Kimchi Mamas

NO is for November

Hello Readers,

Are there any of you still out there? It seems that the blogosphere has mostly died.

(Fine by me. All life is a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.)

Well, in case there ARE still folks reading, or perhaps for my own therapeutic writing and processing, I bring you some musing for November.

I heard someone say "NO is for November" and I immediately adopted it as my slogan for this month.

Why do I love it so much? Well, because it gave me permission to say No.

As a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser, saying NO is a skill I learned well into adulthood and am still learning everyday.

As a deconstructed ex-vangelical, it takes a lot of reprogramming to know and own that I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. And that I am the only one who knows what's best for me. Not my parents, not a person with a penis, or any other "authority figure."

When I learned of the results of the election, I contemplated what I wanted to do. There was so much anger and sadness all around me and within me. But I really didn't want to shed one single tear for that man. He does not deserve my tears.

I decided to unsubscribe from the New York Times (games only!) and mostly stopped listening to NPR too.

I really don't need to know the latest shitty thing he did.

And it's been GREAT!

I love not being angry and triggered by the news!

I decided that I'm going to be spending a lot of time at the pottery studio for the next four years. Hurray for hobbies and doing something creative with my hands! I even signed up for a two week wheel throwing masterclass in Korea next year! I'm so very excited. Something to look forward to.

Instead of consuming the news, I read a couple of books by Han Kang, the first Korean and the first Asian woman to win the Nobel prize for literature.

I read The Vegetarian first. I felt the translation was lacking but the book made me think deeply about violence and misogyny. The book is not for the faint of heart but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I'm just about to finish Human Acts. It is such a gripping book. I had heard about the Gwang Ju uprising and massacre but I learned so much more through this book and through characters Han Kang created. Highly recommend.

So, I guess I'm saying Yes to reading and pottery and no to News and Politics.

What are you saying No to this month?

Best,

Mary

Why I am with Hillary Clinton

When I was just a toddler I was adopted by a childless couple.  My father who had a deep distaste for women resented my personality in every way.  I grew up never knowing what to do or how to behave in front of him or around him since the punches and poundings came at me with not a consistent origin or cause.  I made things worse for myself because I was headstrong and full of life, which meant, without meaning to, I defied everything about him.

Even though I managed to leave those two people at age fifteen, it took me a very long time to learn how to honor my own voice and to trust what I think and what I feel.  As a grown woman, I am still coming into my full self.

A few years after I left them, my mother said to me, “if you had been prettier, softer, more girl like in your behavior, he would not have beaten you.”  She may have been right in some ways.

All of his beating, physical and emotional, was to beat out of me who I was.  My mother used to say to me when I was a little girl, “you are too smart for your own good.  That’s why you are a bad girl.”

In response I used to pray every day for God to make me not so smart, so that I could be good.

What I grew up into, how I ended up responding to those two people in my childhood, so that I don’t let them win, is to become passionate about making a positive difference in the lives of children.  I can call myself a survivor.  

But I know another survivor.   She has been through the hell and back and really not many think of her that way because she has never let anyone think of her that way.

The abuse that she has endured is not quite as obvious as a child abuse and the toll that must have taken in her life and her heart is not readily apparent because she will never tell you that or does she appear to even look at herself that way.

In the end she has turned herself into so much more than a survivor, but a super strength woman because she managed to power through the pressure of emotional punches and stayed on course of her life, her own hero’s journey and never allowed those immense pressures and roadblocks to stop her from doing her work.

She is a superhero because most normal humans would have quit a long time ago.  She has fortitude unlike most.

Her abusers, GOP and others with motivations that I cannot explain have put her into awful positions.  They have pushed her off balance with the games that continued to change.  She has had to adopt and adjust so that she, a woman could survive in order to stay in the game, that which many now use to accuse her of being dishonest.  But through all of this she does not complain or claim being victimized.

If she cannot express what is deep in her heart, we the world had forced it upon her.  She would have been accused of being weak or she would have been cut off of her path.

If she had lived her life like Bernie Sanders, she would have never made it this far in the political game.

She has had to fight off million different forces that Bernie Sanders could never even imagine or understand.

I am with Hillary Clinton because I am so damn proud to watch a woman not let anything crumble her and she fights.

Her slogan that she is fighting for us, is so appropriate.  She has fought an amazing fight and she is still standing.  I cannot think of anyone who can match that strength, that tenacity and endurance.

Throughout this campaign, she never once wined.  She never once said woe's me, look what they are doing to me.  She never aligned herself with the imagery or the idea of victimhood.  

That to me is a measure of a true leader.

Hillary Clinton makes me proud to be a woman.

-- Nancy

 

A Holocaust Ignored

I feel nauseated!  I have never before in my life read something that gave me a physical reaction like this. I have the physical urge to throw up! I don’t even know where to begin. I’m going to try... Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, who otherwise looks to be a human, said that the rape of women (comfort woman) was ok because it relaxed their rapists (Japanese soldiers).

Comfort women were NOT prostitutes! They were set up to be raped by Japanese soldiers by the Japanese government.  

Comfort women were kept in small cubicles that resembled micro-sized portapotties.  They were forced to stay in these cells without being let out except every couple of weeks to wash themselves. These enclosures had chamber pots within them.  Every fifteen minutes a Japanese soldier would enter and rape the woman inside the cubicle, and if the woman in anyway rebelled, she was pulled out, put to death and left where other women could see her as a warning.  The soldiers gunned down lines of women if they caught STDs, instead of treating them. The women were treated as less than human all those years ago, and now Hashimoto dehumanizes them again.

What if a German politician came out and said that some part of the Holocaust was necessary? What if he said that the victims of the holocaust deserved kind words, but that killing them, torturing them, using them as slaves made the German soldiers relax, made them feel good because they were at war, and provided needed relief?  How would the world react to that statement?  How would the victims of holocaust feel?  Is there inherently some difference between how the world views the victims of one country-wide tragedy to another? I wonder why one article on the BBC website is all the press this has received, and I wonder how different it might be if it were about another set of victims. 

I cannot understand where Hashimoto is coming from but you can read it for yourself here:

“Japan WWII ‘comfort woman’ were ‘necessary’ - Hashimoto

- Nancy

Stranger in a Strange Land

The kids and I sat down at our local teriyaki place, next to a couple in their 50s with their buddy. They were very conspicuously complaining about all the taxes they have to pay this year, including a THOUSAND dollars to THAT OBAMA (I assume they make the check straight out to him?), and how they're not taking it anymore and they're going to just not pay it because that money is going directly to welfare queens and aborting babies and death panels and Muslims and...

...so I told the kids to pack up their stuff because we're moving to another table.

I tried to give them my best Korean Mom Death Stare along the way. They quieted down after they realized that they were out of their usual bubble.

This happened in Long Beach, California, a diverse city compared to most of the country.  And yet, it is apparently not diverse enough, since people like them still feel like they can proclaim their misinformed, bigoted thoughts without repercussion.  Obviously, people are entitled to their own opinions, but it's the pure vitriol in which these opinions are uttered that disturbs me.  And of course, if they were the first people I encountered bad-mouthing the poor, the disabled, or the race, nationality, supposed religion, or character of our president, I wouldn't have bothered writing about it.  But attitudes like these are prevalent here.

Even my next door neighbor, whom my children adore and who has many times helped us settle into our home, holds frightening views on Latin Americans and other  immigrants.  He doesn't know that I, like many other permanent residents and naturalized citizens, was at one point an illegal immigrant.  

A family who lives a few houses down sent their two young girls canvassing the neighborhood in support of Proposition 8.  When I tried to explain to these girls how I aligned myself with the gay community and believed in marriage equality for all, they looked sincerely frightened of me.

Across the street from them, another lady runs a daycare in her home, and she told Tim to watch out for other daycares in the neighborhood who hire minorities and illegals, when he called her to enquire whether she had room for Emi when we first moved here.  Since the conversation was over the phone, she did not know she was talking to a minority family.  Since then, we have seen her take her charges for walks around the neighborhood, always 6-8 beautiful blonde children in a red wagon.  I do not think it's pure coincidence that the children are always white.

And so, after almost five years here, this corner of Long Beach doesn't quite feel like home.  I feel like a tourist, an alien, and I worry my motley little family will always feel that way, no matter where we settle.

--Julie

----------------------------

A reader expressed some concern about my statement about being an illegal immigrant at some point in my life.  Here is my clarification (although honestly, I don't know the whole story, since I was a young child when this all went down):

My family and I did not COME here illegally, my father was sponsored through his employer and he did everything by the book. However, there was a very, very long waiting period between applying for a green card and receiving it, where technically our status was up in the air (or maybe his status was still okay, but my mom and I were not? I'm not clear on the details). We couldn't go visit relatives in Korea, for example, because we would have trouble coming back into the US.

During that waiting period, which I believe took about 10 years, I grew up as a normal Korean American kid in southern California. There was no way you could line up other typical Korean American kids and point out those of us who were technically visaless, or social security number-less, and those who were born here, even if you opened a window into our brains.Once we received permanent residency status, things were hunky-dory, and it didn't take long for us to become naturalized citizens after that. This was a pretty typical immigrant story for the time period, although I do not know what the process is like now.

Romi Haan of Haan Corporation Speaks at APEC Women & The Economy Summit

Recently, I attended the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation's Women & the Economy Summit in San Francisco.  One of the most impressive stories I heard was that of Romi Haan, a South Korean business leader and entrepreneur. It was wonderful to see a Korean woman sharing the world stage with business leaders from around the world. This is an excerpt of what I learned at the conference. ~Glennia

Romi Haan was a housewife in South Korea with a problem: how to keep the floors clean without spending hours a day doing it.  Because of the ondol tradition of heating homes through the floor, Koreans spend a great deal of time at home in a central room, on the floor.  As Romi says, "Koreans live on the floor. We sleep on the floor. We eat on the floor. We sit on the floor. We play on the floor." 

Keeping the floor clean is serious business for Korean women, and means daily washings, down on their hands and knees.  Romi wanted to free herself of this daily chore, or make it a little easier for herself and her friends.  So, she imagined a steam cleaner to do just that: clean the floor with less effort and cut the time spent on washing the floor in half. It was a way to get women up off the floor and out into the world.

When Romi approached a bank about a government loan program to get her product made, the bank officer asked her, "What company did your husband bankrupt that makes you now have to work?  Are you doing this for him?"

When she told him that her husband was not the reason she wanted to go into business, he didn't believe her. Her application was denied. Romi didn't take no for an answer, and persisted with her dream. She mortgaged her home and quit her job to pursue her invention.  She was able to get her business up and running in three years, but faced other hurdles. 

When Romi tried to market and distribute her product, she was met with skepticism and disdain by male buyers for department stores. She would go in to talk to them, and they would ask her, "Why do you need a steam cleaner when you have a vacuum cleaner?"

She explained that a vacuum cleaner would sweep the floor, but her cleaner would mop it. After an hour-long discussion the buyer would ask again, "Why do you need a steam cleaner when you have a vacuum cleaner?"

Ten years later, Romi Haan is now the CEO of a multinational, multimillion dollar appliance and beauty products company, Haan Corporation. She is one of the few female CEOs in South Korea, and her business is thriving. She represents a new breed of Korean women executives and a model of successful entrepreneurship. Her story is not atypical of the challenges that women face in the global economy, but her success is unfortunately too rare.

The APEC Women & the Economy Summit brought together women leaders, government officials, diplomats, and corporate innovators to discuss actions to improve the lives of women in the Asia-Pacific region, and by doing so, the world's economy. Recognizing that women are a vast, largely untapped resource for change and growth, the group spent a week in San Francisco working on plans for change.  This was one of several meetings around the Pacific Rim leading up to the APEC Summit in Hawaii in November, which President Obama will attend.
 
I was not able to stay very long at the Summit, but I was able to attend the Plenary Session in which Romi Haan appeared on a panel moderated by Tina Brown of The Daily Beast and Newsweek.  Also on the panel were Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women; Susan Fleishman, Executive Vice President of Commincations for Warner Brothers Entertainment; Blanca Trevino, CEO of Softtek, a global Information Technololgy company based in Mexico; and Ilene Lang, President & CEO of Catalyst, a research and advisory firm that specializes in promoting women in business.

American Revolutionary: Grace Lee Boggs Documentary

American Revolutionary - Indiegogo Pitch from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

I was recently in the Jane Addams Hull House Museum in Chicago and saw a wonderful portrait of Grace Lee Boggs hanging on the wall. It is part of an exhibit called Americans Who Tell The Truth, containing 10 portraits from the inspiring series of the same name by Robert Shetterly. Some of you may have heard of Grace Lee Boggs through the documentary The Grace Lee Project, or you may have heard of her because she has been an activist and community organizer in Detroit for many decades. She has been an inspiration to me and one of the influences in my own personal journey of becoming politicized. At almost 96 years old, Grace Lee Boggs continues to dedicate herself to serving her beloved community, and her impact is felt not only in Detroit but throughout the world, via her writings and her mentoring of activists and justice lovers in so many places over many decades.

Because of the inspiration Grace Lee Boggs has been to many of us who contribute to Kimchi Mamas, we were excited to hear of a new documentary film project about her by the filmmaker of The Grace Lee Project, who is also named Grace Lee and is also a Kimchi Mama. The new film is titled American Revolutionary:The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. Grace Lee wrote the following in an email a few weeks ago telling us about the new project:

"I actually started this project while I was staying home with my son who was born three years ago. I wanted  him to know about Grace Lee Boggs and her ideas of rethinking what it means to be an 'American revolutionary' -- someone who is dedicated to the ideas of social justice and the process of building community. Fellow moms I think would respond to her message as well."

Grace Lee is currently raising funds to be able to complete this project, and we at Kimchi Mamas are only too happy to help get the word out for this worthy cause. She has 12 days left to reach a goal of $12,500 to be able to receive an anonymous matching donation of another $4,500, bringing the total to $17,000. She is soooo close to that goal now at just shy of $11,000. We encourage all our fellow Kimchi Mamas and Kimchi Papas and allies to donate if they are able. No amount is too small, and I am certain that the resulting film will be a treasure and inspiration to so many, including ourselves and our children. Please go to Grace's Indigogo site to contribute.

To learn more about the work of filmmaker Grace Lee, please visit her website at gracelee.net. To learn more about the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs, please visit The Bogg Center.

~Sarah-Ji

Food and Parenthood

There is nothing more satisfying than watching my children eat. At every meal, I encourage my 3 year old, "Eat some more! One more bite! Here is some rice and ghim (seaweed paper), open wide!"

I watch my 5 month old baby at my breast and listen to him swallowing the milk. Gulp gulp gulp... and I smile.

What is it about food that brings people together? Especially in the Korean culture, perhaps due to it's history of war and famine, food is such an important part of life. A very common Korean greeting is, "Did you eat rice?" (literal translation). Parents call their busy children and ask, "Did you eat dinner yet? No? Tsk tsk... you shouldn't skip meals!" The best way to show a guy you love him is to pack him a nice lunch and bring it to his office, according to the Korean dramas! Or maybe buy groceries and cook for him. Better yet, cook him porridge when he is sick. It works the other way around too.

Reunititing Families to Unite A Nation

Whenever North Korea is in the news, and lately that's been pretty frequently, I'm struck by how the media talks about the country as if it were separate - a truly alien and different entity from industrialized, modern, democratic South Korea. And no doubt there is much to separate - over a half century of disparate ideologies, influences and, of course, the DMZ, two and a half miles of the most militarized border in the world.

But if there is any evidence left that Korea is truly one nation waiting for reunification, it is the thousands of Koreans cruelly separated from their family members all these years. Children separated from parents, brothers from sisters. These tragedies are nearly mythic, part of the many narratives of war that our grandparents and parents have carried with them all these years. Over time they become nearly irrelevant, their potency diluted against the mongering of missile testing, sanctions, politics.

But this week, those stories are being told again. 97 families were reunited in the North Korean mountain resort of Keumgang and 99 will be reunited next week. These are families - Korean families - able to embrace each other again after decades of separation. They are the fortunate ones. There are thousands of families who applied who were not picked for this round (and hopefully there will be more) of reunification meetings.

I've read that many people in South Korea are ambivalent - or at least concerned - about reunification, whether it will ever happen and even, whether they want it to, considering the possible economic ramifications. But I know most Koreans still yearn for unification. They still know, despite all their modern differences and latent ideological and political hostilities, that the 38th parallel is truly just an arbitrary line drawn in the sand of one nation. They are not truly North or South, they are simply Korean and one day will be so in name too.

- Nina Moon

South Korea's Ex-Presidents Commits Suicide

Sadness. Former president Roh Moo-hyun commits suicide.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104494312&ps=cprs

-Mary

Laura Ling and Euna Lee to be "tried" in June

I heard an update of their story on NPR yesterday...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104146763

It's been almost 2 months since they got detained in North Korea.

-Mary