Between Here and There: Navigating in No Man's Land

I have been doing some reading and researching to find/define my truth to be more clear about which set of moral codes and existential compass I want to follow to make better sense of life and the universe. This journey has taken me to conclude that all religious institutions are man-made. But I see the need for humans to create institutions for a collective sense of purpose and meaning. I admit that a lot of good comes out of religion and I personally have benefited from being Mormon. But the perks of being Mormon notwithstanding, I have stopped going to Church.

I think the only time I have ever enjoyed going to Church was when I was a missionary a decade ago. And the only reason I enjoyed it then was because I could sit for 3 hours straight without having to plan, teach, knock on doors, or feel guilty for not being a good enough missionary. The only aspect of Church that I enjoyed before and after my mission was a social one. I went to Church to see my friends when I had them. When I didn't, I would go out of habit, obligation and/or the fear of judgement if I didn't go. But I saw how futile my efforts were. I was there only in body. I always checked out mentally as soon as I sat down in Sacrament Meeting.

I stopped going to Church for many reasons. I questioned the truthfulness of the Church. I always had a problem with the Church claiming sole proprietorship of Truth. (This church is the one and only true Church on the face of the earth!) I lost my testimony of the Book of Mormon, Restoration, and Joseph Smith. I didn't feel spiritually fed or nourished in Church meetings. I was annoyed by the teachings in the Church that just regurgitated the simple-minded rhetoric of keep-the-commandments-and-you-will-be-blessed-and-will-prosper-and-be-happy without regarding the complexities and paradox of life's events. I never cared about hearing the testimonies of others about food storage, what they did over the weekend, how much someone loved somebody in fast and testimony meetings. But I cared about how mind-numbingly boring all the meetings were. Eventually, Church ceased to be meaningful to me.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, I am still emotionally attached to the Mormon Church and being a Mormon. I was born and raised in the Church. Even though I was inactive for many years in my youth, Mormonism was my first religious language that articulated my metaphysical cosmos. It gave me a God that I relied on when life got sad and painful. It told me there was hope when misery abounded. It taught me how to pray. It taught me to be kind. It became my culture, my family's culture. It became my identity.

So, even though I left the Church physically and intellectually, I still have a soft spot for Mormonism. And if I find a good ward, I might even return but on my own terms: without a testimony of the Restoration but with respect for an institution that promotes good things.

How I am going to get rich and famous

It is always with guilt that I make my come-back after a long, unannounced hiatus. I do this with my journal, too, even though no one is reading the entries except me. With whopping 16 people following my blog (I am not being sarcastic. I really appreciate my followers. Without you, this blog would be voiceless), you can imagine the magnified guilt. But I am sure you weren't losing sleep over my unannounced absence except for maybe guitarsophist. (Maybe we should be Facebook friends so you know I am alive.) 

Anyway, some of you know from my Facebook status that I left Seattle for good. My life in Seattle was stressful, enlightening, educational, fun, and eye-opening. First of all, the study of ethnomusicology is really cool. (For those of you who are just tuning in my life, I enrolled in the ethnomusicology graduate program at University of Washington with the intent of getting a Ph.D.) I learned a lot and if you are interested in world music and academia sandwiched in one, I highly recommend you look into it. However, I decided to leave the program because I realized I wasn't on the path to living the life of my dreams. When I imagine my dream life, I am on stage performing. I am not reading and writing and trying get published. This realization was spurred on by meeting a hot musician who was living the life of his dreams performing all over the world. And I was like, why am I not doing that? It hit me like a ton of bricks. (Also, I was inspired by a graffiti scribbled on a bathroom door that said, "I aimed for the moon and returned with a pocket full of stars" or something like that.) So, a couple of weeks later I told the head of the department that I was leaving the program to pursue a performing career. She was surprised but gave me her blessing and said I could come back to the program if I so desired in the future. I said thanks, packed my bags and left.

So, how am I going to go about having a performing career, you may wonder especially if you are one of my hundreds of musician friends. Well, I wondered that, too. But I have been brainstorming for about three weeks now and here is what I have. The music I am going to make will be a fusion of pop, classical, and Korean traditional music. Still not sure what market segment I want to target but I decided to let that take care of itself by exposing it on the Internet. So, here is the plan: Write a song fusing all those elements, find musicians to collaborate with, make a recording and a music video. Enlist the help of my friends on Facebook (and that would be you, my dears) to make it go viral online. Link the music video to the Kickstarter fundraiser and raise enough money for a whole album and a concert. My goal is to have the music video circulate and go viral online by the end of the year. Which means it has to be good. Really good. And I am confident that it's going to be good. :)

I also have another project that some of you know about. It's an opera about the story of my grandmother told from my perspective as a Korean-American that I've been wanting to write for a long time. I found a composer and a historian/ethnomusicologist to collaborate with. I also have a conceptual artist in mind who might be interested in doing multi-media stage work. So, I will be doing a lot of research and interviewing my family members over the summer to write the libretto for this work. I am really excited about it. There is a lot that needs to be done for this project like finding funding but if the work is good, we may be able to get the Korean government behind it.

The sad tale of a starving artist is that even with all these grand plans, I still need to have a day job. So, I am planning on applying to community colleges to teach piano, voice, and/or music history and start a piano/voice studio.

So, that's the plan. And I am really excited about it!

My Dream

"What do you really want to do with your life?" was the question I would often get when I expressed my confusion and frustration in graduate school studying classical voice. But I always hesitated to give them a full account of what I had in mind in fear of getting a response like, "Who do you think you are?" or "That would be such a waste of time. Give it up and start doing something more practical." But since about a year ago, I started to make more tangible connections between my dream and ways to accomplish it. And even though I still get raised-eyebrows of disapproval or skepticism from my relatives, I stand immovable in believing that I will achieve my dream. You may even call it destiny.

I have always known that I would lead an artistic life. But it took long, and tortuous detours for my amorphous wishes to finally crystallize into something definite and tangible. There were lots of disappointment, discouragement, tears, resentment, and doubt that accompanied this process and I am pretty sure they will come back to haunt me in the future. Regardless, I feel a sense of surety that this is my destiny, my offering to the alter of that Being whom I call God.

And this is my dream.

I will create, produce and perform works that give breath and life to forgotten history, especially the unrecognized and silenced voice of Korean women. To do that, I am going back to school to study ethnomusicology. I feel indebted to the Korean women of the past, especially my grandmothers, and I want to pay homage to those who paid the price for the privileges and freedom I enjoy today. I want to tell the stories of their quiet resilience and courage of their human spirit. In so doing, I want all of us to dig deep into the roots of our humanity to discover our common vulnerability and understand that with courage and love we can overcome our personal and national tragedies. I want people to feel that we are all the same, that we belong to the same human family however brief the thought may last.

I know this sounds lofty and idealistic but somewhere deep inside my core, I know I will do this. I just know I will.

Footsteps Behind My Shadow: A Story of My Grandmother

My dad’s house was burglarized a earlier this year—the entire house was ransacked. When I came home to California in the summer, I checked my room to see what had been taken. I first checked my jewelry box. I didn’t have much in there and the only thing that was of any worth was the diamond ring that my grandma had given me before she passed away in 2004. And it was gone. Disheartened, I consoled myself that it was just a ring.

A few days ago, I was looking through my jewelry box in my room in Salt Lake City (a different one than the one at home). Among the tangled necklaces and earrings, I saw a thick ring with seven studded diamonds in the shape of a flower. I had found my grandma’s ring! I must have brought it to Salt Lake with me sometime last year. I put it on my right ring finger and stared at it for awhile as my thoughts spiraled to what she might have been like not as a grandma but as a woman.

My grandma or halmuni as her grandchildren used to call her, was born in 1910 as the last bits of monarchial rule of Korea was being swallowed up by Imperial Japan. She grew up in a milieu of national oppression and gender bigotry in an extremely patriarchal society. She received a formal education up to maybe the third grade. She barely knew how to read and write. At age fifteen, she was married off to a man she had never seen before her wedding day. Since that day, she was responsible for drawing and carrying water from a well a mile away every morning at five, making fire to cook rice for her husband, parents-in-law and the field workers. It was her job to deliver lunch on a large pan that she carried on her head to the workers in the rice field. Sometimes she faltered and spilled at which point she ran back to the house to prepare the meal again. She washed, mended and made clothes for the members of her household until the wee hours before she finally went to bed. She labored diligently all of her life as a wife and mother of six children even as she faced pain and humiliation of her husband’s infidelity and domestic violence.

When I was younger, I just assumed this was the stuff of life for Korean women in her days. Only recently, as I looked at her diamond ring she had purchased herself, I realized that she must have had a desire to be seen, heard and be beautiful. Her wedding day was the only day that she wore makeup. Her teenage years were spent working and serving. But she must have had a desire to be educated, to discover and develop her talents, to fall in love, and be loved, to have nice clothes, to be praised for her intelligence and beauty. I wonder what she would have done with her life if she were given the same opportunities as her grand-daughters--what kind of career path she would have taken and what kind of man she would have married. I wish I could get to know her again as a woman to woman.

When she was alive, I remember her sometimes fanning herself furiously saying there was a fire in her chest. I imagine that that was perhaps the fire of anger she was never allowed to voice or channel for the injustices she suffered. She didn’t do anything great in the eyes of the world—she was never allowed to. She may have dismissed her life as a failure especially during her last years as she became increasingly invisible. And yet, she is my hero. She practically raised me and my siblings when my parents divorced. She was the source of warmth and comfort when life got cold and sad. She loved with great love.

I marvel at her story and how she didn’t let a trace of bitterness cloud her love for her children and grandchildren. Her circle of influence may have been small, but she touched everyone she met with kindness and compassion. When I don’t feel loved, I could always think of my halmuni and find an ember of warmth in my heart that she left me while she was alive. Even though she may not know, in my eye, she lived her life humbly, yet magnificently.

As I ponder on my own life, I become acutely aware of the rich blessings of this generation. I have freedom, rights, and opportunities because of the sacrifice of my halmuni and the countless women of yesteryear. They walked the road history allotted them so that I could start much more ahead. As I stand on the threshold of uncertainty, I am infused with a sense of responsibility to live a life much bigger than what I allowed myself to believe in. After all, my life doesn’t stand on its own but as a culmination of history of great, heroic women whose stories will never be told.

Party-crashing the G20 Summit

We were trying to get the president of Indonesia to come on our show, "Heart to Heart." Well, to be more exact, we were looking for ways to roll-over and bark and see if we could get 30 minutes of his time whenever we could, wherever we could. The embassy took forever to get back to us so meanwhile we applied for the press pass just in case we could show up with our cameras to the G20 Summit. Well, he ended up coming on the 2nd day of the summit and didn't have time to meet with us. This post would have been much more interesting and glamorous if I said I sat with the president of Indonesia, sipped tea and talked about the recent natural disaster he had to deal with and the state of Indonesia as a newly emerging market. But it was not to be.

But on the up side, we had the press pass so some of my co-workers and I went to the G20 Seoul Summit on the second day anyway (just to remind ourselves how important we are).



We first registered and got our badges...



...and went to the media center. Because there were thousands of reporters from all around the world, only a few were allowed in the actual room where the meetings were held. Most of them were placed in the media center and watched the meetings from the big screens.



I tried to get online to work on the post-production writing (subtitles, names, bio that goes into the program) of the episode of Dena Merriam, the founder of Global Peace Initiative of Women who came to Korea to attend the World Religious Leaders Forum that was being held in parallel to the G20 Summit. It was being aired that night so I was frantically trying to finish.




We walked around trying to look cool, calm and collected.





We posed for pictures...



...and had a fabulous buffet of lunch.



It was really great to feel the vibrancy of the reporters. I just wanted to sit there all day but we had to go back to work so we posed for one last time.



The head-spinning speed of Korea's economic growth is lauded as the "miracle of the century." When Korea was nothing but a waste land of war, its gross domestic product was less than $20. Sixty years later, its gross domestic product is approaching 1 trillion dollars making Korea the 15th largest economy in the world. It's really mind-boggling to think about it.

The Korean Folk Village

Last Saturday, I had visitors from the States and took them to The Korean Folk Village. The Korean government has recreated this folk village to display the traditional life and culture of the Korean people. There are approximately 250 replicas of buildings of the different social classes (peasant, landowner, aristocrats) and a traditional market and restaurants. We also got to see the traditional Korean wedding, and the farmers' performances of traditional music and dance. It was pretty cool.

Here are some pics!


Farmer's dance and music


Korean traditional wedding


Korean traditional kitchen


My traveling backpack with straw shoes tied in the back


Me hauling water


Carrying water on my back

Living History

I have always liked Hillary Rodham Clinton. I liked her even when I claimed to be Republican. I read a couple of books about her when I was younger that portrayed her in both good and bad light. It was good to finally hear her story from the horse's mouth.

This book mainly focused on her experiences as First Lady in the White House and the Administration's diplomatic relations with Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. She also used the book as a score-settling platform against Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House during the Clinton Administration and Kenneth Starr, an independent counsel who led the brutal Whitewater investigation about the financial dealings of the Clinton's.

Even though she left out or watered down a lot of the most difficult or humiliating part of her private life, I got to read about her vision for the world's future in woman's rights, health care, and global poverty.

This was an interesting read for me because I have always liked Hillary Clinton but I think it would still be an interesting read for those who are curious about who she is and what she has done.

Auguste Rodin

The first time I saw a great collection of Rodin's works was three summers ago when I trudged over to Musée d'Orsay after I discovered that the Louvre Museum was closed on Mondays. I was already super tired from backpacking around Europe and basically museumed out by the time I got to Paris. I walked around with what seemed like the capacity of a pea-sized brain and tried to admire the works of great masters. I don't remember much from that experience except for one piece of work called "Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière" or "She who was the Helmet-Maker's once beautiful Wife." It is more simply known as "The Old Woman."



I remember my visceral reaction when I saw the work for the first time. It was tragic and mournful yet beautiful and celebratory at the same time. The old, wrinkled body evoked the feeling of inevitability of the passing of time and yet it seemed to celebrate the strength of the human spirit that lives on in that frail body.

Rodin said: "Commonly ... ugliness in nature can in art become full of great beauty. In art, only that which has character is beautiful. Character is the essential truth of any natural object."

Rodin's sculptures and drawings went on international tours for the first time and I got to see many of his works again in Seoul. Although I didn't see "The Old Woman" again, I saw the great beauty of character in his works. Maybe it's the nostalgia evoked by the quality of impressionist sculptures, but I was emotionally moved by the experience.

Also, I learned about his pupil and lover, Camille Claudel and their love story. An artist is incomplete without a passionate, and stormy love story that often ends in tragedy. She ended up dying in a psychiatric hospital.

Breaking News! Heavenly Mother is in Korea!

For those of you who missed the second coming of Jesus:

The World Mission Society Church in Korea was founded by a man named Ahn Sang-Hong who was baptized in 1948 and subsequently became "translated" into Jesus. Unfortunately for those of you who wanted to fly out and kiss his feet, he died in 1985. But his wife Zang Gil-ja is the female incarnation of God and she is still alive and kicking. The congregation prays to her and her husband. I know you are all dying to see what she looks like. So, here she is:



If you ever doubted the ethnic superiority of Koreans, this will dispel all unbelief. I mean both Jesus and Heavenly Mother are Koreans. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Korea is really Zion.

And get this: 70% of the members of this church is female. When they first join the church, they are told not to tell their husbands. The church requires substantial donations "for the glory of God" and many go into debt to pay their "tithes" so they can go to heaven. One of the main tenets includes the belief that the world will end at the end of 2012, before which they hope to recruit 144,000 members. (And what if 2012 comes along and the world is still rockin'? Does our Heavenly Mother just say "oops" or does the church go on clearance sale?)

A female God and her female underlings. Talk about the irony of feminism and abuse all rolled in one shot.

Sex and Racism

Western representation of the female gender of the East has often been misrepresented as inferior and cloaked in the mystery of sexual eroticism. With the obsession of chinoiserie and japonisme in Europe in the late 17th and 19th century respectively, Asia, especially Asian women have become a hot commodity for artists and writers to perpetuate this man-made Asiatic fantasy. In America, the Euro-American perception of Asians, specifically the Chinese, was already tainted by the European concoction of Orientalism but they still cast their own Orientalist veil on their perception through which they saw the Chinese and interpreted their culture even before a large group of Chinese people immigrated to the American soil in mid-19th century. This primordial impression of the Chinese undoubtedly contributed to the shaping of American racist attitudes toward Asians and permeated the ethnocentric consciousness of Americans even before the first group of Chinese immigrants arrived.

This is how Asians got their first start in America.

But that was a long time ago. How does this really affect me now? In defense of America, I have to say that America has been very kind to me for the most part. Racist attitudes weren't very apparent to me as an Asian woman and if I detected them, they were very subtle, underhanded and infrequent. (Although my perceived-image associated with racial stereotypes as an Asian woman might be a totally different story.) Racism exists in America but I never felt heavily burdened by its presence.

Ironically, it is in Korea that I see a more pronounced, in-your-face ethnocentric American attitude toward Asian women that makes me want to puke. But I do realize that this idiocy is helped not only by the media's misconstrued portrayal of Asian women (think Lucy Liu, Ziyi Zhang, Sandra Oh, and other Asian actresses on TV--they are all made to exude the image of I-wanna-have-sex-with-you.) but also by the Asian corporations and Asian women themselves.

I recently saw an Asian airline ad in The New York Times with a beautiful Asian flight attendant with the banner "I just want to listen." These Asian corporations are commercializing these "idealized", subservient images of Asian women to target white men, thereby feeding and completing the supply and demand circle.

I think economical, and political strength of a nation reflects the personality of its citizens. I suspect that some Korean women, even with the dizzying speed of Korea's economic growth, feel that by being with an American, they have turned their socio-economic knob up a notch. These women perpetuate the myth that any Asian women will do anything to hook up with an American to get a second chance at life and reinforces the ridiculous idea that white American men are superior and more desirable. Yes, some American men (especially the military ones in Korea) are idiots and sometimes I want to sit them down and yell at them using $50 words to make them feel infinitely stupid and kick them in the balls but there are also Asian women who play the part of an innocent, stupid geisha just like Madame Butterfly. It resurrects the century-old Orientalist view of Asian women. It's a maddening thing.

And I am sure, when these American men go back to the States, they will harbor the same kind of racial superiority when they encounter Asian and Asian-American women. It is sickening that I, along with numerous intelligent, independent, strong women, am numbered among these stereotypical geishas if not consciously, subconsciously.(And I strongly believe that our racist attitudes are much more subconscious than conscious.)

The truth is that Asian fantasy has been created by western men and is perpetuated by both western and eastern cultures alike. And I am helpless in changing it and it frustrates me to no end.

Remembering the Forgotten War

The 2002 FIFA World Cup was held in Seoul. The entire country was united as one as Koreans ardently rooted for their home team. Millions in red t-shirts joined in cheering the players onto unprecedented success in the history of Korean soccer. Even workaholics put watching games as a priority over work. The media named these obsessively impassioned Koreans the 11th player in the field. Koreans all over the world shared in their victory--except me.



I didn't understand why it was such a big deal for Korea to win. Above all, I didn't understand the mass hysteria they called patriotism. It seemed like Korean people were reveling more in the drama of the event rather than their love for the country. To me, they were swept by collective hypnotism caused by fanatic nationalism. I didn't understand this endemic psyche of the Korean people only until very recently.

Yesterday, I went to the War Memorial of Korea, a museum that houses the 5000-year history of wars. But because of its chronological proximity to the present time, and the availability of materialistic sources, one-third of the museum was dedicated to the retelling of the Korean War.

My Dad talked about the war often because he saw and lived through its many catastrophic events. He told me the stories of war-orphans, childless mothers, starving people living among piles of rotting corpses. The reality of such a past hit me as I walked through the museum and watched the documentary footage of the war.



The Korean War broke out only 5 years after Korea was liberated from the Imperial Japan who occupied Korea for 35 years. The memories of oppression, and the smell of war are still fresh within the minds of the older generations and their stories are passed onto their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The nascent freedom of the Republic of Korea was bought with the lives of 2 million people in the span of 3 years after the war ended in 1953. An armistice was signed that restored the border between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

After having walked through the museum, I understood the source of the fervent "madness" with which the Koreans cheered for their team. What brought the Korean people together was not their love for drama, but their bare-knuckled tenacity to unite to survive and triumph. For the first time in my life, I felt my personal history merge with the collective history of the Korean people. It felt as though the blood of its history was running its course through the vein of my ante-natum past.







This is a blood-stained flag that was used to inflame patriotism among Koreans when revolutionaries attempted to free Korea from Japanese imperialism.



During and after the war there were no buildings to hold classes in so students studied outside on the ground.



Books they used




Many survived with only one spoonful of food a day.



Children selling fruits and cigarettes to survive.



People lining up for their ration of food.



So-called "Oink,Oink" porridge. It was made with the thrown-out left-overs by the American soldiers.



The armistice that ended the war