Mother-in-law Diaries March 2003

This month: The Dirty Diaries.

1-22-03

Sitting on a cold seat, in my cramped outhouse, staring at a wastebasket stuffed with stinky folded tissues reminds me of my first year in Korea. My housemates were an old single man rarely up before dinner and three college kids sharing a room. The bag of tissues next to the toilet never filled up. I‘d assumed my roomies changed it. I flushed mine.

One day the landlady came stomping at my door. On the floor of the bathroom, a massive pile of dirty wet tissues and a torn plastic bag. Someone had been dumping water in the waste bin to flatten out the tissues. She‘d assumed it was the foreigner that‘d never seen a bag of dirty tissues three months earlier.

One recollection leads to the next. The tissues I hold are from Texas Street, where a woman handed me a large packet with the name and address of her church, a picture of Jesus and two men holding hands pointing to a church. For the next three weeks I’d think of Christ, the fellowship of man, before I wipe.

1-27-03

I’m sitting in a drinking establishment with Kiwi friends. We’re discussing nothing particular. Some Brits are in one corner. Some Koreans are with us. A Canadian man, age about 43, enters and sits with us. None of us know him so he introduces himself.

The conversation turns to American foreign policy. We voice agreement, disagreeing with unilateralism. I compliment the Kiwis for their country’s nuclear policy and say, “What’s the most dangerous weapon you can find in New Zealand, a baseball bat?” The Kiwis laugh. The Canadian shoots an angry look my way. I say, “Is it a bad thing? I think it’s great.” He says, “Your comment lacks tact.”

Later the subject turns to North Korea. An American explains that a missile from the North would take less than thirty minutes to reach Seoul. But here we are safer. I mention my wife and kids. What would happen to us? To them?

“No worries,” says the Canadian. “Your wife and children will burn up so quick, there will be no pain. You can always get another wife and have more kids.” I left soon after this comment, the Canadian‘s face still intact.

2-02-03

My wife’s student, a fifth grade girl, says she studies ten to fourteen hours each day. I asked about her schedule. Get up at five and practice brain exercises, a sort of cerebral meditation. For this she uses an electric gadget that looks like a plastic, battery operated brain. Then she reads literature for an hour, and then real meditation. She studies English for three to four hours on various days, Chinese calligraphy, arts and crafts, science, and Korean grammar. Foremost, three to four days a week she studies math for a six-hour stretch. They eat in class. The teacher eats as they work.

“Why would your mother enforce something like this?” I ask her. She says, “Because she loves me.” If this is love, my children will be loveless.

2-05-03

Whenever I meet expats who frequent Poetry Plus they that mention my kid pissed in the bass drum. I don‘t mind. It was funny and I‘m not embarrassed. Kids piss. We all piss. Most men prefer pissing on a tree to a toilet. I admire a woman that knows how to use a squat toilet.

Those without children don‘t seem to understand that shit happens with kids. My neighbor kids eat boogers and offer to share them with me. When I was a child my mother occasionally found me munching on the neighbor‘s cat‘s turds in our sandbox. I recall having a collection of toe and fingernails in a jar as a kid. Something about them fascinated me.

Our second boy, Josh, is almost a year old now. This is an age when children scoot about quick as cockroaches, getting into anything that takes their fancy. My approach towards this is to clean the house thoroughly and let him loose. My wife and mother-in-law‘s policy is to leave the house filthy, leave everything out on the floor, and leash the child like a hound. Follow him, pull him back – restrain him. It all seems so much work. My way is simple. It takes ten minutes to clear a room, and then I can watch the news.

Sometimes our methods clash. Just last night I‘d cleaned up and let Josh loose. He scooted out to the living room, which I‘d cleaned thirty minutes earlier. I watched BBC. But Josh was quiet. Even that young, silence is an unspoken signal. Something was not right. I walked out.

In both hands Josh held Caleb‘s turds. His shit-smeared face grinned up at me with brown fudge dripping from his teeth. My wife shrieked, “What did you do to him!” Me? My mother-in-law had left Caleb‘s trainer toilet out, in the center of the room.

2-18-03

Last night I called my parents to tell them about my holiday in India. My mother was fascinated, but brusque. She asked some questions and handed the phone to dad. He was quiet, asked me very few questions and paused whenever I asked him something. His answers were low grunts at most. I asked him if he was okay and he said yes.

Today I got an email from him explaining to me, with apologies, that they, my sixty-year-old parents, were having sex when I called.

Mother-in-law Diaries Jan 2003

The Beat January 2003

10-24-02

This Saturday I follow Caleb as he makes the rounds through our neighborhood. All up and down our street, ajummas sit gossiping, shucking garlic or picking persimmons off trees. Caleb greets each group but is intent on a specific place. We reach a courtyard entrance and he clicks the ringer. The gate swings open and an old man pops his head out of the front door to greet us. Caleb bows, takes off his flip-flops before leading me into a bedroom where a high school girl sleeps off last night‘s study session. Caleb proceeds to shake the poor girl, and when that doesn’t work he pulls her blanket off and grabs her hair, saying, “get up” in Korean.

Sometimes when I walk down in our local market strange men and women yell to me, “Caleb’s Papa!”

10-28-02

This weekend is a two-day trip to the countryside with my kids and mother-in-law. My mother-in-law carries three packs with her. One is a change of socks and underwear. The others are food and drinks. Each bag seems to weigh as much as me, filled with fruits, candies, and canned drinks. I offer to buy lunch but she shuffles away before I can insist.

Most westerners believe Korean women are naturally weak and helpless. Korean girls enforce this stereotype through excessive diets and knock-kneed, finger-sucking mannerisms. But not long after the first child is born, a stout ajumma replaces the flimsy little virgin. In place of the timid girl is the aggressive, blustering woman we submit to on subways.

So we sit down on the train and my mother-in-law begins opening bags of goodies for us, tossing emptied bags into the aisle, stuffing pear peels into torn vinyl seams and the net pouches attached to each seat. Like all old Korean women, she refuses to believe someone might not be hungry. She wakes me up to offer me apples, peaches, pears and persimmons, then three kinds of juice, a beer and soy milk before finally allowing me sleep. My son has picked up this Korean habit. Two year-olds in America are greedy. My child will climb on my chest and force-feed me.

11-02-02

Its 9 pm and we‘ve returned home from a five hour train ride with our two sons. Our oldest crawled over seats and demanded candy and cola for the whole ride. The youngest has a cold.

We approach our home’s front gate with children, backpacks and boxes. Oddly the store is closed, but I hear the faint pulse of hands clapping and voices howling. A light shines out from beneath the door leading into our spare bedroom. My wife is mumbling emphatic tones, shaking her head and hissing. I follow her into the next room, where she kicks in the bedroom door. Standing on a small dinner table, my mother-in-law is wailing out a trot, shaking her arms and hips. Surrounding her are old women clapping, cheering and toasting. The room is covered with empty soju and beer bottles. Upon another table are three gas burners frying black Cheju shit-pig.

I head towards the scent of burning grease. But then the room is silent. My mother-in-law‘s face wears the look normally reserved for guilty teenagers. The ajummas have fled. I sit down, eat, and empty soju bottles into an unused shot glass. Jang-mo-nim collects beer bottles, appeasing my wife‘s newly cultivated temper.

****

A female friend from Michigan arrived in Busan about three months ago. She is a tall, robust girl with impressive breasts and thick curly hair. Needless to say, the average Korean man is possibly intimidated, by both her physique and intelligence.

But love comes when least expected. Two Korean men are now obsessed with her. One is a divorced playboy with a Russian fetish. He is apparently fascinated with my comrade‘s breasts, as is the occasional taxi driver telling her “boobs number one!” This man‘s height places him at a convenient point of view.

The other man took her out last week. He said he liked her because she was sexy. I‘d not warned her of the Konglish translation – sexy girl. She figured it out. After dinner her date suggested a video-room. One hour into the movie she went to the WC. When she returned, her date lie stretched out on the vinyl couch naked, smoking a thin cigarette and smiling. “I love you,” he said. She tossed him twenty thousand for cab fare and went home.

12-15-02

It’s 11 pm, we‘re all sick tonight, sitting on the heated kitchen floor watching Korean soaps and blowing our green running noses. I’m listening to wind rattle the splintered, dry-rotten window frames. Outside the store wash-water from neighbors’ kimchi tubs freezes to the tarmac. Vegetables stiffen, seem to wilt, but in two days will be bigger and greener, in front of me on the little floor-table with a dish of peppered dwenjang and samgyeopsal.

The metal store gate screeches its welcome and in hops a snot-nosed ten year-old neighbor girl wearing sandals, shorts, and t-shirt. She skips to the door, grins and bows. “Dad wants liquor and cigarettes,” she says. Then she stumbles back out, cradling two bottles of soju, two packs of cigs, and an ice cream cone.