귀향 Homecoming

Tuesday, 3/17/2015

Very sorry for the really long delay--things have been hectic and I wanted to make sure I didn't half-ass this final post, but I've put a lot of thought into it and I hope you enjoy :)

Before the main post are a couple of ideas I wanted to do, but didn't fit in to previous posts.

한국 맥주  Korean Beer:
With all the shit I've given Korean beer so far--terrible, terrible, cheap, terrible Korean beer--perhaps you're wondering if that abuse is truly deserved.  I've come a long way from force feeding myself Keystone Light and PBR in pursuit of developing a taste for beer in college, and now feel that, thanks in great part to Franz, Colin, and Gruner, I now have enough expertise to answer this question.  In order to do this, I conducted a tasting of all of the major Korean beer brands, for science; here are my findings:

Kloud:  The first beer I had in Korea, Kloud gets things started off strong by making the bold, fairly defensive claim that it is, in fact, 100% real beer and then invites you to enjoy its foam.  It has a vague aroma of potato salad (no bullshit) and tastes of stale Sam Adams diluted by half with after-notes of piss diluted by half.

modernseoul.org  Believe it or not, I didn't take this picture and it is supposedly a professional shot.

Cass Fresh:  In spite of sounding like a rapper name some douche that went to your high school made up for himself, Cass Fresh is perhaps the most popular Korean beer.  My friend Adam prefers Cass to the other Korean beers, which is a little like picking your favorite Nicholas Cage movie.  Mine is The Rock.

Cass has a distinctively Miller Lite-y nose, particle board notes, and a carbonated water body.  Its taste was significantly improved with the addition of several measures of soju.

OB:  I swear to god this is the exact same beer as Cass.

exploringkorea.com

Hite:  This one was probably my favorite Korean beer, though unfortunately, I didn't discover it until my trip was almost over.  It actually smells like a decent, more god-fearing beer, which is a plus, and it tastes remarkably like what Hoegaarden would taste like if you watered it down and put a little bit of handsoap in it, which is pretty damn good considering the bar we've set here.  I later detected an aftertaste of my own tears which had inevitably, after subjecting myself to so many Korean beers, fallen into my glass.

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               stockngo.com                         onlinecashandcarry.co.uk                   socalbev.com

Wednesday, 3/18/2015

인그리스 Engrish:

Not that I'm in any position to poke fun, given my novice Korean skills, but by far one of the most entertaining things about walking around the shopping areas in Korea and Taiwan, and a great source of fodder for snapchat, has been the spectacularly and inventively incorrect English translations on shop windows, subway ads, and printed clothing.  I've amassed quite a collection of pictures of these "Engrish" mistranslations during my time there, so here they are broken up into arbitrary categories of my creation for your viewing pleasure.

The Google Translate:  By far the most common type of Engrish, the Google Translate type was clearly and unabashedly arrived at through the use of Korean-to-English Google Translate or other similar online translating tool.

Taiwan's Shilin night market gets us started with an archetypal example.

Even Korean national parks are not immune to the seductive allure of Google Translate.

Nor is their public transportation system.

And finally, this doozie.

The So Close, yet So Far:  This heartbreaking type of Engrish overcame a difficult childhood, found its passion on the school track team, made it out of the gate, past all of its competitors, and sprinted down the final stretch with self-assured abandon, only to realize with horror that, in the aftermath of its exertion, it had lost all bowel control and shat itself in front of everyone at the finish line.  Everything is right; everything, except one small, deal-breaking error that, much like the popular Korean bar food 곱창 kopchang being inconveniently made out of cow rectum, renders it an utter (udder? heh) failure.

Someone should tell them...

-->

Good thing these aren't permanent.

Nailed it.

The Carpet Bomber:  Much like a short essay test that you didn't adequately prepare for, sometimes it feels like the best way to go is just to write as much as you possibly can and hope that it contains all of the necessary pieces, even if there is some extraneous information contained as well.  Well a lot of Engrish translations tried just that, going full Jackson Pollack and just flinging as many English words out there as they could, hoping for the best.

For $10, how can you say no?

I don't trust it...

I actually bought this shirt in Taipei, in no small part because their slogan was so catchy and relevant to my life; it kind of reminds me of a blackout drunk Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Super Awesome Excite Okeydokey!:  A type of Engrish that seems to me to be somewhat unique to East Asian countries, the Super Awesome Excite Okeydokey! substitutes such frills as accurate grammar, syntax, and word choice for a word vomit hurricane of exclamatory, cocaine-addled, cotton candy-flavored, school spirit-y technicolor explosion of adjectives.

It's like if Lisa Frank tanked it in the folder and pencil case industry and found a temp job writing ads for toilet paper holders.

To be fair, their drinks were just as overly sweet and neon-colored as you'd expect.

The WTF:  Sometimes there is just no discernible rhyme or reason to how the translations were arrived at, what they were initially going for, or sometimes even if it's supposed to be English at all.

In addition to being a very strange and hopelessly niche-y concept from a business standpoint, I'm pretty sure this is false advertising as John Mayer is surely too busy being an unfortunately talented douche elsewhere in the world to be running a bar in Hongdae.

$19 though!

I actually really liked this one and found it very effective.

Yeah, I have no idea, dude.

Okay, no more silliness. 

Wednesday, 3/18/2015

귀향 Homecoming:

Though I started writing this post weeks ago, it's taken a while longer to finish it, first on the airplane somewhere over the starlit Pacific, and now sitting in my parents' study in Jackson at 3:00 AM (and finishing the final edits in Germany much later than intended).  That's certainly in part because I just ran out of time to blog while in Korea, but also significantly because this experience has given me so much to process that I couldn't hope to do it all in one sitting.

I approached this trip quite differently than I have other vacations.  Where usually it's more about the deliberate--the destinations, the itinerary, the must-sees--my trip to Korea was much more about the accidental, the coincidental, the potential.  Because in truth, I did not have many expectations since so much was unknown.  Would I find something that I was looking for?  Would I discover that my biological mother and brother are living somewhere in the city?  Would I even like it in Korea?  All these and more were common themes of preoccupation as I undertook my trip and all were answerable only with time.

"...that I believe spending time in the country where I was born and where my birth culture evolved might hold some very real and very important lessons for me.  In that spirit, my expectation is that expectations are a foolish exercise in futility.  I have no idea what I'll learn in these next several weeks, or in what form those lessons will come, I only know that it is an undertaking worth doing and that I feel almost like I have to do it."

That's from my first blog post, and since then, I've done my best to throw myself headfirst into Korea:  to read, converse, and listen; to travel but also put down roots; to meet new people and look at myself differently; to eat and drink; to eat and drink some more; to try; to dare; to fill five weeks so fucking full that they stretch and burst in an explosion of a thousand colors, sounds, and smells.

The last five weeks were truly amazing and I will never forget them (except for the parts that I never remembered in the first place--don't worry, not that many, dad).  It wasn't an awesome trip in the way Hawaii is an awesome trip though; it runs much deeper, much more significantly than that, and the full complement of reasons why is difficult to articulate, but I can try.  As I've written here, I've been incredibly privileged to explore a beautiful country with a fascinating culture and a dynamic, storied history.  I've been lucky enough to get acquainted with a city, my birth city, that beats and pulses in neon and bass, pumping its trendy pop culture and cutting-edge technology across the world.  And most of all, I've been blessed to meet so many kind and interesting people, who more than anything else, have colored my experience here.  All of this together has woven an incredibly novel and formative experience out of love, adventure, and the unshakable, intangible, bone-deep feeling of the impossibly familiar which elevates the whole experience beyond the mere sum of its parts--that somehow I am connected subtly but irrevocably to a place that I could not remember, but now will never forget.

Now don't get me wrong, there are plenty of bad things about Korea too, and I have not missed them by looking only through rose-colored glasses (in fact, I'd be happy to tell you about them), but at the moment, I am feeling far too positively to do that here.

As only someone who's been in school forever, trying to stave off the real world as long as possible, can appreciate (I'm in 21st grade now), I have learned so much on this trip.  From reading up on history and chatting with Peter, who is an encyclopedia of all things Korean, to wandering around with only my ear buds and a chance to stumble upon something unexpected and thrilling, one of the major reasons this trip has been so engaging at such a deep level is because I have just constantly been learning new things--about Korea, about myself, about everyone.  For instance, I learned that I could get LASIK eye surgery for just $700 or double eyelid surgery for $50, that I can be trusted to not lose a scarf for five weeks, that Koreans love corn-flavored things, and I can't hold my alcohol like I used to (now I can again though--practice makes perfect).  I've also learned that until recently, I've never really taken a proper look at my racial identity or tried to understand it, and that it's not an end-all or a critical missing piece for me as it is for some, but it is still very important, bringing the person that I am into sharper focus and adding a very important dimension to how I see myself.

This blog itself has also been invaluable in helping me to sift through all of these experiences and feelings, as many thoughts have clicked into place in the small hours when night blends imperceptibly into morning, trying to find the right way to word something on here or perusing Mean Girls gifs to paste in.  And in that way, this blog has become about more than just Korea for me, and my time in Korea has become more than a search for connection with my birth culture.  It is capstone experience, a shouted challenge to myself, and an exclamation point to the many years of school that have crescendo-ed to this final semester and my recent residency match at U of M Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.

The realization of my adoptee identity, the acute awareness of the impending residency years, and the many nights spent dissecting and reworking it all have laid things out much more plainly that I've done in years.  These last five years have been busy, challenging, usually enjoyable, but never ideal for developing healthily as an individual, and with hindsight, I see that in the chaos, I may have lost sight of some of the better parts of myself and made several lapses into carelessness.  To name a few, I tend to overestimate my abilities and what I am entitled to, I take things too personally, and even though I'm approaching my 27th birthday (28th in Korea) I have an almost debilitating case of Peter Pan syndrome.  Yet, I have also gained many new insights, as these years have taught me things about compassion, social justice, relationships, and the commonalities of the human experience that I hope and believe will shape and inform my future as a doctor and a person for the rest of my life in immeasurably important ways (M3s that want to use that for your personal statements, I'm charging $20 royalties).  I suppose all of this must have been percolating for some time, but I believe that this Korean experience, perhaps unwittingly, has been the key, and in that sense, I left home five weeks ago to go to Korea for the first time, not knowing what I'd find, and came back with a lot more than a much cooler haircut and bottle of fancy Korean liquor from Mr. Goo (which I'm pretty sure cost him a not insignificant chunk of the rent I had just paid him).

This is not the end for me and Korea.  A new part of me discovered electrified, invigorated consciousness in the wooded hills and busy streets of Seoul and it saw me off with a smile and expectation of my return at Inchon airport.  I will be back, regularly I hope, though I think the ship has sailed on the opportunity to live there for more than a few weeks at a time.  I fully intend to improve my Korean language skills and continue to learn more about Korean culture, and if I have children, I want them to grow up with Korean culture as a part of their lives.  After 26 years, this part of me is truly awake.

It's funny how when you go looking for one thing, you often end up finding something else.  Going into this trip, I knew one of the main things I was going to try to do was find my biological family if they were still in Seoul.  How could I not?  It wasn't a compulsion propelled by a need to know or even the same esoteric allure that Korean culture in general seems to have on me, but if I was back for the first time ever, it was something I was damn well going to look into.

I didn't find them, though.  I know, it would have been a great story to blog about, a poetically just finale even, but it didn't work out that way.  My biological mother left a fake name with the agency at the time I was put up for adoption--a common practice to avoid social stigma and/or the potential complications reunion in the future; that was her choice.  However, Korean Social Service did find a woman who utilized their services with the same birthday as my biological mother, and they contacted her to let her know I was looking.  She might now know that I was in Korea asking after her and can contact KSS if she decides she would like to be in contact; that too is her choice; however, they have not heard back yet.  That's okay though and if it happens, it happens.  I am at peace with the matter.

What I was able to do was to visit the Korean Social Services campus, and it was there that I found some other things that I wasn't necessarily looking for.

Peter and I arrived at Korean Social Service on Friday, 3/6.

Since its founding in 1964, for over half a century KSS must have watched the city erupt and blossom out of the rubble left by the Korean War, tucked away almost over the horizon at the northernmost edge of the city.

As I entered the grounds, there were no flashbacks, no beckoning sense of familiarity tugging just behind my stomach, just the surety that this place had known the significance of many life changing decisions.  And it had, as KSS has placed over 20,000 children in need of adoption over the years.

We were then met by 김춘히 Kim Choon-Hee, the kind social worker who not only handled my post-adoption correspondence over the past few months, but also started work at KSS in 1976, and so was on staff during my and Stephanie's adoptions.

She gave us a tour of the premises and to my surprise, informed me that I spent ten of my earliest days in this building after I was discharged from the hospital and before I was set up with an interim foster family.

Though a year and half apart, Stephanie and I must have slept in these bassinets a long time ago.

Ms. Kim then showed me my file, which is kept forever in the vaults of KSS, though I was allowed to look through it at my leisure there.  I had most of the paperwork ahead of time:  my discharge summary from the hospital; the initial relinquishment document which described my biological mother as a pretty, young, fair-complected woman; and my original intake form which described me as "a good-looking baby boy with well-shaped features and sparkling eyes (clearly not the most accurate bookkeeping, but oh well)."  It also contained some things I hadn't seen before:  the correspondences from the Michigan social worker conducting the ongoing evaluation of the new adoption once I had arrived in Jackson with my parents.  These consisted of written reports and pictures of my family and me, and looking through them gave me a strange sensation of third-personhood--peering into a part of the past that I have no conscious memory of, but which is steeped in the feeling of the familiarity of home.

(-_-)

"A good-looking baby boy with well-shaped features and sparkling eyes..."  Don't look at me though--quick, look at that tv!  Wow what an old tv!  Crazy right?! Ms. Kim told me she expected me to be fat when I came to meet her because, well because of pictures like this.  Go blue though.

As I flipped through these snapshots of my first year of life, I was not thinking about the situation from which I originated, but the one I was so fortunate to have found.  I unexpectedly became a bit emotional, overwhelmed by nostalgia, gratitude, and the full force of what the decision to adopt two Korean children has meant to me, my sister, my parents, and the rest of my family.

I may never know if there is someone else out there in that city of 10 million beating hearts who shares my nose, my laugh, my curiosity, or my inexplicable love of Liam Neeson movies.  The mystery of my biological origins may forever start and end in a manila envelope in a file cabinet at KSS, but I think I'm okay with that.  Because to me, more important than race or family pedigree could ever be is how I choose to define myself, and I choose to define myself first and foremost by the people that have given meaning to my life.  Those who have raised me, supported me to be and do whatever I dreamed up, shared a childhood with me, and snuck into my room to eat my snacks while I was sleeping.  Those who've taught me and mentored me, guided and challenged me.  Those who've laughed with me, drank with me, sang with me; those with whom I've fallen out and reconciled with, who've listened to me, who've trusted me.  Those whom I've dated, those who've hosted parties with me, played unhealthy amounts of video games with me, and stayed over talking so late it became tomorrow.  That is what, more than anything else in the world has, or ever will, define me, because I say it is.

Home is a concept caught somewhere between the literal and the figurative, the discrete and the infinite--places which bud and blossom with meaning and attachment over time only because of the people and experiences that have lived within them.  A childhood home, a college campus, a favorite vacation spot--we all have them--places like these become so imbued with soul-filling memories and deep personal significance that they become home, surely and irrevocably.

This trip has undoubtedly been a homecoming of sorts, and Seoul, a new home-away-from-home has been deeply significant, wildly fun, and inexpressibly formative, but now it's time for a proper homecoming.  I return with a significantly emptier bank account and a lot less hair, but an immeasurably fuller heart and head full of clarity.  I return now knowing happily that I will be living in Ann Arbor for another four years as I enter the next stage of this never-ending doctor business.  I return home, and if home means being around the people who remind me most of who I really am, who share with me joy, growth, purpose, and love, then be it Ann Arbor, Seoul, Jackson, or wherever, I hope to be home for a very long time.

Mark