So… yesterday was your birthday. I promised myself, when I started this project, that I’d finish each post as a birthday present of sorts—that is, get it done by your birthday. Of course, when I started this website, I had no experience dealing with a toddler, so… yeah, I’m starting this post the day after your birthday in 2017. It’s October 26th, 2017, and I thought maybe you’d be interested to know what the world looks like, first, before I get to the stuff specific to you.
So: earlier this year, the President of South Korea was impeached and removed from office. She was a clown named Park Geun-Hye, the daughter of the former dictator Park Chung-Hee. Their whole family was bad news for Korea, but Park Geun-Hye wasn’t just an authoritarian nut: she was also an idiot, and in very deep with a weird New Age cultist living in Germany. You can look up the scandal if you’re interested. I’m not putting links here since who knows what links will work when you’re finally seeing this, but…
Here in October, your mom and I are worried. Donald Trump, shitclown extraordinaire, is the President of the United States. It’s hard for me to explain this except to say, imagine the TV celebrity least qualified for running the most powerful country in the world. That’s the situation right now. Worse, he’s threatening nuclear war with North Korea. It seems unlikely… but in his most-of-a-year in office, he’s demonstrated that he’s an incompetent moron many times, and one never knows what’s going to happen. Meanwhile, North Korea’s been escalating things: firing test missiles hither and thither, over Japan, towards Guam (which is a US territory now) and basically pushing the US’s buttons. Russia and China keep flip-flopping in their response to this, as they tend to do with anything that involves North Korea.
That’s the circumstances under which 2017 has unfolded. We’ve multiple times considered sending your mom and you to Canada just to be safe, and the only reasons we’ve hesitated are because things calm down, and because we’re afraid to burn away the savings we have over nothing. (Each time we don’t do it reinforces the sense that doing it the next time might be a mistake and a waste of money.)
Money matters because money’s pretty much the thing keeping us from leaving for Canada this winter. We need money to do it, and lots of it, because I’ll have to retrain and get some other kind of job, it seems. (There’s not a huge demand for TEFL instructors in Canada, after all, and without a PhD in Creative Writing—a useless degree, all told—I’m even more disadvantaged in the competition for the few Creative Writing professor jobs that do exist in Canada than I would be just for being a genre fiction author.) Your mom and I, walking around with you, see so many reason why we want you to grow up in Canada: nasty kids who’re not parented behaving like idiots in public; reckless driving being the norm; the toxic dust that fills the air these days. Will South Korea have fixed these problems by the time you’re older? Who knows, but we also want to spare you the pain of military service, with all the violence, sexual abuse, and brainwashing that are part of that. Living in Canada will spare you that, or at least give you the choice. But also, we just see the cruddiness of kids’ lives here: walking past 7-11, there’s a group of nasty, shit-mouthed boys gobbling up instant cup noodles and shouting at each other. Drunk guys sitting in front of GS-Mart who “invite” me to sit and get drunk with them when I’m walking with you, a two-year old, around our apartment complex. Kids all staring into their cell phones, with no social skills and no ability to engage with strangers, and abusing one another because they were born in different months. And they have nowhere to go, no fun things to do. It’s astonishing to us that Saskatoon—a tiny city of a few hundred thousand—had so many more fun things for kids last summer when we visited than Seoul does, despite being a city of millions.
Canada’s not perfect, but… it’s going to have lots of better places for you to grow up than even the nicest parts of Korea. You won’t have to be shat on for being a racial minority every day, you won’t have to have your mistakes and achievements all attributed to your supposed “racial impurity,” and you won’t have to go through life constantly being called a “foreigner” and constantly hearing people make a big deal about our family being somehow “weird” or unusual. The other day I realized that in Korea, we’ll never be seen as just a “family”; even sympathetic, nice people insist on calling us an “international family.” Why? Because Korea’s just at that stage… justifications aside, Korea just hasn’t digested the reality that it’s becoming multicultural, and that that’s fine.
Anyway, I hope things are better when you’re older, and that you can visit and enjoy this place. But I suspect change will come far too slowly to do much good during your childhood, and I prefer not to expose you to this junk—let alone the toxic microdust, and the constant food safety scandals, and unsafe roads, and lack of parks and places to play—when so much better is readily available in Canada. Maybe our careers will be difficult there; maybe we’re be a bit less well-off. I don’t know, but I know I can’t allow you to grow up mired in this place, so we’re going to make whatever sacrifice we have to in order to ensure you don’t.
As for us: Well, because you started day-care this year (more below about that) your mom had more free time, and she decided she wanted to earn some money. She decided to do some freelance English teaching, and took on a number of individual, and then finally group, lessons. She’s been earning a reasonable amount of money consider the limited number of hours needed to put it in… and in her spare time, she worked a bit on her art (sketching and painting) as well as deciding to get into 3D printers. Her first 3D printer arrived just a few days before your 2nd birthday—so close to the day that she never actually got to test it out until after. I bought it for her from a compnay that was crowdfunding a manufacturing run on IndieGoGo, a popular crowdfunding site at the time.
Your mom has also been collaborating with me in translation. We did our first 2014, though it was published in 2015. Then in 2016-2017 we did some more for a publisher in the States doing an anthology of Korean SF in English. We’re planning on working on some more tranlsations, too, and maybe launching our own anthology as an ebook or maybe as a crowdfunded project., if we can’t find a publisher for it. I learned a lot from the project we were involved in—like, for example, that it’s best to sometimes play your cards close to your vest, and that yeah, sometimes you need to swallow your pride and do what brings in the money, even when you know you’re being screwed a little—but on the bright side, we have more translation credits and I know now that I have what it takes to edit a book of short stories.
The way we translate… well, I wrote about it on my blog, but who knows if that’s out there now. A simplified version: your mom does a rough translation to English, and I pretty it up, and then we sit down together and figure out what’s wrong with what I’ve prettied up (the stuff that departs too far from the original) and how to fix it. It’s a good method for us, and we get good results, though I imagine it’s a bit slow compared to solo translators.
Your mom has also spent a huge amount of time with you this year. I don’t mean to make you feel guilty: that’s what parents do. But I was the breadwinner, and so at school, and also was writing (see below), so your mom picked up the slack and spent a TON of time online.
As for me: would you believe that I finished my novel—currently no title, but it’s the massive one about the alchemists and the alien yeast in London—just the day before your birthday? That’s the novel I’ve been working on, off and on, since 2014. Back then, I wrote almost two novels’ worth of material, before realizing most of it was not suitable to a novel. (It was almost all from the childhood of my characters, when nothing strange or supernatural-seeming was happening, which is a bad fit for the science fiction book market.) Anyway, I got very little work done on it in 2015—and nothing usable, really—and 2016, I was too busy with you and work, but finally on 2 April 2017, I opened a new file on my Mac and wrote an outline for the book. Then I started drafting. 24 October 2015, I finished work on it. That got me to 192,000 words, most of them rewritten from scratch.
Besides that, one other thing kept me busy in 2016: I’d pitched a tabletop RPG project to James Raggi, the publisher of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, an old-school RPG game. I hadn’t played any flavor of D&D for something approaching a couple of decades by that point, but I was eager to get back to the hobby, like a lot of former gamers around that time… especially those who were newly parents. Anyway, Raggi accepted the pitch back in 2015, not long before you were born, and I actually started work on it a few days after you were born, still at the postpartum recovery center. Anyway, long story short, it took until early October for the layout and text to be finalized. I’m hoping it does well, as that may allow me to do more game design work, as a supplement to our income. But besides that, playtesting the adventure (which I did in March 2016) got me started with a gaming group that continued until basically Christmas holidays of 2016-2017. I ran only Lamentations for that group, but 2017 was the year I spent catching up with old favorites and acquainting myself with other games and types of games that have come along since I stopped playing in 1998. I have a pretty big shelf of games, and I’m looking forward to someday trying some of them with you! Oh, beyond that: this year I got my first chances to play RPGs as a player since, basically, elementary school school. I played a one-shot of Numenera at Free RPG Day in Seoul, and also joined an online game of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons run by my friend Jeremy Tolbert, a good guy living in the States.
I assume by the time you’re seeing this, some of the references above won’t be immediately obvious. What’s Numenera? What’s Free RPG Day? D&D 5th Edition was the current edition? I guess you’ll have Wikipedia or something like it to read up references if you’re interested. I don’t know… anyway.
Enough about us… what about you?
When we got back from Canada in August 2016, you’d just started walking. By your birthday, in October, you were a master of that, running around like a nut. That meant we could start bringing you to Play Zone type places—called Kids’ Cafes—which you took to with absolute gusto. There’s one at the local Homeplus (a grocery store in Jochiwon) where I took you a lot, while your mom taught lessons.
Because you were walking, I was also able to take you out to other places. Sometimes we just walked around our apartment block, which for you was a whole world of discovery. Leaves! Rocks! Bugs! All of it was new to you, and exciting and fun.
I also sometimes took you out the local reservoir, where the city’s water is stored. There’s a big wooden walkway that circles the lake, and though we never got all the way around, you enjoyed the walk. More about that a bit later: there’s an adventure that happened with a friend of ours who was in Jochiwon for a few months.
You remained fixated on books, all through the second year of your life. Some of your favorites were the Underpants books—Dinosaurs Love Underpants, Pirates Love Underpants, Aliens love Underpants—and I plan on holding onto those for you. You also really like Sesame Street books, and pretty much anything with dinosaurs. Actually, in the last few months (from about August to October) you’ve been starting to speak, and any of your first words have been dinosaur names: “tsa” for Tyrannosaurus Rex (or, as we say to you, “T-Rex!”), “anklyo” for for Ankylosaurus (who’s your favorite), Puhtera for “pteranodon” (the P isn’t silent in Korean), and so on.
You’re also surprisingly interested in clothes, much more than your mom and I are. This was the year you got into hats: we ended up buying a couple for you, and you got a few in Canada, including a cute frog hat your auntie Marie made for you. You’re a bit less crazy about them now, but in the summer of 2017, everytime you left the house there was a big decision to make (by you) about which was the hat of the day: the fedora? the porkpie hat? the ball cap? You also really got into shoes, because our cleaning ladies gave us some hand-me-down shoes and you have had a huge assortment to choose from, including some that are golden and shine brightly. (Those were your favorite for quite a while!)
There’s a Toy Library in Jochiwon that we started to use sometime after we got back from Canada. The place is run by a great NGO that fights for kids’ rights and supporting kids in the developing world, and they have a ton of toys, including lots of animal figurines and plenty of dinosaurs. You’ve played with every single dinosaur toy in their stock. Another big obsession of yours is their stock of toy cars—big plastic ones.
Likewise, one of your favorite things to do is come into my room and raid my stock of die-cast hot wheels cars. Man, do you love that: you’ll come in and choose a few cars—usually one more than you can carry—and then try bring them all outside (the living room) to play.
We spent Christmas in Jochiwon, in our huge apartment. Your mom’s mother (your grandmother) visited, and statyed with us a few days. I don’t remember what she gave you as a present—or what any of us did—though maybe your mom will be able to jog my memory. I can tell you that, both before we went to Canada last summer, and after we got back, your favorite song for her to sing to you was the Korean version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Somewhere around here we have a video of it, I’ll try include the video it in this post, and have it backed up on a DVD-R for you.
What else? The holidays—my winter holidays, that is—are kind of a blur in my memories as I write this. I spent a fair amount of time with you, and some time trying to write, too. I taught Presentation classes, which meant a split-shift schedule and me being at school a lot of the day, so your mom was with you a lot. She took you to nearby playgrounds, played with you in the house, and taught you a lot of things. Shapes, colors, numbers—you didn’t learn the words for these things, not then, but the concepts were starting to take shape in your mind. You had begun to really like dinosaurs by then, I think, and of course every day you spent a lot of time just leafing through the books we got you.
Those books! We got them from two sources: half of them were from local people selling or giving away boxes of kids’ books. Your mom once got us something like five huge boxes of board and kids’ books for the equivalent of five dollars! It was shocking. Sometimes, people even gave away the odd box of books for free, too. But the other half came from Ebony Books, a small independent second-hand bookstore in Cheonan. We used to drive up to Cheonan with you, to pick up groceries at the Costco Wholesale chain, and one place we used to stop while we were there was Ebony Bookstore. (I think the Korean name was “Ebony and Ivory” or something like that.) Well, early in 2016, they had a massive clearance sale. WE went and picked up two insanely heavy boxes of books, most of them board books, but also some chapter books like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Horrible Histories, as well as some old, battered Dr. Seuss books. I also picked up some hardcover Nancy Drew series books in the local second-hand shop in Jochiwon, with which you’re oddly fascinated: you can read the text yet, but we think you like holding a “grown-up” book and mimicking reading it, the way we do, as well as seeing the occasional pictures as well.
It was sometime in the spring of the year that we decided to try wean you off Pinkfong, a crazily popular video series run by Koreans. The song “Baby Shark” (아기 상어) was, no kidding, one of your favorite songs at the time, but you also used to throw temper tantrums i you didn’t get to watch it, and we had to distract you from them with songs hat made you dance—which was easy, because you LOVED to dance. There are lots of cute videos that get a few moments of it, but the cutest moments, unfortunately, were never recorded. You were so adorable, though.
And as for your character, well: even in March—hell, even last year—we could see hints of your stubbornness, which you get from both your mom and me in different ways—but we could also see how generous and loving you are. Of course you’re small, and sometimes your emotions get the better of you, but you’re eager to share in a way I don’t see in a lot of kids your age. We’ve never seen you bully anyone, or push people around. You do sometimes thump your mom, or step on her, or scratch her arm up in ways that hurt, but it’s not out of malice: you never do such things knowing you’re hurting someone. You like to share food—offering it to us, and to other people—and one of your favorite activities is helping to empty the dishwashing machine… which you do with such energy we have to sometimes ask you to wait or slow down, as receiving everything you remove from the machine sometimes feels like a two-person job.
In March, school started again, and your mom was teaching, so we locked into a schedule: I’d go to work, and she’d be with you, and then I’d come home and take you out or hang out with you while she taught. Pretty gruelling, some days, but it worked, and meant you got to see both of us most days. Sometimes I’d go back to school at night, to get work done or try write. (Though all my attempts at working on my novel failed to produce much of worth until April!)
I guess I should also note that we moved house in April. That’s the second move in two years, but it was just to another building in the same complex in Jochiwon. We took a smaller apartment, because the associated fees were way too high for the palatial place where we lived in from April 2016 to April 2017. That was… well, not stressful, really. We hired a moving company, which felt stupid considering we were maybe moving 200 meters, to another building in the same complex where we live, but it saved us so much hassle. With a baby, it’s the way to do it.
Some people living nearby gave us a semi-functional air conditioner, so summer was… liveable. Not pleasant—Korea still hasn’t really internalized the idea of air circulation or ventilation, in 2017—but liveable. Our new apartement was smaller, but cozy and, as long as we accepted sleeping together with you for the remainder of our stay in Korea, pretty much perfect. It has a nice view, and the day care is just downstairs and out our front door. So guess what came next?
Yep, you started going to daycare that April. We were lucky: there happened to be a spot and you were able to start basically right away. This was a difficult thing to agree on: in South Korea in 2017, the government had just started taking seriously the issue of child abuse in day care and preschool facilities. The news was full of stories about children being abused or killed in day-cares, and we were terrified. However, it turned out the day-care run by our apartment complex was pretty good, all things considered. The windows were all open to the public, and the teachers seemed genuinely compassionate and kind. A couple of the boys in your class are jerks, and one looks like a little gangster’s son—and, yes, I’ll admit, in October one of the kids bit you—but it turns out biting is a common misbehaviour among little kids, and mostly things were good. You made some friends in the daycare: a girl named Gayoung, and a little half-Japanese boy named Chaehwan, as well as a couple of Korean boys named Juwan and Jaehu.
Oh, and much as I may complain about things in Korea, I will say this: the support for having a kid is pretty reasonable. We got a sizeable allowance from the government for the first year of your life, as well as being lucky enough to live in Sejong City and get one of the biggest lump-sum payouts in the country when you were born. (All that went to baby food, diapers, and other baby stuff we couldn’t have imagined we’d need, as well as the hospital fees and the stay at the recovery center, which at one week was probably shorter than it should have been. Poor your mom… though if you’d have been born in Canada, it’d have been free, but with no recovery center.) Anyway, your day-care is basically free, which is great, and a huge help to us. The teachers like you, and while you’re still at the stage where you’re happy to play on your own, you definitely have friends there.)
Around our apartment complex, you’re pretty well-known. The security guard actually refers to me as 노을의 아빠… “Noeul’s dad.” There are a few older girls who you see often at the playground, and who sort of play the role of Big Sister to you, and you also met a boy out there who was very enthusiastic about being your Big Brother and playing with you in a way that was surprisingly kind and attentive.
Most people who meet you like you… in fact, when we meet people who meet you and don’t, that’s a pretty easy way to guess they’re assholes, because you’re an affable, friendly, sometimes-shy, but polite little kid. You have been saying “bye!” for almost a year now, and these days you’ve started bowing goodbye occasionally, as well as blowing kisses to your mom and me. You’re wary of strange men, and also seem to have a pretty good instinct about which women are nice and which aren’t, though in general you’re more comfortable with women. I think most kids your age are.
So… by the end of May, you’d continued developing. Not growing—kids between one and two years old don’t grow much, their metabolism slows down for some reason—but developing. Your personality began to really shine through, and you were starting to really be a fun kid to be around. Then my buddy Justin Howe (a writer and RPG enthusiast) came to town, to cover for someone who got fired from my workplace for some kind of shady legal problems. (He was the second guy in a month, too: while I said I worry about you having real friends here, I also find it hard—and so does your mom—to make real friends in Jochiwon, and actually in Korea generally. The expat population here is… “a mixed bag” is putting it lightly.) But anyway, Justin… you took to him really quickly, calling him “Dutch” because you couldn’t pronounce his name, and that was the closest you could get to it.
Justin was good for all of us: for me, it was a reminder that it wasn’t really my fault that I had no close friends at work: 20 foreign instructors, practically, but most of the few who aren’t weird or damaged or just obnoxious child-men are busy with families of their own. Justin hung out with us—including hanging out with you—and since he stayed to cover the summer semester, we all got closer and I think he really came to care for you, as you did him. When we’d pull up in front of his building, in the usual spot where we picked him up, you’d say, “Dutch!” even before he appeared. It was fun. We went to a lot of places. That summer was good for all our heads, I think: for me, it was especially good, since I was finally having interesting conversations regularly with a native English speaker, for the first time in years.
(There’s a shadow lurking behind that comment—about the time when we went to Saigon to share a house with people we thought were our friends, but learned were nothing of the kind—but I’ll save that for later.)
Anyway, I alluded to an adventure we had out at the reservoir. That’s in the video below, but first, some setup: you were wearing a hat, which you somehow removed and dropped down onto the ground-level rocks by a stream beneath the walkway. Jihyun and I were ready to abandon it—having no desire to break a leg—but Justin insisted on going down for it. This was after we saw something mysterious causing a huge ruckus among the bushes, which I assumed to be some kind of wild pig or something. But Justin, fearlessly, insisted on going down and getting it for you. Here’s how it went:
VIDEO
And then, not long after that, Justin moved back to Pohang, where he and his wife live. His wife’s a webtoon artist, and he’s working freelance—teaching English and writing fiction, after a few years teaching in public schools here.
Anyway, he was gone. It left a hole in our social life, but I guess my energy to finish my novel was renewed, because I jumped into that feet first in August. In September came the online D&D game, but it wasn’t a distraction. I was writing, you were at daycare and with your mom, your mom was at home teaching and with you.
By September, the walls of our house were decorated with stickers of dinosaurs and sea creatures: I put up the former with your help, and your mom helped you with the latter. Though you couldn’t yet say “bathroom” or “mine!” or “gimme!” you started to know the names of certain dinosaurs: Stegosaurus, Pteranodon, T-Rex, Brontosaurus, and of course, your favorite, the Akylosaurus. Dinosaur books and cartoons, your mom’s patient teaching, and my reinforcement all helped you get those names.
Also, I bought a Playstation 4 game console from a friend moving away, and within a few weeks, we had the TV moved into my office, because you were getting a bit too obsessed with watching it every day for longer than is healthy for a little boy. We figured it’s a way of controlling your access. I hooked up the Playstation and played a few games, though mostly I ended up using the PS4 to stream Netflix to the TV, since my laptop doesn’t have a connector that can do it. One of our evening rituals is that you come to my little office and we watch a kiddie cartoon together while I feed you. The first thing we watched was the French Zagtoon series Miraculous: The Adventures of Ladybug and Cat Noir, and these days you and I watch a cartoon called Super Monsters while your mom and you tend to watch a Korean cartoon called Pororo. You’re also a fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, and have a bunch of Thomas toys we got second-hand from someone selling them off. (You developed that interest after my sister Marie gave you a lovely wooden Thomas train that, I’ll confess, we’re saving to give you when you’re older, since you have a set of diecast ones to play with now.)
The other ritual is reading together. Every night when it’s bedtime, we gather a small pile of books—or, if we’re all exhausted, one or two—and read them with you. Your mom has a more emphatic, playful, style of reading, while I am likelier to turn whatever’s on the page into a song. Dinosaur and animal books feature promimently in this ritual, though you also love certain pop-up books, especially one called Deadly Dungeon. (There’s a whole series this is part of, but it’s from the 80s and hard to find.) Who knows, maybe I’ll make a dungeoneer of you yet?
August was tough because you got a bad earache that lasted weeks and weeks: we were still taking you to the doctor by the middle of September, and had to get you off antibiotics despite your not having recovered fully yet. We all got sick from that virus, and I in fact ended up needing to visit the doctor a few times—my ears were fine, but I got terrible chest congestion. Anyway, you recovered but I stayed sick a while, and then, by the end of September, we were all fine again. Whew!
October was stable, other than the fact I was pushing like hell to finish my book, and the fact that you got bitten at day care… on your chest, right near the armpit. Apparently you saw a kid was playing with something—a door on a toy stove, maybe?—and you thought it looked fun. You came over—not to steal it from him, you’ve never done that so far—but just to be near, and crawled under the door. The kid bit you. Shocking! But kids do that. It’s a phase. We were shocked and mad, till we read more about it, and learned that lots of toddlers go through that phase, because they can’t express themselves in words yet.
I’ve started taking you for walks at night, though I may have to adapt that habit to late afternoon. Last night, your birthday, you got a very stuffy nose and couldn’t sleep much at all. It was a rough night for your mom, for me, and especially for you. The walking, though, is good for all of us: your mom gets a break, and I frankly have neglected my fitness while writing. I need to start swimming again, maybe start going to the gym, but walking’s a good start.
I guess that brings us to your birthday. We had big plans.
Since it was exam week, I didn’t have to go in to work that day. You were dressed up in your kilt—which is what you wear on fancy-dress days, now—and served you a chocolate cake that your mom made for you. (It seemed a good idea, after the horror I made for your first birthday cake.) We gave you a collection of plastic dinosaurs, because man are you crazy about dinosaurs. Many of your first words, in fact, were the names of dinosaurs, with the ankylosaurus being your favorite. (“Ankylosawa!” you would say, happily. It’s so cute.) The collection is pretty big, and though we didn’t know it at the time, it would become a mainstay of baths for a month or two, with you picking which dinosaurs you wanted to bring to the tub. Unfortunately, the plastic bin of dinosaurs we got you didn’t have an ankylosaurus; it’s just a random assortment, so we couldn’t know till it was opened. But that would be sorted out soon…
Then we went out to Sejong City to bring you to a place you really like to go: the natural history museum. It doesn’t matter how many times we take you, you’re always excited to see the dinosaur bones and the taxidermied modern animals. This time, you actually recognized the tailbone of a stegosaurus! We were surprised and proud of you. On the way out, your mom got you another dinosaur: this one was a huge ankylosaurus, about ten times the scale of the little ones you got earlier in the day. You were so happy, gripping the thing by the tail and waving it around.
Then we drove back to Jochiwon, and took you out to 용암골 (“Volcano Village”) the barbecue meat place you like. They serve barbecue-grilled pork that’s just a little smoky, and you absolutely go crazy for it. You were gnawing the meat off the bones and were so happy, you ate like a maniac. That, of course, just made us happy to see, since you’re sometimes a really picky eater. At least on your birthday you ate well!
After that, it was home for a bath, some storyboooks, and bed. That was your birthday for 2017! I’ll update more soon—I’m thinking of more frequent updates from here on in, since I struggled with so many of the details of the past year. Whether you will want to hear about your life in this much detail, I don’t know, but in case you do, it’ll be here for you. I’ll also try write a bit about us, too, since nobody really knows much about their parents’ lives when they were little, and you might be curious.