It was a learning experience and then I cried.
So it's been a little over two weeks since I came back from South Korea, and I'm finally feeling some semblance of 'normal.' As in, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Case in point - the relationship I have with my mother. It's nowhere near as bad as it was when I was a teenager because now that I'm older, I can understand and sometimes empathize with my mother more than I could when I was younger - because shit, that was just dramaaaaa and misunderstandings and why are you trying to blot out my light with a bushel and extinguish my brilliance and YOU ARE OPPRESSING ME, MOTHER and only a little genuine emotional abuse thrown in. She said to me the other day - You know you'd be really beautiful if you just lost 20 more pounds. She's been saying some variation of this to me pretty much my entire adolescent life - partly because I think she felt like if she could control this aspect of me, she could bridge the gap between us and partly because I was a really damn cute child and - uh, I wasn't so cute after I sprouted up and started talking back. And dying my hair various shades of factory noxious (and pink).
Seriously, I look at pictures of me when I was wee and wonder where that big eyed, tan little gangly thing went. Then I remember, oh yeah she grew up and filled out and turned 30 years old somehow, and is only a little bit emotionally damaged and withdrawn from relating to most people in normal ways!
So she said this old chestnut to me (if it's not this you could be so beautiful if you changed this thing about you it's get a boyfriend and marry him so I can stop worrying about you) and I immediately thought of this joke I used to tell my friends in college - "I have an eating disorder and I call her Mom." Which you know, funny to the kids with overbearing and well meaning mothers (and a lot of them happened to be Asian or Jewish or Catholic. Which...interesting and probably unrelated.) and then the women with actual eating disorders just gave me shank-eye and muttered under their breath about 'oh that fat neurotic Asian chick is spouting her mouth off again in Creative Writing class - thinks she's so funny" and it's a sign of how much I've grown as a person that when she said this, I just shrugged and said, Well, I already lost 25 pounds when I was in Korea. I think I look okay now. (While my inner voice was saying rather snidely, thank goodness I only really care about being awesome.)
If this had happened say, 10 years earlier, I would have been beside myself in self-righteous rage, screaming, What do you know about body type, I'm taller than you, my BMI index is higher, I'd rather look like me than you, and so on and until I had screamed my lifetime special out of myself. Then my grandmother would scold me for talking back to my mother and I would sulk and go for a drive somewhere and inhale a bucket of chili cheese fries, because I could.
Now that my grandmother has gone, and my mother's estrangement with my aunt in Taiwan grows deeper and chillier every year, and her beating stomach cancer - I'm the only family she has. It's just us in the world now (and more likely to remain that way though I am determined to adopt a cat in the next five years) so I let things slide a little more. I can't say that there isn't pain whenever she says something like this to me, but it's smaller, dull. More like pain from an old bruise remembered than a fresh cut. It is sad when I think that I'm never going to be the daughter that my mother wanted (thin, successful for more than a few months at a time in a real career, possibly married to a doctor), but you know in all honesty - she didn't turn out to be the mother I really wanted when I was younger, either (less angry and tired all the time, talked to me about things besides tutoring and getting angry at me in math, less resentful and dismissive of my absent father - who for all I know might have had some good points, but forever is known in my life as that loser who never amounted to anything and you're just like him, my god) so we've both disappointed each other.
And stuck with each other for better or worse.
It was so much easier to talk to her when I was in another country because we didn't have the immediate past clouding our conversations, just the present and if I was eating well and staying healthy. I started lying to her three months in when I realized to the extent of fuckery I had gotten myself into and the Odious Boss was just starting to show his true colors, and I haven't told her everything that really went down when I got back. I meant to - but as soon as I came back home, it was as if I was a child again (and yes, I know to every parent, their child is their child forever) but I had never left the house, never got a license to drive - never had any independence whatsoever. And it was incredibly stifling and frustrating when I was conscious enough to realize it (basically my past two weeks were fighting jet lag, recuperating from the cold the replacement teacher gave me as a parting gift, and getting my money from Korea - because the OB paid me Sunday, and I left Korea on Monday afternoon and there were no branches of my bank in Incheon airport) and trying to reconnect with friends and the life I left behind.
I think I could fit in some of the slots in the old routine but so much has changed. More friends are married. More friends have gotten pregnant and given birth and now I'm defacto Auntie Saff to two baby girls and another baby on the way - somewhere, somehow my friends and I have grown up. It's not a remarkable change, it was inevitable but sometimes I still can't believe it. When I turned 30 in Korea, I thought - I never thought I'd be this age in another country. I didn't even know what to expect about the age 30. It seemed so far away. Then I graduated college and went through a succession of terrible soul destroying jobs when really I was just an unsatisified desk ninja yearning to be free...to do what? So I ran away decided to make a long held dream finally come true and go abroad to teach. It turned out to be one of the best things and hardest year of my life. While most of the bad parts and difficulty and dark days of vague suicidal thoughts (I live too much in my head sometimes, and that's a bad thing when you're alone and in a foreign country and they actually have proper, cold winter instead of the ridiculous balmy sunshine wisps that pass as typical California winter) were directly tied to how much I hated my boss and his idiot tyrannical way of managing us, the school and the curriculum, the parts that weren't my boss? Pretty spectacular. I like seasons - I don't think they're overrated at all, and it was cool to see the earth actually signify a different season was happening by the trees and the snow and rainy season and the mosquitoes - okay, the rainy season was poetic and interesting and fun for about a week. Then the mosquitoes came and feasted on my tender sweet flesh and really, the rainy season can GDIAF, honestly. But oh, cherry blossoms and the hemlines on women's skirts got shorter and the shoes got taller and it was amazing that I saw five delivery men motorcycle accidents but not a single woman fall down from atop her insane heels the entire year. In fact the only falling down was from me, and I was wearing flats both times.
So Korea - lots of learning surprises, unfortunately none of it in actual Korean, though I do understand a lot more of it than I did last year. I met and made and kept some really good friends there. There is Faye, who was hired two months after I was - and who was so helpful and patient and kind and I could talk to easily on a peer basis instead of the other Korean staff, who were nice but very much Married and with Lives ladies and strictly Work Colleagues. Faye became a friend. I even got to be an invited third wheel on her 1000th day date with her boyfriend/now-fiancee Ethan. (and yes, those are their English names, but they're both 100% native Korean)
We sort of climbed a mountain - the only mountain Gwangju has, and I took pictures of waterfalls and there was celebratory bbq afterwards and Ethan paid for everything and it was like, this is stuff that they don't put in the brochure and this is so much better than it it is in America, where the Korean BBQ (the good kind and really authentic -whether it be in Ktown or other pockets of Koreans in SoCal) is so expensive unless you're in a huge party, and even then splitting the bill made more sense. Then my last weekend in Gwangju I hung out with ex-pats and other foreigners in a board game cafe. A board game cafe. There are alternatives to bars here. I was so happy, even though I lost at Jenga and got hit on the head with plastic toy hammers. Then there was the day Gihee - a former foreign exchange student who lived in California for six years and who I was friends with back home, who I ran into on Facebook - and we met up in Gwangju, which turned out to be her hometown and she lived 10 minutes away from me in the same neighborhood (small coincidences!) took me out for a day in the mud flats. Or the reeds really - an ecological park two hours away from Gwangju and we walked up to the observatory and crossed some shady bridges and there was a planetarium where I fell asleep listening to the presentation about Orion and the milky way. Then we went to a duck restaurant and had bbq duck and I listened to Gihee and her guy friend sing along to the hits of 2AM and IU and I just couldn't stop smiling the entire drive home. Because for a little while, it felt like Korea was just like home - driving around with friends and being silly and eating delicious food.
So that's the Korea I prefer to remember, the one I keep above the other Korea, which was hard work for almost no meaning - other than to fill the hours and earn money (good news - I paid off all my credit cards save one - I had three, and only one remains now and there's a few thousand on it) and crying in bathroom stalls because I was so miserable at living with the OB family in law, and the various illness and day of vomit and humiliation, and the tense work meetings where I asked Faye exactly what my boss was saying about me in Korean and realizing he really was that much of a bastard, and the endless insomnia filled nights of stress. That Korea I want to erase but it is what it is. I didn't go to Korea expecting it to be easy, but I was unprepared for how hard it could be. But I'm glad for the experiences, even the horrible ones because I met the people who I needed to meet and did most of the things I wanted to to. I also stress shopped a ton of makeup I really didn't need, but we all have our different ways of coping. Some people eat, some people drink, I shopped in make up stores. There is just something about picking up a brand new compact or tube of lipgloss in its immaculate (and often painfully cute) packaging and feeling a little rush of anticipation. I don't think having a new lippie or eye shadow is a life changer, but for a few precious minutes, it's better. I feel the same way about art stores, book stores, and camera stores, by the way - but makeup seemed to be the predominant venue of stress relief for me. I should have taken up kick boxing or something - if only I spoke Korean. Next time.
Case in point - the relationship I have with my mother. It's nowhere near as bad as it was when I was a teenager because now that I'm older, I can understand and sometimes empathize with my mother more than I could when I was younger - because shit, that was just dramaaaaa and misunderstandings and why are you trying to blot out my light with a bushel and extinguish my brilliance and YOU ARE OPPRESSING ME, MOTHER and only a little genuine emotional abuse thrown in. She said to me the other day - You know you'd be really beautiful if you just lost 20 more pounds. She's been saying some variation of this to me pretty much my entire adolescent life - partly because I think she felt like if she could control this aspect of me, she could bridge the gap between us and partly because I was a really damn cute child and - uh, I wasn't so cute after I sprouted up and started talking back. And dying my hair various shades of factory noxious (and pink).
Seriously, I look at pictures of me when I was wee and wonder where that big eyed, tan little gangly thing went. Then I remember, oh yeah she grew up and filled out and turned 30 years old somehow, and is only a little bit emotionally damaged and withdrawn from relating to most people in normal ways!
So she said this old chestnut to me (if it's not this you could be so beautiful if you changed this thing about you it's get a boyfriend and marry him so I can stop worrying about you) and I immediately thought of this joke I used to tell my friends in college - "I have an eating disorder and I call her Mom." Which you know, funny to the kids with overbearing and well meaning mothers (and a lot of them happened to be Asian or Jewish or Catholic. Which...interesting and probably unrelated.) and then the women with actual eating disorders just gave me shank-eye and muttered under their breath about 'oh that fat neurotic Asian chick is spouting her mouth off again in Creative Writing class - thinks she's so funny" and it's a sign of how much I've grown as a person that when she said this, I just shrugged and said, Well, I already lost 25 pounds when I was in Korea. I think I look okay now. (While my inner voice was saying rather snidely, thank goodness I only really care about being awesome.)
If this had happened say, 10 years earlier, I would have been beside myself in self-righteous rage, screaming, What do you know about body type, I'm taller than you, my BMI index is higher, I'd rather look like me than you, and so on and until I had screamed my lifetime special out of myself. Then my grandmother would scold me for talking back to my mother and I would sulk and go for a drive somewhere and inhale a bucket of chili cheese fries, because I could.
Now that my grandmother has gone, and my mother's estrangement with my aunt in Taiwan grows deeper and chillier every year, and her beating stomach cancer - I'm the only family she has. It's just us in the world now (and more likely to remain that way though I am determined to adopt a cat in the next five years) so I let things slide a little more. I can't say that there isn't pain whenever she says something like this to me, but it's smaller, dull. More like pain from an old bruise remembered than a fresh cut. It is sad when I think that I'm never going to be the daughter that my mother wanted (thin, successful for more than a few months at a time in a real career, possibly married to a doctor), but you know in all honesty - she didn't turn out to be the mother I really wanted when I was younger, either (less angry and tired all the time, talked to me about things besides tutoring and getting angry at me in math, less resentful and dismissive of my absent father - who for all I know might have had some good points, but forever is known in my life as that loser who never amounted to anything and you're just like him, my god) so we've both disappointed each other.
And stuck with each other for better or worse.
It was so much easier to talk to her when I was in another country because we didn't have the immediate past clouding our conversations, just the present and if I was eating well and staying healthy. I started lying to her three months in when I realized to the extent of fuckery I had gotten myself into and the Odious Boss was just starting to show his true colors, and I haven't told her everything that really went down when I got back. I meant to - but as soon as I came back home, it was as if I was a child again (and yes, I know to every parent, their child is their child forever) but I had never left the house, never got a license to drive - never had any independence whatsoever. And it was incredibly stifling and frustrating when I was conscious enough to realize it (basically my past two weeks were fighting jet lag, recuperating from the cold the replacement teacher gave me as a parting gift, and getting my money from Korea - because the OB paid me Sunday, and I left Korea on Monday afternoon and there were no branches of my bank in Incheon airport) and trying to reconnect with friends and the life I left behind.
I think I could fit in some of the slots in the old routine but so much has changed. More friends are married. More friends have gotten pregnant and given birth and now I'm defacto Auntie Saff to two baby girls and another baby on the way - somewhere, somehow my friends and I have grown up. It's not a remarkable change, it was inevitable but sometimes I still can't believe it. When I turned 30 in Korea, I thought - I never thought I'd be this age in another country. I didn't even know what to expect about the age 30. It seemed so far away. Then I graduated college and went through a succession of terrible soul destroying jobs when really I was just an unsatisified desk ninja yearning to be free...to do what? So I ran away decided to make a long held dream finally come true and go abroad to teach. It turned out to be one of the best things and hardest year of my life. While most of the bad parts and difficulty and dark days of vague suicidal thoughts (I live too much in my head sometimes, and that's a bad thing when you're alone and in a foreign country and they actually have proper, cold winter instead of the ridiculous balmy sunshine wisps that pass as typical California winter) were directly tied to how much I hated my boss and his idiot tyrannical way of managing us, the school and the curriculum, the parts that weren't my boss? Pretty spectacular. I like seasons - I don't think they're overrated at all, and it was cool to see the earth actually signify a different season was happening by the trees and the snow and rainy season and the mosquitoes - okay, the rainy season was poetic and interesting and fun for about a week. Then the mosquitoes came and feasted on my tender sweet flesh and really, the rainy season can GDIAF, honestly. But oh, cherry blossoms and the hemlines on women's skirts got shorter and the shoes got taller and it was amazing that I saw five delivery men motorcycle accidents but not a single woman fall down from atop her insane heels the entire year. In fact the only falling down was from me, and I was wearing flats both times.
So Korea - lots of learning surprises, unfortunately none of it in actual Korean, though I do understand a lot more of it than I did last year. I met and made and kept some really good friends there. There is Faye, who was hired two months after I was - and who was so helpful and patient and kind and I could talk to easily on a peer basis instead of the other Korean staff, who were nice but very much Married and with Lives ladies and strictly Work Colleagues. Faye became a friend. I even got to be an invited third wheel on her 1000th day date with her boyfriend/now-fiancee Ethan. (and yes, those are their English names, but they're both 100% native Korean)
We sort of climbed a mountain - the only mountain Gwangju has, and I took pictures of waterfalls and there was celebratory bbq afterwards and Ethan paid for everything and it was like, this is stuff that they don't put in the brochure and this is so much better than it it is in America, where the Korean BBQ (the good kind and really authentic -whether it be in Ktown or other pockets of Koreans in SoCal) is so expensive unless you're in a huge party, and even then splitting the bill made more sense. Then my last weekend in Gwangju I hung out with ex-pats and other foreigners in a board game cafe. A board game cafe. There are alternatives to bars here. I was so happy, even though I lost at Jenga and got hit on the head with plastic toy hammers. Then there was the day Gihee - a former foreign exchange student who lived in California for six years and who I was friends with back home, who I ran into on Facebook - and we met up in Gwangju, which turned out to be her hometown and she lived 10 minutes away from me in the same neighborhood (small coincidences!) took me out for a day in the mud flats. Or the reeds really - an ecological park two hours away from Gwangju and we walked up to the observatory and crossed some shady bridges and there was a planetarium where I fell asleep listening to the presentation about Orion and the milky way. Then we went to a duck restaurant and had bbq duck and I listened to Gihee and her guy friend sing along to the hits of 2AM and IU and I just couldn't stop smiling the entire drive home. Because for a little while, it felt like Korea was just like home - driving around with friends and being silly and eating delicious food.
So that's the Korea I prefer to remember, the one I keep above the other Korea, which was hard work for almost no meaning - other than to fill the hours and earn money (good news - I paid off all my credit cards save one - I had three, and only one remains now and there's a few thousand on it) and crying in bathroom stalls because I was so miserable at living with the OB family in law, and the various illness and day of vomit and humiliation, and the tense work meetings where I asked Faye exactly what my boss was saying about me in Korean and realizing he really was that much of a bastard, and the endless insomnia filled nights of stress. That Korea I want to erase but it is what it is. I didn't go to Korea expecting it to be easy, but I was unprepared for how hard it could be. But I'm glad for the experiences, even the horrible ones because I met the people who I needed to meet and did most of the things I wanted to to. I also stress shopped a ton of makeup I really didn't need, but we all have our different ways of coping. Some people eat, some people drink, I shopped in make up stores. There is just something about picking up a brand new compact or tube of lipgloss in its immaculate (and often painfully cute) packaging and feeling a little rush of anticipation. I don't think having a new lippie or eye shadow is a life changer, but for a few precious minutes, it's better. I feel the same way about art stores, book stores, and camera stores, by the way - but makeup seemed to be the predominant venue of stress relief for me. I should have taken up kick boxing or something - if only I spoke Korean. Next time.