17 November 2017:
I’m going to try to be a little more systematic about things here—that is, I plan to log in and take notes about various events from this year, as well as adding details and firsts.
I decided this on the occasion of your first time playing a computer game. It was a Playstation 4 game named Flower. Here’s a video of gameplay:
I tried to capture your expression as you played it, in a video, but my phone somehow glitched and the video wasn’t saved. I can say that as you made the little petals soar, you cried out, “예쁘다! 예쁘다!” Also, when you finished your game, you said, “Bye-bye!” to it, which was the cutest thing ever.
Another first you might find interesting was your first movie: Despicable Me 3. Your mom took you. That was not long before you turned two, though, and this is year 3, and I think I may have mentioned it already, along with some of the cartoons you’ve watched with us, so… yeah.
Not long before your 2nd birthday, your mom signed up for Netflix, which I assume will still be around when you’re old enough to read this, but if not, it’s a streaming internet media service, sort of an online TV thing. (I’m old enough to remember when Netflix operated by sending out DVDs by postal mail, but they started offering to online streaming years ago, and switched over 100% to online streaming a few years ago.). Netflix Korea started up last year and it’s been a real boon in terms of cartoons we can watch with you. Aside from Miraculous: The Adventures of Ladybug and Cat Noire, you watch different things with me and with your mom. With me, you like to watch Supermonsters—even calling out the name of each character when they transform, along with the characters—and a Scottish show called Puffin Rock, about puffins who live on an island and get up to hijinks. With your mom, you have started to watch Robocar Poli and Superwings. (More about those shows below.) And of course, you like Pororo and Gun, which are Korean cartoons. I don’t like them, but you do… so much, in fact, that your mom had to move the TV to my home office so that you wouldn’t constantly be begging to watch TV. We have Netflix set up (through the Playstation I bought from a friend when he moved away), which… well, it’s a distraction for me, from writing, but it’s also handy for isolating it from you, and I have to admit I like being able to just switch on a game and turn off my brain after you’ve gone to bed.)
Also in November, you continue to be crazy about dinosaurs. You’ve also developed a liking for some specific music. Last night in the car, you were grooving very hard to the original soundtrack theme song of Ghostbusters (the Ray Parker Jr. song): you were, from the first time you heard it, pumping your firsts in the air very excitedly to the beat—right fist and left alternating, one-two, one-two—says your mom. (I was driving, so I couldn’t see.) Another song you really went for was Caravan Palace’s “Clash.”
You’re still pretty picky about food. It’s kind of a struggle to get you to eat anything but bread, so we have to resort to tricks like making you pressed sandwiches (without a sandwich press) and quesadillas with eggs, shredded veggies, and a little meat stuck together with some melted cheese, or shredding the meat and vegetables and mixing them up in rice, which you’re more willing to eat when it’s rolled up in dried seaweed (er, by which I mean what’s called 김 in Korea). You’re also somewhat more receptive to non-bread foods if we’re watching something on TV: the entertainment sometimes distracts you enough to be willing to eat food that’s not dry and crunchy, though again, it’s kind of hit-and-miss. Does that mean anything? I don’t know: sometimes, a food preference is just a food preference, and it could be inherited—I also really like salty, crunchy foods—but it could be that there’s a neurological reason for this preference. I have no idea, but we’re paying attention to see.
At night, it’s tough to get you to sleep sometimes. Here’s the routine:
- You get a bath, or, if we’re running late, at least a shower. In Canada, you probably wouldn’t need a bath everyday in the winter—you don’t sweat that much and don’t tend to get dirty outside—but we do it here because like most kids in Korea, you have 아토피.
(I’m guessing the cause of this atopic dermatitis is a mix of the terrible air quality—one of the reasons we’re planning to leave Korea—and likely a widely-unrecognized problem with mycotoxins in the air due to the pervasive practice of not dehumidifying and not air-conditioning housing. Which is to say, Korea saturated with fungus and it’s taken for granted and nobody seems to be interested in considering, let alone doing anything about, the health hazards this entails. (So, for example, practically every apartment is wallpapered here, and the wallpaper is generally not fungus-resistant.)
(Er, tangent. Anyway…)
- At the end of your bath, there’s a little ritual you love. Basically, you get up out of the tub with one of us—often your mom—standing beside you. You stand on the edge of the tub, dripping wet, and hug whoever’s there, while they encircle you with a towel, with a toy—usually a little plastic dinosaur—in each hand. When you’re wrapped in the towel, usually I count to three and then hoist you up so you’re supine in my arms, and your mom and I say, “오! 베이비네!” (“Oh, you’re a baby!”) You absolutely love this. I think it’s sort of fun for you to playact that, and you like it precisely because you know you’re not a baby anymore. And you do know that: you’re getting willful and insistent these days, as I write this in November.
- Then you get diapered and dressed, and mostly play a little more or read books with me, while your mom prepares some stuff like filling the humidifier and getting your toothbrush. Your mom almost always brushes your teeth, because you won’t let me do it. You’re still very much a creature of habit, and since she’s mostly been around in the early evening while I was working on my book and getting schoolwork done, she’s the one you’re used to brushing your teeth. I’m not bad it… but I can’t seem to convince you to let me brush them. Usually, when your mom brushes your teeth, she sings a song about toothbrushing to you, which is from the Pinkfong Youtube channel. Here’s the video.
PINKFONG VIDEO
- After that, you know it’s bedtime, and for you that usually means reading. Books, books, books. It’s insane, kid, how many books you want to read before sleeping, and how hard you cry for one more, and one more, and then one more after that. You’re like I was when I was little: one book after another, till the stack requires two hands to move. When I’m at work on days when you’re home from day-care, your mom reads like 40 books a day with you. Lately, this too is something you prefer to do with your mom, though you’ll settle for reading with me if she’s conked out.
- When it’s time to sleep, you can be kind of rough to deal with, especially if you’re getting to bed on the later side. Somehow when it’s 7:30pm and you’re down for the count, it’s easy as pie, but when it’s 8:30 or 9:00, you become much harder to handle. You especially like to jump on your mom and pile-driver her. She’s suffered a lot in the struggle to get you to sleep.
You also, just after your 2nd birthday, started doing two things that were new:
- Sleeping in your own private little space. You had slept together with us for the two years previous, as in, shared our two 요-styled futons (which sit on the floor, or on a very shallow stand just above the floor), but sometime in late October, you started getting out of our bed and making your own little one on the floor by the window. It was very cute, with you pulling a blanket on top of yourself and then pulling a pillow on top of you.Of course, Korea being as Korea is, this was alarming: the windowsills are terribly drafty because of the poor construction, and we knew you’d get quite sick in the winter if you continued this way. It was clear you wanted your own space, but at the same time, we don’t have enough rooms in apartment for that, and we’re a little nervous about putting you in your own room since you often wake when left alone, so instead your mom ordered a sort of indoor pup-tent which has become your dedicated space. You can read books in there, and hang out, and also sleep. These days (it’s mid-November) your mom is still sleeping inside the tent with you, but the idea is she’ll move back to our 요, which is right beside the tent, once you adapt to the idea.
- You started talking up a storm. Seriously, it’s as if a switch flipped in your head around your 2nd birthday, and suddenly you started talking all the time. You even started making sentences, like, “It’s a toast!” Neither your mom nor I ever said that in front of you: it was astonishing to see you apply the grammar you’d learned elsewhere—”It’s a baby!” or “It’s a bird!”—to something new, when you had toast in your hand.You still don’t realize that your mom and I are speaking different languages to you—and we both use a mix of English and Korea, though your mom mixes and matches more than I do—but you’re acquiring vocabulary from both languages pretty constantly. Yesterday I took you for a little walk and you were saying words like yellow (which is your favorite color at the moment) and purple and red and flower. Not all of them were new to you, but I think purple was, and you picked it up right away, when you saw these berries:
PURPLE BERRIES
Yesterday was a kind of typical day. I was home from work (Thursday’s my day with no classes, a “prep” day) so I picked you up from day-care while your mother was teaching a couple of English lessons, which is what she does to earn some money these days. While she taught, I took you for a walk around our apartment complex, stopping by the convenience store. They were sold out of your favorite candy, which is a chewy little fruit-flavored toffee-like squares, so I ended up buying you a sheet of stickers instead. Pretty much the whole rest of the walk, you clung to and stared at the stickers, except when you were going up or down stairs, or running down ramps—both of which are things you love to do. I taught you some color words and tried to get you to hold my hand all the way (again, except when you were running down ramps, because you like doing that alone and it’s pretty safe).
We got home, and your mom’s lesson was (pretty much) done. Basically I took a short break (because walking with you is pretty draining, what with the struggle to get you to hold my hand) and then we took off for Sejong City. Now, if you’ve visited recently, I have no idea what that part of South Korea (Reunified Korea? Postapocalyptic Korea?) is like, but in 2017, Jochiwon (where we live) is actually a part of Sejong City, technically. That’s more of a legal fiction, though: Jochiwon is a small country town full of small country people, which also happens to have two university campuses: Hong Ik Dae University, and Korea University. I work at Korea University, pretty much because it pays slightly more (despite having way less time off in holidays, and much more boring, useless students: the Hong Ik Dae students are probably just as poor quality, but since there’s more art majors, there’s at least more interesting stuff to talk about with them).
Er, tangent…
Anyway, Sejong City’s this other city you can reach only by driving about 15 minutes on the highway. The bus service to there is… well, it’s okay, I suppose, but it’s easier to drive. And of course, like with all city mergers, the library is in the newer, nicer, more developed place, which is Sejong City. So we had to go drop off some overdue library books, and then we went out for dinner. (Southern food restaurant chain called Shy Bana. Your mom had jambalaya, I had some kind of weird spaghetti dish, and you had… a pop-it, some cornbread, and part of a biscuit. You refused the coleslaw, macaroni, spaghetti, and rice, as well as the Korean pear your mom prepared for you when we got home. All you wanted was bread, bread, bread. I think I’m going to make stuffed popits tonight and see if we can trick you into eating those.
(That’s what it’s come to: feeding you vitamin supplements and trying to trick you into eating a wider range of stuff, while you do your level best to eat all bread and only bread to every meal. Bread and water: who are you, Jean Valjean?)
But if I sound like I’m complaining, don’t get me wrong. You’re a great kid. Fun to hang out with, and generous, and really sweet. Your mom just posted online about how fun you are and how easy to take care of. When I come home, you yell “아빠!” and run to the door to hug me most days. You’re frankly more generous with snacks and possessions than most adults I know, and still eager to help, to give people things, and so on. We suspect that you’re really guarded when I try to take things from you mainly because boys at day care are mostly aggressive and try to wrench away toys from you, while girls don’t do it so much (and so you have far fewer issues when your mom takes things from you). Also, you’re smart as a whip, kid. Your mom and you were playacting—playacting!—the other day, You were consciously pretending to be upset about your toasted bun being given to you in one single big piece, and saying, “안되네! 어떡하지?” to your mom with a (fake) upset face, and then smiling in fake relief when she broke a piece off for you to eat. It was very, very cute…
VIDEO
Meanwhile, the world is creeping toward insanity. Donald Trump is ravaging America, and at least in 2017, as the USA goes, so goes the world. The Republican Party has doing more to collapse America—and the existing global order—in the past year than anyone has really done in the past century, and while in other circumstances I might argue the global order needs changing, it’s not in a direction I think makes things better for anyone except the richest few people on the planet… and even for them, it’s only short-term gains, with the planet being flushed down the toilet, the future being pilfered to line the pockets of the elites of today, and nobody being held to account. I fear nobody will be held to account, ultimately: the bastards will get away with it all, when the biosphere is torn apart by their nonsense. And yet what are decent, sane people to do? Even reflecting on the fact that none of us is as powerless as we imagine, I’m not sure how the little power we do have ought to be directed. This, I suppose, is how civilizations founder: like I said to my class minutes ago, people who can’t “think outside the box” are destined to be trapped within it all their lives.
What I can say is that at least we’re trying to get you to Canada. My sense is that Canada’s culture and education is at least a little bit about breaking out of that box. From everything I’ve seen, the institutions in Korea are all aimed at training people to be unable to think outside the box; to minimize that kind of thinking as much as possible, and to train people not to notice there is a box, or how uncomfortable life inside it is. The last bit is failing, these days, but whether people will begin to recognize it’s because of the box and their failure to think outside of it is another question. And of course, here I am being a self-righteous foreigner saying Koreans should think outside the box, when I have my own box I can’t think outside too. (Climate change, our moribund Western pseudo-democratic political systems and the failure mode they seem to have fallen into, and hell, even my own professional career.)
Change is painful and difficult, son. It’s going to be painful for us to adapt to life in Canada—even for me, and I’m from there, albeit at a distance of a decade and a half. But sometimes it’s the only thing that allows survival. As for my failure to see how we could stop the bastards robbing the future, I’m sorry. I wasn’t alone in that. Perhaps in your day, you’ll say we should have hunted them down and killed them, to stop them killing millions. But who? Where? How? And hunting down individuals doesn’t stop a juggernaut. I say that, but I know pressure does, and that I could be doing something that puts pressure on the juggernaut, or robs it of momentum. I guess I want to figure out what I could do that would be doing that. I guess that’s what I should be thinking about now, as I plan out my own coming career transition.
I wonder if the worrying is in vain: if technologies will solve some of the problems we fear you and your generation will be saddled with. I have serious fears—fears serious enough that I plan on printing this book before we leave Korea, and every few years after that, and putting the videos on a DVD-ROM and maybe even film for you, as well as storing them online and printing as many photos as possible. I mean, sometimes I look forward at the century heading toward us and shudder in fear. There’s shadows up ahead, things are obscured and I can only guess, but your mother and I have a bad, bad feeling. We worry about you, about having brought you into this world in the state it’s in.
But what can we do, save try to prepare you for it, and try push back against the awful possibilities with ways of moving toward hope? It isn’t the first time people have foreseen horrors that never came. But it’s also not the first time people who foresaw horrors were poo-pooed by people who didn’t, only to unhappily learn that the horrors were real, and worse than they imagined. And, well… parents worry. They can’t help it. Worry is bound up, at a deep level, with love, because of the fragility of our bodies, and because of those forces in the world—natural, political, economic, and social—that disregard the preciousness of an individual body and mind, in order to better exploit them. This is the world. Assailed on all sides, we must shield you, but also armor you and arm you to survive it.
As for thriving, well… you may be too decent, and too intelligent for that. From what I’ve seen, those who most thrive in the systems and cultures we know are usually less wise, less decent, and less intelligent than you seem likely to become. And less gentle and human. This prides me, but it worries me too.
Enough. This is a one-month update—not even, as it’s only 17 November—and yet it’s already gone far off the rails. I’ll try get it back on the rails in December, if I can.
26 January 2018
Hi again son!
Sorry for missing December. It’s been… hectic. At the job where I’m working, we finish the fall semester right before Christmas… and then winter classes start up just after Christmas. (Like, this year, they started on Boxing Day 2017.) Between that, and you and your mom catching the flu toward the end of the third week of my course, it’s been a hell of a couple of months.
Maybe it’s easier for me to sum up what’s happened this way:
In December, well, there was Christmas.
In January, you caught the flu. That’s the big event. Of course, a toddler with the flu is… still a toddler. You were full of energy, happy to run around, and not really affected beyond coughing and sneezing more than usual, as well as a fever and some inflammation in the middle ear. Thing is, you were already on meds for your ear, because—after all the ear infections you’ve gotten—our pediatrician had sent us to this specialist in Daejeon. We’re still taking you to him—the third appointment is next week—just because he’s trying to figure out if your ear infections are chronic enough to need those little tubes kids sometimes get installed so their ears can drain. I suspect it won’t happen, but it’s sometime necessary when a kid gets too many ear infections, to avoid worse complications like hearing loss.
Anyway, even with the antibiotics for your middle ear, the flu caused some inflammation, so we put you on tamiflu and more stuff for your ear. It was kind of a trial, because of course the medicine tastes like crap and you hated taking it, plus I was still teaching an intensive course. We were lucky your grandma Lee could come down and help over the weekend, and basically I minimized the work I had to do for the class early in the final week so I could come home and watch you as much as I could. Your mom was really tough, though, and did a lot even with the flu heaving weakened her. For about a week, you only saw me with a white surgical mask on: I was doing everything I can to avoid catching the flu: disinfecting doorknobs, washing my hands constantly, and… well, one gets tired of the smell of his own breath inside a mask! Anyway, by the end of the week, you and your mom had basically recovered.
That was last week, or.. yeah, I guess it was. It seems so long ago now.
Here’s some things that are new about you:
Your primary obsession now is split between Thomas the Tank Engine, Superwings, and Robocar Poli. The former, I imagine, will still exist in kids’ popular culture when you’re older: it’s a long-running British show about sentient trains and their social conflicts. (When you explain kids’ shows this way, it sounds really weird!) Superwings is basically a cutesy riff on Transformers: airplanes that travel the world delivering packages and learning about the local culture while helping kids with “problems.” The planes can transform into robot form, hence the catchphrase of the sshow that you’re always saying to us: “변신파워!” (“Transformation Power!”) You’ll laugh to see this, maybe, but I messed up that phrase once in the car, shouting, “변기 파워!” (“Toilet Power!”) Ooops. I think Superwings is a Korean show. Likewise Robocar Poli, which is another transformers riff for little kids. “Poli” is a police car that turns into a robot, and his buddies are a fire truck, and ambulance, and a rescue chopper. Of course, the only female character is the ambulance.
This is a familiar riff in Korean cartoons: Korea’s about 20-30 years behind English-language entertainment in terms of sexism. Well, or it was, until recently. In fact, Superwings is a lot better. There’s still a lot of male characters, but there’s a few female ones, and the ones that are female—including a space shuttle—are tough as nails and get right into it alongside the boys. Your mom prefers it, and so do I, though, of course, you’re still nuts about Robocar Poli.
These days, when I watch Netflix with you, we’re actually watching a Spanish show (in English) called Pocoyo. The kid looks like you—a fact I think isn’t lost on you—and it’s cute and fun and sometimes it makes you dance.
One of your rituals these days is to distribute your toys among us. That’s something your mom and I have noticed: you’re a very sharing person. In the morning, whether I wake before you or after you, you always make sure to give me one of your Thomas the Tank Engine trains (the red and black one called Hiro) and the cop plane from Superwings (whose name I don’t remember). You have other ones you give your mom, and maybe she can tell you which ones, but with me, you’re especially concerned with making sure you give me those two trains.
You also come up with hilarious little things. For example, you have a couple of tin vitamin containers—this is one of the things they sell at pharmacies here, a little tin with a plastic suitcase handle. Yours are Pororo and Superwings. The other night, you gave one to your mom, and then held her hand and insisted on promenading through the house with each of you carrying one of the tins. From the living room to the bedroom and back, and forth, and back, and forth. It was so cute.
Often you and your mom wake before me, because you also go to bed earlier. This morning, your mom told me that while I was sleeping, you came to me, put the “Hiro” train down beside me, and then patted my arm and sang a lullaby. Such a sweet kid. Not every kid is that nice or gentle, you know? We always have to suppress a chuckle when you say, “Oh nooooooo!” anytime you drop something on the floor, and we can’t hold in our laughter when you eat something you like and start bouncing in the chair, head shaking left to right in excitement.
That doesn’t mean you’re not stubborn, of course. Lately, “No no no no no!” has become one of your catchphrases. You’re also really insistent about snacks—especially Pororo crackers—and about getting your TV time. If my back wasn’t so bad, and if the air were better in Jochiwon, I’d probably just insist on taking you outside instead, despite the cold weather, but since we’re stuck inside, TV ends up being one of the things. We still try make it more interactive—watching together as much as possible, responding to the show, dancing when it fits with the show, and so on.
You’re talking more, and sometimes complete sentences are popping out of your mouth that surprise us—it’s sometimes hard to figure out what you’re saying at the moment, because you’re also using both English and Korean words. You don’t know, not quite yet, that there’s such thing as separate languages, but you do seem to understand that there’s some consistency to the words dad uses for things, versus the words you hear at daycare. (Your mom switches back and forth, and so do I, but I’m trying to be your exposure to English so I fight the temptation to just use the Korean words for things even when you know the Korean word already.)
Your funniest sentence in the past month was when we were playing with some inflated balloons—the long kind used to make balloon animals. Your mom and I had made swords for us all, but you preferred just a long inflated balloon. We were playing a game where you and your mom taunted me with balloons, and I tried to catch and steal them. At some point, I caught yours, and you got right in my face and said, “하지마요!” (“Please don’t do that!”) in the most insistent, serious tone. It was hilarious.
You’re bowing to people more now, and saying thanking you, and bye bye. You’re still at an age when most people just see overwhelming cuteness.
There’s things we’re keeping an eye on, though. For one thing, you’re starting to show faint signs of temper tantrum. Sometimes, when you’re upset, you make a really furious face and sort of mimick a sense of being about to explode. We never do this in front of you—not that I can remember—so we suspect you picked it up at daycare, from some other kid. We’re gently trying to break you of the habit.
Also, you sleep with us (still) and you’re somehow prone to waking in the night. Sometimes it’s momentary, but not always, and that’s always rough. I’m not sure, but I suspect you react to us—your mom’s soft snoring, and my louder snoring. But giving you your own room isn’t feasible right now: our apartment has three bedrooms, but your mom and I each have an office, so that leaves one room for us to all sleep in together. That’s down to finances. Maybe in Canada we can set up something a little better. (I hope.)
Today, your mom was talking about printing up some cookie-cutters on the 3D printer. That’s new: I think the cutters will be the third thing she’ll print up on it. You seem ready for that, and it looks like something you’ll enjoy, based on how you play with play-doh these days.
After daycare today, I’m going to take you to see the movie Coco. It’s an hour and forty-five minutes, so I guess we’ll see if you can handle that. You’ve enjoyed the other movies you’ve seen, though: Son of Bigfoot, and Despicable Me 3, and others.
Our cleaning ladies are… well, they’re a bit unreliable, since they keep having to cancel on us, but they dote on you, and one of them has been giving us so much in the way of hand-me-down clothes that it’s almost like they’re cleaning for free. Your winter coat this winter, and the boots you wear, they’re from her. So are most of your shoes. (By the way, it’s plural not because we’re rich or anything; we had one woman coming to clean for 2 or 3 hours a week, but she hired a friend to work as a team, so they come together and work for 90 minutes, for the same rate. They’re lifesavers: between them and the dishwashing machine, life is a LOT easier.)
What’s still not easy is feeding you. These days, you seem to want everything wrapped in kim (er, dried, salted, roasted seaweed.) I made lasagna the other day, and it turned out pretty nice. But you only wanted the filling, and only wrapped in seaweed. I guess that’s a kid thing, though. We persist, letting you try new things and giving you a taste. I’m planning on making tarts—caramelized pumpkin for one set, and pear (well, Asian pear) for the other—so you can taste more flavors and get used to them. You’re a little better than before: I don’t make Jean Valjean jokes about your diet (of bread and water) but it’s still a challenge. I suspect your mom wonders if she’s just not cooking to your taste, but I think you’re just being a regular picky kid.
Here’s something I can say that sums it up: you’re a bright little light shining in our lives. You’ve given us so much joy and love, and you’re such a joy to be around. You’re trying to teach me to relax, to put things aside and just live in the moment and play, and I swear, I’m doing my best to learn. The number of times I’ve said I won’t be able to read you bedtime stories, but then relent and do, because it makes you happy, and making you happy makes me happy… I’m learning. We both are, different things. You are changing us as people, in a good way. Thank you, son.
3 August, 2018
Well, it’s been too long since the last update. Let’s see:
You had surgery a few days ago. Almost a week ago, in fact. The technical term for the surgery was Simple Mastoidectomy, though don’t be confused: they didn’t remove your left mastoid bone, so much as they cut open your skin, drilled into it, drained some fluid, and then closed the skin again. We’re hoping the bone grows shut as you get older, but there’s a microscopic hole there right now. They also installed a tube through your left eardrum, so that fluid could be drained. (I think a tube was installed on the right, but I’m a bit fuzzy on this, since everything—all the discussion—was done in Korean, and at the last minute too.)
If that sounds strange, well: for me, anyway, it definitely is. When the doctor told us he was recommending this surgery, he basically just said what I wrote above: that he’d be drilling into the bone to get the fluid out, because he was concerned that the fluid built up from your recurring ear infection was going to mess up the air bubbles in your mastoid bone, calcify the bones of your inner ear, and leave you with impaired hearing.
We actually scheduled the surgery for the end of June, but you caught a cold and so we had to reschedule. It then ended up at the end of August—we got lucky, there was an opening. When we checked you into the hospital, we had to sign a release form. Then basically a resident—an inexperienced young doctor-in-training—met with your mom and told her horror stories about the worst possible things that could happen during the surgery. Except, because she was inexperienced, she told her this stuff (like how your eardrum might be completely excised, or they might have to remove the bones of your inner ear, or cut through nerves to access the inner ear (leaving you without muscular control of half your face, or unable to taste food). Of course, this was panic-inducing, and I called back the resident to confirm that these were unlikely-worst case scenario complications, rather than all part of the surgery you’d been signed up for. Your mom was so panicked that she burst into tears when the resident explained, “Oh, yes, those probably won’t happen. This is a common, simple surgery; I just have to tell you the very unlikely risks.”
It was kind of a sleepless night for all of us.
The next day, watching you go under general anaesthetic was a bit terrfiying: after all, some people don’t ever wake up from it, or wake up brain-damaged. (Your mom has a nephew who did, in fact, though that was twenty years ago and medicine has come a long way since then.) We felt pretty powerless watching you drift into a daze. You weren’t even unconscious when they wheeled you away, though you were close.
Your mom and I waited, boiling over with stress in our characteristic ways: I was raging at all the noisy, inconsiderate people in the waiting room, while your mom was quiet and receded into herself.
It was nearly three hours before we saw you again. As soon as you were back, I called my mom, and your mom called her mom, to let them know you were waking up and okay.
You woke up, and you were crabby for a while, but pretty soon your personality started to reassert itself over the crabbiness. The toughest part was that you were begging us for water, but we weren’t supposed to feed you or give you water for six hours after the surgery. It was heart-rending, since you were crying and asking for a drink, and your grandma almost gave you one out of pity, though we realized what she was doing and cautioned her that it could hurt you seriously. (From what I’ve read, the possibility is that you could choke on it, and your body might not properly work to expel the water.)
They put a huge bandage on your head, and of course you immediately removed it twice, so we had to get someone from the E.R. to come up and reapply it in a way that didn’t force your eyes to squint, since… you watched cartoons all day. We normally don’t let you watch more than an hour of cartoons, but it was such an effective distraction from the pain, and from the I.V. plgged into your left, that we just made an exception. You also played with sticker/coloring books and wanted to get wheeled around a lot, so we did that, using one of the ward’s wheelchairs.
The hospital, by the way, was Chungnam University Hospital—the one in Daejeon, which is about 30 minutes (plus a ten minute cab ride) from our apartment in Jochiwon, or anywhere from 1-2 hours’ drive depending on traffic. It’s a weirdly-built hospital: clearly a lot of the building dates back to the 1980s or 1990s, so there’s central air conditioning but not everywhere. Your room was a solo room, thank goodness, so we ran the air conditioner the whole time, but out in the hospital, temperatures ranged from maybe 24°C all the way to 28°C. Since you have a heat tolerance more like mine (you have the gene for wet earwax and more perspiration, unlike your mom), this wasn’t great, but it bothered me way more than it did you.
By the second day, you were pretty much back to yourself, in any case, and you were released from the hospital around 10:30 in the morning. Of course—and this is something we weren’t told beforehand—the recovery regimen for your surgery means trips to the hospital every couple of days. We went on Thursday (2 August) and are going back on Saturday morning (4 August) and then the following Monday (6 August), at which point—if the fluid drainage isn’t serious—we won’t go back for a week.
You’ve been pretty good about the gauze that’s stuffed into your ear, meaning you haven’t yet even ripped it out, or tried. If you do, that’ll be a trip to a a local doctor, and then to the emergency room, so we’re hoping you don’t. You’ve been a good sport, given the fact your ear hurts and you’re not allowed to touch it, and the fact you have a huge stitch over your mastoid bone, and the fact you have to sleep all night on your right side. (Which, since you move around a lot in your sleep, is a bit of a challenge to you.)
Oh, and when we went to the hospital on Thursday, you really didn’t enjoy having your ear drained. We did what all guilt-ridden, powerless parents do: we bought you something. The main floor of the children’s ward has a booksale on raising funds for the children’s cancer ward, I think it was—that’s were we go you the various sticker/coloring books—and we ended up buying you a Pororo dinosaur set/book, which comes with a dozen tiny plastic dinosaurs and three medium sized ones. The funny thing is, you had an Allosaurus in your hand that you’d brought from home, and the lady running the stand commented that you didn’t need it since you had dinos at home… but you didn’t care.
Anyway, that’s the story (so far) of the surgery you had. There is the buildup, though, which I could mention.
Daycare is out for the moment. Your mom actually pulled you from daycare around the time your last surgery was scheduled, in the hope of avoiding what happened anyway: the cold you caught, which delayed the surgery. Still, the degree to which you recovered from your ongoing ear infection convinced her that not sending you to day care was the best thing for you, so she’s decided not to send you back even after you’ve recovered from this treatment, for as long as we can hold out. That, of course, means some sacrifice: she no longer has her days free to work on projects or study. She’s also trying to give me more time so that I can finish writing this book I’m working on (the first “gin craze” novel, which is almost done now) and get some direly-needed exercise, so your mom is bearing the brunt of work at home. Still, the balance isn’t satisfying to me, and I think we may need to readjust, with me taking less time for writing and her being freed up to work in the evenings. Probably that will happen in the spring, when we move to Sejong City.
Meanwhile, it’s pretty evident we need to get out of Korea, as I’m just constantly on the verge of exploding at badly-behaved people and stressed out of my mind living here (which in turn stresses out your mom), and as it’s clear a lot of things wrong with this place won’t be suddenly turning right by the time you’re old enough for them to impact you negatively. That in itself is a complicated problem: we’re essentially trying to track the trends in political, economic, and climatic change over the next few decades, and any one of those is kind of above our heads, though it feels clear Korea’s not going to be in great shape in any of those categories. (And even if it were, the obsession with racial purity, the problems linked to North Korea, and fact you’d almost certainly be compelled to render service to in abusive military are things we cannot condone inflicting on you.)
Of course, I’m 45, and the prospect I’d long hoped for—that I could secure a position teaching Creative Writing at a university—seems unlikely. I may manage to sell some novels, or hit it big in game design, but… it looks like maybe I need to retrain and get some skills in Computer Science, if we’re to really make a go of it in Canada.
What else? Let’s see:
- You’re still obsessed with dinosaurs. My friend Jeremy’s son cried when he learned that the dinosaurs are extinct (and that means they’re all dead) and I’m wondering how you’ll react.
- You’re starting to get obsessed with robots, especially transformer-style ones that turn into animals.
- You’re still pretty much into your Mom to the exclusion of everyone else. You sometimes refuse to interact with me… and then, when I’ve left for work, you say, “아빠 보고싶어…” That said, you’ve gotten a bit mean about it. Not that you understand that, of course, and we can’t blame you, but I was shocked when I heard you’d told your grandma “Go take a Thomas.” (Which, since you call all trains Thomas after the character “Thomas the Tank Engine,” means you were telling her to get lost and catch a train home. Yikes!)
- That said, you’re still very sweet a lot of the time. We all melt when you decide you feel like giving us a kiss (especially on the nose) or a hug.
- You’re speaking more and more all the time. These days, you seem to really grasp that there’s one language your mom speaks, and another your dad speaks, and that they’re not the same thing. You switch to English with me, and switch to Korean with your mom.
- You mostly are still crazy about books, but you’re starting to shift in your habits. You used to want to read ten books a night with me, before bed, and countless more during the day with your mom. Nowadays, you tend to want only two or three books at night, and you also tend to want to read new ones (well, new to you). We still haven’t gotten into all of the books I bought for you for Christmas—second hand books from a place called Ebony Books in Cheonan—and you’re just starting to like reading longer picture books. We’ve also gotten lucky a few times and picked up stacks of kids’ books left outside by the recycling station; the stack we picked up a few days ago (after your grandma noticed it) was especially full of nice picture books, all in Korean. (And that’s rare: Korean kids’ books tend to be badly done and very didactic, but these ones have great art and fun stories.)
- Your third summer has been the hottest of your life. It’s something like 35-36°C outdoors—a revolting damp 35°-36°C, too—and the car gets so hot when it’s parked in the sun that you refuse to get in, or cry and rage when put in your carseat, even after I’ve cooled it. (I can’t blame you: a few minutes out in that sticky nastiness and I get so sweaty I start to itch all over, which is another reason I tend to be away from the house as much as possible in this weather.) There was a cyclope (Prapiroon) that swept over Korea a few weeks ago, and gave us a week of wonderful weather, but since that passed, it’s been rough. (Even more so because Korean architecture seems hostile to the idea of building houses in a way that accounts for weather: the walls of apartment buildings are terribly insulated, and the windows leaky, and rarely is an apartment provided with windows in a position that allows for a cross-breeze. We’re still kind of amazed at how much more intelligent and well-developed the apartment layouts in Vietnam were, with regard to this. (Also, how they had small air-conditioners installed in every room, so that half the rooms in your place would not suddenly become unusuable during hot weather.)
- We got you some sunglasses and a dinosaur shirt with money your grandma gave you for Children’s Day. Oh, and we went to the Children’s Day festivities on campus where I work. They were… okay. Less fun than the year before, though.
- You had your first taste of cotton candy after a visit to the doctor a few weeks ago. You were dubious at first, but then you loved it. You’re still kind of tough to feed: there are a few things you like, such as fried diced carrots and rice, dried seaweed, fried or broiled beef, pork, and chicken, and bread, especially castella bread (which is hugely popular in Korea, as an import from Japan, where it grew popular because Portuguese sailors carried it on ships as provisions, because it took ages to go bad). You like french fries, too, which is lucky because when we go out to eat, this is usually the snack you get while we eat… and then we go home and feed you properly, if you’re hungry. We try make sure your diet is balanced, but sometimes you refuse to eat “real” food. Oh, and you like to drink chocolate milk, these days, and ice cream. You make the funniest, cutest face when you taste it and then feel the cold hit your nerves. You’re growing more independent about feeding yourself, though that’s only been in the past month or so. We’re at the point now where we can mostly just put a plate or bowl of food in front of you, with a spoon tucked into it, and then sit with you and eat, and you join in and feed yourself. It’s still messy, of course, but that’s motor skills, and will take a while.
- You’re not potty-trained yet. We’ve sort of let it go, since you’ve been sick and all. The day-care had you in training underpants for some reason. (This isn’t what training underpants were designed for: pull-up diapers are what we use in Canada so that parents don’t have to constantly clean up pee from the floor, and training underpants come in after a kid basically is potty-trained, just as backup. For some reason, Koreans have collectively decided to start using the training underpants long before the kid gets fully potty-trained, which… well, you can imagine: parents cleaning up pee, and having to wash training underwear constantly, is the result. This is an example of what I’m sure you’ll hear me talk about someday, how Korean society seems to really, really like to do things in the most work-intensive, time-wasting way possible. The paperwork demands at my job are another example, and a pretty Kafkaesque one, but I won’t get into that.)Anyway, we’re hoping to potty-train you once you’re fully recovered.
- You’re growing. You never really got heavy like some of the other kids at the daycare, and we weren’t sure why, until finally—months too late—someone told us you weren’t really eating the food. When we saw a picture of the typical meal served at the day-care, we could understand why: you prefer crunchy, dry food (like me) and the day-care food is the opposite of that. It actually looks pretty typical of shitty-university/workplace-cafeteria food, including way too much overspiced kimchi and other “red” stuff, soup, dripping-wet vegetables, and so on. For the last couple of months of day-care, your mom started frying up carrots and spinach and dropping them off, and you ate a lot better then. We were a bit heartbroken to think of you having only rice and a little meat at lunchtime for months on end. Someone even told us we should “train” you to like and eat kimchi. When your mom explained that we don’t even eat it often at home, they of course attributed it to your and my “foreignness” (ignoring the fact that your mom is Korean). Sigh.
- I may sound like I’m being negative about the daycare, but the teachers were authentically nice to you and cared about you. When we run into them—which happens occasionally, as the daycare is just downstairs from our apartment—they always ask how you’re doing, and dote on you, and tell us we need to start sending you again because they miss you. We were lucky: the news has been awash in recent years with cases of kids being hurt or even killed at negligent, terrible day-care places, so we really do know how lucky we’ve been.
As for your parents:
Your mom has been working with/at an organization called Sejong Woman. It’s a local feminist group—a progressive one, because yes, there are also “conservative” women’s groups, who basically are bigoted Christian women who’re against everything feminism stands for—and she was (until you stopped going to daycare) involved in the Feminist Book Club as well as having helped organize a small film festival screening. (Two short films were screened in Jochiwon, and the Season 2 preview film of Miraculous Ladybug was screened for families at the Lake Park in Sejong City, because Ladybug is a pretty good example of a feminist hero for kids.)
She’s also been drawing and reading a lot. She has hopes of figuring out a way of linking her interests in 3D printing (deferred, because I messed up the calibration on her 3D printer a while back) and illustration, and also plans on buying an iPad and working on her drawing skills on that. Oh, and she recently mentioned that she’s interested in writing a certain kind of book—in a format that’s popular here—that consists of micro-essays. People seem to be reading those a lot now, perhaps because short essays by definition can’t go very deep into a topic. (As your mom explained to me recently, poetry is very popular in Korea compared to the West, but that’s probably because poetry in Korean is a lot more shallow and simplistic, dominated by a poet straightforwardly discussing their “feelings”—the sort of thing that Western poets haven’t really engaged in, in such a direct manner, for a few hundred years.) Anyway, she thinks that a book on the subject of atheism (and how she became an atheist) could be both popular and controversial—the latter feeding into the former—and she figures short little pieces will be easier to write, too. She’s also suggested the possibility of translating some of my Korean Lovecraftian fiction for publication in this kind of format, since single-novelette books seem to be popular here too these days.
As for me, I taught overtime last semester, and didn’t get much writing done outside of a commissioned RPG adventure (for the new GM guide to Lamentations of the Flame Princess). That said, in February I wrote about 20,000 words of fiction, expanding my novella “Asshole Island” into half a novel. I finished off the job after ending off my summer intensive English course, bringing it to 87,000 words, which… I guess that’s a good length for what may or may not be a YA novel. We’ll see.
For August, I have a big job ahead of me: I need to cut the “gin craze” novel I’ve been working on in half, and polish the first half of it so that it’ll be ready to send out to publishers. (I think. I may end up trying to write the remainder of it, and sell it as a single-volume huge-as-hell novel, but I have my doubts anyone would publish that from an unknown new author, the success of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell nonwithstanding. Plus that’s a book about magic in general, while mine is this weird SF singularity masquerading as fantasy about a dozen topics of interest in a not-so-popular period of history. I dunno.) I also have to finished editing a Korean novel I’m being paid to fix up, and write a proposal for an LotFP setting book (adventures set on a fungus-infested version of the moon). Plus I’m still trying to study Python on the side and get some RPGing in, so I can keep my sanity, and spend some more time with you, because if anything’s been driven home in the past few weeks, it’s how precious time with you is, and how fast you’re growing up. (Which, incidentally, also has me trying to exercise and get into better shape, so that likewise I’ll be around longer and have more time to know and care for you. Mostly right now that means me returning to swimming, in the crowded and inconsiderate-dolt-filled pool outside town.)
I guess that’s enough of a roundup for now. I’ll see if I can post more soon, and maybe get in one more update before your birthday, if I can.
