Monthly Archives: April 2013

Instrument of Peace

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

For a long time now, I’ve been trying to imagine what an instrument of peace would look like. In my fantasy world, they would be at the top of every child’s wish list. In the aisle where toy guns used to be, “instruments of peace” in clamshell packaging would fly off the store shelves.

In this world, we would not be afraid to send our children to school, go to a movie theater, or to participate in events like the Boston Marathon…In my fantasy world, kids could march to the beat of their own drummer and be celebrated for it. Women would feel safe walking alone. Here, it would be preposterous to think that marriage between people who love each other would have to be “legalized.” Food, shelter, and access to health care and education would be available to everyone. It would be taken for granted that we could assume the best of each other.

On those days when the world seems so very dark, what can we do but try to sow peace, love, pardon, faith, hope, light, and joy every day, in whatever way we can, wherever we may be?

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How my brother foretold his future when he was 1 year old

This is my little brother Teddy on his first birthday (dol). In Korea, the first birthday is celebrated as one of life’s most important milestones.

Cardinal ColorsTeddy is wearing the dol-bok, worn for the first birthday celebration. The stripes on his sleeves are in the traditional Korean pattern that incorporates the five “cardinal colors” of Yin and Yang. White represents metal, red represents fire, blue represents wood, black represents water, and yellow represents the earth. This colorful striped pattern is worn only by children and is meant to protect them from evil spirits. The long belt wrapped  around his body represents  longevity. A pouch like the one to the right, is strung on the belt for good luck.

Traditionally, the gods Sanshin and Samshin Halmoni were honored at a first birthday celebration with offerings of food and prayer. Sanshin, the Shaman mountain spirit, (who has also been assimilated into Buddhism), grants prayers for sons. He is always depicted as an old man with a tiger by his side. Samshin Halmoni, or Birth Grandmother, is the Shaman spirit of childbirth.

Symbolism imbues every aspect of the first birthday celebration. With a decorated screen as a backdrop, a round prayer table is set with an abundance of auspicious foods and objects. The roundness of the table ensures a smooth life without conflict and hardship.

To cut a flower would be to cut short the life of a living thing, so only a potted orchid and artificial flowers (both seen on the left) decorate the table. Bronze tableware is used to represent a bright future. Noodles represent long life. The bowl of steamed white rice symbolizes wealth. The association is made explicit by the coins that are actually placed on the rice. Behind the bowl of rice are jujubes, which represent abundance, fertility, and prosperity. Other fruits are piled high in the display. The parsley to the right represents good health, longevity, fertility, and also marriage. Next to the parsley is a skein of thread for longevity, and coins for wealth. Usually one would find a bowl of seaweed soup, closely associated with birth and birthdays. An assortment of rice cakes is also usually present on the table. White rice cakes represent purity, rice cakes coated in red bean powder are meant to ward away misfortune, the multi-hued rice cake seen on the back right is meant to ensure that all of these good wishes for the child will come true.

The birthday celebration culminates with the doljabi ceremony, during which the one year old foretells his future by selecting an object laid out on a table. For our first birthday parties, our family has always set out the three most commonly used objects. If the child chooses the pen, he’ll become a scholar. If he picks money, he’ll be wealthy. If he picks the thread, he’ll live a long life. Sometimes the doljabi can be even more elaborate:

The child who chooses the bow and arrow will become a warrior. The medallion represents fame and prestige. Note the stethoscope and judge’s gavel on this doljabi table!

In the photo of my brother Teddy’s doljabi, you can see him foretelling his future with amazing prescience. He picked up the pen and then jabbed it into his cake. After four straight years on the Dean’s list in college and after a brilliant three years of law school where he distinguished himself as the editor of the law review, Teddy found his true passion as a Crossfit gym owner. Nowadays he writes about nutrition and health on his gym’s blog…

and it was all foretold on his first birthday!

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Home

I love the city.

I feel energized and really alive when I’m there. If I could pick anywhere in the world to live (and had unlimited funds!), I’d make my home in NYC.

But I live here:

En route home from NYC

O.K., this isn’t actually where I live. I stopped the car about an hour north of Charlottesville to take this picture on our way home from NYC.

I must admit, it was good to come home to this:

Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’
Daffodil ‘Replete’
Hellebores

And…….this!

Prunus Persica

I wait all year long for this patio peach tree on my deck to bloom. When the occasional peach forms, I leave it for the squirrels. I grow it solely for those gorgeous, ephemeral blossoms. For one or two weeks at the most, the tree is a vision of exquisite loveliness.

After an entire week of full days and late nights in Gettysburg and New York City, my son Nicholas fell ill on our last night in the city. He was burning with fever and he had a pounding headache and sore throat. As he sat in our hotel room, shivering, his teeth chattering, his friend Noah wrapped a quilt around his legs. It was a vision of exquisite loveliness to see this adolescent “googleyezing,” fart machine toting, water-squirting camera bearing prankster sitting solicitously by his friend’s side, his blue and pink spiked head cocked, asking him how he was feeling.

Back at home a couple days later, my son Teddy and three of his friends were having a long-awaited spring break sleepover. They were camped out in the basement watching a movie. In order to segregate Nicholas and his germs from our guests, I set him up in our master bedroom with his own movie. Nicholas settled himself down where my husband usually sleeps.

“Lie down on my side of the bed so you don’t get Dad sick,” I told him.

He said, “But yesterday Dad told me to stay on his side, so I wouldn’t get YOU sick.”

Home is wherever there are people who care about you and who look out for you. It’s wherever you have invested your heart by planting seeds that will blossom into flowers or friendship…whether that’s in a hotel room in NYC, or in your own little patch of paradise in Charlottesville.

Hope your weekend is “wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping”!

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Central Park

For our last morning in NYC, the boys wanted to go to Central Park.

 

 

As the boys climbed the rocks, Rosita and I sat on a park bench and chatted (and took pictures, of course). Here’s her lovely photo of a horse-drawn carriage:

 

It was time to leave New York and head back to our lives in different states.

When Rosita’s family moved away four years ago, I gave her a seal that said this:

 

When we met up this time, she gave me this pendant she had made using the seal:

Rosita's pendant

Rosita’s pendant

It was hard to say goodbye to our friends, and of course, we could never forget them.

 

 

Friends then, now, and always.

Happy Birthday, boys…We love you.

*Read Rosita’s take on our weekend in NYC here. Enhanced by Zemanta

Soho & Chinatown

New York Adventures continued…

Breakfast!

by Rosita

Although we were in NYC to celebrate our sons’ thirteenth birthdays and to do boy-oriented things, I considered it my duty as a friend to introduce Rosita to the joys of Uniqlo. The boys managed to find a way to amuse themselves:

Next we went to Pearl River, a fabulous Asian emporium in Soho and one of my favorite stores of all time. I brought my sister there once and we spent a longish time there, which might explain this text:

My son replied:

But look!

And look!

Yep. Victory is sweet.

Muji, which Rosita refers to as her favorite “anal retentive validation store” was juuuuust down the block, so off we went. Rosita took this photo of the boys looking pretty happy to be there and posted it on Facebook:

Muji

I took this photo moments later:

We wandered over to Chinatown in search of lunch, but were waylaid by a chopstick store. Yes, a chopstick store! It’s not like you see one of those every day…

Chopsticks Store – try to say it 10 times as fast as you can!

Finally, the boys’ patience was rewarded when we stopped for lunch:

Soooooo…as we were heading back to the subway, we just happened to go past this store:

Obviously, we had to check it out.

So how do you drag two almost thirteen year old boys into a Hello Kitty Emporium? By turning a blind eye to this:

The Googleyezer
Googly eyes in Chinatown

And this:

The GooglEyezers strike again.

Hey! You gotta do what you got to do!

Tomorrow: Central Park

*My friend Rosita wrote about our trip to NYC here.
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FAO Schwarz, Dylan’s, and Times Square

Our Boys’ Birthday Adventure in New York City continued at FAO Schwarz…

It’s not just for toys!

We went to Dylan’s Candy Bar for more appetizing fare…

From Project Runway: dresses inspired by and made out of candy!

And then on to Times Square!

After our long day, we were dead tired…though perhaps not quite as dead tired as these riders:

Tomorrow: How we lured our two adolescent boys into the Hello Kitty Emporium…
*Find my friend Rosita’s blog post about our trip here.
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Grand Central and Rockefeller Center

(Continued from last week)

My friend Rosita and I strode out of our hotel with our almost 13-year-old sons. We headed for the subway in high spirits to begin our Boys’ Birthday Adventure in New York City…If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know that I have a spectacularly bad sense of direction, aaaaaand you can probably guess what happened next. After a couple of false starts we had to stop and consult our iPhone maps to get us back on course for the station.

 

Rosita and her beloved, permanent iPhone prosthesis!

Rosita and I laughed as we remembered another earlier trip we had made to New York City with our friend Katherine. Rosita was the only one of us, who had an excuse for not knowing her way around a city that was new to her. Katherine, like me, had been a student in NYC, but despite the years we had lived in the city, and despite the fact that it is rationally laid out in a fairly systematic grid, we were still constantly getting lost and disoriented. At one point, when we were having trouble figuring out which way was north, Katherine said in all seriousness, “Let’s figure out which way the sun is shining on the buildings!”

“Oh yeah, and let’s also look for which side of the buildings the moss is growing on!” I suggested.

 

The boys wait…

We stopped to smell the roses along the way…

 

 

 

First stop: Grand Central Station, celebrating its 100th birthday this year…

 

…and looking grander than ever!

 

 

 

 

Rosita caught the frenetic activity of shoe shiners:

 

The beautiful food court

 

Teas

 

Spices

Rosita’s photo:

 

We caught the last day of the Nick Cave installation of raffia horses on the ground floor of Grand Central, but sadly missed the Alvin Ailey dancers donning the horse suits to bring the sculptures to life.

 

 

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins was commissioned to write this poem for Grand Central’s Centennial
Golden Clock

The iconic Chrysler Building:

 

The quintessential mode of transportation in NYC:

 

Rockefeller Center

 

 

 

 

 

Minamoto Kitchoan, the Japanese confectionary at Rockefeller Center.

 

 

 

 

 

Cherry confection captured by Rosita

It’s not so much about the taste, as it is about the aesthetic experience. I still maintain that desserts are not the forté of Asian cuisine, (red bean paste — need I say more?), but everything in this store is absolutely  exquisite…to look at, anyway!

Next stop: F.A.O. Schwartz, Dylan’s Candy Store, and Times Square

*Check out Rosita’s blog post about our trip.

 

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Chronic Chroniclers

My friend Rosita and I are both chronic chroniclers…

I love that you can see us both with our cameras aimed at our sons in this shadow photo…

Occasionally, our subjects tire of the relentless flashbulbs:

“No more pictures!”

But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree:

“Say cheese!”…(That’s a waterproof camera, by the way).

Here’s Nicholas recording his FaceTime conversation with his little sister.

Next week: More photos, of course! Until then – have a wonderful weekend!

Odyssey in the Odyssey

Part 1: C’ville – DC

Everyone makes the occasional dunderhead move while driving. As an Asian woman driver, I have always felt unduly burdened by the weight of negative expectations on the part of other drivers on the road. I worry that to them, my occasional driving blunder is no mere momentary lapse, but rather: further evidence that Asian Women Can’t Drive.

“Damn!” I think when a wheel goes over a curb, or when I am forced to make an inelegant seventeen point turn in my big honking Honda Odyssey minivan. It’s not the action itself that bothers me so much as the reaction I imagine witnesses having.

“Mmmhmmm,” I imagine them saying to themselves, “Asian Woman Driver.”

This is all to say that our trip to New York City was somewhat tortuous, and maybe even a little torturous. I started out in Charlottesville and picked up our friends at a hotel in D.C. From there, we planned to drive on to Gettysburg to pick up my son, who was there finishing up a weeklong field trip with his school.

As I have written before, navigation is not my strength. In preparation for the trip, I had printed out a sheaf of google maps for every leg of the journey. I had also set up my iPhone maps to help me navigate. Despite my best efforts, I was in trouble not five minutes after leaving my parents’ house in Arlington to pick up our friends. As I approached I-66, I called my sister in bewilderment.

“There’s a huge sign that says HOV-2 and motorcycles only! Is that a general prohibition, or just in the lanes with the diamonds?”

“Just the lanes with the diamonds!” my sister reassured me over the phone. I was still rattled. If I could have possibly figured out an alternate route, I would have, just to be sure not to get hit with the whopping $1000 fine single drivers are threatened with on those big electronic signs dotting the highway. Finding an alternate route on my own? Obviously, that was just not an option for the likes of me. I kept nervously glancing over at other cars hoping to spot other single drivers, but didn’t see any. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I managed to make it to the hotel hotel without getting pulled over.

When Rosita got in the car she immediately set up her own iPhone with google maps. Even with two different iPhone navigation apps and a set of printed directions, we still managed to get lost in D.C. None of our sources took into account the vagaries of D.C. traffic patterns, which change according to the hour and the day. At one point, we quite literally were directed straight into oncoming traffic. We kept having to make sudden last minute U-turns and lane changes. I was getting so frazzled that I started to make genuinely boneheaded driving maneuvers. I may have driven through a red light, for example.

“We’d make a lousy Thelma and Louise,” Rosita observed.

I followed her train of thought, “Yeah. We’d be like, ‘How do we get to the cliff? Which way should we go?! What does google maps say? Where’s the freaking cliff?! Oh, never mind…’.”

Later in New York, we met up with a high school friend of Rosita’s. He listened to our harrowing tale of escape from D.C. and told us that he had learned an expression for this when he lived in L.A.: “DWA,” or “Driving While Asian.” Whatever.

Part 2: Gettysburg – NYC

We made it to Gettysburg and met up with my son. We decided to kill some time walking around Gettysburg to wait for a cafe to open so we could have lunch before pushing on to NYC.

 

“How many more hours till we get to NYC?!”

 

Gettysburg Emporium

I got yelled at by a little old lady in Victorian garb in the Gettysburg Emporium for taking this picture:

 

The Cupcake Café! This perfectly pink and frothy venue was just the place to start our adventures with our two adolescent boys. They let us know how they felt about it:

 

Pit stop at the Cracker Barrel:

 

Pee/Tea/Checkers break

We finally made it!

 

New York-style pizza for dinner

 

Kicking back at the hotel

 

 

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My son and his buddy

My son and his buddy are both turning thirteen this month. The boys met when they were just three years old during storytime at the library, and they immediately hit it off.

(My son is on the right).

I became fast friends with the mother of my son’s friend. Besides the fact that our sons were born in April and have names beginning with “N,” we share other similarities. Rosita and I are both Korean. We married Englishmen, who happened to have studied at Cambridge at the same time, and whose families live in the same general part of England. When we met, we were both in the trenches of parenting our firstborns and were delighted to have found a kindred spirit in each other. (As you might guess from her name, Rosita has a fascinating background, which you can read more about on her blog).

The first time Rosita and her son came over for a “playdate,” (I put that word in quotation marks, because after all these years it still makes me wince and want to apologize for using it at all), the boys disappeared into the playroom. Rosita and I sat next door in the living room drinking tea and chatting happily. We kept hearing loud crashes and noises, interspersed with peals of laughter. We were not yet seasoned mothers, so we were foolishly reassured by the laughter. We had gotten past the point where we couldn’t blink for fear that the boys might drown in a toilet, impale themselves upon a sharp object, or tumble headfirst down the staircase. We thought we had at long last dropped our anchors into the relatively safe harbor of toddlerhood. In any case, we were desperate for adult conversation and companionship and it was easier to just ignore what was going on next door.

“Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat…” (Crash! Bang!)

My son’s friend kept popping into the room to drop hints that we should be paying more attention.

“We’re being Thing 1 and Thing 2,” he said.

“Oh, uh-huh,” we nodded absentmindedly and continued communing with each other like long-lost sisters, “Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat…” (Smash! Boom!)

He disappeared into the playroom again, only to reappear a few minutes later to announce plainly, “We’re doing terrible things in there.”

Clearly, it was time to check on the boys. When we got to the playroom, our jaws dropped. We were aghast. We were speechless. Every single toy was on the floor. Every single puzzle had been upturned and all the pieces strewn about the room. Every single board game had been opened and the pieces shaken out all over the floor. Every single book had been taken from the shelves and had been dumped on the floor. There was literally no inch of carpet visible under the ungodly mess the two boys had created in a matter of fifteen minutes.

We scolded. We cleaned. We gave stern looks. We reorganized. We shook our fingers. We reshelved books. Finally, we got the room back in order.

Not wanting the boys to mess up all of our hard work again, we sent them upstairs to play in my son’s room.

“Don’t make a mess!” we warned and went back to our tea and sympathy.

“Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat. Chitchat, chitchat, chitcha–”

Suddenly, we realized that it was alarmingly quiet upstairs. I think most parents would agree that silence is far more ominous than noise.

We raced up the stairs to see the two boys hunched silently over stuffed animals, industriously giving them haircuts.

“We’re being barbers,” the boys announced proudly as they looked up from their work. The badly shorn lions and bald teddy bears stared at us reproachfully…

I’ve always been convinced that the boys will be lifelong friends. Rosita’s family moved away to Madison, Wisconsin four years ago, but we still stay in touch and we see each other at least once a year. This past weekend Rosita and I met up in New York City with our boys to celebrate their thirteenth birthday together.

Tomorrow I’ll share pictures from our trip, but for now, here are a few pictures I took of the supplies the boys travelled with:

Hair-spiking gel? Check.
Remote control fart machine? Check. Water-squirting camera? Check.
Video-recording spy glasses? Check.
The Googleyezer
Googly eyes in Chinatown
Googlyeyezed Starbucks Lady.
Best buddy? Check.
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