Kimchi Mamas

As promised....Giveaway results.

But first, what did Weeny Beeny sell?

A lot of you were right!  It's a Candy shop. I think they do specialize in jelly beans but they have a whole bunch of other candies too and it's selft serve, kind of like our Sweet Factories.  I snapped these shots at the Lotte World Weeny Beeny store.

Onto the winners!  I really wished we had a doll for everyone.  But since we can't, the following winners were chosen at random:

For the doll with the green top and red skirt:  Amy Bringham

For the doll with the yellow top and pink skirt:  Kat

Thanks for participating and Thank you for reading Kimchi Mamas!

Shoeshine Pastor

 

Throwing a little bit of inspiration your way.

 

- Mary

When worlds collide

One interesting part of living here in Korea is watching Korean TV.  You'd think that I'd be glued to Korean dramas all the time, but really, it turns out that I can only handle only one of them at a time which ends up being just a couple of hours a week.  Not that I don't love them.  I have my favorites that I look forward to and I get happy on my K-drama nights.

But I was surprised at how much TV time was taken up by Korean versions of shows we watch in the US.  Mostly reality shows like, Top Model, Project Runway, Biggest Loser, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol.  Well, it wouldn't be called American Idol here.  It's called Superstar K (K for Korea, I guess) and it's just as addicting with an additional crossover factor for me because they keep bringing on past American Idol contestants. 

But before I get to that, there's something just fascinating watching the Korean version of these shows because though the set up is the same, the way the people go about solving the problems and hashing out the issues seems different.  Example.  When one group is told they are moving on in Superstar K and another is told that they have reached the end, the group that has passed on is usually the group to shed tears and carry on.  They talk about how they don't deserve it and how they sad they feel for their friend.  Or on Top Model, the youngest of the bunch is put in her place by her Unnis who feel it is their duty to teach her how to be respectful.  So Interesting.

Anyway, back to the tie in to my former American life.  Last year, my first season being sucked into watching Superstar K, John Park was on and made it really far.  Like to the finals.  He eventually took second place and kind of became a celebrity here in Korea.  Then, this year I tune in, and find it just as addicting.  I also find in the sea of dark haired and brown eyed talented Koreans, Chris Golightly, who looks familiar.  With some googling, I find that he'd been on American Idol before too.  Remember this story?  So sad.  But I guess he's friends with John Park who encouraged him to come to Korea and the story seems to be that he's been in Korea working in the music biz and was encouraged to try out for the show. 

He made it into the top 10 (through all the initial audtion stuff and mission stuff even with the language and cultural barriers) and it's time for the Korean public to vote.  EEK!  Here's his first performance all gussied up.  Only Korean songs allowed.

 

Wasn't he amazing?  This performance got him into the next round.  Team Chris!  I am also Team Christina because she is an awesome kimchi sister from America (her korean is pretty good but with her totally perfect English and American way of thinking you can tell she's a second generation) doing her best in the competition.  So I guess I am the Team Chrises.

  

 

Book Review: "This Burns My Heart" by Samuel Park

How could the world fit so many lives, so many iterations?  It couldn't be that big, it couldn't fit so much.  We're only given one life, and it's the one we live, she had thought; how painful now, to realize that wasn't true, that you would have different lives, depending on how brave you were, and how ready.

This little nugget was excerpted from Samuel Park's This Burns My Heart. Three of us got to read the novel, we received advanced copies for free, and here is what we thought:

Mary:

This Burns My Heart by Samuel Park tells the story of Soo-Ja Choi's life in South Korea in the 1960's. I've never read a book quite like it. Set in Korea during a period that I can imagine (I was born in the 70's) and written in English from the perspective of a woman, I should have been able to relate to this book a whole lot. And while I could related to Soo-Ja in some ways, I also found myself being somewhat distracted by what I thought were unrealistic dialogues between her and the other characters of the book such as her Father-in-law, her husband, and her parents. I found Soo-Ja to be a somewhat likable character. Her husband, Min, seemed unreal. Did men seriously fool women into marrying them? Despite these distractions, I found myself drawn to the book and into the story of Soo-ja's life. I wanted things to work out for her and for her to finally be happy. I also wanted to shake her and tell her to just speak the truth about her feelings. Why is it that Koreans say the opposite of what they want?

On a side note, I loved the art cover and found myself staring at that shadowy figure.

Angie:

Was the yearn and understanding of a "what if" life there for me as a reader? Of course it was.  "The saddest words of tongue or pen are what could have been . . . " But in what I think was Park's intent to make Soo-Ja's plan clever - I found only manipulation and cunning - and the consequences for those choices. 

Throughout the narrative, I wanted to like Soo-ja.  I wanted to feel bad about the decisions she made and the perceived tragedy of her life . . . but I couldn't. We all make decisions in life - some people regret, others move on, others are forever frozen in place. 

Here was a woman who in youth was beautiful, educated, well taken care of and practically revered/loved by her family and yet none of it was enough.  Instead she plays chess with the very people who care for and about her - treating them as her pieces.  Does she make up some of her trangressions in judgement with her best friend? Yes, but much later in life.  

Soo-Ja's relationship with her daughter, Hannah, could have been better developed.  I did not get from the text a sense of a special bond or particularly deep relationship. (Semi spoiler alert!) I was also a little perplexed about how at the end of the novel Hannah could so freely forgive her mother and her relationship - it felt like a loose thread in a blanket that failed to warm my heart. 

Julie:

I for one fell in love with Soo-ja.  Soo-ja really reminds me of my own mother...both women grew up in boy-less households in the post-war south.  Both were high-maintenance, coy, intelligent young girls, with their little world their oyster.  However, a series of decisions (sometimes their own, usually not) led them into an adulthood that was quite the opposite: the vivacious girls had to quickly morph into respectable, honorable wives.  Their lives once seemingly so open, now uni-dimensional, full of stubborn self-denial, servitude to their husband's families, and buried regrets.  My mom found some amount of relief by emigrating to the US, but Soo-ja's invisible shackles prove to be much stronger.

To me, this novel is an allegory of the state of womanhood in Korea.  Females can be quite treasured in their youth and encouraged to dream (if those dreams do not overshadow their brothers' dreams), but once they grow up, those dreams are almost always an impossibility.  The institutions of marriage and motherhood have very well-defined rules (backed by history and by the law) that must be followed in order to maintain honor, and those rules do not leave time for individual pursuits or personalities.  Even today, employment, inheritance, and divorce laws in Korea are seemingly equitable, but they are not fully enforced.  This kind of repression is most clearly reflected in the fact that Soo-ja's most original, most relatable thoughts are merely inner dialog and never spoken aloud.  That must be the most frustrating part about that life, because it certainly was the most frustrating part reading about it.  Where does empowerment begin: from the woman who finally says what she really means, or from the society that allows her to do so?  

I don't want to give away the ending, but I hope that the Soo-jas of today can find themselves a similar one.  I highly recommend this book to people who would like to see the Korea our parents grew up in come alive. 

From the publisher: 

Set in South Korea in the 1960s, THIS BURNS MY HEART (Simon & Schuster; July 12, 2011; $25.00) centers on Soo-Ja Choi, an ambitious young woman who finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage. Faced with adversity and oppression, she struggles to protect her daughter and to fulfill her own dreams—all against the backdrop of a postwar society caught between tradition and modernity.  Samuel Park based the character Soo-Ja Choi on his mother, who grew up in South Korea. Park says, “The book is based on my mother’s life, but it is ultimately a work of fiction. I was inspired by all the stories my mother told me about her life.” 

Learn more about THIS BURNS MY HEART at www.samuelpark.com.

You can buy the novel on Amazon.com.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Please keep South Korea in your thoughts as residents face astonishing amounts of torrential downpour. The resulting floods and mudslides have already killed 38 people in Seoul and the central regions, and the death toll is climbing.  There seems to be a lot of infrastructure damage, so we will keep you posted with ways we can help once things settle down and the full amount of damage is assessed.

Kimchi Mama jooliyah, we hope you and your loved ones are staying dry and staying safe!  Please check in when you can.

Article from the Korea Herald, English edition

Blog post from Koream Magazine

Kimchi Mama Honor Roll: Sonya Thomas

This past Fourth of July Weekend, the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest held a womens division for the first time.  The inaugural champion was Sonya Thomas, aka "The Black Widow," a 43-year-old Korean American, who won by eating 40 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

This is the first I had heard of The Black Widow, and I am a bit ashamed to admit that, because this was by far not her first competitive eating victory. In fact, since her debut in 2003, she has set and broken many world records, defeated men who are household names like Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut, and is currently ranked the #6 competitive eater in the world.  It is also worthy to note that Ms. Thomas achieves all this despite weighing in at 98 pounds.

After reading a few news articles, I was smitten.  I knew we Korean gals can pack it in like no one's business, but other than brief mentions on where she grew up in Korea, there was no mention of how being Korean helped or hindered her at all.  Here's the backstory, in her own words, to winning 29 competitive eating world titles.

Kimchi Mamas: Are your parents back in Korea aware of your competitive eating success, and if so, how do they feel about it?

Sonya Thomas: I think lots of Koreans feel negatively towards competitive eating, they think of it as a bit foolish: why do this instead of using your brain?  They also worry about my health, if my stomach will explode or something.  My parents were the same way when they first heard about it.  In fact, I didn't actually eat that much as a child, so they were totally surprised.  They were worried, but after they saw me on the news, they were happy for me.  Now, they're not exactly proud, but they know their daughter did something special.

KM: That sounds like the best you can ask for with any Korean parent.  Was there anything from your childhood that helps you at all today? 

ST: From childhood to now, I have always been competitive, I always want to be the best, to show people I'm special.  I'm not really outgoing, kind of shy, but anything active, I'm determined to show people I "have it."

KM: Oh wow.  Where does that drive come from?

ST: I was born in 1967, and it was a hard time for Korea, and my family was very poor.  My parents, 2 brothers, my sister, and I lived in a 1 room house.  Not a lot of people could afford to eat white rice, so they would mix their rice with barley.  But our family's rice was all barley!  The American government also gave us flour...so we had noodles everyday.  

I had to be brave, more brave then than now.  My first day of elementary school, I walked there by myself, and registered myself.  After that, I always tried to help my parents earn money.  I remember one time, I was 8 or 9, and we went to the ocean to catch clams.  I kept pushing myself to work faster and faster, and I dug up more than my mom!  About 40 pounds of clams!  Afterwards, as we opened the shells, I was the fastest.  I was the third child, but I was the boss!  [Laughs]

KM: You sound like you'd be the perfect athlete.

ST: During school, I competed a lot in sports, but I wasn't that good.  I wasn't a fast runner, I was too short and not a good enough shooter for basketball, and my reflexes were too slow for badminton.  But I still wanted to be the best at something.  Competitive eaters aren't only competitive in eating; we must be competitive in other things.  I was born like that, always wanting to do something special all the time, something different from other people.  Eating is one of my skills.  In others, if I'm not that great, i just give up and try something else. 

KM: That is so Korean!

ST: [Laughs] Yes, it's very Korean: very competitive, very "hurry hurry,' no patience.

KM: Sonya, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to us.  Best of luck, and FIGHTING!!!

Sonya Thomas' next competition will be at the Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo, NY during Labor Day Weekend.

Sonya Thomas' homepage

Sonya Thomas on Wikipedia

Article from the Chosun Ilbo

Korea's own word for Hapa: Honyol

I've learned a great many things living in the motherland.  Mostly by just listening and watching.  I do it a lot more here than I did back home in the states.  At home, everything is so familiar I think I just go go go.  But here, even with all the Korean drama watching, there's so much that's new and foreign.  So I like to just hang back and watch.  I watch to see how people interact, how they react and how they go about daily life because often times it's with a twist from what I expect.  At first it was easy to point and say the way we do things at home are better.  But soon I could see that the way they do things here, works here and could teach me a thing or two.

I guess you can't say I'm completely immersed and away from all things familiar here because I am here with the American military.  I have access to an Army post with all the trappings.  Several times a day, I travel between a little America and the Korea outside the barbed wired walls that surround it.  Inside, I can buy Organic Valley butter and Jet Puffed Marshmallows, and then outside I can get fifty kinds of korean yogurt drinks the kids are slowly growing addicted to.  During the day, my son attends the Department of Defense school on post along with a lot of other military and government worker children. 

We could have lived on post too, but we chose to live off post because we wanted to take advantage of living in actual Korea as much as possible.  It was more painful at first.  We had to learn to throw away our garbage properly (so complicated!) and the houses offered on base are just set up in a more familiar and therefore more cozy layout.  But, I think we've grown accustomed and we are now reaping the benefits. 

One such benefit is making friends with families who know a lot about Korea who live in our building.  It's been a little more difficult to make make actual Korean KOREAN friends, but there are a significant number of families where there is an American father and native Korean mother.  They have, who I'm used to calling, "hapa" children.  Because these hapa children have lived in Korea most, if not all, of their lives, their Korean is often fluent. If they don't attend the American school yet, it's usually better than their English skills.  I'm just so used to seeing Hapa children in America, that it's been eye opening to see them here.

After a few months, I started to pick up on a word these mothers married to non-Korean husbands would use among themselves when talking about their children or other children mixed racially like their own. They would use the word "Honyol."  It kind of shocked me at first because the only contact I'd had with the word was in the book Ten Thousand Sorrow by Elizabeth Kim.  In her story, she'd stated that it was a derogatory word to call a Korean person who was racially mixed with another ethnicity.  In other words, that it was an insult.  But here were loving mothers, standing around, using the words to refer to their bright beautiful children.  Interesting.

After listening to them for several weeks, I finally asked outright if Honyol was the word for mixed children in Korean.  They all agreed.  I told them about my word "hapa."  They said the difference is that "Honyol means always Korean mixed with something.  It's how Koreans tell that the children have Korean blood in them."  I asked them about negative connotations that went with the word.  They agreed that there were some, especially in the past.  But, that attitudes were changing and people were more accepting...that it wasn't the word, but how someone used the word to express themselves.  If someone were to spit out the word in a hateful statement during a fight with their child, then it would be used in a bad way.  But facts were facts.  Their children were mixed and there was no hiding it in such a homogeneous society.  Their children are Honyol. It is now a common word to describe their children. Korea is slowly starting to come to realize that there is not only one "kind" of people.

At first it was hard to use the word. All this time I'd thought it was a bad word, and now I was using it to describe precious children in conversation.  But the more I thought about it, the more I think those moms were right.  It's not the word.  It's how it's used.  At least that's what people have decided to do here.  Watching them talk about their children lately though, I wondered, could we use this word for our children in America?  I may not have had Honyol children myself but I expect Honyol grandchildren someday and I am hoping for Honyol nieces and/or nephews soon.  Will this word have traveled over by then? 

- jooliyah who always grew up thinking she'd marry someone to make Honyol children with, but had to abandon such thoughts when a hot Korean American swimmer dude ended up becoming her best friend.

 

Korea's Got Talent: Sung-Bong Choi

I have a hard heart when it comes to reality television, but even I couldn't stop the tears from flowing when I watched this:

Orphaned at the age of three and left to fend for himself starting from the age of FIVE, Sung-Bong Choi sold gum and Bacchus drinks on the street to survive.  He did not attend school until high school, and during his many nights wandering alone through the city, he listened in on vocal lessons to learn how to sing.

I hesitate to call him Korea's Susan Boyle, not because of any lack of talent, but because there is too much tragedy staining the transcendence.  In his pre-performance interview, Mr. Choi stated he entered this competition so he could be normal like other people, not famous or rich or notorious.  I find that very telling of his strong character, and since he had been let down in such a profound way by his government and fellow citizenry, I hope his appearance on this show will at least cement a sure and stable future for him, never lacking in comfort or company.

--Julie

Happy Children's Day!

The school halls and classrooms are empty here in Korea.  Well, all of them except the American schools on bases, that is.  Jun still went off on his school bus today- all regular like- with promises of fun when he got back.  But he was ok with that.  Probably because he has no idea that the Korean kids around him have today off.

Growing up in America I heard about Children's day but I didn't actually experience it.  In Hawaii we had May Day on May 1st with lots of elaborate Hawaiian hula pageants and flower leis.  And since the Japanese culture is pretty dominant, that meant May 5th was Boy's day.  At school we had little class parties where the boys got served first and the girls had to put the boys chairs up on their desks at the end of the day for them and let them get lunch first or something.  (Incidentally, I think in Japan it is now Children's day in May 5th too and this tradition of just it being Boy's day is old?  I think.  But in Hawaii it's still pretty separated between Boy's and Girl's day.)  At home, my parents would mention something about Children's day in Korea, but gifts never appeared and we never went out even for dinner or anything so it always sort of passed as one of those bits of information they threw at you about your culture that you never really grasped.  Or at least that's how it was for me.  I think that's how it is a lot with Konglish life.  You can't experience a 100% of both cultures, but when you miss something you really don't know that you are.  So it's interesting to finally be here to see what it is I've been missing.

You know what?  It's a big deal.

The kids get a day off from school.  Which means that the parents schedule to take off from work as it's also an age in korea when there are more and more two income families.  Which means that there are a lot of businesses today either closed down or running low staffed.  Requirements of the day are to spoil your child rotten.  They get gifts and treats and taken out for a day of pure fun.   Apparently the gifts and treats can come from anyone.  Gracie and I just returned from picking up a carton of eggs at our local market where the cashier gave my very excited little girl a plastic bag full of candies, packets of cookies and sweet yogurt drinks.  Lots of admission prices for various amusement parks and similar places are waived today.  That means a lot of Kimbaps are being packed (along with Choco pies and Pororo drinks) as I type this in anticipation of a day of fun at whatever fun place the child chooses.  You can bet that nobody in this family will be going anywhere near any of these places anytime today.  We will be staying far far away from the madness.  I shudder to think of the lines and crowds.

Not that Children's day will pass quietly this year for our family.  I do admit we are getting swept up in the excitement.  I want it to be different for my kids than it was for me.  I still like that they can celebrate how other cultures celebrate things in May (and isn't it interesting how all of these fun things fall in May?  there's Cinco de Mayo too!) but we have this cool one that's our own all this time.  When I explained what the day was for, Jun, whose behaviors sometimes overshadows his accomplishments, puffed up and said "I'm a children!  The day is for me!"

When Jun gets home today we will celebrate their childhood.  There will be gifts for him and Gracie.  Books mostly.  Hardback ones to fill out their library.  Then we will probably gorge on video games for him and play some beauty shop for her and then eat a dinner of their choice.  Probably keem and rice with chocolate milk (I never understood how they could stomach this combo!)  But before dinner, a prayer of thanks for these lovely children who fill this home and our lives with such love and joy. 

 

 

A wish for all our Kimchi children today:  May they grow healthy and strong into compassionate people who change the world for the better. 

- jooliyah who will be playing a mario game on the wii and getting her toenail painted by a three year old in a few hours after writing this.

Open Thread Thursday

Secret marriage (and divorce) and (possibly racist?) review of Please Look After Mom.

What's on your mind today?

 

- Kimchi mamas