Last week my parents brought some framed pictures from their house. Included in this group of pictures were a couple of family pictures (none taken after 1993) a couple of sports related info sheets and a picture of a fighter jet. I can’t tell what model of fighter jet it is because I don’t remember ever being into fighter jets. I’m not even sure why I have a framed picture of one, but now I’m in possession of it, and it’s up to me to find a place for it (in the trash, though I’ll keep the frame). I won’t trash the family photos though I probably won’t put them out where they can be prominently seen. I’m not ashamed of my family but I am just a little embarrassed by a photo of me when I’m 8 and sporting a clip-on tie. I’m confused why my dad didn’t bring me a more recent family photo, but perhaps after the age of 8, my parents thought I stopped being cute.
I think our most recent family photo was taken sometime between 2001 and 2002 and I haven’t heard any chatter of taking another one anytime soon. It’s hard to get all 5 of us kids in one location, especially now that 3 of the kids have kids of their own (and we’re spread out on both coasts). In our last family photo, my hair was still growing back from when I shaved my head (I had dyed my hair blue) so it’s probably not even a very accurate depiction of me, but I’m not holding my breath for a reshoot. I don’t take a lot of pictures of myself, I don’t really take a lot of pictures in general. I don’t even own a a camera, I just have my phone (which I guess at this point is just as good as a camera). I guess it’s pretty ironic, as a person with a film degree, that I don’t take a lot of pictures. Even with film projects, I always tried to take as little footage as possible.
I think if I had an actual camera, I would probably often forget that I have a camera on hand or that I would forget it at home. I think in general, taking a camera out and lining up a shot disrupts the moment when you’re in the middle of an experience. Since I’m so light on photos, I’m probably fortunate that I have such a vivid memory so I can therefore recount experiences and events that I have no visual evidence of. While there are no photos, I remember the first time that I met Bruce as his mom carted him around on a Radio Flyer wagon. I actually remember a lot of Minneapolis better than my sisters who lived there longer than me and learned to drive there. I’ve remembered a lot of things whether good or bad, both recent and from way back. I wouldn’t say I have a photographic memory or that I remember everything that has ever happened to me, but I remember quite a bit.
Unfortunately I often need these memories triggered, so it’s not like I can pull every memory out on a whim. I was recently friend requested by an old high school classmate on Facebook. I recognized him in his picture, knew his name, but couldn’t recount exactly how I knew him in high school. I knew that we didn’t hang out outside of school, but I didn’t remember if I had classes with him or if I was in a couple of clubs with him, or if we just knew each other through mutual friends. I had no idea what we talked about back in the day, I just knew that I thought he was a nice guy. I felt kind of bad. I know that it’s Facebook, but he obviously remembered me better than I remembered him, so I felt like a fraud. It’s like if I had run into him on the street and he said “Hey Ryan!” and I replied back with “Hey you!” while racing through my memory to figure out why I recognized him and what his name was.
I know that I could probably go to my parents’ house and dig up my old high school year book to find out if he had written anything to me to try to find clues on how exactly we were friends. I could also message him on Facebook and just bluntly ask him. I’ll probably do neither. Not as a sign as a disrespect to my classmate but as just a fact of reality. I can’t be friends with everyone that wants to be friends with me and vice versa. There’s only so many hours in a day, days in a week, and so on. Even though it’s entirely possible that this guy would be a better friend to me than current people in my life, I won’t know that now. It’s possible that I will someday decide to reconnect with the guy and remember that I enjoyed hanging out with him, but for now, with the lack of time in my life, and the lack of memories I have, that friendship is just going to have to wait.
Even though I grew up in Minnesota, a place that will never be mistaken as the American version of Seoul, I grew up in a pretty typical Korean house. My childhood , like many others, was full of Korean food and old 8-Track Korean albums and Korean cabinets. In fact, when I was really young, I would play a Korean card game “Hwa-Tu” endlessly with my aunts. I got pretty good at the game and I was pretty proud of myself about it until, one day, of my Sunday school teachers found about it and chastised me about. I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about since I never played for money. I mean I played “Yut” with my parents and sisters and no one ever told me that “Yut” was going to make me go to hell.
Since my parents’ first language is Korean, I would still hear it enough in the house to be able to understand it, or at least understand enough to figure out what was being said using keywords and context, even though I couldn’t really speak it myself. This led to some very interesting exchanges on the phone when they would pick up when I was already on a call with my friends (pre-cell phone days, kiddos). Occasionally my parents would start punching in digits on the phone even though there was no dial tone, but usually they’d say “Hello?” and then they’d start talking to me in Korean about how they needed to use the phone while I would respond to them in English. My friends would marvel at these exchanges, but this was pretty commonplace in our house. Unfortunately my friends were the only people who really marveled at my Korean acumen.
During my insecure adolescent years, it was pointed out to me that I am not a very stereotypical Korean person, and get this, it was pointed out as a bad thing. I would be criticized about my choice in music and I’d be told that my parents should be ashamed of me if they aren’t already ashamed. The people that pointed this stuff out claimed they were trying to be my friends, but I pretty much despised them. I remember running into one of these “well meaning” people in college after a few years he finally let me be me. At one point he wanted me to back him up that the reason that there are so many adopted Korean babies in the United States is because they are the cutest babies. I told him “I think it’s because Koreans don’t know how to use birth control.” If I had said this in passing while we were high school kids in San Diego, my comment would’ve definitely have led to a brawl, but he laughed this time. I don’t know what caused him to change in college. We were at a college that was 60% asian and very very Korean, so if he wanted to hang out with only Korean people at UCI, he easily could have done so (and I believe did so). We never became close friends, but now if I were to see him at a mall, I’d be more than happy to say ‘hi’ to him opposed to throwing a tirade of curse words at him.
While I’m fine with him now, since he’s decided to stop giving me a hard time, he and other people did quite a lot of damage to me when I was younger. I never hated being a Korean kid, I was just a Korean kid who hated almost every other Korean kid. I tried to fit in a little – Yes, I am admitting I tried to have a K-pop phase. I played Starcraft until 4am in the dorms, but I had to stop when it started affecting my studies too much. After many failed attempts to be more Korean, I realized that compromising who I was just going to leave everyone dissatisfied. I was going to be disappointed in trying to be someone that I wasn’t and these kids were always going to find me “not Korean enough”.
As I’ve gotten older, the amount of people who bug me about my “Koreaness” have basically become extinct. Ironically, people have found my lack of “Koreaness” refreshing instead of damning. I’m not sure this is exactly the impression I wanted to give people – I did take Korean for two years in college so I could speak it better, but I guess at this point, I’m tired of arguing about it and I’ll take whatever compliments about it that I can.
During freshmen year of college, a lot of my high school friends became devastated that a lot of their “friends” from high school weren’t keeping in touch with them. I tried to explain to them that sitting next to someone in a class and getting along with them does not count as a friendship. This would usually get my friends pretty bent out of shape. “Are you saying that this friendship was fake?! We had so many deep conversations!” I would respond by telling them that if they weren’t having these deep conversations outside of class, they were merely acquaintances, or (gasp) just classmates. This usually just added to the betrayal that my friends felt, but I thought it’d be better that they hear it from me than waste hours trying to hunt down people that were just “classmates”. People just lose touch. It’s a fact of life. I wasn’t trying to be a downer. I even suffered this same betrayal after college. Even with the technological advancements in recent years like Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, and e-mail, people have still found a way to not keep in touch. It’s almost harder not to keep in contact with someone than it is to keep in contact with them.
Lets start with a simple SAT exercise.
Marge Simpson: Casinos :: My mother: ________
A) The Farmers Market
B) Garage Sales
C) The Mall
D) Church
In Season 5 of The Simpsons (don’t ask me the episode number, I am too lazy to research this, and not a big enough nerd to know this off the top of my head), Mr. Burns opens a casino and Marge becomes addicted to gambling. Homer explains to Lisa that “The only monster here is the gambling monster that has enslaved your mother! I call him Gamblor, and it’s time to snatch your mother from his neon claws!” While this monster is obviously supposed to be an exageration, I do believe that there is something that takes over my mother the instant she walks into the mall. Once she enters those doors, you cannot be sure whether she’ll ever walk out and if you are foolish enough to follow her, your life will also be in danger.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “you hate shopping with your mom because you’re a boy and you’re exagerating.” Not true. I have four sisters, all whom love to shop. They all can’t stand shopping with my mom. They all have horror stories of losing her, my mom not meeting them at specified times (my mom wears a watch, by the way, so she really has no excuses), and my mom not answering her cell phone. It’s really the thing that my sisters loathe the most when they’re back home for the holidays.
Not that they’ve ever had it bad as me. At least they’ve never been told to stay in the car for “ten minutes” while my mom walked into Brookdale mall for about half an hour (would’ve been longer if it wasn’t closing time) in the freezing Minnesota cold without a heater. I was probably five at the time and while this sounds totally barbaric, I think times were a bit different back then, so please don’t call Social Services. I would never accuse my mom of being negligent, in fact, she’s pretty much the opposite but that’s another story (my first day of college).
So my sisters have all tried to devise ways to make shopping with my mom into an enjoyable experience. As far as I know, they’ve failed. When my mom was in Oregon (writers note: 0% sales tax is pretty sweet) visiting my sister, my sister lost her at the mall while going with her kids to pay for some earings. It turns out that my mom slipped in to a fitting room while my sister was gone, and you know, didn’t call her to let her know or anything. My mom is a department store ninja.
What has made this more difficult in recent years is the addition of grandchildren to the equation. Now my mother has more options than just shopping for herself (petites), men (my father and myself), women (my sisters) and jewelry (herself). Now she has grandchildren between the ages of 1 and 12 years old to shop for. Instead of being confined to just a few different sections in the department store, my mother could conceivably be anywhere. It also means she has more stores to check out when she hits the mall, which means she has more “hiding places” to sneak in and out of.
My other sister has decided to accept my mother for who she is, with alterior motives. She goes shopping with Mom with full knowledge that the scene will play out like this: they will arrive at the mall, my mom will promise my sister they will only be there for a short while, my mom will say she’s almost done when she’s totally not, my sister will get frustrated and angry, and then my mom will buy her something to calm her down. My sister is thirty four years old.
I, on the otherhand, have decided to be creative about this dilemma. My theory is that you have to take my mom shopping somewhere that is foreign to her, and I don’t just mean that you should take her to a mall she’s never been to before. A lot of malls are designed pretty similarly (like if they’re designed by the Westfield Company), it doesn’t matter if they’re indoor or outdoor, they have the same stores, and they all come with a map to help you find your way. They’ve designed to be convenient, to trap people like my mom, but not the shops on Melrose.
The shops on Melrose Ave. are just that, shops that are spread out on a street on Hollywood. there’s no map, and this street stretches out for miles. There’s no elevator or escalator (of course my mom is kind of scared of these), and no map. Heck, there’s a good chance you don’t know what half these stores sell until you walk inside. The stores are all one floor and they’re much smaller than the a typical store in the mall. There are no department stores and usually these places charge you an arm and a leg because these are mostly speciality boutiques. At one point the Bathing Ape store sold toilet paper at $35 a roll. I didn’t buy one, but I’m sure there were plenty of people who did.
So my plan is to take my mom to these shops on Melrose and to take her to some stores that I know she’d enjoy browsing at like the Marc Jacobs store. My mom is pretty afraid of Los Angeles in general so I don’t think she’ll wander off too far without me and since the shops are small, I should be able to recognize if she’s making a break for the door. The tempo of the day should be controlled by the small amount of stock in the stores, and by the fact that we’ll have to drive around a little bit. I think my plan will be successful though my sisters think that like all our other plans, this one will fail. I hope not, but if it does, I guess my mom will be buying me some new stuff to calm down so it’s a win-win situation for me.
I’ve always loved going to museums, maybe not as much as the arcade or the baseball stadium (or Metrodome, if you will), but it was something I was excited about. Especially since the Science Museum of Minnesota is pretty top notch and perhaps this is why moving to San Diego was kind of underwhelming. I wasn’t a big fan of the museums and since San Diego seemed like a big deal (population and popularity wise) compared to my beloved Twin Cities, I expected bigger and better museums.
So whether you’re discussing the latest masterpiece, or the little child that’s wading into the fountain, make sure you know someone nearby because there’s always going to be something to talk about.