Write write write.

6. Please, for the love of everything healthy, do try your best to eat more vegetables. Eating all the broccoli your mum put on your plate – all three of them! – on Christmas (best present ever, thanks mum) was a big step for you, I know. I am challenging you now to take more such steps this year, even if they are the kind that are always narrated in books as being taken “gingerly.”

7. Consider everything in this following paragraph to be bolded text. Be more appreciative of the people you have been blessed with in your life. Take care of them, but also let yourself be taken care of. Lose the insecurities you still have about yourself. (A good way to do this would be to put them in a “safe place” so you never lose them; in just a few days time you won’t be able to remember where on earth you put them and will hunt about for them to no avail. This method of losing things has an excellent success rate, and has worked beautifully with such things as passports and small earrings in the past.) Love and be loved. Remind yourself that you are beautiful as God made you, regardless of what the world thinks about you and regardless of what you think about you. And above all, be thankful, for you have much to be thankful for.

Looking back on what I have written, it appears that these are simply New Year’s resolutions attempting to disguise themselves as instructions, an attempt about as successful and subtle as a girl wearing bunny ears and spandex on Halloween and trying to pass herself off as a rabbit. Transparent disguises aside, I still hope you follow these instructions to the best of your ability this year. Brush off failures like they ain't no thang, and, as those wise-quote-refrigerator-magnets say, laugh at your mistakes and learn from them. And I expect some kind of end-of-year report or evaluation from twenty-year-old Yurie on how you did when 2013 draws itself to a close. But that is still such a long way away, isn’t it?

Good luck, and please don’t give me too much reason to be disappointed in you, as you have done so often in the past.

From your friend/enemy/your very own

Self.

learning to be okay with the fact that things always sound better in my head

In my head, the words I conjure up are unfailingly eloquent. I have things to say, and I know how to say them. My sentences are perfectly arranged, my metaphors all in order, my analogies irreproachable. I get excited, lying in bed with my eyes closed, as I think about all the wonderful ways I can express my thoughts in writing. So I sit up in bed and turn on my laptop, still excited. And I open a blank page, and, well, crap. It's all gone. If I picture my oh-so-beautifully-crafted sentences travelling from my brain down through my head, shoulders, and arms to my fingertips, I imagine they must all get lost somewhere around my elbows and start breaking apart, drifting to my fingertips in fragments of words and phrases that I can't properly piece back together. It's very, very frustrating, and it makes me just not want to try at all much of the time.

I feel the same way about coming home. (Actually, come to think of it, I could probably make this feeling a metaphor for just about anything in life, but since I just got back home three days ago after being away for six months, this is what is on my mind.)

Because I'm away from home for several months at a time during the school year, I always forget, to some degree, what it's like to be here. So in the few weeks leading up to my return, I make fantastically bright plans for how I'll spend my time at home. How I'll show nothing but love and respect to my parents, play with my sisters every minute of my free time, and above all, be patient with every member of my lovable but crazy, drive-me-up-the-wall family. This will be the break that I am able to show them the perfect, flawless example of Christ's love, I think to myself every single time. I get excited, lying in my terrifyingly wobbly bunk bed in Berkeley as I form these laudable intentions. I board a plane, sit in an uncomfortable seat for 12-plus hours, still excited. And then I come home and after just two days I realize how hard it is to carry all these good intentions out. I snap at my dad when he repeats unwelcome advice for the tenth time, and I find myself spending more time with a book than with my sisters. I frustrate myself with my inability to put into perfect action the perfect plan for showing the perfect love to my family.

There's a "but," of course. That "but" is that, ultimately, it's okay. (Not that I snap at my family; no, no, that's not okay. And I have to repent each time.) I'm learning, however slowly and resignedly, the very simple lesson that things will always sound better in my head. Even when it comes to things like loving my family. I'm a very flawed, very incompetent, very sinful human being, and I can't hope to live up to my castle-in-the-sky standards of eloquence and lovingness. But even knowing this, that the way I plan it in my head is not how it will be in life is no reason to stop me, or anyone, from trying. And in the act of simply sitting down in front of my sorely unused blog screen or in front of my younger sisters, words and actions come to life that might not have been part of my plan or even come close to measuring up to my impossible ideals, but that still in some way carry out the same intention behind it all.

The conclusion I inevitably but somewhat abruptly come to is no new, world-shattering revelation, nor do I pretend that anything I've written above is such a thing (or who knows, maybe it is to somebody). Simply the often repeated but for all that still so very true phrase that we are called to excellence, not perfection, which belongs to God. Just as my fears of not meeting my perfect standards in writing and in loving shouldn't stop me from trying in the first place, so my failures to meet them when I do try shouldn't cause me to wallow in frustration or self-condemnation. Especially because I know that, ultimately, I can only love because He first loved me. And this is where my writing-loving analogy breaks down, because I don't have a way of applying 1 John 4:19 to my writing. But hey, this post was only ever going to be perfect in my head anyway.


"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men" (Colossians 3:23).

"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business." - Michael J. Fox