Adventure

“A monument only says, ‘At lease I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”

           

Adventure stories were my meat and potatoes growing up—mice with swords, hobbits, dragons, good and evil, victory and defeat. The tropes are so deeply ingrained in me that I often don’t realize that not everyone takes the metaphor of life as a journey as deeply as I do. Not everyone imagines difficult conversations as battlefields, periods of boredom as the literal Doldrums. To others, pain is pain—a broken leg hurts and a broken heart heals. But to those of us inundated with the spell of fantasy, scars are stories with a beginning and end, replete with significance, mystery, romance.

            All that to say I wonder sometimes what brought me to Korea. What madness possessed me to cross the ocean and throw myself upon Thailand, Cambodia, Australia, China, and wherever else I might land? I’m a homebody so homebodyish that parties still—at twenty-three! Perhaps forever?—make me nervous and time away from home weighs on me down like a wet fur coat. Whatever am I doing on the opposite side of the globe?

            Leaving, or its milder, more symbolic form, going out for an evening, is necessary—even for the extreme introvert. After a day of watching Sherlock episodes and cleaning my apartment, I badly needed to get away from my Fortress of Solitude and enter the world of the living. But how—maybe you know the feeling—how could I ever leave my bed, my sweatpants and hoodie behind for the cold, wetness of the outside?

            I needed a disguise—the disguise of a person who didn’t mind the rainy streets and solitary bus ride out to the nearest worthwhile coffee shop. Pirate? Too scurvy. Knight? Rain would rust my armor. Ninja? Perhaps, but I don’t have the right shoes for the outfit. So instead I dressed up like a writer and took to the streets in my scarf, sweater, and skirt combo, armed with my netbook, Precise V5 Pilot pen, and a couple notebooks. I’m happy here in my cozy coffee shop—jazz pouting quietly in the background, bookshelves lining the walls, wooden tables, wooden floors and chairs and records bordering the cornice[1]. Michael Bolton looking angelic with flowing blonde locks on the cover of The One Thing. The Best of John Lennon. Beethoven and Schubert and Roy Fox.

            Maybe that’s all my travels abroad are sometimes—a disguise, a jaunt. Brian Jacques has taught me all too well the value of a quest, so that when college ended what else could I do but light out for Salamandastron? I think I’m okay with that. There are worse wastes of time, less idealistic reasons for travel. I do hope that the metaphor works the same in real life, though. I hope that I come back changed for the better, confident—or at the very least not as confused—that I have achieved something.

            Life is so big, I think. Stuck in the middle, I haven’t the eyes to make sense of it all. The stories—fantasies, adventures, journeys—help my faith in the meaningfulness of reality. There’s a piece of poetry I find similarly comforting. Says Robert Browning, “This world’s no blot for us, nor blank. It means intensely and it means good.”

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[1] Outdated word compliments of Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.”

Kids Vote Republican

If you never knew it, my sister is an incredible writer. It's galling because she's actually a music teacher and spent most of her school years bs'ing her way through writing and reading assignments, but she writes a mean blog post. Most of her writing is about her job as a middle school orchestra teacher. Since not all of you grew up in a family of musical educators, I think you'll find the stories of the job entertaining. Plus my sister's a riot.

Check it out: Daily String Warm-ups: A String Teacher's Musings

Also, check out the etymology of "riot:" which is TOTALLY different that the rather coloquial usage above.

Intimidated by Joy

The other day I was editing my novel (don’t laugh and don’t ask to see it because at this stage it’s laughable) and I discovered that most of the scenes I’d written were downers. Even the scenes that were supposed to be happy carried this dour, cynical certainty that things were going to get worse pretty soon. And I realized:

I don’t think people will believe me when I write about happiness and joy.

So much so that nothing I write—and usually nothing I say in conversation—ever conveys the unbridled joy that I know. Always, always I try to reign it in with a more believable frown.

The implications make me gag a little. It’s as if we all believe that true joy is a delusion at worst and an illusion at best. But I also realized:

My joys are much more personal than my sorrows. The situations, the people, the thoughts that make me truly happy mean so much to me that I try to hug them tight to my chest because if someone were to see them and to disbelieve them, ignore them, or, God forbid, laugh at them, that joy might be lost forever. Besides, if joy is so personal, can I possibly write it in such a way that you don’t gag from sentimentality?

It’s a tall order. It terrifies me to try. But “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” So:

Every Wednesday I take a two-bus commute across the city to a little apartment situated on the fourth floor, above the third-floor Nore-bang.[1] When I open the door faces turn and laughter pours out into the hallway before I can slip the door closed. Shoes spill over the entryway, into the tiny, over-warm living room packed tight with twelve or so of us. I yank my shoes off quickly, tight-roping over stretched legs and sprawled conversations into my usual corner, sinking into our circle. Two hours later, the circle stretches wide as we go our separate ways—by bus, subway, scooter, and foot. We’ll meet again next week.

That’s the best I can do until I grow up a little more. The happiest moments of my life have been when I disappear into the heartbeat of a group like that. It’s been a long time since that’s happened to me on the soccer field or in an orchestra: shared passion, shared goals.[2] Here in Busan it’s difficult to disappear. As a foreign teacher I stand apart—naturally excluded from my students both by nationality and occupation. It is inevitable, understandable, an interesting part of the expat lifestyle to be apart in a culture obsessed with togetherness.

And it makes my Wednesday nights all the more joyful.

To be honest, I'm still not completely sure what we were doing in this picture since we were supposed to "make a
Downton Abbey face" and I've only watched one episode. Still, I think it gives a decent insight into the group.
Squirrels notwithstanding.

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[1] Karaoke room, for you non-expat waygooks.

[2] Punny!

Linksies

So my friend from college whose name is (awesomely) Griffin, immortalized in this post by equally awesomely named friend from the same college Sanna, started a website. It's a completely sweet idea: a website written and run by 17-30 year-olds targeted at the interests of the same age group. I've been writing for it the past month-ish which might be one of my reasons for slacking on posts a bit lately.

All that to say this: check it out. Read a couple articles (I've linked mine here and here and here. Narcissism!) If you like to write, write for it. Seriously. More people need to be writing these days and yes, you are good enough. All the writers will tell you that writing is about practice more than skill. And with that rallying cry-!

And with this picture of a typhoon:

It's All Relative

I was worried I’d come to a place called “home” that wasn’t actually. I was scared I’d spend the whole summer halfway between America and Korea, thinking of both of them as vacation spots, equally exotic. I thought maybe I’d come back to Indiana and feel lonely in all this space or harried by the flood of suddenly understandable language. Maybe I’d come back to Chesterton and Valpo and find everyone gone or changed, disinterested or, worse, dis-interesting. I thought I might spend the ride home from the airport begging to get back on the plane to my safe cheese-box of an apartment where even if it didn’t feel like home, it felt like a fortress.

I was steeling myself to relive the realization that words like “home” are meaningless. Words like that wander around your brain when you’re on the road so that any little pocket of comfortability feels like “home.” I believed it, too, that home would disappear simply because the idea of it was no longer clear to me after months of hopping from here to there.

I’m home. Undeniably. There’s grass everywhere and clean, fresh air. My mom’s garden is flowering beautifully and the elephant tree stands in the front yard with a new haircut.[1] My beagle patters about like always and there are exactly as many steps up from the first floor to the second and they are still hazardously carpeted so that I’m liable to fall down when in a rush. My room still has the ugly green walls my parents allowed me to paint despite the pink carpeting.

As nice as the grass feels and as comfortable as it is to sleep on a bed that’s actually comfortable, those things are nothing compared to seeing my mom and dad drive up at the airport in the red Prius and give me big, long hugs. Dad’s smiling and telling everyone we see—mostly ourselves—how good it feels to have the little one back home. He pats his heart a little bit when he says it and I know that “home” isn't meaningless or mysterious.

Children’s children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children. (Proverbs 17:6)

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[1] Mom hates the elephant tree and vows it will be terminated. Dad has put it on his summer to-do list. I will lobby for its safety as long as it stands elephant-like in our front garden.

Busan's Book Alley

I have a theory. My computer is not only sentient, but sadistic and is messing with me all the time. Every time I open it up, it’s changed somehow. Though I have done nothing to instigate this change, Microsoft now automatically displays new documents at 120% instead of 100%. My homepage has changed from Google to some unidentifiable and utterly useless search engine. Also the keys on my keyboard are taking turns not working, forcing me to hit them extra hard if I want to use that letter. Sometimes I completely rewrite emails, status updates, and blog post in order to avoid certain letters. This week it’s my s key and let me tell you, it’s hard to write a sentence without an s.

Devilspawn!

All that to say, although I’ve embraced technology, I still view it as a necessary evil. I tolerate my kindle because it is light and currently holding 46 books I couldn’t read in Korea without it. Skype is cool—free video calls across the globe still seem like something out of a sci-fi novel—and I love being able to look up the geography, history, and so on of Crimea[1] without going to the library after said area comes up in dinner conversation.

But I’m dumber than a brick when it comes to utilizing anything on a computer beyond basic functions. You may have noticed, all three of you who occasionally comment on blog posts, that I never write you back. I really want to! I just...can’t figure out how yet. Someday!

I don’t trust this new-fangled technology stuff and bother. I much prefer face-to-face conversations with friends, encyclopedia’s in the library, and—relatedly—real books. So a day after I became enamored with the Korean jjimjilbang, I found a new favorite part of Korea: Nampo’s Book Alley.

Mini Busan Geography lesson for clarification:

I live on Yeongdo, which is an island (do, pronounced “doe” as in “doe a dear” means “island”), from which I have to take a bus to the mainland of Korean, where the rest of Busan resides. The neighborhood closest to my island is Nampo (pronounced sort of like “nompo” and spelled 남포). Every area of Busan that is not Nampo requires a bus and a subway and at least 45 minutes, so whenever anything is in Nampo, we give a little cheer for convenience.

Hooray!

Books, books, books were everywhere! It doesn’t matter that most of them were in Korean or that all the shop owners looked at me like I was some kind of white alien. Books! There will be many a trip back to said book alley, particularly when I have a better camera and a little more money on hand.

I’m not going to rapture about books because so many other writers have already done it so much better. The final word is Maya Angelou’s:

 I love the book and the look of words

The weight of ideas that popped into my mind

I love the tracks

Of new thinking in my mind.

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[1]  It’s an autonomous parliamentary republic within Ukraine (pop. 2 mil) which seems to have been conquered by everybody and their pet turtle. 

A Love Letter

I hate you, writing. Hate, hate, hate.

I’ve never met anything or anyone who could make me feel quite so insignificant. So inadequate. I could write all day every day and only produce two sentences worth anything—if I’m lucky. I used to think I was consistent before I met you. I used to be content with my ability to work through problem (or creatively side-step said problem). I used to approach my keyboard with a sense of confidence and happy expectancy.

Like a dragon licking its lips before it roasts a marshmallow to perfection with a delicate blast of flame.

But you are a jerk. You force me to sit for hours, fingers still on the keys, eyes staring blankly at the screen. You make me lost. You make me repeat myself. You make me use the dumbest clichés. You make me pissy and mopey and ten kinds of frustrated. You make me look like an idiot.

Like a dragon scared to fly, allergic to fire, and unable to fit into its scales. Or something. You could said it better.

But do you know why I really hate you? Of course you do, you jerk. Because without you, I can't say

Sartorial Santa Claus vs. Korbama

Monday’s are laundry days. I wish I meant that in some sort of cool metaphorical sense because then it’d be a great opening line to my first novel. But seriously, I do my laundry on Monday mornings because I have the morning free to lesson plan and climb up and down the mountain like some sartorial Santa Claus.[1]

It was about the third time that I climbed up the rock steps between building two and the dryer-housing dorm that I remember to write about Saturday’s speech contest.[2]

As previously mentioned, this contest was for high school students who were asked to either write their own speeches or memorize famous English speeches and perform them. There’s something about English used well in political documents that gets to me in a seriously nerdy way. I get goose-bumps when I hear the Federalist Papers read aloud.

So it was with a mixture of chills and giggles I made it through this past Saturday afternoon. Chills because even when the speaker can’t pronounce any of the r’s or l’s in the passage, the following quote is still baller:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

Heady stuff.

Giggles because it was pretty hard to listen to a kid—who had never seen the good old US of A—use a Korbama[3] accent to recite, “With a father from Kenya, and a mother from Kansas, and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.”

Giggles because it was perhaps funnier to hear how many different ways the beautiful parallelism of “on the color of their skin, but the content of their character” could be butchered.

And many more giggles because when trying to copy Bobby Kenedy’s hand motions, one little girl definitely resembled a Hitler-in-Training.

But in the end, it was pretty amazing to hear this kids rattle 3 minutes of famous American speeches from which I only recognize the taglines.

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[1] And yes, this entire blog was written so I could use the phrase “sartorial Santa Claus.” What of it?

[2] Even though all I can really thinkg about it Shinee. New fav: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skZxb5sBoiU&ob=av2e Around the twenty-seventh viewing you stop noticing how odd it is that one of them is wearing ALL RED and start noticing how incredibly cute he is at exactly 1:13 (other favourites include 1:09, 1:38, and 2:54). Who says obsession is ugly?

[3] What? Everyone else combines whatever they want with Obama’s name. Why not me? Korean-Obama!

Heungbu and Nolbu

Nolbu was very greedy and mean, but his little brother Heungbu was generous and loving. When their father died, Nolbu forced Heungbu and his wife and two children to leave so he could keep the fortune for his own family. Heungbu left, and his family lived in poverty while Nolbu prospered.

One day, Heungbu and his wife were out working in the garden when they saw a snake climbing up a tree to eat a baby swallow. Heungbu chased the snake away and repaired the baby swallow’s broken leg. The little swallow gave him a seed to show her gratitude.

The seed grew into an enormous gourd plant, inside of which, when they split open the gourds, Heungbu and his wife found expensive jewels. Soon, everyone knew that Heungbu had become rich—including jealous Nolbu.

He asked Heungbu about his sudden change of fortune, and Heungbu told him honestly. So Nolbu found a swallow, broke its leg, and forced it to give him a seed when he treated the wound. But instead of jewels, the gourds from this seed contained thieves, who stole all of Nolbu’s possessions.

Shaken, Nolbu begged Heungbu for forgiveness. Of course the generous Heungbu forgave his brother, and they all lived in harmony for the rest of their days.

                                                      

The version my students from group ten presented this very folktale, but instead of jewels in a gourd, our Heungbu found a watch in a ramen box, and Nolbu put a band-aid on the swallow’s neck to make her better again. There was also an odd moment when Nolbu told his wife, “Go to the bed,” inexplicably drew two rectangles and the letter “19” on the board, and grabbed her by the neck for a fake kiss.

But I chalk that up to creative license.

Sidenote: for some reason, typing “Heungbu” is fantastically difficult for me to type. I’ve yet to do it correctly on the first try.

Sounds Outside the Lines

I wonder when I began thinking in outlines. Probably years and years of note-taking are finally having an impact, and now my thoughts are neatly organized, compartmentalized, and all sorts of other-ized.

All that to say, I wanted to write about beautiful sounds today, and I couldn’t help but make an outline from which to expound.

Bus 70, pictured here, is not our friend. Despite being
identical to bus 7 and 71, this is the bus that does NOT go
the one place it needs to go, as I discovered today on my
way to soccer where only one person asked if I was a man.

Blessedly (for all of our sakes), I can’t do the 5-sentence paragraph anymore, if indeed I ever could. 

It hurts worse than homesickness. Actually (transition!!), I kind of like how homesick feels: it’s 

a happy kind of hurt. 

There are certain sounds from back home I miss 

more than anything: the ding of the oven (macaroni casserole, oatmeal raisin cookies: done), Gracie’s toenails against the hallway tile, the garage door opening when mom or dad returns from work, Hilary’s no-holds-barred laugh.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about beautiful sounds here in Korea:

       1.      Ship horns: Mornings, afternoons, evenings, I can hear the ship horns harooing their way into or out of the harbor. They are so much more majestic, so much calmer, bigger, deeper, than the blats of car horns. They feel like adventure and fresh air.

       2.      The right answer: Okay, class. So far you’ve failed to respond to “good morning!” and “how are you?” and “did you do the homework?” Next question is tougher: what part of speech is ‘quickly’? Silence. Silence. More silence. The silence of frustration. The silence of despair. Then deliverance. “Adverb!” Usually it’s Julie (group 6) or Ssing Moo (group 10), but sometimes Presia or Toto decides to speak up and when they do, it is the most blessed sound a hung-out-to-dry English teacher can hear.

         3.      Lee’s ukulele nearing my office: I know when a native English speaker is about to knock on my door because they’re louder and less giggly than Koreans. But it’s pretty cool to know it’s Lee by the sounds of the Arrested Development opening theme strumming closer and closer to 2203.

         4.      Korean praying: It is a thing to behold. Yesterday I saw two groups of students praying. Each consisted of four people, one of them strumming a guitar and all of them yelling—loudly, effusively, almost obnoxiously—their praises and prayers. I caught the occasional “Hananim[1],” but otherwise it was unintelligible to me. And it gave me goosebumps—in a good way, in the way that happens when God is really being praised.

CAPTION CONTEST

      5.      A word I recognize: Because learning Korean is hard, I like to appreciate the baby steps. Words I recognize in the middle of long soliloquys or dialogues are all beautiful: anyeong (안영)! jinjja (진짜)? Gwiyeopta (귀엽다)! Mwo (뭐)? Juseyo (주세요)? Kamsahmnida (감사합니다)!

I tried to throw the outline out the window, but this blog post still seems so organized. Unfortunately, it’s so organized that I can’t help but analyze the similarities between all these sounds. The only thing they have in common (besides being sounds in Korea, of course), is in their randomness, their unpredictability during the day. And they are so much more beautiful that way.

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[1] Mini second-coolest Korean lesson you will ever learn: “Hana” (하나) means “one” and “nim” (님 )is a respectiful suffix. They add nim (님) to the end of teacher (선생) to make seonsaengnim (선생님), for instance. So 하나님 is like saying “Honored number one,” or, rather more pointedly, “God.”

Time the Destroyer is Time the Preserver

            It’s hard to tell when life is changing. Time slips by unpretentiously, humbler than Christ himself, leaving me fumbling with my mat as I try to get up and walk. By the time I’ve got it under my arm and I’m ready to leave the pool, it’s disappeared into the crowd—and the crowd has disappeared, too. It’s just me and the cool breeze and the black sky.

            I’m not complaining, mind you, about the breeze and the unreadable night. But sometimes it’s nice to have a little more warning. Sometimes it feels good to hear the clock ringing the hours or see the sun shifting degree by degree from horizon to horizon. That’s why I appreciate the birthdays and the benchmarks—the lines on the wall denoting my infinitesimal growth spurts. They’re good for the filing system.

            All-State Orchestra with strep throat.

Playing against Augustana College.

            My sister’s wedding.

            Les Miserables in London.

A flight to Korea.

But more often the real growth spurts happen in those shifting times—during the breeze and the black—and only a shiver of the chord connecting your heart and memory tells you something’s changed. The shivers are clues, so tiny I usually miss them—so random I sometimes mistake them for a trick of my emotions (is it that time of month again?). But I’m getting better at catching them these days: when a student prays for our class in Arabic; when my students cover their teeth to giggle at my jokes; when two of my grown male students hold hands as they walk down the hall beside me.

So what’s changed? Not much. It’s a little colder in the mornings. Most of my students remember my name and aren’t afraid to use it. Minhee smiles at me sometimes. When I fumble (with words, with my keys, with my mat as I leave the pool)—even as the leaves change color and the night comes a little faster - I don't stumble.

Double-Extended Lash-Boosting Mascara

Makeup disturbs me on several levels. There’s the “I’m slathering myself with pig-fat” level, closely followed by the infinitely less practical and more angsty “Do you know who I am underneath the makeup?” level. But it’s neither the germ-o-phobe nor the teenager in me that is the most disturbed, but the writer.

Allow me to back up.

Occasionally I find myself in need of certain products that will make me incandescently beautiful such as mascara. The last Sunday of my American convalescence was one such time, and I found myself in Target’s girl section where everything shimmers and the floors radiate with a pink estrogen glow. Or maybe that’s just the lip gloss cabinet. Either way, it’s a little eerie, so I try to dash through.

Luckily, I’m not all that picky about my mascara. Because I’m cheap and makeup is brutally expensive, it’s usually a simple process of finding the cheapest brand (L’Oreal, $5.84) and slouching off to look at notebooks and pens. I had already half-pulled my $5.84 choice off its little metal hook when I spotted the one next to it. “Bold-looking volume,” it claimed intriguingly. And that’s when I made a fatal error:

I hesitated.

Make-up quiz for the guys: When I say "Fabulash" I am
a.) applying makeup b.) drunk

The $5.84 went back on its hanger and I looked to the one on its other side. “Dramatic-looking volume,” it announced. I glanced back at “Bold-looking volume” and then back to my original pick—“Voluminous Million Lashes.” Thoroughly bamboozled, I did a quick scan and discovered I could also buy mascara with a “Lash Boosting Power System” that acted as an “Eye Illuminator.” And, if I was willing to up my price by a few measly dollars, I could have “Lash-boosting serum” mascara, or “double-extended lash-boosting” mascara or what was advertised as a “Telescopic Explosion.”

I tried for a moment to visualize an explosion anywhere near my eye in a positive light and failed. This is about the time I pulled out my notebook and sidled over to the CoverGirl display. They offered a dazzling display of yellow, orange, pink, and purple tubes each labeled “lashblast______” with each tube offering to fill in the blank with “length, volume, luxe, and fusion” respectively. In case you’re curious, “luxe” means “shimmer” and “fusion” refers to the combination of both length and volume—in one mascara! Can you believe they sell it separately, too? What a steal!

I took copious notes and moved on to Revlon. There, I was offered CustomEyes, FabuLashes, and Grow Luscious Plumping—with or without something mysteriously referred to as a “double twist.”

Rimmel tempted me with SexyCurves—magically guaranteed to make my lashes exactly 70% curlier than before with its triple plump brush and a particle accelerator. No, wait—actually it’s a volume accelerator, but I’m sure it’s equally scientific. From there I could choose between megalash, megavolume, megaplump, and megaprotein. No joke: megaprotein.

I laughed out loud. You can’t make this stuff up.

And that’s when it hit me. Yes, yes you can make this stuff up and someone did.

English majors, harken to me for I have the horrifying answer to the question that has haunted you for years. “What are you going to do with that degree?”

All in all it's just a brick in the--or something.

I repeat: horrifying.

I suggest, “I’m going to work for Revlon” instead of “I’ll be one of 6 poor underpaid saps who spends eight traumatizing hours every day pondering every possible way to combine the words “luscious,” “volume,” “plump,” “fabulous,” “length,” “lash,” and “eye” into one God-awful word that means even less than the dollar amount on my paycheck.”

Or maybe stick with grad school.

But that’s years away and almost as intangible as the possibility that I might one day be mature enough to select lipstick for myself. But when that day of grad school and maturity comes around, be assured that I will make an earnestly-deliberated decision between Sassy Mauve, Berry Haute, Va Va Violet, and Pink Pout Matte for my back-up color. I’d love to choose Fire and Ice for my primary lipstick, but behind that name is an English major, writing minor who desperately snuck a Robert Frost reference past her supervisors in an attempt to make the next seven hours of that day bearable.

Too heavy. And my face isn’t good with such dark colors. I think a Kiss Me Coral goes a little better with my skin tone, don’t you?

End note:

On Saturday I ran out of the house all gussied up for a wedding (more on that later, and oh yes, I just successfully used the phrasal verb “gussied up”). Unfortunately, my going-out-of-the-house checklist failed me. Cell phone? Keys? Wallet? Cleats? Both shin-guards? Earrings? Mascara?

Whoops. Luckily, I was able to sample some mascara in the underground shops on the way to the subway, so little Korean children did not shriek when they saw my face (no more than usual, anyway). But it did remind me of something I wrote, and thus, this slightly dated post.

Jeju is for Lovers

Before visiting Jeju, all I’d heard that the island was the Hawaii of South Korea. I heard about the local sex and teddy bear museum (separate entities) and not much else. I knew it as a place for lovers and honeymooners—and, of course, the foreign faculty from Kosin University on an all-expenses-paid retreat.

But no one mentioned that Jeju is famous for having women so badass they make Russian Women’s Battalion of Death look like conservative schoolmarms advocating female disempowerment. There’s a saying on Jeju island that says, “Have a baby girl and we will throw a pork barbecue party; have a baby boy, and we will kick his ass.” Hundreds of years ago, these women overturned centuries of Confucian thought to become the main breadwinners of the family.

The Jeju women, called haenyo (or “sea women” or “mermaids of Jeju”), are skilled divers who farm the sea for anything they can catch such as abalone, conch, and octopuses. This taxing job was once held by the men on the island, until it became unprofitable due to high taxes—or until they died leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves. The Jeju women, who were not taxed, picked up the tools on the trade and shouldered on while the men stayed home and raised the kids.

These “tools of the trade” neither include very much that protect the women from frigid temperatures, sharks, and jellyfish, nor are they helpful when it comes to breathing underwater. Wearing a lead-weighted vest or belt and (a recent upgrade) a wetsuit, the haenyo need only a float to mark their location and three metal tools: a flat metal stick to pry abalone rom the rocks, a metal blade with a 90-degree curve (used for dragging octopuses out of lairs), and an all-purpose hook for shellfish and other prey. They dive for roughly two minutes at a time, popping up every so often to deposit their catch into the buoys. There they give a distinct whistle, a unique way of breathing out carbon dioxide and breathing in fresh oxygen.

Also, 85% of these women are old enough to be your grandmother. (My grandmother, anyway)

Up until the 1950s, there were as many as 30,000 haenyo, but now their numbers have dwindled to around 5,000. But still, that’s 5000 grandma’s working a forty-hour week diving up down in the crashing waves of Jeju island. Most people agree that the haenyo are dying out because they have sent their daughters off to college and better prospects. For some reason, Jeju’s younger generation of women now chose to work in an office rather than suffer the stress of sharks, jellyfish, and holding their breath for two straight minutes to swim down 20 meters to catch octopi with a curved blade.

There is another saying on Jeju island about the difficulty of the life of haenyo that goes like this: “Better to be born a cow than a woman.”

Recently, a 24-year old Korean woman named Kim Yeon-ji has decided to join the ranks of the haenyo and carry on the tradition of her foremothers. As a fellow 24-year old (in Korean years), I wish her well. It’s nice to know that at least 1 person my age can be as bad-ass as our grandmothers.

Debauchee of Sea Spray

Confession: the water beneath my hotel room, while
lovely, dark, and deep, was not nearly this photogenic.

I hate everything about Katy Perry’s songs: the inane lyrics, the mundane melodies, and the drawn-out rhythms (ex-tra-terre-strial!!), but damn—her songs are catchy. Luckily, she has brilliant competitor in Robert Frost, and Frost’s poetry is stuck more firmly in my head right now as I sit on the balcony to my overpriced hotel room on Jeju Island, and the waves crash against the breakers 50 feet below. The sea is lovely, dark, and deep…

The first Dutch guy to come to Korea
brought 15 terrifying clowns with him.
Apparently?

It’s been a long day of touring. This “vacation” reminds me a lot of my previous trip to China. Those of you who know the stories may well cringe, but don’t worry: Jeju can never match the toska of Ningbo. But both Chinese and Korean sightseeing is enough to make you miss the ebb and flow of a work routine.

Often half of the entertainment is figuring out exactly how we are supposed to be entertained. Today we drove past an inviting temple on a mountain to stop in a random parking lot, 500 feet below. We wandered around and eventually found the seaside—which was beautiful and windy and everything a seaside ought to be. Also, there was a small shrine/museum/enormous fake boat dedicated to Dutch people.

                                          I thought I was joking, too.

Green Tea. In plant form.

Then we wandered around a tea plantation, where there was a four-teacup museum accompanied by  an extensive gift shop for the likes of green tea, green tea soap, green tea tea cups, green tea cakes, green tea cookies, green tea ice cream, and green tea face exfoliate. There were lots of green plants, too. And some windmills which weren’t green, but probably should have been.

All in all, I am happy to be sitting on the balcony over the lovely, dark, and deep waves. The only other sound’s the sweep of steady swells and plunging crests. The sea is lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep—

and miles to go before I sleep.

Cute couple enjoying the tea museum.
Note the matching shirts: this is COMMON in Korea. O_o