uBookworm

Food Writing Elsewhere

2007-06-22T09:57:00.000-05:00

Thanks for visiting! My recent writing is more likely to be found at NibbleKibble, a mostly Chicago-based food blog. (I can't believe I've neglected this one for such a long time...)

recent creations

2006-08-09T17:15:00.000-05:00

Aside from looking for intern positions in Chicago involving writing, I'm beading.

enamel flower blue
An avanguard pair (each piece of the pair has slightly different yet matching design), made with classic-looking cloisonne & glass beads.

ginkgo ring amber
If my boyfriend was a woman (or a man who wears this type of earings!), I would give him this pair--his nickname is Giant Ginkgo.

caliph's milky stones
Vaguely reminiscent of a harem in a caliphate, I think.

triangle red

Photographing them with my boyfriend's 100mm macro lens is a lot of fun, too--although it can be tricky with dim light and shallow depth of field.

pervert on commute

2006-07-02T18:03:00.000-05:00

In this article on CTA Tattler, Kimberli reports a commuter pervert on CTA's Red Line who takes one of the single seats facing each other at the end of the train car and exposes his erect penis to unfortunate female commuters sitting in the opposite seat. This criminal pervert takes advantage of the isolated nature of these specific seats, which prevents other commuters from witnessing his act.

Seeing the criminal musterbate in front of her twice, she says: "I knew that I should have done something, but was paralyzed. I don't know why I didn't do something, but I guess I was both embarrassed and scared to get up and go press the button on the other end of the car." Why didn't she just get up and let everybody know that there was a pervert playing with himself? Why didn't she just get off the train and call the police? Why didn't she tell the asshole to stop?

All these questions would popp up in my mind, questioning her cowardry response more than the pervert's criminal and hateful act--had I not been victimized by the same guy myself.

About a week ago, I was reading the British Lit textbook in one of the single seats facing each other on the Red Line when I noticed a young white man staring at me from across the aisle. Sipping his Dunkin Donut coffee every once in a while, the man scanned me with his sticky stare. There was something disconcerting about his stare, but I went back to reading. The train was fairly empty. A few stations later I glanced at him before looking around in the train; I recognized something flesh-colored and stick-like against the bottom of his white shirt. Huh? I thought and looked back, to find his pale yet erect penis sticking out of the fly of his pants. At that point, my head was completely washed white and all I could think of was to not let the guy know that I noticed his penis. I dropped my eyes on the page that now conveyed no meaning to my paralyzed mind. As soon as I had a chance to get off the train to change lines, I did so, without looking at the pervert again.

The rest of the day I spent in a strange state of heightened yet detached sensitivity. I didn't tell anyone about the incident. Just like Kimberli, I knew that I should have acted decisively and felt that my inaction was somehow more culpable than the man's silent aggression toward me.

The next day, the same guy took the seat in front of me. Again. Since I was paying more attention to my surroundings, I noticed him right away. This time, I observed that he was doing preliminary masturbation through his pants before pulling out the erect penis. He cleverly used his large black backpack to further shut out any possible witnesses from the rest of the car, putting his penis back into the fly at each station, making sure that customers on the platforms won't see his criminal act. I typed on my laptop, again pretending not to notice yet paying full attention to the man. Since the train was slightly more crowded, the man had fewer chance to expose himself. As the train moseyed through the construction area and as the guy continued his sneaky attack, a different kind of whiteness filled my brain. It was a mixture of many emotions, but dominant were weariness and rage. I wanted to humiliate the guy in the most humiliating way. I wanted to retaliate.

What a pathetic loser, I thought. It was obvious that he does what he does in order to humiliate, stain, degrade, the woman in front of him whom he hates and fears--woman whom he hates because he fears. What a pathetic way to deal with his fear, though--in front of me was a miserable creature who succumbed to his fear without even knowing it, who can only soothe his miniscule, crooked mind by living in the fantasy of humiliating the object of his fear and hatred by making his own sexuality despicable and obscene. If he uses his penis as an instrument of degradation, what kind of impoverished relationship does he have with his own sexuality? As I thought about the repulsive behavior of the man in front of me, weariness overcame rage within me. I felt very tired. Tired that this was the man's only way of self-placation, weary that I felt paralyzed at this utterly pathetic attack directed at women but only coming back to himself.

For some reason, calling the police or the conductor didn't occur to me. When the train became rather empty after leaving Grand, I was weighing something in my mind. There was no one between the man and me when the train arrived at my station. I picked up my backpack and stood up without looking at the man. A part of me said no, it was dangerous, but I wanted to say it.

As the doors opened, I leaned toward him, looked into his small blue eyes and said "loser" and got off the train. My knees shook as I went down the stairs. I was scared that he might retaliate. The rage and weariness were intertwined with fear. I hoped that I sounded as weary as I felt, as firm as necessary for it to be effective. I didn't have time or the guts to observe the emotions that probably sprang up in his small blue eyes. I spent the day imagining what terrible emotion might have been in his blue eyes when he heard the word.

I haven't taken the Red Line since, so I don't know if the man is still harassing other women in his gluey bog of misery.

For once, the radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon was right--sexual crime is a hate crime. Sexuality itself, sexual organs themselves, aren't despicable, obscene, degrading, or repulsive. The criminal pervert's penis wasn't nauseating in itself--it was smoothly shaped and faintly pink-hued, nothing inciting immediate disgust. It is the malice emanating from the man that turned his penis into a repulsive weapon. It was his hatred toward me, me as a woman, that disturbed me into emotional paralysis and near panic. It was his own perception of his penis as something disgusting that made me look away, not the physical appearance of his equipment itself. (This is why being a nudist and exposing oneself on a train are two different things--the former doesn't involve malice and hatred.)

In this sense, the act of exposing his penis to me is only harmful because he means it to be harmful. Somehow I perceived his desire to harm me (probably not me personally but me as a representation of all women) and felt fear and panic. It was when I saw his miserable smallness in turning his own sexuality (and his sexual organ, too) into an object of disgust that my fear and embarrassment turned into weariness. Of course this is all in my head--for all I know, the CTA perv might be leading an incredibly rich personal and sexual life by exposing himself on CTA trains--but the more I think about that man, the more pathetic and miserable he appears in my brain. I just hope that I won't see him again and if I have the misfortune to run into him again, I'll definitely call the police, not because he exposes his sexual organs but because he does it with malice and hatred.

keywords: CTA, public transit, public transportation, pervert, crime, sexual crime, sexual harrassment, Catherine MacKinnon, feminism, public offender, pervert, exhibitionist, penis, masturbation

do girls dream of thier boyfriends' signature?

2006-04-06T19:30:00.000-05:00

I had a dream. It was a very wrethced dream that kept me tossing and turning in the wee hours of the night, but I only remember one thing: my boyfriend's signature was different from the one I'm familiar with. Patrick's signature consists only of his first name, and is done in one of those unintelligible way with violent lines jerking up and down. In my dream, he signed something with his full name, and his handwriting was round and rather cutzy. Somehow the difference in his signatures bothered me a lot in the dream.

When I woke up, I told him about the dream. He smiled uncomfortablly as I described his weird signature. When I'm finished, he said, "You know what?"

"What?" I asked. He grinned some more and shook his head.

"I used to sign exactly like that," he said.

How could that happen? How could I see his old signature, which I hadn't seen or even heard about, exactly the way it was in my dream? I hadn't even known that he used to sign differently. I was stunned. I guess it's one of those strange coincidences that make people believe in some supernatural power or divine existence, but since I don't buy into that crap... I'm still perplexed. Wow.

keyword: dream, dream analysis, signature, relationship

somatophilia/somatophobia: what self-pornorates on Flickr tells me

2006-03-27T19:29:00.000-06:00

As one of the million amateur photographers in need of occasional pettings on our artsy-fartsy ego, I use Flickr. Last Thursday, I posted a few black and white photographs of my legs and left hand, which I decided to call "self-pornorate."

Thursday's legs #2

left hand

Nothing too dangerous--one might even call them "art nude" photographs, although I'm not sure if I want to call them that.

But they're getting soooooooooo much more views than my other photographs of landscapes, architecture, plants and so on. Two of the four self-pornorates were clicked on more than 400 times over the weekend, whereas most of my photos get less than 30 clicks over many months.

What does that tell us about human nature? I'm not saying that we are driven only by our "basest" instincts, which is a Victorian way to say our sexual desire (although it is tempting to say so). Rather, the disproportionately large interest shown in these body shots in the Flickr community seems to point to our strange curiosity and affinity toward our bodies. I, for one, sometimes find myself clicking on small icons of photographs that seem to zero-in on bodies or body parts. It could be the absoolutely beautiful curves defined by the back of a young (and super-fit) woman in a perfectly lit studio. Or it could be the rough texture of a creased hand of an old farmer in an African savanna under the scorching sun.

Human bodies, when photographed right, seem to be far more powerful and beautiful than a shot of the most beautiful and elaborate flower. It is often said that our modern culture teaches us the strange somatophobia (fear of bodies and bodily functions) and it is so true, but behind that drape of somatophobia, there seems to be the curious and tender child of somatophilia (love of bodies) pushing us to test our boundaries, if in the semi-secrecy of the internet.

I'm sure many of the clicks my self-pornorates get are out of sheer lust, but the rest of them testify to our universal love of, and interest in, human bodies.

keywords: photography, nude, self-portrait, sexuality, somatophobia, somatophilia, body, desire, Flickr

pink notebook, 1984

2006-03-21T15:04:00.000-06:00

On my fifth birthday, my mother bought me a garish pink notebook with an illustration of a house with perspective problems, inhabited by a family of grinning purple dogs. She wrote on the back of its front cover in her large, round handwriting: "A gift to Yu for your 5th birthday. Keep a diary every day. Mom." I don't know what she expected a five-year-old to keep diary about. But I was to write something in it, every day. Anything.

The pink notebook was one of the manifestations of her ambition to raise her only daughter to be a lover of reading, just like her (as you have suspected). To learn to read, one must learn to write, she must have figured.

My mother was a woman of dicipline. She made sure I wrote something on the notebook every day. She would make me sit at the dining table and draw her chair next to me. Sipping from her mug of Nestle instant coffee, she watched me squeeze an event or two and put them on the lined pages in my crooked handwriting of a beginning speller. In a few days, I came to resent the notebook. There wasn't much to write about in my infant life of hiding in a playroom of the kindergarten when the 2 o'clock snack of the day was mango (for I hated mangoes) and riding my tricycle on the white linoleum floor of my parents' bedroom, avoiding the imaginary monsters that roamed the dark and sinister caves that was the space under my parents' twin beds.

"There must be something you want to write about," my mother would say.

"There's really nothing!" I whined, wanting to hit the table with the 2B pencil in my hand but not daring to do so in front of her.

"You have to keep doing what you've started," she would resort to her favorite line. I wanted to tell her that it wasn't me who started the diary but her, that I never wanted to keep a diary. But again, I didn't dare to say it. I felt the tears generate in the back of my eyes. It felt so unfair. My nose became stuffy with the tear I held back. Eyeing my mother, I swallowed what almost came out of my mouse: "but I don't know what to write." Her face was telling me that there's no "but." She had a very low tolerance for whining, especially when it was about wanting to quit what I'd taken up.

I grasped the pencil firmly and put its lead tip on the cheap paper. I went over my day and tried to think of something to write. Nothing. I got up in the morning, went to the kindergarten, had a normal day and came home. Nothing special. I think harder. Nothing. The pencil starts to feel slippery in my sweating palm. I must have been making that grumbling noise unconsciously, for now my mother snapped: "stop oinking!"

I flipped through the earlier pages of the notebook.

"Tuesday, Jan. 23. I went to the kindergarten today and played with Ayako-chan and Sugimoto-kun." I'd done the same thing today, but I'd wrote about that already.

"Wednesday, Jan. 31. It's a month and two days till grandma visits us."

"Thursday, Feb. 1. It's a month and a day till grandma visits us."

It would be a bit risky to do the same count-down three days in a row. I needed something else. I went further back in the notebook for a hint.

"Tuesday, Jan. 16. Mom and dad had a quarrel. It was because dad went to golf and came back late." I could remember how furious I was on that day. My mother wouldn't let me go play with Naoko-chan because she didn't have time to pick me up later. So I wanted to take revenge in my diary. Writing about the petty quarrel between my parents seemed to be the best way to do so. But when my mother looked at the entry, she didn't say anything. I remembered my disappointment at the non-reactio of my mother.

Still I didn't have anything to write about. A five-year-old doesn't have a passion for detailed description, nor has she acquired the intellectual manipulation to squeeze some deep-sounding thoughts out of the mundane. For her to write a diary entry, there has to be something extraordinary happening in her life. And my life was a finest specimen of an ordinary life. Or so it appeared to my five-year-old self.

Finally I picked up the pencil that I had dropped on the table and started writing. I'd found a thing to fill in the note space designated for today's entry.

"Friday, Feb. 2. It has been a Friday today."

I don't remember what my mother said. The yellowing paper of the old pink notebook does not reveal what happened after that. The entry for February 2nd, 1984 ends right there, curt and brief, just like the other entries of my "diary" infested with drastically deformed or completely inverted characters and skewed pencil strokes almost tearing the cheap paper, revealing the grudge the sun-tanned girl held toward her demanding birthday gift.

keywords: Thailand, Bangkok, childhood, diary, journal, mother, daughter, parent, reading, writing, education, 1984, discipline, literacy

disrupted CTA services...

2006-03-09T09:40:00.000-06:00

It was the slowest CTA train I've ever taken. It took me an hour and a few minutes to get from Jackson to Morse. Even worse, the train stopped a few hundred yards from the Morse station. I don't know why--I could see the track ahead, and there was no "crew working on track ahead" as their daily "we're sorry, we're being delayed" announcements always suggest. I was on the famous "blessed train" (whose conductor has a rather jolly disposition and announces that he's grateful that the customers are on his blessed train, slipping in some varying lectures on the virtues of being grateful and so on), but I wasn't blessed enough to know what was going on. When the train had been stopped for seven minutes, in sight of the station, a woman got up her seat, shaking her head and mumbling something in her mouth. It was clear that she was far more irritated than the rest of us, who were, in our own lights, pretty pissed ourselves. She pried open the heavy door to the next car.

"Well, that'd make a tremendous difference," I thought, and went back to my reading of The Devil's Highway. The dead Mexican "illegal entrants" were enjoying the coolness of the morgue drawers after days of baking in the 100-plus degrees heat in the Southwestern desert. They were waiting for their first-time-ever flight--in their government-paid cheap coffins--to their homes in Veracruz.

The young man who sat next to me stood up, folding his conservative newspaper. I looked up. He walked up to the front of the car, where some people were saring out the windows, shaking their heads and muttering something in low voices. Then I saw the pissy woman walking across the track. She must have gotten off the train from the narrow connection bridge between the cars--in her frustration at the stopped train. She furiously walked to the other end of the tracks and quickly disappeared down the bank. By now, everybody on board was following her eccentric action, half amazed and half entertained.

The train remained at the same spot four more minutes before it slowly slid into the station just two blocks ahead. A police car cruised past us on an alleyway along the track. When I finally stepped out of the snail train, a loud and cracked voice was apologizing the delay due to a "disruption to the service." Sure, the woman getting off the train mid-journey was a surprise, but that didn't explain why the train had to stop for seven long minutes before her irritation reached that point. Sometimes I'm sick of this perpetually disrupted public transit system...

keywords: Chicago, public transportation, CTA, red line, train, reading, Luis Alberto Urrea, Luis Urrea, The Devil's Highway, immigration

Spring snow and croccusses

2006-03-09T09:26:00.000-06:00

Pure white feathers fell from the sky, one by one, like extra-large snow flakes that covered the ground a few days ago. It oculdn't have been snow, the air was too warm, too spring-like for snow. The feathers landed on the yet leafless bush in someone's front yard, and I noticed many more trapped among the intricacy of the shrubbery. I looked up puzzled. The feathers poured from a point in a tall tree, where two branches grew in their separate ways. Something moved behind one of the branches. I walked a few steps to get a better view. It was a small hawk, white throat and belly with dark brown spots, feeding on a pigeon. As it picked the fluffy mass at its talons, more and more white feathers, no, they were now softer downs, came flowing down to the shrubbery, to the ground. Tiny sparrows chirped in the tree a few feet from the grim feast. The hawk buried its compact head in the invisible flesh of the pigeon, probably still warm and tender. It seemed miraculous that none of the many, many feathers and downs did not bear the bloody mark of the violent death.

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

I saw the spring on that day. Three yellow croccusses had pushed their heads through the previously fridged soil, appearing right next to the apartment door. Daffodils had grown to a few inches tall, their cream-green flower buds still tucked in their leaf-wrapped stems. The air was moist and mild, making me roll down the window of my car on the way home. The yellow of the willows seemed to have intensified in the last few days.

plant abstracts (and more) from the Lincoln Park Conservatory

2006-02-26T20:08:00.000-06:00

A visitor to the Lincoln Park Conservatory was reading a book by a small pond, occasionally talking to the maintenance guys whom she was obviously friendly with. I don't know how she survives the heat and moisture in her thick jacket...

Winter tends to be a quiet season for me as a photographer. Trees have shedded leaves months ago and it is too early for the spring budding. The sky is often gray, reflecting the gray dryness of our neighbor's front lawn. There aren't too many parades and fairs to go out for portraits. My camera and I mostly hybernate during winter, unless there's a spectacular snow storm or something of the sort.

This year, this natural (?) tendency has been backed by another factor: I was too busy with the preparation for my first photo show to do anything other than buying frames, cutting mat boards and peeling photo corners off their backing sheets. (And when these were done, there was the exciting part of running up and down three flights of stairs with cardboard boxes full of framed photographs.) When the show was done, I was exhausted--I wanted to do things with absolutely no connection to photography. Patrick, who also participated in the same show, felt the same way. So, we spent the first weekend after the show buying grocery to fill up our empty fridge and watching an anime show set in post-unification Germany.

The next weekend after that, however, the photoworm in my stomach started to squirm. I wanted to take pictures. Badly. We went to the Lincoln Park Conservatory, one of our favorite photo-shooting spot (it's free and full of interesting tropical plants). Here are some of the shots from the outing.

Making a near-abstract image out of natural objects is one of my favorite experiment.

Two different patterns on the stalk (?) fascinated me--what are they becoming when they grow up?

A palm leaf seen from below. It has a nice curve like a woman's back!

My recent obsession: keeping the image very dark to direct attention to minimally lit parts of interest.

keywords: Chicago, Lincoln Park Conservatory, greenhouse, plant, photography, photograph, abstract, portrait, natural abstraction

old school

2006-02-23T18:53:00.000-06:00

My father can be quite clueless when it comes to worldly things. When I was ten, I stopped him from putting a plastic steamer (meant to be used in microwaves) on stovetop to heat it. It was very close but he didn't burn the house down.

Just five minutes ago, I spotted him licking the back of postage stamps he was using to mail in a check. I know one has to lick the back of postage stamps in order to make it stick to envelopes in Japan. Maybe he was so used to doing it that it was automatic. But... couldn't he tell that the American ones he was using were... in fact... stickers? He peeled them off the backing sheet himself. I dunno.

keywords: father, daughter, parent, funny, Japan, U.S.A.

beyond the four borders

2006-02-22T16:56:00.000-06:00

She looks as if she has retreated into her own inner world, oblivious of the rambunctious festivity all around her. Her profile is frozen in this private moment, with her heavily made-up face slightly tilted, her dark eyes cast down pensively. There is an expression on her face, of a person in touch with something intangible, of a woman lovingly holding something fragile so dear to her. On her head is a headdress of rainbow feathers and colorful fake crystals the size of her eyes. She has a hand raised at her shoulder, lightly holding the blue feathers trailing down from her exuberant headdress. Yellow nail enamel on the tips of her fingers is visible on the blue feathers, like a few precious eggs of a tiny bird in a blue nest. The crystals and line stones that hang from her ears and circle around her neck sparkle, reflecting the mid-morning sun of June. Under the heavy makeup and dazzling costume of a samba dancer, I cannot tell if she is really a woman.

One Sunday in June 2005, I decided to hunt for opportunities for candid portraiture in the Gay Pride Parade of Chicago. Earlier in the year, I had surprised myself with a few gripping portraits I took during the Cinco de Mayo Parade in Pilsen. I itched for more such opportunities. I borrowed Patrick’s Canon, a reliable SLR (single lens reflex) camera, a 50 mm lens and a 70-200 zoom, and hopped on the red line. As the red line train moseyed toward Belmont, it became decidedly festive with a drove of men in shiny drag and crazy hand-made costumes got on at each station. A sense of strange camaraderie brewed in the train, although no one openly made a cheering racket.

At Addison, a silver-painted man with a gigantic pair of white wings came in, with his three servants in flashy blue Teutonic armors and matching helmets. The winged man majestically smiled and nodded at the passengers, who admired his elaborate costume. But my eyes were nailed to three conspicuous bulges in the fronts of the Teutonic men: their armors stopped abruptly at their bellies, and all they had underneath them were tiny, tight-fit triangles of swimsuits, from where their blue legs stretched into their blue flip-flops. Oh, boy, I thought. How many of these protrusions am I going to see today? Patrick had told me that people “can go quite far” in the event. I felt a liberal half of me struggling against the other, more prudish half of me as to the appropriateness of the open display of sexuality in public. As much as I embraced the honest talk about sexuality and equal treatment of various sexualities, I felt at a loss at the sight of its ostentatious display. Yet, if the whole purpose of the Gay Pride Parade was to celebrate the gay sexuality, along with the gay experience, my discomfort with the conspicuous blue bulges seemed to have no space in the occasion. At least I have someone not too hard to follow now, I thought, peeling off my eyes from the Teutonic soldiers.

As I turned the matter this way and that way in my mind, the L arrived at Belmont. I got off the train, following our majestic silver angel. As he inched toward the exit on the crowded platform, the silver angle sprinkled his theatrical smile liberally upon spectators and fellow participants of the parade. I noticed stubs of beard on his round chin. He and his Teutonic blue men led the obedient herd to the intersection of Clark and Belmont. Some of the spectators bought cheap metallic rainbow beads and small rainbow flags from street vendors as we passed them by. TV crews were busily setting up their threatening cameras on tall cranes hovering over the street, while a few young women took off their punk tee-shirts and crossed off each others’ nipples from their breasts using strips of gray duct tape, as if they were tearing delicate handles off translucent bone china teacups. Dozens of exuberant men and women self-consciously adjusted their costumes on the colorful stages set on trucks. A gigantic pink flamingo with a tall bobbing head chatted away with an Andalusian widow in a black shawl and an elaborately carved comb, waiting for the parade to start moving. I pulled out the Canon and took some general shots, hesitant to zero-in to the men in opulent costume on stages and on the pedestrian street. I felt a kind of thin curtain of instinctive defensiveness and rigidity descend on the parade participants at the moment they noticed my camera.

I started walking down the Clark Street, looking for a good subject, preferably someone engrossed in his own concern, unconscious of the surroundings. I switched the 50 mm lens with the 70-200 that would allow me to get intimate shots without getting too close to the subjects. I didn’t want them to notice me partially because I was too shy to talk to them. The biggest reason, however, was to capture the natural expression of the people, avoiding the artificiality of posed portraits. Gradually the festive atmosphere of the parade seeped through my timid skin, making me feel open and bold. I started to shoot bursts of colors on men in drag, confidence in gay men feeling comfortable in their own skins, coquetries of dark-skinned female dancers dressed like hyper-sexual orange cats, and occasional insecurity of the parade participants betrayed through their excessive display of pride and confidence. Some of them noticed me and my conspicuously long zoom lens. As the enthusiasm of the parade seized them one by one, just as it did me, more and more of them winked, smiled, and waved at me. Soon I found myself smiling back and waving my camera in thankful gesture. I wasn’t a part of the parade, that was for sure. With my invasive and patronizing gaze through my camera, I was a conscious outsider. Yet, the welcoming gestures of the “true” participants, which in themselves were a product of the communal enthusiasm, had a gradual but palpable blurring effect on the boundary.

About fifty shots later, I came across a group of samba dancers waiting for the parade to move on. At first, my eyes were fixed on a smallish but energetic African American woman, who literally jumped around the group in a burst of rage. I tried to capture her naked and sincere anger, so rare to see in our emotionally well-insulated lives. In her rage, she bared her teeth, glared at a member of her group, shouting something that was lost in the cheerful noise of the crowd before it reached me. Before long, however, I gave up on capturing her. Along with the difficulty of following her as she quickly disappeared to and reappeared from behind the wall of colorful dancers, a doubt as to the morality of photographing someone’s emotional explosion without her permission held me back. The age-old stereotype of Africans as primitive, emotional and savage immediately came to mind—would I be reinforcing the stereotype by visually reproducing the image? I didn’t feel that I had a convincing answer that could justify my photographing her emotional moment if the dancer were to confront me on the ethics of the action.

Leaving the angered dancer in a golden headdress, I looked around for another subject. A few feet away from the main group, I found a quiet Caucasian dancer who seemed to be oblivious of the intense scene taking place only a few steps from her. She seemed to be absorbed in her own private thoughts, intense and sincere in its own way. I pointed the camera at her, framed out everything except for her profile and her gorgeous headdress of trailing feathers and glittering crystals, adjusted the exposure, and released the shutter several times in a row. The small mirror in the camera made the familiar clicking sounds.

When I removed the camera from my eye, the African American woman was nowhere to be seen. I probably took fifty more shots as the day and the parade proceeded, but when I looked at the photographs I took on that day, the shot of the pensive dancer surpassed all the rest. With the quiet but intense emotion on her face and inexhaustible details of her headdress, it is visually captivating. Yet, the photograph bears a special meaning to me precisely because of what are not in the frame. The photograph preserves what I did not photograph: the blue conspicuous bulges of the Teutonic warriors, the taped-off pale breasts of young women, and the bared teeth of the samba dancer. In future, as I mature as a photographer and come to terms with ethics and emotions involved in the art, I will probably look back at the photograph and trace the meandering route I have taken to reach the position I have come to embrace. But now, the photograph of the pensive samba dancer is a portal to the myriad unsolved questions that lie beyond its four borders.

keywords: photography, portrait, candid, Gay Pride Parade, Chicago Gay Pride Parade, LGBT, ethics, 2005, festival, parade, ethics of photography

2006-02-11T13:48:00.000-06:00

After weeks of going through thousands of pictures, cutting mounting boards and running up and down flights of stairs with bulky boxes of frames, the Love-a-Palooza pre-Valentine's Day Art Show (see below) is now over. Thanks to all the art-oriented people who came out on this dreary night, Brooke's antique condo bustled with hugs and conversations. It was very interesting to see which ones of my photographs caught attention and which ones were liked the most--some were surprising, others were expected. Flipping through the unframed prints, some visitors suggested combinations of photographs I hadn't thought of, such as the ones below.

Since there are quite a few leftovers, I will have to look into other opportunities for art shows. But right now, after weeks of virtually no life other than the show-related work, and after a morning of through-cleaning of the apartment (which has been under piles of papers and cardboard boxes), I'm all ready to sink into a nice comfy chair with a big mug of coffee and gaze at the light flakes of lake-effect snow dancing in the pale gray sky. Sweetie-Pie, Patrick's old cat might climb onto my shoulder, demanding attention she has been deprived of--and I will pet her and rub her chin, listening to her satiated purr and feeling the warm weight of this furry creature.

Pre-Valentine's Day Art Sale in Chicago

2006-02-10T17:41:00.000-06:00

Declaration of Love in Autumn

My photographs will be on display and for sale on Friday, February 10 in Rogers Park, Chicago. The show, titled "Love Shack," features works of two photographers (including me), a jewery maker and a drawing artist. It takes place at a private residence--an absolutely beautiful three-bedroom antique apartment near the Lake Michigan, belonging to Brooke Costello, who is the organizer of the show. Time and the exact location is toward the bottom of this post.

The other photographer (who happened to be my boyfriend), has selected prints from his urban architectural and cityscape shots. The drawer, whom I haven't had a chance to meet, uses Indian ink and dry brush to create minimalist but gorgeous silhouettes of female bodies. As for myself, I will focus on my nature photographs, which were the starting point of my photographic experiments--I started photography in my parents' backyard and nearby forest preserves. Below are some of the photographs that will be included (and thus for sale) in the show.

Lotus

Feather

Dewdrops

Impression

Love Shack Art Show
time: 3 pm to 9 pm
location: 5089 N. Winthrop Ave. Apt. 3N (Brooke Costello)

For Google map, click here. As a rule, the area suffers from a pretty bad parking shortage. The good news, though, is that the apartment is two blocks from the Thorndale station of the CTA Red Line, and buses 36, 84, 136, 147, 151 are also convenient from downtown. Once you are at the door to the building, just buzz the apartment 3N. One of us should be able to let you in and greet you on the third floor. Brooke will accept cash and check (bring plenty!). If you have any questions, leave a comment to this post. I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

analyze me

2006-01-29T14:00:00.000-06:00

I had a dream.

Apparently there is a range of sounds in Western-style hand-clapping that cannot be produced by the Japanese way of hand-clapping. A lecturer was giving a lecture on the subtle but important difference between the two ways of clapping hands. A whole bunch of Japanese grade school kids listened intently, then practiced the Western-style hand-clapping, imitating the enthusiastic lecturer. When they all nailed it down, they marched out of the hall into the street lined with neighvorhood produce stores and fish markets, clapping their hands in the Western way, producing the impossible sounds unknown to the Japanese thus far. They were VERY proud of the noises their little hands made, as onlookers stood amazed.

I wonder what Freud has to say about this.

keywords: psychoanalysis, psychology, dream, dream analysis, Freud, East-West

the horror of milk tofu refuse

2006-01-25T17:00:00.000-06:00

The most horrifying food experience in my life, thus far, came right after my family moved back to Japan from Bangkok, where we’d lived for five years. Among other changes, I was to be introduced to the wilderness of school lunch, out of the cozy protection of home-cooked lunches. My mother, never a big fan of cooking, was giving a sigh of relief, but I wasn’t very excited.

After the first day of the new school, I studiously went over the month’s school lunch menu. My eyes got fixated at one item among other, more safe-sounding ones: milk tofu refuse. It was scheduled to be served somewhere in the second week of school. I had no idea what it was, but I knew it was going to be bad. I hated milk. I went to my mother and asked what the “tofu refuse” was. Instantly, her facial expression changed into that of agony. Obviously, it evoked some painful memories within her. “It’s a byproduct of tofu making. After you squeeze the soymilk out of the beans, you get the refuse. My grandma used to cook those all the time. I never liked them,” she said. I pictured a bowl of lukewarm milk with fibery bits of soy residue floating in it. It seemed to be the worst food possibly ever imaginable. “But it’s nutritious,” my mother added like an afterthought.

For the next ten or so days, the horrible image lingered in the back of my mind. When the day came, I seriously considered playing hooky, but couldn’t summon up the guts to do so and headed out for school in defeat. At 12:30, I was looking down at my plastic plate. Instead of a bowl of milk with tofu refuse floating in it, there was a pale brown, moist blob of some fibery stuff with bits of carrots mixed in. I wondered where the milk was, and thought the moistness had to be the milk. I looked at other kids’ plates. They seemed to have gotten much less of the refuse than I did. I picked at it, and fled to the task of eating other things. When there was nothing else left on my plate, however, I had to face the milk tofu residue reality again. In Japanese schools, not finishing what you have been served isn’t an option. It’s impolite, unhealthy, and wasteful. I poked at the brown blob a few more times, trying to keep the tears welling up in my eyes, in vain. I had no proof, but I was convinced it was the yuckiest thing in the world. The mere thought of putting the substance into my mouth was more than enough. By this time, most of my second-grade classmates had finished their lunch and gone out to play in the schoolyard. The teacher noticed my torment and came over to me. Probably because I was still new in school, she decided that I could “take home” the milk tofu refuse just this one time. She gave me a plastic bag from her desk, and I put my archenemy in it, knowing very well that no one would eat it back home.

In a few weeks, I realized that the school lunch was a great system. I liked most of the food, and the variety was fantastic. But I never got over my ingrained fear of milk tofu refuse. I didn’t have to suffer much, though, for I quickly developed a skill to sneakily give it off to some of my hungrier friends whenever it was served. As a result—I still don’t know what it tastes like.

keywords: school, childhood, food, lunch, school lunch, horror, Japan, tofu, tofu refuse, okara, culture shock, culture

flight from dishes--a domestic sketch

2006-01-17T13:07:00.000-06:00

My boyfriend never does dishes, except for two occasions: when someone outside of his immediate family is visiting him during my absence and when he has no clean dish or cup to use (and he has a large collection of dishes and cups, I don’t know why). There is no exception to this rule. When I’m sick, he just waits for me to get well enough to do the dishes. On such unfortunate occasions, though, when he absolutely has to perform the daunting task, you’ll find him standing in front of his kitchen sink, at a loss where to start. He’ll eventually pick up a cup with a coffee ring on the bottom or a knife covered with congealed butter and start washing them reluctantly (with liberal dose of annoyed sighs), but apparently it takes an enormous will power to even touch them.

I don’t like doing dishes, but I prefer that to having a pot of fermenting water (in which some pasta was boiled a week ago, maybe) sitting on top of the stove, so I usually give in and wash the dishes, cursing myself silently for letting him have his ways yet again. He would be surfing on the Internet in the adjoining room. In a few minutes, he would sneak over to the kitchen and fondle me from behind, making noises that he believes to be guilt-ridden. “You’re too nice,” he would say. I’ve learned better than that. After all, we’ve been together for close to two years now.

One night, when his sister and I were doing dishes (surprise!) after a Thanksgiving dinner, his dish-escapism became the subject of our conversation. "Does he ever do the dishes?" she asked.

"Hmm, I'd say very rarely," I said.

She grinned knowingly. "Yeah, he tries very hard not to do it at all. Once he told me that he didn't know how to."

"That's a great excuse."

"Yeah, and I showed him, right there, how to do it. Oh, was he unhappy!"

We laughed, a laughter of kinship, consisting of a part annoyance, a part affection, and a part forgiveness.

His sister continued. “You know, Patrick is not sexist or anything. He escapes from dishes not because he believes that women are solely responsible for them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a woman or a man who does dishes for him. He’s not a sexist. He’s…” She posed for the right word.

“Just lazy,” I filled in the blank.

keywords: boyfriend, girlfriend, relationship, power, politics, domestic power politics, dish, dish washing, lazy, funny, feminism, gender

spray your coat with grease--a night of tapas bar hopping in Madrid: part 1

2006-01-12T17:01:00.000-06:00

Although its appeal felt slightly faded after coming back from the epicurean country of Basque, we found Madrid with a great range of tapas bars to offer. One of the convenient clusters of tapas bars scattered across the city is the Santa Ana area, about five minutes walk from the tourist-and-pickpockets-filled Puerta del Sol. On our third night, which we inadvertently spent in Madrid waiting for our backpacks that disapperaed during the flight in, we went to the Santa Ana district for a night of tapas-bar hopping.

Figure A: Spaniards hapily tapas-hopping in Santa Ana.

The streets were literally filled with people overflowing from busy bars (Figure A). Smell of garlic (a Spanish staple) being fried in abundant olive oil (another staple) floated in the crisp yet welcomingly warm night air of mid-December. We headed to a tapas bar, which, according to my reliable companion's "Rough Guide to Spain," specialized in sea food to kick off our night. The place, despite its fluorescent-lit drabness, was packed with local customers mainly in their forties and fifties. A good sign. We squeezed in to get a narrow stretch of the counter and ordered a portion of gambas al ajillo (small shrimps cooked in garlic-scented olive oil in a small clay pan) and patatas bravas (fried wedges of potatoes smothered in spicy red sauce, my favorite dish from the last visit to Spain). The shrimps were ever so tender and sweet in themselves, and the bravas sauce impressed my companion, who delightedly wiped off all the piquant sauce with a piece of bread that came with the order. Drinking our Mahou beer (a rather nondescript beer ubiquitously found in Madrid), we looked around the busy establishment. Wisps of gray hair sticking out from a worn-out brown hunting cap of a working-class man, oily shells of shrimps (with tiny legs still attached to them) scattered on the tile floor, cheap paper napkins being passed from hand to hand--the place felt "authentic," which is often an euphemism for the mundane, even slightly shady drabness, but not this time. After eyeing at a few sticks of roasted meat on someone's plate behind my companion, we ordered two (by pointing fingers at them). It turned out to be pincho moruno, seasoned and roasted lamb. Very tasty. As we attack our lamb sticks, the place became even more crowded. There were people everywhere, waiting for a space to squeeze in. We decided that it was time to leave for another bar. The bill came out to be thirteen euros for shrimps, potatoes, two skeweres of roasted lamb and two beers. Great.

After spending some time in the greasy, smokey, stuffy environment, the night air felt wonderfully fresh. As we wandered in the star-ceilinged streets, we noticed that we were very thirsty--despite the beer we just had in the bar. With some notable exceptions in the Basque region, Spanish tapas are on the extremely salty side--sometimes excruciatingly salty--possibly in order to increase the sale of beverages. (Yet, alcoholic beverages are insanely cheap. For example, you can get a glass of beer for a euro, a small glass of hard cider for 80 cents.)

This time, we decided to put the guide away and sniff our way to the next tapas bar. Wherever smells good, must tast good. Plus, we could easily judge the good ones by the degree of "packed-ness," for it was hitting the prime bar-hopping time (which means it was around 10 pm--Spaniards are late eaters). Thus, following the guidance of our reliable noses and judging from the packed-ness index, we decided on Freiduria Rocio for the next stop (figure B).

Figure B: Freiduria Rocio, a tapas bar specializing in various forms of mussles.

This place was even more crowded than the last one--we couldn't get a space along the counter, which is usually the best place to occupy, in terms of the proximity to the bartenders and the ease of ordering things whose names we don't know by pointing at them. We squeezed ourselves next to a narrow, greasy wooden board protruding from the back wall, which worked as an additional counter space. Behind the counter, a bolding Spanish bartender (who appears in the above photo, proudly displaying his steamed mussles) and a Latin American cook were working like two frenzied hamsters in a fast-spinning wheel. Quickly looking around, we set our minds on a plate of mussle shells stuffed with something mysterious, breaded, and deep-fried. A group of young women were devouring these piping-hot creations one by one, using tiny spoons and smiling at each other in satisfaction. Those gotta be good.

After a few minutes of awkward attempts, I finally got the attention of the Latino cook (who was very sweet to us linguistically challenged) and asked for the fried shells. The guy grabbed six from a refregerater and threw them in the deep frier. Soon, an appetizing aroma of hot grease and spicy blend of seasonings started to tickle our nostrils. Then the cook picked them up from the frier, mounted them in a plate and handed it to me, saying "Tigres!" We dipped our tiny spoons into the soft filling in the shiny mussle shells, breaking the crunchy cover of bread crumbs. Inside was a mixture of bechamel sauce, spicy tomato sauce and chopped-up meat of the mussles heavenlily mingled together to create a dangerously hot, decadantly creamy mass of obscene calories, sodium and cholesterol. But who cares? We didn't come all the way to Spain to "eat right." So, we ploughed through these little "tigers," soothing our fiery (fiery from the heat, saltiness, and spiciness) mouths with gulps of beer. Six large shells of stuffed mussles came for a mere 4 euros.

Our coats had started to smell of grease by this time--but we weren't done yet. My gluttonous companion demanded for one more tapa. Though the angel on my right shoulder whispered no, her voice was obliterated by the devil that was my insatiable palate. We paid the bill and head out, making our way through the tight-packed crowd like an appetite-driven Moses.

[to be continued]

back from Spain

2006-01-06T12:04:00.000-06:00

a couple overlooking the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, as Madrirenos swarm around the tents selling Christmas fun stuff

I'm just back from my two-week Spain trip. It is my third time in Spain--if I count the second one, which lasted for less than a day, that is. (I had a plan to walk the Pilgrimage road of Santiago de Conpostela in Northern Spain, but had to fly back to Japan immediately after I got strangled and robbed of everything I had in Madrid... sigh). This time with my boyfriend, I revisited many of the places I wowed at five years ago with my dear friend--the thousand-arched Mesquita in Cordoba, peaceful little courtyards of Sevilla's Alcazar, and of course, the Alhambra Palace, boasting its infinite details and beautiful Arabic caligraphy. Revisiting the same places I visited years ago turned out to be more exciting and interesting than I had thought it would be. There were so many areas of the city, details of the architectural decoration, and tidbits of Spanish way of life I failed to notice the last time I was there. I realized how photography frenzy had changed my way of seeing and how it shaprened my attention to visual details. (In fact, I had hard time re-imagining how I had spent two weeks in Andalucia and Barcelona, without taking a thousand photographs five years ago! It had become such an integral part of my life...)

Of course, I wandered around in cities and regions I hadn't visited in the last trip, which included Cuenca (an avant-guard cliff-top town about 2.5 hours bus ride from Madrid) and the Vasque region (oh, the fresh seafoods so lightly/rightly prepared!!!!!). Bar-hopping (an indespensable, cheap, tasty part of Spanish life) was a new discovery for me--five years ago I was too young and felt too intimidated at the very idea of going to bars to fully explore and enjoy the wonderful Spanish bar culture along with its mouthwatering offerings of various tapas. Christmas closure of vertually everything gave me an opportunity to gape into the juicy world of Spanish TV, with its Spanish-dubbed Simpsons and stupid comedy shows (imagine: fully-grown baby Jesus in an oversized crib, diapered, displaying his armpit hair as he screams for his mom, who, in turn, is clad in cheap blue polyester veil--Spaniards definitely know how to make fun of themselves).

I'll sporadically post some sketches from the trip from now on, optimistically assuming that my bad habit of picking up a project only to desert it a few weeks later...

censored proposal of a Japanese prince: let's have concubines!

2005-11-09T10:50:00.000-06:00

In Japan, a comment made by one of the members of the royal family has stirred up a controversy over the proposed change in the Imperial Household Law, a law that governs all aspects of the royal family.

By Constitution, Japanese emperor (and by extention, members of the royal family) has a political and civic status separate from the rest of the population. The emperor's function is limited to those of purely simbolic nature, and he is not allowed to have any political voice. He does engage in the relationship with other countries, but it is limited to the fostering of "amicable atmosphere" and does not involve any political decision. In domestic matters, he is practically a decorative fixture, supposedly symbolizing the unity of the Japanese people, by the consent of the very people he symbolizes. His appearances in various scholarly and philanthropic organizations are highly valued as a token of recognition, and his occasional visits to numerous localities throughout Japan are enthusiastically welcome (or so it is staged), but those are pretty much all he is allowed to do. In a sense, he and his family are reduced to a very inhumane condition, utterly deprived of any political rights, forced to perform the roles "we the people" collectively (and imaginatively) demand him to play in exchange for the allowance we grant them from our tax dollar (I should say yen here). The Imperial Household Law articulates the details of these arrangements, based on the Constitution.

The necessity of ammendments of the Imperial Household Law arose in the absence of a male descendant of the current crown prince. The Law, supposedly according to the "uninterrupted male succession ever since the days of the gods (Japanese royal family has its mythical origin in gods)," only allows male descendants of the emperor to succeed him. Therefore, given the absence of a male descendant of the crown prince, it is likely that there won't be anyone who qualifies to be the emperor after the next one. (Further complication is the ill health, psychologically and physiologically, of the wife of the crown princess, who married him years ago, at his persistent "requests," leaving her brilliant career as a diplomat. It is speculated unlikely that she would have another child.) Prime Minister Koizumi has assinged a committee to discuss the possible solution to the problem, and its mainstream discussion has been to allow female succession of the imperial throan (with which imperialist rights have been more than furious).

Then came the Mikasanomiya comment.

In a newsletter of a social welfare organization to which he belongs, this prince, who is the fifth in the line of succession as a cousin of the current emperor, expressed his opposition to the idea of female succession. Excusing himself that since the newsletter's circulation is limited in number, his political remark would not constitute a violation of the ban of political functioning of the members of the royal family, he discusses the reason of his opposition and proposes some "solutions" to keep the male line of succession.

When I first came across the article in a major Japanese newspaper, I was quite appalled by the anachronistic diction and logic. His only argument against the female succession was the "solid historical fact" that "the imperial throne has, since the days of the gods and mythology, over 125 generations, been succeeded by male descendants, without a single exception." His claim of uninterrupted male succession is wrong, to begin with. There were empresses, many of whom known for their outstanding political aptitude and literary talent (Tanka poetry being a requirement of sophistication in the imperial court of the past). What is more appalling is the fact that this prince seems to truly believe in the strange, fanatic-rightish reasoning of the (manufactured) tradition of male succession being the source of authority and importance of the Japanese imperial family. To me, who can't even comprehend the necessity of the emperor and the admiration and the reverence some Japanese people hold toward the imperial family, his reasoning is completely alien, incomprehensible, and scary (as a kind of reminder).

The Yomiuri newspaper reports that Mikasanomiya "proposed 1) to bring back some ex-members of the royal family 2) to allow a female descendant to adopt an ex-members of the royal family (of the male line of succession) and to let him be the successor and 3) to restore some of the discontinued branches of the royal family, etc." According to an article on the Daily Telegraph, the "etc." part included a far more appalling idea, apparently censored in the Japanese mainstream media. Mikasanomiya's proposals included, with a defensive gesture that he understands that "this might be a little difficult considering social climate in and outside the country," the bringing-back of "concubines." Okay... concubines. How anachronistic is that? Emperors should be able to reduce women to child-bearing machines? Only to make sure that boys would be around to be emperors? Concubinage is different from polygamy. Polygamy could be a result of a different yet valid construction of romantic relationship, but concubinage, at least in this case, is an arrangement solely for the sake of the creation of male child. The patriarchal, misogynystic disregard of the female dignity so concisely expressed here (and apparently inherent in the imperial thoughts) disgusts me. And the fact that this incendiary part has been hidden from the Japanese public is alarming, infuriating

I don't need an emperor to symbolize the unity of the Japanese people (or whatever reason). Hence, the whole controversy over whether or not to allow female succession of imperial throne is, on one level, completely irrelevant and even somewhat useless. Yet, the values and ideologies that resurface during the debate have such disturbing power that I cannot but speak out, although I'm aware of the stupidity of the entire controversy.

your body's a wonderland... of pieces of sushi!?

2005-11-04T13:52:00.000-06:00

For some reason, I don't think using a woman's body as a sushi plate is a great idea.

Kizoku Sushi, a Japanese/French/Italian restaurant in Chicago's River North area, offers an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet that is served on what the Chicago Tribune review calls a "nubile body of a scantily clad young lady." A $500 value for a group of four. The Tribune reports that the human serving dish "lies in the center of your table wearing strategically placed clamshells," where a sushi chef places various sashimi and nigiri for your enjoyment. The Tribune goes out of its way to assure you that "it's not that gross; the fish is placed on bamboo leaves, not directly on her skin."

In the photograph, the woman looks like a mannequin, inanimate and silent object of beauty. And yet, she is alive. Her muscles are tense to keep her body (and the food on it) in the perfect arrangement. She hears your conversation over dinner. Would there be an interaction between her the plate and you the diner? Or would you ignore the fact that she's a human being? What would you talk about, if you did engage in human interaction? Would you be comfortable with picking up a piece of sushi from the body of a living person, warm and breathing? Should you be?

I don't think I would. I just can't imagine being the female diner in the photo. It's less about the fact that the woman on the table is naked than about the fact that she is used as a beautiful, exotic serving plate: an object. I don't think I should be comfortable with the idea that I can objectify someone's body and ignore her (or his) mind just because I can pile up cash upon the table. Declaring this, I'm aware that there might not be much of a qualitative difference between using a "semi-clad woman" as my serving plate and wearing a Banana Republic tee shirt that was probably manufactured in a sweatshop in Southeast Asia, where the water polluted by the bleach used in the factory is slowly destroying the workers from within. Therefore, it is not to say that being able to ignore the carefully concealed objectification of other human beings is alright and being able to have fun with objectifying a person in front of you is not, but I'm tempted to refuse to believe that there are people who can enjoy sushi served on a woman's exposed body. I mean, how would you deal with the physical presence of a whole person who is confined to being a plate? I don't understand.

I'm equally disturbed by the tone of the Tribune review, if not more. Whoever wrote this article, s/he didn't seem to have the whole idea problematic. The only concern that the article seems to have is whether or not this way of serving food is hygienic or not (recall the "it's not that gross" part). Reading the article, I rolled my eyes and said to myself, is THAT the first thing that comes to your mind? (And maybe the last?) The amused tone of the article, with its total lack of awareness that this might be found problematic (not in terms of hygiene but in terms of dignity of human body, etc., of course) is just striking. Then I wonder to myself: am I disturbed because the restaurant and its treatment in the review blur the boundary of "inherently harmless" everyday dining and the whole industry of "vile adult entertainment"? Am I buying into the centuries-old dichotomy of chaste wife and promiscuous whore? ...It raises so many questions.

It does raise so many questions, but there's one thing that is clear. It is not a great idea to serve sushi on a human body. Human bodies are warm. Sushi shouldn't be. Plain and simple.

All the photographs were taken from the Chicago Tribune website.

*UPDATE ON Nov. 10, 2005*
Yesterday's Red Eye, a free tabloid-sized paper produced by the Chicago Tribune with a younger audience in mind, featured the restaurant on the front cover. Again, without even a hint of questioning. According to the article, the serving-plate woman (who goes by only her first name) earns as much as $500, including tips, for a 1.5-hour shift, two of which she has for a night. As for conversation with her, it "is kept down to a bare minimum" in order not to make the sushi and maki rolling all over her body. In a questionnaire they had run on the Metromix website, on whether the practice is "gross" or not, 8% is reported to have said "I'd go for fresh cream," but none critical. It seems that, if I were to be sympathetic and understanding to the reporters and have some faith in them, since getting worked up on these things (like I do) is deemed so totally "uncool" that the reporters self-censor themselves, silencing any critical (uncool) thoughts and questions raised by the practice, out of sheer fear of losing their audience (and of course, eventually their jobs.)

aborted fetuses a delicacy in Japan!?

2005-10-14T13:35:00.000-05:00

As you can see on the right-hand column of the site, I have StatCounter built in this blog. (I need occasional reassuarance that someone's reading what I write. Yes.) I was looking at the visitor path earlier today, and found out that someone came here via an MSN search for "aborted fetus a delicacy in Japan." A very primitive search, indeed, but it made me curious--where the hell did this weird notion come from!? So I performed the same search, which led me to an article titled "China's Barbarism". Apparently a Christian pro-life magazine, the article on Christian Action News is just plain outrageous.

It claims that eating aborted fetuses (as a soup with ginger and pork, or for an epicurian, with orange) is a common practice in Shentzen province of China, and introduces a female doctor of "the state-run Shenzhen Health Center for Women and Children." She is reported to have handed a reporter a glass filled with fetuses, saying "there are ten fetuses here, all aborted this morning. You can take them. We are a state hospital and don’t charge. Normally we doctors take them home to eat - all free." Okay--let's say they do eat fetuses in China just for the sake of argument. Here's a doctor, trained in medical school and of course exposed to the Western culture, openly saying that she eats fetuses on a regular basis, without any hint of hesitation. Something is weird here--would she be THAT stupid to be completely oblivious of the potential controversy over the "practice"? I would think she would be more careful about publicity if she did engage in such a practice. Here, the article sounds like a poorly manufactured lie, doesn't it?

Naming such internationally acclaimed syndicated media sources such as UP and Japan Economic Newswire, but conveniently forgetiing to actually giving any citations, the article creates an atmosphere of authority and authenticity around this report of supposed "savegery." Medicinal benefits of fetuses are dropped in to make the article more believable to those of us who are bombarded every day with the newly-found anciend wisdom of Chinese folk medicine. The article from there procedes to criticize the mainstream U.S. media that fails to report the practice and the population control enforced by the Chinese government, while passingly attacking scientific research projects that utilize aborted fetuses in the U.S.

It is probably not worth trying to refute this article--unless one is preconditioned to believe it, the article's lack of credibility is quite obvious from the first glance. (Having more than a few spelling errors doesn't help, either.) I'm just too amused to know that such outrageous report existed, and that there's a whole industry of less than dubious articles on this matter. I'll probably be tired of this kind of malicious manipulation of ignorance sometime soon, but right now, I'm amused. (I'm also amused about how this scandal over a purported Chinese practice has been translated, in someone's mind, into the same practice in Japan.)

...Wait. This whole "fetus-eating in China" is NOT what the majority believes, right?

*UPDATE on Nov. 4, 2005*
Apparently the alleged fetus eating in Japan is a big thing in some weird little corner of the www. The visitors to this blog have increased by more than five times since I put up this entry! I hope people will come to their senses before too long...

"Tony Takitani" by Haruki Murakami (3)

2005-10-07T12:15:00.000-05:00

This is my translation of Haruki Murakami's short story "Tony Takitani," which has been made into a film and brought over to the U.S. (to my delight!) The first part is here and the second is here.

One day, after dinner, he ventured. How about slowing down your clothes shopping? I’m not talking only about money. I don’t mind you buying what’s necessary, and I’m glad to see you become more beautiful. But do you really need this many clothes?

His wife thought about it for a while, looking down. Then she said, I think you are right. I don’t think I don’t need so many clothes. I know that very well. But I can’t help it even if I know it. I have to buy them when I see beautiful clothes in front of me. Whether it is necessary or not, whether I have many clothes or not, these things become irrelevant. I simply cannot stop buying them. Like a sort of an addiction, she said.

But she promised to try getting out of it. If I keep doing this, the house will be filled with clothes before long, she said. For about a week she locked herself up at home so new clothes wouldn’t meet her eyes. When she did so, however, she felt like she had become empty. It was like walking on a planet with little air. Every day she walked into the dressing room, spent all day picking up her clothes in her hands and looked at them one by one. She caressed the textile, smelled them, put them on, and stood in front of a mirror. However long she looked at them, it didn’t tire her. The more she looked at them, the more she craved for new clothes. Once she thought she wanted them, she couldn’t stop herself.

SHE JUST SIMPLY COULDN’T STOP HERSELF.

But she loved her husband deeply and revered him as well. She thought what he said was surely reasonable. She didn’t need this many clothes. She had only one body. She called her favorite boutique and asked the manager if she could return a coat and a dress she had bought just ten days ago and hadn’t worn even once. That is fine, if you could take them back here, we will give you a refund, the manager said. She was their exceptional customer. They were willing to accommodate such a request from her. She put the coat and the dress in her car and drove to Aoyama. She returned them at the boutique and had the credit card transaction canceled. She thanked them, left the boutique, hurried back in the car trying not to see what was around, and headed straight back home on highway 246. After returning the clothes, she felt her body was somewhat lighter. Yes, they were unnecessary, she told herself. I have enough coats and dresses to satisfy my need until the day I die. But while she waited for the light to change at an intersection, at the head of the line, her thought didn’t leave the coat and the dress for a moment. She clearly remembered what colors they were, how they were designed, and how they felt against her hands. She could picture them vividly to the tiniest details as if they had been in front of her eyes. She felt sweat well up on her forehead. She inhaled deeply, with her elbows on the stirring wheel. She closed her eyes. When she opened her eyes, she saw the light change. She jumped to floor the gas pedal.

Right then, a semi, trying to force through the intersection with a yellow light, crushed into the nose of her blue Renot Cinque, sideways, at full speed. She didn’t even have time to feel anything.

What was left for Tony Takitani was a mountain of clothes, size seven, enough to fill a room. Shoes alone counted toward two hundred. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with them. Because he didn’t want to forever hold on to what his wife put on her body, he called a dealer, made him take all her accessories at his price. He burnt her stockings and underwear in an incinerator in the backyard. He left the clothes and shoes, for there were simply too many. After her funeral, he secluded himself in the dressing room and all day long he looked at the clothes that stuffed up the room.

Ten days after the funeral, he placed an ad on a newspaper for an assistant. Looking for a woman, size 7, height around 161 cm, shoe size 22, will pay well. Since the salary he proposed was enough to be extraordinary, thirteen women in total came to his office in South Aoyama for an interview. Five out of thirteen were obviously lying about their sizes. From the remaining eight, he selected a woman with a shape closest to his wife’s. She was a woman with a featureless face, in her mid-twenties. She wore a plain white blouse and a blue tight skirt. Her clothes and shoes were clean, but a little worn out, under close scrutiny.

Tony Takitani told the woman: the job itself is nothing difficult. Every day from nine to five, you come to the office, answer the phone, deliver the illustration, receive reference materials, and make copies and so on, in place of me. There is only one condition. I recently lost my wife and have a very large number of her clothes left at home. Most of them are brand new or like new. I would like you to wear them while you work here, as a uniform. That is why I included the dress and shoe size in the requirements. It must sound strange. You must think that this is a little suspicious. I understand that very well. But I don’t mean anything else. It’s just that I need some time to get used to the fact that my wife is gone. In other words, I need to adjust gradually the air pressure around me, so to speak. I need such a period. While I do that, I would like you to be around, in my wife’s clothes. That way, I should be able to grasp, on gut-level, that my wife died and is gone.

The woman bit her lips as she quickly thought about the strange condition. It was indeed strange. To be honest, she didn’t really get the main idea of Tony Takitani’s story. She understood that he had lost his wife recently. She also understood that his wife left many clothes behind. But she couldn’t quite understand why she had to work in her clothes, in front of him. In usual circumstances, she probably should suspect that there was something more to it. But he doesn’t seem to be a bad person, she thought. It was obvious listening to the way he talked. He was surely off-balance for the loss of his wife, but he didn’t seem to be the type of people who would harm others for that. And after all, she had to work. She had been looking for a job for the last few months. Next month her unemployment benefit would expire. Then it would be hard just to pay the apartment rent. She probably wouldn’t be able to find another job that pay as well as this.

Okay, she said. I don’t see the fine details, but I think I can do what you just told me. Could I have a look at the clothes, just in case, though, I think I should see if the size is really right for me. Of course, said Tony Takitani. He took her to his house and showed her the dressing room full of clothes. She had never seen so many clothes in a single place, except for at department stores. And each one of them was apparently very expensive, and of the highest quality. They was not much room for improvement. It was an exceedingly dazzling view. She had trouble breathing. Her heart beat fast, for no reason. For her, it seemed somehow similar to sexual arousal.
Tony Takitani told her to try the size and left the woman in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few clothes at hand. She also tried the shoes on. Both the clothes and the shoes fit her perfectly, as if they had been made for her. She took those clothes in her hand, one by one, and looked at them. She rubbed them with the tip of her fingers. She smelled them. Hundreds of beautiful clothes sat in files. Eventually tears appeared in her eyes. She couldn’t help crying. Tears welled up endlessly. She couldn’t push them back. She sobbed, trying to contain the sound, enveloped in the clothes the dead woman left behind. Tony Takitani came to check in after a while and asked her why she was crying. I don’t know, she shook her head. I haven’t seen so many beautiful clothes, so I think I’m confused, I’m sorry, she said. And she wiped off the tears with a handkerchief.

I would like you to start coming to the office tomorrow, if you don’t mind, Tony Takitani said in a business-like voice. For now, select a week worth of clothes and shoes from this and take them home with you.

The woman took time to select the wardrobe for the next six days. Then she selected matching shoes. Then she put them in a suitcase. It might get cold, take a coat, Tony Takitani said. She picked out a warm gray cassimere coat. It was light as a feather. It was the first time in her life to have such a light coat in her hand.

After the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went into his wife’s dressing room, closed the door, and for a while blankly stared at the clothes she had left behind. He didn’t understand why the woman cried looking at the clothes. To him, the clothes looked like the shadows his wife left behind. Her size-seven shadows hung on hangers rows after rows. They looked like a loosely hung bunch of a few samples of the infinite (at least theoretically infinite) possibilities inherent in the existence of a human being.

Those shadows were shadows that once clung to his wife’s body, were given warm breaths, and moved around with her. But what was in front of him now were a herd of miserable shadows withering away, minute by minute, having lost its root of life. They were meaningless, musty clothes. As he looked at them, he started to feel choked. Multiple colors danced in the air like pollens and jumped into his eyes, his ears, and into his nostrils. Greedy frills, buttons, epaulets, fake pockets, laces and belts thinned the air in the room in a strange way. The smell of abundant mothballs made silent noises like countless minute winged insects. Suddenly he realized that he loathed these clothes now. He leaned against a wall and closed his eyes, with his arms folded. Loneliness drenched him again, like a lukewarm sap of darkness. This is something that has already ended, he thought. Whatever I do, it’s all ended.

He called her apartment and asked her to forget about it. I’m sorry, but the job doesn’t exist any more, he said. Why, the woman asked, surprised. I’m sorry, but the things have changed, he said. You can keep all the clothes and shoes you took with you, and the suitcase, too, so please forget about this, and please don’t tell anybody about this, Tony Takitani said. The woman was completely perplexed, but she thought it was no use trying to get back the job any further. She said she understood and hung up.

For a while she was angry with Tony Takitani. But before long, she started to feel that it was ultimately the best way for the things to turn out. It was unnatural from the very beginning. I could have used that job, but I’ll get by somehow.

She carefully stretched out the clothes she took from Tony Takitani’s house, hung them in a closet, and put the shoes into a shoe case. Compared to these new comers, her own clothes and shoes that had been there before all seemed staggeringly shabby. They felt like a different kind of matter made from materials of a totally different level. He took off the clothes she wore for the interview, hung them on hungers, changed into a blue jean and a sweat shirt, sat on the floor and drank a can of beer out of the fridge. She recalled the mountain of clothes in the dressing room in Tony Takitani’s house and sighed. So many beautiful clothes, she thought. Oh boy, that dressing room was far larger than this apartment. It must have taken an insane amount of time and money to collect all those clothes. But the woman is already dead. Leaving behind a room full of size-seven clothes. She wondered what it would feel like to die, leaving so many clothes that are so beautiful.

Her friends, knowing that she was poor, were surprised to see her in new different clothes every time they saw her. All of them were designer clothes, sophisticated and expensive. How in the world did you get those, her friends inquired. I can’t explain, it’s a promise, she said. And shook her head. Even if I explain, you won’t believe me, she added.

At last, Tony Takitani called a secondhand clothes dealer and had him take away all the clothes his wife left. They didn’t amount to much. But it didn’t matter. He wanted them to be all gone, even for nothing, leaving none behind. He wanted them to be gone in a faraway place where they won’t meet his eyes ever again.

He left the empty room that once was a dressing room empty for a long time.

From time to time he went into the room and dazed away, without doing anything in particular. For hours on end, he sat on the floor and watched the walls. There were shadows of the shadows of the deceased. As years went by, however, it gradually became impossible for him to remember what used to be there. The memory of their colors and smells disappeared before he knew it. And even the vivid emotion he once embraced drew back outside of the realm of memory. Like a fog trembling in the wind, his memory slowly changed its shape, and every time it changed shape, it faded further away. It became the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. What he could feel was the sense of absence that was left behind by what used to be there. At times he couldn’t even remember his wife’s face. But sometimes he recalled the strange woman who once shed tears in the room, at the sight of the clothes his wife left. He remembered her featureless face and worn-out enamel shoes. And her subdued sob came back alive in his memory. He didn’t want to remember such things. But it returned against his will. After he completely forgot so many things, mysteriously he couldn’t forget the woman, whose name he didn’t even remember.

Two years after his wife’s death, Shozaburo Takitani died of liver cancer. For a cancer death, he suffered little and his hospitalization was short. He died as if he had fallen asleep. In that sense too, he was lucky till the end. Except for some cash and a few stocks, Shozaburo Takitani didn't leave anything that could be called assets. All that remained were the trombone and a huge collection of old jazz record. Tony Takitani kept the records piled up on the floor of the empty dressing room, not even taking them out of cardboard boxes of a home delivery company. For the record smelled of mold, he had to open the windows regularly to ventilate the room. But except for that, he rarely stepped into the room.

A year passed as such. However, he started to feel tired of gurading such a mountain of records in his house. Mere thought of what sat there sometimes choked him. At times he woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. His memory was vague. But it definitely existed there, with its due weight.

He called in a vintage record dealer for an estimate. Since many of them were precious records that had gone out of production decades ago, the estimate was considerably high. It was just about enough to buy a compact car, but it too, was irrelevant to him.

When the heap of the records was gone, Tony Takitani was finally really all alone.

"Tony Takitani" by Haruki Murakami (2)

2005-10-06T17:16:00.000-05:00

This is the second part of my translation of "Tony Takitani" by Haruki Murakami. Here is the first part.

But one day, out of the blue, Tony Takitani fell in love. It was a girl who came to his office to pick up his illustration from a publisher, for whom she worked part-time. She was twenty-two. A calm smiled lingered around her mouth while she was in his office. She was a girl with a pleasant face, but was not extraordinarily beautiful. Yet, there was something that struck hard his heart about her. Once he had the first sight of her, his chest was so stuffed that he almost couldn’t breathe well. What was in her that struck him so strongly, he didn’t know. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been the kind of thing that could be explained with words.

Then his attention was drawn to the way she dressed herself. Although he didn’t have a particular interest in clothing and he wasn’t the type of a person who takes notes of what women wore, he was somehow utterly impressed by the way she wore her clothes so comfortably. It could be said that he was almost moved. There were a fair number of women who were just good at choosing what to wear. There were far more who put decorations on themselves to show off. But she was completely different from such women. He wore her clothes very naturally, very gracefully, like a bird that flies to a distant world puts a special wind around its body. The clothes seemed to have acquired a new life by being put on her.

When she thanked for the illustration and went out with it, he was left speechless for a while. When the dusk came and the room sank in the darkness, he just sat in front of the desk, in an immobile daze.

Next day he called the publisher and cooked up a business so she would have to come to his office. When the business was taken care of, he asked her out for lunch. The two chatted over lunch. Despite the fifteen-year difference of their age, they had much in common. Whatever they talked about, their conversation clicked. Such experience was new for both of them. She was nervous at first, but soon started to relax, laughed a lot and talked a lot. You’re always a great dresser, he complimented when they parted. I love clothes, she said with a shy smile. I spend most of my paycheck on clothing.

From then on, they dated a few times. They sat together in quiet places and talked, instead of going somewhere special. They talked about their lives, about their jobs, about how they feel or think about many things. They could talk on and on tirelessly. They kept talking as if to fill a void. When they met for the fifth time, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend whom she had been with since high school. With the passage of time, their relationship had gone off the track and now they had reached a point where they had quarrels over trivial things every time they met. She enjoyed being with Tony Takitani more. Even so, she couldn’t severe the relationship with her boyfriend at once. She had her own feelings. And between her and Tony Takitani, there was a fifteen-year age difference. She was still young and didn’t have much experience in life. She couldn’t discern what that fifteen-year difference would mean in future. She said she needed time to think.

While she thought about it, Tony Takitani drank alone, every day. He couldn’t concentrate on his work. Loneliness suddenly became a burden, weighed him down, and made him suffer. Loneliness is like a prison, he thought. He just hadn’t noticed it so far. With desperate eyes, he kept staring at the thickness and coldness of the walls that surrounded him. If she says she doesn’t want to marry me, I might die just like this, he thought.

He went to see the girl and explained it squarely. He explained how lonely his life had been, how much he had lost, and how she made him realize all that.

She was an intelligent girl. She took a liking for Tony Takitani as a human. From the beginning she liked him, and she liked him more as she dated him. She didn’t know if it should be called love. But she felt there was something wonderful within him. I’ll be happy if I get together with this man, she thought. And the two got married.

The lonely period of Tony Takitani’s life ended. When he woke up in the morning, he looked for her. He felt relieved if he saw her sleeping next to him. When she wasn’t in his sight, he looked for her all around the house, feeling insecure. Not being lonely was, for him, a bit strange of a condition. For he was stalked by the fear of being lonely again, now that he ceased to be lonely. From time to time, when he thought about it, he was scared to the point of cold sweat. That fear continued for about three months after their marriage. But it gradually thinned away, as he got accustomed to the new life and as the possibility of her sudden disappearance became scant. He finally became calm and able to soak himself in the quiet happiness.

Once, they went to listen to Shozaburo Takitani’s performance. She wanted to know what kind of music her father-in-law was playing. Would your father mind if we went to his concert, she asked. I don’t think he would, he said. So they visited a club in Ginza where Shozaburo Takitani performed. Except for in his childhood, it was the first time Tony Takitani went out to listen to his father play. Shozaburo Takitani was playing the exact same kind of music he did in the past. They all were tunes Tony heard on record all the time since he was a child. Shozaburo’s play was very smooth, refined, and sweet. It was not art. But it was music, created masterfully by a first-class professional to put its audience in a pleasant mood. Tony Takitani piled up liquor glasses unlike his usual self and listened to the music.

As he listened to the music for a while, however, as if dusts accumulate in a narrow tube, slowly but steadily, something about the music suffocated him and made him ill at ease. The music felt slightly different from what Tony Takitani remembered as his father’s music. Of course it was a long time ago, and it was just a child’s ear. Yet, the difference seemed significant for him. It might be just a tiny difference. But it was important. He wanted to go up to the stage, grab his father’s arm, and ask him: what’s the difference, dad? But of course he didn’t do such a thing. He sipped his brandy without saying anything and listened to his father’s stage until the end. And he clapped his hands with his wife and went home.

There was nothing to cast a shadow upon their marriage. His work was going well as usual. They never quarreled. They often took a walk together, went to see movies, and traveled around. She, for her age, was a fairly talented housekeeper and knew moderation in everything. She did household choirs briskly and never caused unnecessary worries on her husband. There was only one thing that bothered Tony Takitani, however. It was the fact that she bought far too many clothes. When in view of clothes, she almost completely lost control. Her face changed in a moment. Even her voice changed. At first he thought she suddenly felt sick. Although the tendency was visible before they got married, it worsened considerably when they went to Europe on honeymoon. During the trip, she bought and bought an incredible number of clothes. In Milan and Paris, she made tours of boutiques from dawn to dark, as if possessed by something. They didn’t see anything. They went to neither the Duomo, nor the Louver. The only thing he remembered from the trip was the boutiques. Valentino, Missoni, San Laurant, Givancy, Feragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Jean-Franco Ferre… she kept buying one clothes after another, looking as if under a spell, and he followed her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the marks on his credit card might wear out.

Even after their return to Japan, the fervor didn’t calm down. Day after day, she kept on buying clothes. The number of her clothes rapidly increased. They had to order a few large wardrobes. They had a closet specially made to store her shoes. It wasn’t enough: they had to convert an entire room into a dressing room. It was a big house and there were more than enough rooms anyway. They weren’t on a tight budget either. And his wife was very good at dressing herself. New clothes seemed to be enough to make her happy. So I won’t complain, he thought. That’s fine, no one is perfect in this world.

But when her clothes started to overflow the dressing room, he couldn’t but feel uneasy. Once, when his wife was away, he counted them. According to his calculation, it would take close to two years to wear all the clothes even if she changed her clothes twice a day. It was too large of a number for any reasonable thought. He had to stop it at some point.

"Tony Takitani" by Haruki Murakami (1)

2005-10-05T22:20:00.000-05:00

This is the first part of my translation of Haruki Murakami's short story "Tony Takitani," which has been made into a film by Jun Ichikawa. To my pleasant surprise, it made its way to Chicago and on screen now at Landmark Century Theater.

Tony Takitani’s real name was really Tony Takitani.

Because of the name (of course, on official records, it was Takitani Tony), his rather Western complexion with deep-set eyes and distinct nose, and his curly hair, people often mistook him for a mixed blood child when he was little. It wasn’t long after the war, and there were many children with American soldier’s blood around. But in reality, both his father and his mother were indisputably Japanese. His father was Shozaburo Takitani, a jazz trombonist with a bit of fame since the pre-war period. About four years before the start of the War in Pacific, he got into trouble involving a woman, and had to leave Tokyo. He took the opportunity to go over to China, bringing with him only his instrument. At the time, a day’s ferry ride from Nagasaki took him to Shanghai. He had nothing at all he couldn’t bear losing, not in Tokyo nor in Japan. There was no way for him to be regretful. Moreover, the artificial glamour the city of Shanghai offered at the time seemed to be more suited to his character. Ever since he saw the elegant cityscape shining in the morning light from the deck of a ferry that went up the Yangtze River, Shozaburo Takitani was in the city’s spell. The light appeared as if it had been promising him something very bright. He was twenty-one.

He spent this turbulent period of war, from Sino-Japanese War to Pearl Harbor, and eventually to the atomic bombs, nonchalantly playing the trombone in nightclubs in Shanghai. The war went on somewhere totally unrelated to him. In short, Shozaburo Takitani was the kind of person who was almost completely unequipped for things like a will about history or contemplation on history. If he could play his trombone as he liked, could have three decent meals a day, and could have a few women around, he didn’t have any particular desire for anything more.

Most people liked him. Young, handsome, and good at his music, he stood out wherever he went, like a crow on a snowy day. He slept with a countless number of women. Japanese, Chinese, Ukrainian, prostitutes, wives, beautiful women, not so beautiful women—he had sex with almost any women he ran into. With his obstinately sweet sound of the trombone and his gigantic and active penis, Shozaburo Takitani came to be an iconic figure of Shanghai of the era.

Also he was gifted with a talent to make “useful” friends—not that he was conscious of it. He kept close friendships with high-ranking army officials, affluent Chinese, and a pack of others who sucked out a huge profit from the war through some dubious methods. Most of them were the type of people who always hid a pistol under their jacket and looked around the street up and down when going out of a building, but somehow Shozaburo Takitani got along with them very well. And in turn, they took special care of him. Should a problem arise, they set it straight for him. For Shozaburo Takitani, life was such an easy task at that time.

Such convenient gift, however, sometimes works against us. When the war was over, due to his friendships with various dubious people, he was marked by the Chinese army and was thrown into jail for a long time. His fellow prisoners were executed one by one without a decent chance of trial. They were dragged into the courtyard of the prison one day, without warning, and were shot in the head with automatic machineguns. The execution always took place at two in the afternoon. Pfewn, the hard-packed sound of the automatic machineguns echoed in the prison’s courtyard.

It was the biggest crisis in Shozaburo Takitani’s life. There, there was literally only a hair-thin gap between life and death. Death itself wasn’t so terrifying. He would have his head shot through and it would be the end of it. Pain would be only momentary. Until then, he had lived his life as he pleased and slept with a few women. He had eaten delicacies and experienced some good fortunes. He didn’t have anything to cling to in his life. He hadn’t been entitled to complain, even if he had been offhandedly executed right there. Millions of Japanese died in this war. There were many who died far more horrible death. He persuaded himself and spent his time in jail, whistling away. Day after day, he watched the shapes of clouds floating outside of the small window with iron fence, and pictured one by one, on the stained walls, the faces and bodies of women with whom he had slept with. Yet in the end, he became one of the only two Japanese who managed to made it back to Japan alive, from that prison.

It was in the spring of 1946 when Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan, a bag of skin and bones, with only his cloth on his shoulder. When he came back, his parents’ house in Tokyo had burnt down in the great Tokyo bombing in March of the year before, and his parents had died in it. His only brother had been missing in action in Burma. In short, he was completely alone in the world. But he didn’t feel it sad or lonely, and wasn’t particularly shocked. Of course he felt some sense of absence, but one would become alone at some point anyway. He was thirty then. He felt like he aged a few years at once, but that was it. Beyond that, there was no other emotion welling up in him.

Yes, Shozaburo Takitani managed to survive anyway, and given the fact, he had to use his head to keep surviving from then on.

Since he couldn’t think of anything else he could do, he formed a small jazz band with his old friends and started to tour American bases. Utilizing his inborn friendliness, he befriended with a jazz-loving American major. The major was an Italian American from New Jersey, and played clarinet quite well. Working in logistics, he could order whatever record he needed from his home country. In spare time, they often played together. They went to the major’s barrack to listen to Bobby Hacket, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, and that sort of happy jazz records, drinking beer, and worked hard copying the phrases. For him, the major procured foodstuff, milk, and liquor, scant at the time, as much as he needed. This isn’t too bad of a time, Shozaburo Takitani thought.

He got married in 1947. His wife was a distant relative of his mother’s side. When he was walking in the street, he ran into her, and over a cup of tea they talked about the news of relatives and about the old days. It led to their friendship, and somehow—which could very well be due to her pregnancy—they ended up living together.

At least that was what Tony Takitani heard from his father. He doesn’t know how much Shozaburo Takitani loved his wife. She was pretty and quiet, but she wasn’t built sturdily, Shozaburo said.

In the second year of their marriage, they had a boy. Three days after the baby was born, the mother died. She died within a blink of an eye, and was cremated within a blink of an eye. It was a very quiet death. There was no inner conflict, no real pain—she died as if she faded away. As if someone went to the back and turned off the switch ever so gently.

Shozaburo Takitani wasn’t sure how he should feel about it. He wasn’t familiar with these types of emotions. It felt like something flat and disk-like was enclosed in his chest. But what kind of object it was and why it was there, he didn’t understand at all. Yet the object remained there ever since and wouldn’t let him think deeper about anything. Such being the case, he spent about a week without thinking about anything. He didn’t even remember the baby he had trusted to the hospital.

The major consoled him sincerely. Almost every day, they drank at a bar in the base. You have to stand strong, you have to raise the kid, the major told him. He didn’t know what the major was talking about, but he nodded in silence. He could at least understand the major’s good intention. Then, as if the thought had suddenly popped in his mind, the major offered to be a godfather of the child. Come to think of it, Shozaburo Takitani hadn’t even named the child.

The major said he could give the child his first name Tony. Tony couldn’t be an appropriate name for a Japanese child in any way, but the question of whether or not it was an appropriate name didn’t seem to come into the major’s head even for a moment. Shozaburo Takitani went home, wrote “Takitani Tony” on a piece of paper, put it on the wall, and gazed at it for a few days. Takitani Tony, not too bad, he thought. It’d be the era of the United States. It might turn out to be convenient to name the child in American way.

But thanks to such a name, Tony was made fun of at school as a mixed-blood, and when he says his name, people looked at him funny or seemed offended. Many people took it as a bad joke, and some people got angry.

Partially for that reason, Tony Takitani grew up to be an introverted boy. He didn’t make any friends, but he didn’t find it particularly hard. Being alone was something natural to him, and it was almost a kind of premise of life, so to speak. As far as he could remember, his father was always away on performance trip with his band. When he was small, a housekeeper came to take care of him, but he started to do everything himself when he was in fifth or sixth grade. He cooked for himself, locked the doors, and slept alone. He didn’t find it particularly lonely. Rather than busily being taken care of by someone, being on his own felt so much easier. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani didn’t remarry after his wife’s death. He invariably kept making numerous girl friends, of course, but he never took any one of them home. He too, like his son, seemed to have become accustomed to being all alone. The father-son relationship, however, wasn’t as distant as it might seem from such a life. But both of them were as deeply accustomed to solitude as a habit as each other, neither of them went ahead to open up their heart. They didn’t feel any particular need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani wasn’t made to be a father, and Tony Takitani wasn’t made to be a son, either.

Tony Takitani loved to draw. Every day he locked himself up in his room alone and did drawings. He especially liked to draw machinery. He was good at drawing minute details of things like bicycle, radio, and engines, using a pencil with its tip sharpened like a needle. When he drew a flower, he traced every single vein on its leaves. Whatever people might say, that was the only way he could draw. Although he received not-so-impressive grades for other subjects, his grades for art were always outstanding. When there was a context, he usually won the first prize.

So, it was only natural that he entered an art school after graduation (from the year he started art school, without neither of them taking the lead, somehow, as if it was a course of nature, the father and the son started to live separately) and became an illustrator. In fact, there was no need to consider other possibilities. While other youth worried, groped in the dark, and suffered, he single-mindedly continued his precise, mechanical drawing without thinking about anything. Since it was the time when young people were rebelling against the authority and the system earnestly and violently, there was scarcely anyone who praised his extremely realistic drawings. Seeing his drawings, teachers of the art school gave a wry smile. His classmates criticized the absence of ideological statements. Yet, Tony Takitani couldn’t understand at all how the “ideological” paintings of his classmates could be so remarkable. In his eyes, they were just immature, ugly, and inaccurate.

When he graduated the art school, however, things changed drastically. Thanks to his very practical skill and pragmatic utility, Tony Takitani didn’t have hard time finding a job from the very beginning. No one else could produce more minutely detailed drawings of complicated machineries and buildings than he could. Everybody unanimously said that his drawings were “real than the real.” His drawings were more accurate than photographs, and were more easily understandable than a thousand words of explanation. Immediately he became an illustrator of great demand. From cover illustrations for a automobile magazine to an advertisement illustration, he took any offer as long as it was about mechanism. He liked his job and it paid quite well.

Meanwhile, Shozaburo Takitani kept leisurely playing his trombone. In the age of modern jazz, then of free jazz, and then of electric jazz, he kept playing his old-style jazz as always. Not that he was the first-class performer, but his name was fairly recognized and he always had some job offer. He could have tasty food, and didn’t have to go without women. From the standpoint of whether he had complaints or not, it was quite a good life.

Because Tony Takitani turned to work whenever he had time to spare and didn’t have expensive hobby in particular, he made himself a small man of property by the time he was thirty-five. Following someone’s advise, he bought a large house in Setagaya. He got to own a few apartments buildings for rent. His tax accountant took all the care.

Tony Takitani had dated a few women by then. When he was younger, though for a short time, he had lived together with a woman as well. He had never thought about getting married, however. He did cooking, cleaning and laundry for himself, and he could call up a contract-based housekeeper when the schedule was tight. He never wanted to have children. He didn’t have any close friend whom he could consult with and confide in. He didn’t even have a friend to go for a drink together. Yet, he was not an eccentric man. Though not as friendly as his father was, he had no problem interacting with people around him in everyday life. He didn’t swaggered nor bragged. He didn’t make excuses, nor spoke ill of others. He preferred listening to others than speaking about himself. So, most people around him liked him. But he never managed to build a relationship with someone that went beyond the practical level. He and his father only saw each other once every few years for some practical matter. Even when they met, when the business is done, there was nothing much to talk about between them. Tony Takitani’s life passed thus quietly and peacefully. I probably will never get married, he thought.

architectural hell: a look into a typicaly student life at a public university

2005-10-04T17:35:00.000-05:00

Built somewhere in the '60s, UIC has serious architectural problems. And I don't mean the chunks of concrete peeling off from the towering University Hall. The exposed (and of course rusting) iron structure 300 feet above my pedestrian head is scary, but that doesn't affect my daily life at this public university. (I made a point not to walk underneath it.) What I'm talking about is what bothers me every single day.

UIC's east campus has, in its center, six single-story "lecture hall" buildings, which are separated into six large lecture halls (surprise!). Due to some mysterious whim of the architect, these lecture halls, even if they're in a same building, aren't connected with each other inside of the building. One has to get out of the building, go around the corner, and get in again to go from one lecture hall to the other. This causes a mess between classes, especially when it's rainy out: one has to wait in line to get out, open one's umbrella to get to a room in the same freakin' building (sorry), and wait in line again to get back in. And mind you, there's no restrooms in these lecture hall buildings, each of which probably house more than a thousand students. Again, one has to get out of the building to go to whichever restrooms nearest to the lecture hall, located in separate buildings. The toilet theme, sadly enough, becomes a recurrent theme in this exploration of bad campus planning.

Surrounding the lecture halls are three-story, one-basement halls, each floor of which probably has ten smaller classrooms. As an English major, I frequent two of those: the Stevenson Hall and the Burnham Hall. Both have problems. To stick with the toilet issue, I'll start with the Stevenson Hall. This building probably has a capacity of more than a thousand students (35students in each room x 10 rooms on each floor X 3 floors). Since most classes held in the building are English classes, the majoriy of these 1000+ students are female. Keep this in mind and try to picture what would happen if this building had only three working toilet stolls. It's not that hard to imagine, right? But obviously it was too hard for the architect (and for the administration). There ARE only three working toilet stolls in this building. There are five stolls (which wouldn't be enough anyway). Yet, one of the five is perpetually clogged and one has its door sitting on the floor. The lines are so bad that I decided not to go to the restroom in this building: it is practically impossible to use the bathroom here and make it on time to the next class. To make confuison worse, the only one hand drier is located on the opposite side of the sinks. So one has to turn around, bump into the line of people waiting to use the bathroom in the narrow space between the sinks and the drier, murmur some applogy, and again wait in another line to use the hand drier. This is the worst toilet design I've ever seen in my life.

The restroom in the Burnham Hall is not as bad--its five stools are all functioning. It even has two hand driers--even on the same side as the sinks, what a luxury!--only that one of them is long dead... The Burnham Hall has a congestion problem elsewhere: in the stairwell. Housing about the same number of students as the Stevenson Hall, it has only one staircase. Well, technically there are two, but one leads to nowhere. The width of the stairs is barely enough for two people to pass. And that is assuming a person of usual to slim build. As college students, we're typically bulged up with backpacks and shoulder backs, if not with "a few extra pounds," and this makes it almost imossible to climb or descend the stairs without twisting our bodies in order not to bump into the people going the opposite direction. Not surprisingly, the movement becomes s........l.........o..........w........... Painfully slow. Between classes, on each floor, there is always a large pool of students waiting to slip into the staircase file. As if the narrowness weren't enough, the architect went out of his way to make a large gap between the steps and the surrounding walls, resulting in the further slowdown of movement: nobody wants to lose his steps into this threatening opening. I just don't want to imagine what would happen in case of emergency. I bet there'll be injuries, if not deathes.

"Student Center" building houses two cafeterias, computer labs, and a bookstore, among other things related to students' life. One of the two major ways to reach the upper floors is an escalator located in the middle of the building. (The other is to use an exterior stairwell.) As the main artery of the building, there is usually a constant flow of people getting on and off this escalator. For some reason, the entrance to the escalator hall is limited to the width of the escalators with glass doors, concentrating the stream of people in one congested area. It is, therefore, very tricky to cross this escalator hall, especially when one has a cup of coffee in one hand and a muffin and an apple precariously heaped in another. Since the escalator hall separates two dining halls, one often finds oneself shuffling through the people, in search for an open table, in exactly that situation. A nice addition is an old communist guy who hands out capitalism-condemning, revolution-inciting pamphlets at the foot of the escalator, probably every day for decades. There is just no way to get around without frustration.

Simply put, the architect who designed the campus and the administrative board which must have approved his plan didn't give any consideration to the logistics of moving a large number of people efficiently in and around campus buildings. Yet, from what I heard from one of the professors, it could have been worse: the original plan of the architect was to cover the campus entirely with concrete, expelling any element of nature, after the glorious examples of Italian Renaissance cities. Maybe I should be glad that this part didn't see the light of the day. Life would have been much more unpleasant if they had adopted this belated representation of the human triumph over the ferocious force of nature.

apologies

2005-09-21T20:07:00.000-05:00

For those who have been checking back on this blog and have been continuously disappointed for the past week or so... I'm sorrrrrrry! I just don't have time and energy to do focused writing, and I'm not inclined to casual blogging without much thought (except for these occasional excuses and apologies, that is). I've had so many topics to write about ("March of the Penguins" and conservative Christian values, delight in Boccaccio, experience of public sphere at Chicago's Millennium Park, etc.), which I'm afraid I'm quickly forgetting. This is pathetic... I'm a full time college student, but I don't even work, and I'm barely juggling the readings and papers... Hopefully I'll have some time to slow down after Thursday.

exposed but enshrined: on the presentation of embryonic specimens in the Body Worlds

2005-09-13T22:45:00.000-05:00

As I wrote in the previous post, I wasn't disturbed by the Body Worlds exhibit, despite my anticipation. Except for their treatment of the embryos, that is.

General concensus (and the way they advertise the exhibit as well) is that it is an exhibition of human bodies, skinned, disected, colored, and plasticized with amazing technology, to show the construction of our bodies. And it is generally true; adult bodies were skinned, disected, sliced, (some even had their tissues melted away to show the quite amazing network of blood vessels,) and put into various funny poses, which some might find offensive.

The exception was with the fetuses and embryos. Of about two dozen specimens, only one was NOT in the whole. It was a slice of an embryo in a transparent plastic cube. Its pose was the familiar fetus position. It was dyed in fleshy red, which was also an anomaly; all the other, sliced adult bodies in transparent plastic were dyed in browns, greens, yellows--colors reminiscent of minerals, not flesh. Other embrionic specimens were all in their entirety, all in the familiar fetus position. Not even one of them was skinned to show the "inside." Except for to show their development in terms of size, there was no apparent scientific reason to display so many fetuses and embryos in their entirety. And this, is totally strange within the context of the entire exhibit, which is to show the "inside" of our bodies.

Most of the specimens of the fetuses/embryos were segregaed in a small curtained section (which is probably out of consideration for those who might find this part too disturbing, due to their moral, religious, or political inclinations). In this small shrine, literally cradled in special white satin cloth (the luxurious delicacy of which all the adult specimens weren't entitled to enjoy), looking like "real" babies in dead gray skin, the specimens were far more disturbing (to me) than their adult conuterpart, which were forced into funny poses and overt display of muscles, nerves, and ligaments. The feeling of the "real" was preserved with the embryonic specimens. The feeling of violating the sanctity of human bodies was carefully preserved, or even created, through the strange juxtaposition of exposure (the embryos are out to be seen) and concealment (and yet their skins are intact, and they're enshrined in a little corner).

Furthermore, a sort of classical, soft music was playing in that little section of the fetuses and embryos. Ever so subtle, but the effect was evident: more appeal to emotion. This is also something that didn't exist around the adult specimens. At this point, I have to wonder, what are they endorsing here? What are these subtle manipulations for? In the context of hysteric controversy over abortion in the U.S., it seems obvious. The embryos were displayed in such a way that appeal to our emotion, advocating their "helpless humanness" and thus the "murderousness" of abortion. To preserve their "humanness," and to disturb the viewers, the exhibit had to show the embryos undisected. To show their "inside" would have injured the sanctity of their humanness. In order to emphasize their helplessness, they had to be shown in their familiar fetal position, alluding to our common image of embryos protected in the "warmth of the mother's womb." And when they had to be disected, the bloodiness, fleshiness should be preserved, lest the spectators be desensitized (which is exactly what happened with the perfectly clean disected specimens of adults). And of course, the music.

I don't know anything about the political inclination of Gunther von Hagen, the creator of the plasticized bodies. But from what I saw at the Body Worlds exhibit, it seems pretty obvious that the exhibit is supposed to perform a public role in the debate of abortion, in support of one view that I'm afraid is becoming the majority. Aside from the political agenda, the "baby section" (which, I think, was given a euphemistic title that I can't remember) was interesting in its display of intricate interplay between the exposure and concealment, and how these two manipulations influence our perception of what is inherently disturbing, and, plainly put, gross.

Gunther von Hagen's "Body Worlds": belated overview

2005-09-12T14:19:00.000-05:00

What feels like a long time ago, yet still only a bit more than a week ago, I went to see Gunther von Hagen's "Body Worlds," on its last day in Chicago. It was definitely a world of bodies--not dead, plasticized ones, but curious, increasingly tired, living bodies filling up the huge exhibition space, leaving literally no open space. It was incredibly crowded. We wait about 25 minutes before our ticket time was called (15 minutes late). We took an escalator upstairs. There was a line, far longer than the one we just escaped. The same kind of densely packed winding line you see in the security check points of airports these days. We moseyed ahead, spending about 20 minutes. When we entered through a gate, we found still other line behind the partition (clever tactics on the part of the MoSI). We spent about an hour in total to go through the rotating gate into the exhibition hall, where, again, we found separate lines to actually see the bodies and body parts on display up close. "There's really no meaning to this timed ticket system! There's no way they can pack more people in here," I heard somebody exclaim, as I spent leisurely 5 minutes to examine a skinned, happily grinning, dancing comedian (with his muscles flying around in all directions). It was worse than exhausting: most visitors were too tired to see anything by the time they reached the mid-point. (Therefore, the latter half of the exhibit, where more graceful figures were displayed, was relatively empty and quiet, utterly unappreciated.) Though I might not have been the best visitor to judge, since I was still slowly recovering from a bad cold I had caught a few days ago, my company of totally healthy individuals had a lot to complain.

Despite all the controversy surrounding the exhibit, I didn't find the dead human bodies disturbing in any way--except for those of embryos, for reasons I will specify in the next post. I expected that it would require a little mental effort to suppress the visceral disgust at the sight of treated corpses to fully appreciate the intricacy of their construction and the technology used to preserve them in such a way. Instead, I didn't have to try to forget the fact that they are indeed real--somehow, the bodies had been stripped of their reality during the process of plastination and marketing. They appeared (physically and emotionally) nothing more than a set of incredibly well-made model, a dozen notches above the ones slowly dusting in the dimness of the science stock room. The transparent slices of the bodies felt nothing more than a piece of crystal with beautiful pattern inside. Like the factory-packaged cuts of beef, neatly sealed (even with a diaper to soak up the bloody drip) and arranged in supermarket cooling cases, the bodies were devoid of factors to incite emotion.

The undertone of the exhibit was that of the infamous "health and hygiene show," a ubiquitous, itinerant show of pickled body parts infected with unspeakable diseases and preserved embryos with severe deformation, often held in a shabby tent as a part of seasonal fairs, very popular in late 19th and early 20th century in Japan (and possibly many other parts of the world as well). Under the guise of educational and scientific purposes, the driving force of these exhibits were bare curiosity to sneak a look at the horrific taboo. In this era of ostensible absence of bodily taboos, the Body Worlds still had the similar feel, with its overwhelming emphasis on bodies and body parts, with very few explanatory plaques and supportive artifacts to illustrate the build and the works of the human body. "This is how it looks. Isn't that great?" was the message. The main focus of the Body Worlds seemed to be on the amazement at the beautifully preserved muscles, blood vessels, and nerve systems. It seems to be still too early for the novelty of the technology to sink in and to be ready to be used for truly scientific and educational purposes, combined with other measures of illustration.

Overall, the exhibit was worth visiting (despite the exhausting congestion). It was, however, not because of its scientific virtues but the storm of rich social and historical issues it raised in my brain. For $16, the experience could have been more comfortable, but then again, we should have visited it earlier, not on its last day, which is so obviously doomed to be super-crowded.

on New Orleans

2005-09-01T19:34:00.000-05:00

A beat-up minivan slowly inches ahead among thousands of people. Some have laggages, backpacks, others have nothing. All are drenched with rain, tired, and terrified. Terrified with the scenes they have seen, terrified with the scenes that might lie ahead. First one by one, then quickly in packs, they start the attempt to stop the van. They yell to stop, bang the windows, jump on the hood. A man smashes open a hole in the windshield with a baseball bat. Waves of desperate people push around the van, like millions of balck ants crawling over and covering up a dead insect. The driver of the van shouts at his horrified daughter in the rear seat to get down. He tries to plow through the crowd, now determined to stop the van. Another man, panic in his eyes, insert his bare hands into the hole of the windshield, grabs the rim, and trys to tear it open, oblivious of blood running out of his now scarred hands. His blood traces the tiny squared cracks of the glass. His eyes bluge. The bones of his knuckles protrude. The coated glass makes horrible ripping sound like an arm being ripped off from a body by sheer force. Another window gets smashed, an arm reaches in, unlocks the door. Within a blink, the rear of the minivan is packed with men struggling to secure their position in the ephemeral safety. The girl screams, in fear of being parted from her father. The father tries to reach her through the broken window, but it is blocked with a body of a man squirming in through the rugged edges of the shattered glass.

As the news reports from New Orleans grow grimmer and grimmer, my mind floated back to the especially intense scene in the "War of the Worlds." To flee from the city under Martian's attack, the father steals a minivan on the street and drives off with his two kids, only to run into desperate refugees a few hundred yards from the only bridge that connects the city to the countryside. Even without a single death, the scene is extremely intense--almost too intense to bear for a naive mind of mine. The sense of desperation, growing hatred toward the priviledged (however little the actual difference may be), and total abandoonment of civilized behavior under an extreme stress, they all make one wonder if it would happen if the same situations broke out in reality. I wondered if I would try to tear open a windshield of a vehicle with my bear hands. I wondered what I would do if I were in such an awkward (well, far more than awkward) situation of having a little advantage over others in an emergency. Say, if I had a bottle of water and a chocolate bar, would I share them, or would I hide them from others? At the end of the day, I just abandoned the questions, just hoping it would never happen to me.

But it does happen. A total chaos in suffocating heat, no food, no drinkable water, moisture of densely packed human bodies condensing on everything, unbearable odor of human feces, dead bodies left unattended in parking lots, no authoritative presence to turn to, no information as to where to go, what to do, when the help might come. Armed men ransacking stores and houses, gasolines stolen from stolled cars, shootings over god-knows-what, ten-year-old girl being raped in a refugee camp, two nights in a row. Apparently this is what happens. Even without the invasion of the blood-sucking, flesh-grinding Martians. This is what happens in what we believe to be a civilized country. Of course, the information at this point could be partial, even confused. Some of the lootings must be done in an organized way, as the last resort to feed the starving people. But others are definitely not. You don't go out and rape a girl because of a hurricane. It is depressing enough. Terrifying enough. Both the acts out of desperation and those based on calculation terrify me. For what human beings can be forced to be, and can want to be.

I just hope that help and order are on the way.

trapped angels

2005-08-29T19:49:00.000-05:00

Meet the resin angel and plastic goddess captured and kept prisoner in a show window of a cheapy gift shop... An anti-consumerism advocate would say that this is another evidence of sweeping consumerism, that appropriates everything, invoking desire to own everything, even religious symbols and creatures of archetypical imagination.

dreamy savior

goddess of discotech

I don't know who in the world would want to decorate her living room with these creations, but judging from the persistence of the gift shop on a busy street in Rogers Park, they do catch customers' fancy from time to time...

not-so-talented sister of William Shakespeare--reading "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf

2005-08-28T22:09:00.000-05:00

The first assignment for the introductory course on Women and Literature was a short excerpt from "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf, the famous part in which she ponders upon Shakespeare's imaginary sister, who shared her brother's extraordinary talent and passion for theater. In Woolf's imagination, this female Shakespeare flees to London when her father arranges her marriage to try her talent in theater. Of course, without her brother's masculinity, she is rejected at the theater's door with a scoff of the theater director, who warmly welcomed her brother. She strives to cultivate her talent in London, but lack of formal education prevent her from exploiting her whole potential. Oppressive social norm against women's creativity eventually reduces her to a depressed young woman, who finally chooses to end her life.

We were given the excerpt, and were to write a short piece of fiction on a real or imaginary woman in history, which we would share with the class. The purpose of it seemed to be, at least in the instructor's mind, to shed light on the obliterated part of history told by, of, and for, men. The recitation of students' work, however (and our enthusiastic instructor's reaction to them), turned out to be quite intriguing in some different ways from intended. Here is one of them.

Reading Woolf's lament of "extraordinarily talented" sister of William Shakespeare and listening to a half dozen students read their versions of imagined women's lives in history, I couldn't but wonder one thing: what about the rest, the mass? What about the vast majority of women whose parents and husbands were poor, whose intelligence was just about ordinary or less, whose passion lay in "womanly" sewing, whose main pastime was to gossip? Granted, those rare cases of women (or even men, on that matter) whose extraordinary something--may it be passion, creative talent, intelligence, or even athletic ability--were suppressed by the social norm must have been forced to a frustrating, if not maddening, life. Yet, as we all know with itch of sadness (o lost dreams of the youth), we are not that extraordinary. At least not in the way Woolf's female Shakespeare is imagined to be.

This skewed representation is partially inevitable. It is only natural that artistic creations of suppressed female artists mainly focus on their suppressed creativity and consequent frustration. However, the current mode of discourse in the imagination on and representation of forgotten women in history is severely biased toward this specific kind of women--passionate, creative, intelligent, rebellious. Inadvertently this overemphasis creates another force of oppression. Flooded by the images and admiration of women who "courageously" stepped out of the realm of "womanliness," a woman today cannot but feel guilty and even inferior when she takes pleasure in any form of "womanly" act. Furthermore, the insatiable demand for women to be intelligent and creative, and eventually to be renowned in the world in the same way men do, can be disempowering for those who don't find passion in these fields and/or who cannot fulfill such inherently elitist demand.

If the empowerment means being able to lead one's life the way one pleases without any feeling of guilt or inferiority, the now dominant representation and admiration of "unwomanly" women in history should be questioned as throughly as is the traditional representation of "womanly" women in the recent days. What appears to be a "resonating theme," in our instructor's words, in many imaginative writings on women in history might very well be a blind adaptation of the new dominant perspective on women, no more or no less oppressive than the previous ones. It is one thing to shed light on obliterated parts of the history, and it is another to project our biased view on the same parts of the history--it is, in a way, to exploit the historical void to advance our (however well-intended) propaganda.

scattered travelogue day 2: the namesake (Colorado National Monument)

2005-08-25T08:41:00.000-05:00

I fell in love with him at the first sight, having a passing glimpse of him smiling at me gently, with a hint of playfulness. I decided to walk out of my usual way and be daring. He came to me with a grease-loaded pulpy cheese burger, a bagfull of flimsy french fries, and orange juice. He came a long way to the U.S. with me, traveled around France with me, and was recently in the insanely beautiful landscape of Utah, with me. And he is not my byfriend.

He traveled around France with me: here he smies in front of bottles of wine and forbidden liqour.

He waits on my boyfriend's zoom lens, as we marvel at the grandure of Canyonlands National Park, Utah,

He was one of those toys that comes with McDonald's Happy Meal. When I saw him displayed in a plastic case outside of the restaurant, I HAD to get him, even if I had to expose myself to the risk of fat-laden, sodium-concentrated substance that they call food at McDonald's. Well, I guess it's not that bad...

He provided fun and creative opportunities to diverge from same ol' tourist pictures--by including him in the frame, I could make the image more compelling or even unusual. Yet, he hadn't had a name for a long time. The Right One didn't dawn on me. So I simply called him "the monkey," after our beloved bird-nest-haired detective Colombo and his Dog.

Then finally came the day of his naming.

photo by Patrick.

We took a brief detour to the Colorado National Monument on our westbound drive on interstate 70 to Utah. Under the clear blue sky, everything was drying up quickly. That included ourselves. We decided to make a stop at the visitor center for water, where we'd have a commanding view of the red rocky canyon that strech tens of miles into the rugged horizon. Hydrated, we walked over to the viewing balcony. Patrick decided to take a portrait of me with the magnificent view as a background. On a whim, I put the monkey on the large brim of the hat I had on to avoid excessive UV. A middle-aged man amusedly exclaimed from the other end of the viewing area: "a William Tell in Colorado, hah!"

Hence, the monkey is now called William. In my opinion, it suits him quite nicely.

scattered travelogue day 4: the ghost town of Sego Canyon

2005-08-20T23:23:00.000-05:00

Just as the creepy/friendly guy in Thompson had told us, there was an abandoned mining town a few minutes into the dirt road. And just as the creepy/friendly guy said, there was nobody there, whether to shoot us with a full magazine of a machine guy or to greet us with a big miner's grin. The two main ruins, one wooden and the other brick Southwestern-style, were at the beginning of the town, followed by a few others. There were no indication of the town having been a coal-mining town, nor were there any hint of recent human activity in the area. The only soda can I found among the tall grass was completely rusted and we couldn't make out what it was. All we knew was that it was more than a decade old, from the old-fashioned pull-top.

I loved the salmon pink of this Southwestern-style brick ruin. The large windows, high up on the walls, framed the blue sky and the surrounding rocky cliffs like picture frames. In the back, overgrown by grass, was a rusting old car, with tens of bullet holes on its one remaining door.

I almost stepped on this lone flower as I walked back to our car from one of the decaying houses. Blooming in a ghost town all alone, it reminded me of an old Japanese tanka (a form of fixed poetry, longer than the now-famous haiku) which laments the cherry blossoms blooming deep in the mountains without being appreciated by any living soul other than the flowers themselves.

Inside of the largest remaining structure, which could have been one of the mine's headquarters, the walls were crumbling into the open area invaded by obstinate desert plants with the aid of the abundant sun pouring from the nonexistent ceiling. The absolute silence in the ruin, with the bright sky strangely severed into a rectangle by the four walls, was a sheer treat for an urbanite.

After about half an hour of exploration, we headed back to the interstate. We had a long day ahead of us--more than 300 miles drive to Denver.

"I think I liked Thompson better than Sego Canyon," I said. Sego was my first real ghost town, but it was too dead to be emotionally engaging. Similarly, the passage of time had striped away any intersting details from the ruins--all that remained was the basic structures of the buildings. On the contrary, Thompson still had the feel of human life and emotion that are falling apart. On a rotting yet mended door of a barn, or in the fading flower prints on a curtain, we could have a glimpse into the people's lives. "But at any rate, I'm glad we didn't get ambushed and shot dead by that guy. I guess he was just being nice."

scattered travelogue day 4: a scary looking guy recommends a ghost town (Thompson, Utah)

2005-08-20T19:06:00.000-05:00

"I see you're takin' pictures all 'round town," said the bearded guy. The sun-tanned flesh of his cheek was up, hinting a sort of smile, but his eyes were murky behind the gold-rimmed sun glasses. Uh-oh, I thought. Instantly, an unsettling image creeped into my head: Patrick and me damped in one of the shrubbery field with bleeding bullet holes in our stomachs, arms dangling, and the guy triumphantly striding back to his blue beat-up Chevy van, proud of his service for the protection of his community from disrespectful intruders from a big city. Patrick seemed to feel the same way. He kept a safe distance from him as he politely talked to the guy, with stretched smile on his face.

"Have you seen the pictoglyphs on the cliff?" he asked, and started a long explanation of what they look like and what they are--something we already knew (for we'd been there earlier) but we didn't feel secure enough to risk offending the guy by interrupting him. So we listened. Patiently, like two kindergarten kids, well-behaved yet still jittery inside. "If you like taking pictures, there's something else up the road, too," the guy continued. His smile started to look genuine. Maybe he's just a friendly local guy, not a wacko, I thought.

"If you take the dirt road from the pictoglyphs and take the first major right, and drive about a mile or so, there's a ghost town called Sego Canyon. There used to be a coal mine there, but it's deserted now. The road isn't paved, but as I look at your vehicle (Chevy Cobalt), you've got high enough clearance."

"Hah, that sounds really interesting. Wanna go?" I asked Patrick. He smiled, said yeah, and thanked the guy for the information.

As he climbed back to the blue van, the guy looked back at us and said: "Don't worry, there's not many people in Thompson who shoot at you for taking pictures. We just stop by and say hi." He laughe out loud, amused by his own joke, and drove off. There was something in the tone of his voice that made me nervous again. I couldn't quite decide whether he was joking in good humor or not.

"I was almost sure he was just being nice," I said, after making sure the blue van had sped away. But oh, man are we going to run into him once we're in the deserted town (thus no witnesses), armed with a fully-loaded machine gun, grinning psychotically on the roof of his beat-up van? That's still quite possible, but I do want to see the ghost town--my mind was ripped into a thousand pieces. Finally, either rationality or curiosity won over the battle and we decided to take a detour. Yet, the creeping doubt still lingered on the back of my mind. Would we be really safe there...?

scattered travelogue day 4: "I see you're takin' pictures all 'round town" (Thompson)

2005-08-17T20:57:00.000-05:00

This is a part of my recent trip to Northeast corner of Utah and drive back and forth on I-70 between Denver, CO and Moab, UT.

From time to time, tiny, bipedal kangaroo rats with long tails scurried across the roughly paved road, disappearing into green shrubs that leaned over to the charcoal-colored road. The sky was infinitely blue, the colorful sandstone cliffs towered a few hundreds yards behind the sage-green field. Surely it hadn't changed much since the times of the Native Americans when they left the amazing petroglyphs which were destined to last for thousands of years. We were driving back to the I-70, enjoying the brief fresh breeze coming through the rolled-down windows. My upper left arm had started to toast under the direct sunlight. A coyote trotted along the edge of the road in a distance and went into the thick bush with a swing of its black-tipped tail. A few minutes later, the road wound back into the dying town of Thompson and came to a railroad crossing. Patrick photographed a house, whose wire fence boasted a dozen of cows' pelvises, dry and white after years under the cleansing sun. With curiosity, as we waited for a railroad maintenance truck to move out of the way, we looked around the town with a feel of the end of the world; the town was described as having "a gas station, a cafe, and a general store" in Lonely Planet, and the faded facade of the cafe told us that it had closed a long time ago.

"Wow! Turn around!" Patrick exclaimed, a few feet past the railroad crossing. "There was an abandoned motel. Turn around and make a left." I did, and there it was, a strip of parking lot filled with a congregation of tumble weeds (which I saw for the first time in my life) and a stretch of small motel rooms with faded pink walls. Most of the glass windows had been broken and the once-colorfully-painted doors were ajar, exposing the dim interior of the incredibly tiny motel rooms, probably 10 ft. by 10 ft. at the maximum. Some rooms still had furniture--moldy armchairs, clouded mirrors, veneer cabinets from which one or two layers were peeling off. The floor was covered with a long-fibred carpet of mixed colors--cream, brown, and white--exactly the same hideous one my room in our house from the '50s was originally decorated with. On the interior walls, somebody had left tens of white handprints, adding more to the abundant creepiness of the decrepit establishment.

door to the front office

one of the vacated rooms

in the front office

another view of the front office (the graffiti says "sweet ain't no thing!")

I was peeking into what used to be the front office, very carefully through the sharp broken glass of a window, when a blue beat-up Chevy van pulled up. A chunky bearded guy with dark sunglasses and a meager pony tail (he was mostly bald) came out, looked around, like a hawk scanning a field for a prey. I smelled trouble.

"Good day," he said, grinning behind his dark glasses. "I see you're takin' pictures all 'round town."

(to be continued, obviously)

scattered travelogue day 4: breakfast in jail (Moab), nine thousand years on a sandstone cliff (Sego Canyon)

2005-08-16T23:08:00.000-05:00

This is a part of my recent trip to Northeast corner of Utah and drive back and forth on I-70 from Denver, CO to Moab, UT.

"Traffic delay west of Idaho Springs. Alternative route advised" was all we had as an advance warning for what became a two-hour, ten-mile back up on the interstate 70.

The sunshine streaming through the eastward window of our "Victorian" room of the Center Street Hotel (I would say the room with grape-vined trellises on the ceiling was closer to being Roman than Victorian, and the shower room was slightly shabby, but it was a fun stay like a grab bag, especially for $39 a night.) was enough for us to get up at seven thirty, even after a more than full day of driving and hiking in the desiccating heat of Utah. Showered and packed up, we headed for breakfast at the breakfast-only Jailhouse Cafe. I contemplated on getting a "ginger pancake with Dutch apple butter," but gave in to a sudden rash of protein craving and got a chorizo omelet served with tortillas, homemade salsa fresca and sour cream. That certainly contained enough cholesterol for a month (which means it was tasty).

We crawled back in the car (a rented Chevy Cobalt, a new, upward-moving replacement for the Cavalier) and drove North on 191, through the breathtakingly colorful scenery of Utah, consisting only of rocks and soil of various colors and meager vegetation. After a brief drive on the I-70, we took a narrow winding road that cut through the alternatingly gray and yellow Thompson Canyon to see some petroglyphs left by thousands of years of Native Americans. Avoiding occasional suicidal kangaroo rats and slowing down for the cattle guards, it took us a few extra minutes. Upon glimpsing one of the several clusters of petroglyphs as we pulled into the small parking lot beneath the sandstone cliff, the bumpy drive immediately paid for itself.

Just above the parking lot on the side of a mustard-colored sandstone cliff, several realistic human figures and a few geometric symbols (such as two cocentric circles with two red bands) were clearly visible--among shameful graffiti scratched over them in the last hundred years, sadly enough. There were several others on the same cliff face, more sinisterly imaginative, a few yards ahead of the narrow road. An ominous, gorgon-like figure with rays radiating from its head and other dark, lobed figures roamed, as if approaching from behind the thick smoke of the end of the world. The drawings were chill-evoking in two ways: for one, it was absolutely fascinating to think that those figures were drawn by people of 9000 years ago and had survived all the erosion and destruction, and for another, they definitely revealed (or so it felt) the dark side of the human imagination, apparent in many mythology and religion with doomsday scenario. On the other side of the narrow road, above a fenced cattle area with still-moist heaps of dung, two more clusters of petroglyphs, each from a wildly different era, awaited us. One was mainly realistic drawings of people, animals and hunting, and the other was ominous, gloomy drawings similar to the second cluster. Shaking my head at the funny absurdity of keeping a cattle herd right under an archeological site of 9000 years, I took pictures as if it would matter as a historical document, as if no one else had ever photographed them before.

imaginative, rimless figures, dating back to 2000 B.C., followed a long period of traditional, realistic representation of hunting/gathering life

hollow eyes add to the creepiness, also from 200 B.C.

a mysterious figure reminiscent of a monkey, which shouldn't have been around in the U.S. at the time of drawing

soldiers of doom appear from behind a thick wall of leathal smoke... also from 2000 B.C.

these figures of inversed triangle were engraved around 600 A.D., before the style returned to the traditional, realistic one

What's fascinating was the shift in style back and forth over time. More specifically, the apparent flourish of imaginative, unrealistic styles sandwitched between more traditional, realistic depiction of the lives of the Native Americans. The petroglyphs dated around 7000 B.C. and ones after 1300 A.D. are within the range of normal expectations for prehistoric drawings on a cliff or in a cave, featuring hunters with bows and arrows, game animals such as deer, and babies bundled up tightly in rag clothes. In contrast, the ones from 2000 B.C. and 500 A.D. include abstract symbols and ominous-looking god/human figures, reminiscent of an evil anime character of some sort, that are well beyond our normal expectation. I'm not familiar enough with the history of the region to fathom the relationships between each group of Native Americans that left the radically different petroglyphs, but I wonder how connected or disconnected they were to each other and what brought forth the change in their styles.

(to be continued)

flying off

2005-08-11T11:10:00.000-05:00

Does being busy inherently entail having less inner-life? Or is it just an excuse?

Either way, I'm having so little inner life these days. Until last week, I was hustling with the final exams and the transfer paperwork to a new university (and related immigratio stuff), and when they're over, I'm too busy having fun! Thus no post of any significance. I went to about a million places over the last two weekends (Chicago Botanical Garden, my parents' backyard BBQ, Indiana Dunes, Oriental Institute in Hyde Park, Chinatown, Brookfield Zoo, farmers' markets, Brookfield Zoo, and the list goes on). To make matters worse (just joking... this is fabulous), my boyfriend and I decided to take a spontaneous vacation over this weekend in Colorado and Utah on Tuesday, around 11 pm, which means we had less than two days till our departure this afternoon. Dah!

We'll be exploring the Arches National Park and probablly Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah, and some of the downtown Denver (where we fly to and from). Hopefully we won't be as red as two freshly boiled octopi by the end of the trip!

irresistiblly anthropomorphic

2005-08-05T18:12:00.000-05:00

Yellow pear tomatoes from our back yard.

"Just a Pig's Rambling..." by Yoko Sano 2

2005-08-05T06:39:00.000-05:00

The second story in "Just a Pig's Rambling..." by Sano Yoko.

2. Fox

Ever since she was born, not a day has passed without the fox being deeply moved by her own beauty.

The position of the sun when her fur shines gold; when she should wiggle her well-shaped ears; how her large eyes should be modestly cast downward; how dramatic it is when she swings her gorgeous tail with momentum; at what angle her nose needs to be to look like a dignified woman, etc...

A lover told the fox: "you aren't good at falling in love, because you never forget yourself."

The fox is now experimenting with ways to appear oblivious of herself, by making her tail tremble.

busy busy busy

2005-08-03T17:26:00.000-05:00

With the finals at my current college drawing near and the transfer to the new university, which entails all the hectic mess, I'm too busy to do anything here... I'm sorry! I promise I'll come back as soon as my life settles down a little bit. Ah, the fun of figuring out the requirements and transfer credits! :{

embracing the absence

2005-07-27T15:10:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago my father had a heart attack and was hospitalized in a large-scale hospital in a Chicago suburb for a week. (It was "close" and he was "lucky," as his cardiologist put it.) Consequently, I spent a significant amount of time at the hospital, mainly by his bedside but occasionally escaping for a cup of coffee or a sandwich, etc--after all, we hadn't been, and still aren't, close enough to comfortablly spend hours and hours about three feet from each other. Downstairs from his third-floor room, there was a small but quite nice cafeteria, which served different groumet sandwiches every day. By the time I managed to get the daily dose of late lunch or early dinner, I would be frozen from the subtle, but obstinate invasion of air-conditioned indoor air into my flesh and bones. So, I would opt for the little memorial garden just outside of the cafeteria. Apparently dedicated to the children who died at the hospital, it was surely a depressing place to sit down, especially when one has someone sick in the hospital. Yet, it was better than the subdued dimness and invasive chill of the inside.

Bronze plates of dedications were implanted on the brick ground. Some were from nurses: "To the Little Angels Who Touched Our Hearts--from NICU nurses." Others were from parents. All were painful to watch. One, however, was particularly gut-wrenching in its evocation of almost visceral sense of loss. Following two names of the lost children, the parents added this : "Embracing you in heaven, in our empty arms." A contradictory statement. Yet, precisely because of this contradiction, it holds such emotional impact on those who come across it.

The gripping image of empty embrace had stayed behind my mind since then--and came leaping at me when I was organizing some of the photos I took during my trip to New England. The above photo of the young fern just unfolding in the misty rain had been one of my favorites from the trip, with its tenderness and yes, its easy-to-anthropomorphize pose, reminiscent of a person holding something--maybe a book, or a baby, if one has a strong Christian imagery ready in stock. But when I looked at the photo after the experience in the memorial garden, the meaning of the photo had completely changed. From behind what appeared to me initially as a serene, tender image of affection and contentment now emerges a piercing realization of loss, the absence of what occupied a certain physical space before.

Looking at a plant in this way is to succumb to the all-engulfing temptation of sentimentality and anthropomorphism. Still, with the tiny dew drops sprinkled on its leaves and stems, the instant association of the young fern and the parents' grief over their lost children is, and will be persistent--such is the power of melodramatic imagination...

Sarcasm with a Silver Lining -- "Just a Pig's Rambling..." by Yoko Sano

2005-07-23T17:29:00.000-05:00

1. Rabbits

Each and every one of the rabbits' residences had a frame on the wall: "Happy Family," under which a large family dined.

Crunching the cabbage, the father said "amend your own behavior at the sight of others' misbehavior." The boys chomped on their cabbage. The mother said "you don't do things that make others laugh at you," and laughed at the clumsy jumps of the next door neighbor's youngsters. The children laughed, their voices in sync, their ears lined up at the kitchen window.

"It ain't mellow out there, the real world." Grandpa Rabbit dropped a nut for his funeral in a jar, and counted 84.

"We've never let anyone point fingers at us."

Grandma Rabbit had a heart attack at Grandpa's funeral and was put in the same hole.

They didn't get along with other families, so rabbits were good and loyal to their own families.

"Just a Pig's Rambling..." (『ほんの豚ですが』中公文庫)is a wonderful bag of various human truth. The little book (about 4X6 inches) with crookedly cute charcoal illustrations by the author doesn't appear to be nothing more than a children's stories with anthropomorphized animals. Yet, a worrysome goat, a haughty fox, and a smitten giraffe (to name a few) all reveal something of our pathetic but oh-so-human conditions. Some stories are bitter, even biting. With the author's hidden, loving, encompassing embrace of humanity, the book take turns to present soft-hearted mellow stories as well. This rare mixture of bitterness and naivete is what makes the book and the author unique among many.

still insensitive--update on the Dr. Meteorology

2005-07-19T11:43:00.000-05:00

Our meteorology class is still continuing to explode at a regular interval, thanks to our evocative geologist, who is forced to teach meteorology at our budget-constrained community college, a.k.a. our teacher.

The first explosion was pretty impressive, making others seem somewhat subdued. But the teacher's inflamatory remarks are definitely switching off most of the students, even though the occasional outbursts of indignation might seem relatively unspectacular compared to the first one. It's becoming unspectacular only because we're getting tired of speaking up aginst this thick wall which we don't seem to be able to penetrate.

The second mini-explosion occured the other day, when the teacher, who boasts his fluent Chinese and intimate knowledge of Asian culture (thanks both to his Taiwanese wife and many years of residence in different parts of Asia), which, he seems to believe, qualify him as a commentator on cultural comparison, said that the Asian students in class are outcompeting others when it comes to homework. "I know this would be inappropreate to say, but our Asians are doing a much better job of formatting. Their margins are correct, they give one line for each answer, but no line spacing between the answers within the same question, they have erased the side borders of the table, and...ah, they're perfect!" Does his remark put me in an awkward position? Oh, yeah. I tried to pretend nonchalant, wanting to hide under the table and go completely unnoticed. Do I fall under the category of over-achieving Asians? Probably. Then does it make that ostensible complement okay? No.

While I fidgeted on the suddenly uncomfortable chair, a girl, who came from Korea about six years ago, protested. "I think that sort of remark is really inappropreate. So could you please stop that?" Although her anger was lurking under her respectful wording, she was completely polite. And everybody would agree that she was right. The teacher shouldn't state such brutal and oppressive generalization in class. Yet, this didn't dawn on him. He dragged on his experiences with neat and diligent Asian students and sloppy, slacker American (meaning non-Asian) students, justifying his impression. He wondered out loud, why this achievement gap was so prevalent, whether it is cultural, political, institutional, and so on. I sighed to myself, shrinking further under my skin.

Don't we have enough of "over-achieving Asian" stereotype? Or ANY stereotype, on that matter? I think we do. Stereotypes do no good, except for when you're a writer and need some believable side characters who don't steal too much of the reader's attention away from your main characters. Stereotypes inherently contains some truth; easiy recognizable tendency that is applicable to a highly visible part of the subject popuation (and therefore refuting criticism by saying that there are plenty of examples doesn't really justify the stereotype, do you understand, Dr. Meteorology?). The problem is that stereotypes are grossly overstretched to apply to the entire group of people, putting unwarranted pressure on both those who do fall in the description and those who don't. Stereotypes are hard to erradicate--even when they appear to have disappeared on the surface, they creep like an obstinate undercurrent that never surfaces but swallows heedless victims. That's a good reason to kick out racial, or any kind of, stereotypes from classrooms. We don't need positive reinforcement of racial stereotypes in classrooms.

Even if we supposed the notion of Asians being over-achieving were not a stereotype, it still wouldn't justify the teacher's insensirive remark. Praising some students as being brilliant could have a positive effect when it is done in private. As soon as the praise walks into the public sphere of the classroom, it inherently brings along with it a condemnation of others who are not doing as well. I don't want to be used as a lihgt to illustrate how dumb other students are. And I'm sure other students don't want to be demonstrated that they are dumb, lazy, or whatever the teacher wanted to demonstrated that they are, in light of ME. It is depressing that the teacher, with twenty-some years of teaching experiences, aren't aware of the psyche of his students--or is he intentionally ignoring it, in another of his crusade of enlightened reason against dim-lit emotion? Or am I too traumatized by the childhood alienation from being brighter than my classmates and the whole notion of stereotype was just a cunning way of justifying my simple discomfort?

My emotion aside, many students seemed to be turned off by the incident--the remaining class period slothed on in a strangely charged silence, with only the teacher lecturing. "I have tenure. So they can't fire me without going to court, unless of course, I apply pressure on students to have sex with me or something. Haha," said him in another earlier occasion. Now I doubt it. There might be plenty of other ways for him to get himself fired...

feathered scare in Rosemont, IL--what's going on?

2005-07-18T23:51:00.000-05:00

Recently I noticed some carcasses of pigeons along the Des Plaines River Road, where it runs under the I-294. Earlier last week, as I drove through the underpass, I took note of four dead pigeons beside the road. "Yikes, that's a lot of dead pigeons. I hope that's not some nasty disease..." I thought. And forgot about it.

Today, a road closure congested the Des Plaines River Road to such an extent that the traffic was barely moving. Thus, I had more than enough time to search for dead pigeons and take precise count. Morbid, yes. But I had some scientific curiosity. A few moments later, though, I reached for the window-rollup button, and quickly closed the windows. I was truly scared.

There were 16 dead pigeons, some belly-up, some crashed by cars, on only one side of the road. Sixteen. Sixteen dead pigeons in a matter ten yards (the width of the on-ramp to the express way). I couldn't see the other side of the road, blocked by the support columns in the middle, but the last time I drove on that side, there were at least three dead pigeons on that side, making it 19 in total. And that is assuming that the number hasn't increased since.

I don't know if the number of dead pigeons has actually increased over the past few days, or I couldn't see most of them when I drove there a few days ago. Either way, it is a staggering number. It is probably without doubt that something is happening to the pigeon population around that specific underpass. Whether or not it is a more wide-scale phenomenon is beyond me. But it gives me chills, the kind of vicarious chill we experience in panic movies in which a sole scientist knows that a fatal viral disease is creeping around, but cannot convince others to take action.

explosive meteorology, or thoughts on sensitivity in community colleges

2005-07-13T15:19:00.000-05:00

(If you suspect you might be my GEO200 teacher, I implore you not read on. Same thing if you're sick of all those priviledged college kids complaining about their classes. In doubt, do not! :P)

In 1950, an average 14-year-old American had an active vocabulary of 25,000 words. Fifty years later, the average vocabulary of the same demographic group has shrunk by 60%, dropping to the 10,000 words. Sad. Astonishing.

At least that is what my yoga-practicing, Bush-hating, Baha'ist and stevia-addicted professor in Birkenstock sandals of physical geology claims. (A similar claim is often made back in Japan as well, and they are probably true, sadly enough.) Thus, he proceeds, as a responsible college professor, he is obliged to throw mouthful words at his students. Good. I'm all for luscious, nuanced, even arcane words. I drool on them. I drool on men who nonchalantly manipulate pompous big words at his rein. Yup, my boyfriend knows that very well. (blush)

But there is a catch. In addition to the regular lecture note, my sun-worshipping professor has what he calls a "live note" projected on a screen. During the three-hour-plus course period, he occasionally writes down "nice college words" that just came out of his mouth, pops open a Webster dictionary in his computer, jots down the words and their meanings in the "live note," and THEY'LL BE ON THE EXAMS. These words, such as "ruminate" and "indigent," are obviously not related to meteorology in any justifiable way to be included in what students are required to learn in the course. Not surprisingly, there's been a dissatisfaction fermenting under the calm surface of the classroom, which eventually exploded yesterday.

A girl, who happened to sit next to me, enabling me to hear her desperate and slightly showy sighs and hushed "oh, god"s every time the lecture stopped to accommodate the linguistic crusade of the professor, raised her hand and asked him why these unrelated vocabulary had to be on the tests. "I don't see why we're spending this much time to learn unrelated stuff, especially when we're taking an intensive 5-week course," she said. I secretly raised my firmly clenched fist by about three inches under the desk. (Where there's no infinite blue sky to display our rebellious fists against, malventilated obscurity under a desk should suffice.) Yes! Go, girl!

After asking us to raise our hand if we share "her concern" and speak out what we think, our democracy-minded professor declared that the method had worked the entire time he taught in colleges, thus he had no intention of changing it. His conclusive question, "Is that alright with you guys?," was unwarranted.

What's fueling the conflict between some of the students and him is his ignorance of the power structure inherent in classrooms, be it a tactical disguise of ignorance or one that's naively genuine. It is apparent in his other behaviors: "invitation" to join him in his hourly sun-worship pose of yoga, "enlightened" policy of allowing students to ask permission to engage in private conversations during class period (in which case he would halt the lecture and wait), to list a few. When he says, every time his favorite phrase "spacial and temporal variations" appears on the text, that we can go home to tell our moms that "we learned about spacial and temporal variations," and that it'll totally impress our hand-wringing college moms, and proceeds even further to make one of us repeat our supposed response after him, many of us feel insulted, but don't say anything. He is apparently unaware.

Another hindrance he creates for himself is his insensitivity to the self-esteem of the students. Due to the accelerated nature of the course, many students are adults, returning to school for a higher education or a career change. It is not hard to imagine the sore it creates in one's self-esteem to be told that one's vocabulary sucks, especially, but not limited to, later in one's life. Even I, as a foreigner who has a convenient excuse for not knowing certain words, felt humiliated to be told so. True, humiliation could be a part of a learning process. And many of us are, frankly, linguistically quite underprepared for college work, of which we probably should be ashamed of. And yet, the professor's insensitivity rubs salt in our half-healed wounds we wanted to forget.

"Some of us are adults, not young college kids. I'm thirty five. I have three children. So when you treat us like grade school children, it feels..." The statement one of us started and couldn't finish should have been more than enough for him to realize that his so-called method was doing more harm than good: it's been turning us off than making us eager to learn more. Yes, we're weak-minded in our vulnerability to such humiliation. Maybe as long as we cling to our defensive attitude when confronted by the truth, asking for sugar-coated niceties, we'll stay in our slots of losers. Yet, his insensitivity to our dignity, combined with his almost caricaturish air of pretended equality with students offends me with no end.

potato handling instructions

2005-07-01T21:22:00.000-05:00

Potato Handling Instructions

Store potatoes in cool, dark basement
So they won’t rot like memories.

Peel two for supper, one for the man, one for you.
Inhale the smell of earth on their papery skin,
Moist with iridescent blood of nourishment,
Flesh firm on your fingers.

Smell that summer field,
On the way home from school at 3:30,
An ocean and two decades away.
Breathe hot air, pungent moisture from deep furrows.
You picked berries from roadside mulberry,
Stained fingers, lips crimson.
Under your nails crept the juice, turned deep purple,
Sweet, warm

Like those nightly bruises, remember?

Breaking open the thin skin,
Pale stumps will sprout,
Their purple heads like dead fetus.
Ivory flesh will shrivel,
Drained, cell by cell,
By silent, parasitic offspring.

Collapse
Of hidden decay, under your forgetful fingers,
Slip of knife, tiny pain,
Dry pulp absorbs the dark blood
Like draught field,
Like dad's flannel pants soft and tingling against your cheek.

Boil the potatoes, heat high,
Dark scar tissue severed,
Blood wiped and forgotten, almost.
Pinch of salt, drop of tear,
Home decayed in memory.

I entered this to the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition. Hopefully it'll see some sunshine. Fine Prints: The writer is not liable to any possible damages caused to the follower(s) of these directions. :P

three currents of suicide: crusades, war in pacific, and "war on terror"

2005-06-20T11:16:00.000-05:00

Japan ranks the 10th in the world when it comes to the suicide rate among the popuation, according to a recent WHO report. When we exclude Russia and other East European countries from the list, in fact, Japan has the highest suicide rate among the developed nations. (35 out of 100,000 men and 13.4 out of 100,000 women committed suicide last year in Japan.) Many Japanese people are weary of explanations offered by the Westerners (cf. Christians) on this high rate of suicides. Either it highlights the samurai tradition which supposedly prefers graceful death to life in shame, or it seeks the answer in the absence of suicide-prohibiting religion in Japan, the culture-based explanation serves to underline the presumed difference between the Western thinking and its Japanese counterpart.

To some extent, the two cultures are probably different. What is troubling, however, is the romanticization of the Japanese culture, which could enhance the sense that the mutual understanding is impossible--just as it happened during the WWII. With abundant examples (from both the Allied countries and the Japanese propaganda), John Dower demonstrates in his "War without Mercy" that the suicidal attacks on the part of the Japanese force were used as the obvious evidence of their savage, subhuman quality, which eventually led to the notion that a total annihilation was essential. Some of the U.S. forces were told not to take hostages but to kill them all. A similar notion of the enemy as incommunicable savages was prevalent in Japanese military as well, making it difficult for the soldiers of both sides to surrender: many Japanese soldiers chose death over surrendering to the enemy who (they believed) would torture them to death anyway. Then in turn, these suicidal attacks and pure suicides were used to underline the subhuman quality of the Japanese enemy, who were impossible to understand with any human reasoning.

When we look at the Western history, however, it becomes clear that the suicidal tendency in the time of war, especially during wars fought for ideology or religion, is far from rare in the Western history as well. Georges Minois' study "History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture" clearly illustrates the point. During the Crusades, there were numerous instances of suicides in the battle field, committed by Christian commanders and soldiers. Some jumped into the ocean to evade capture, others chose to continue fighting rather than surrender, when there was no practical possibility of victory (or even survival). These suicides were, of course, praised as heroic acts (just as the dead Japanese soldiers were praised in their home country during WWII).

It is hard not to see a similarity between the Crusades and the WWII. It is not the peculiar culture of Japan nor Medieval Europe that drove the noble crusaders and savage yellow monkies to suicides. It is the perceived nature of the war and the enemy that tempted them to choose suicide over surrender. In both cases, it was imagined that reconciliation with the enemy was impossible, on the ground that the moral/religious values of the two sides were different beyond any possibility of mutual understanding. Indeed, the imagined "other side" was not even a human quality, thus the total annihilation was a logical consequence. In case of defeat, it was better to be dead than caught. It is the imagined and propagandized "irreconcilable difference," and often "inferior nature" of the enemy that led to the suicide en masse in these circumstances.

Yet, the myth of suicidal tradition of exotic Japan still persists. Along the same avenue, what appears to be an incredulous fanaticism of the Islamist suicide-bombers is probably tainted by our (both intentional and unintentional) oversight of the situational context and the politics of cultural imagination. I have to admit that I'm having hard time understanding the psyche of the bombers, but reflecting on the contemporary interpretations of the two suicide currents in Western and Japanese history makes me, at least, to pause before I draw any shallow, cultural-savvy conclusion on the matter.

if I could bitch about this guy...

2005-06-18T19:30:00.000-05:00

There's only one adjective to describe my lab partner: scary. I just hope that I'll survive (literaly, that is) the eight-week chemistry course over the summer.

On our first lab day, he spilled "unknown liquid" on the desk (thankfully not on my hands) and knocked over several flasks when he pushed his lab manual with a jerk of his elbow. His bodily movement is more toward choppy than suave, which makes me nervous every time he moves. He has some serious issue with accuracy as well: when our powdered "unknow solid" wouldn't sink in water, he took out his pencil and pushed it down in the water, ending up picking up most of the powdery substance with his pencil and smearing the rest onto the inner wall of the graduated cylinder we were using. What we were doing? We were measuring the volume of the "unknow solid." I would be surprised if our measurement had been anywhere near the correct answer. Well, at least an inaccurate measurement won't kill anyone.

As if they hadn't been enough to impress me, he even tried to inflate a rubber ball for our pipet BY BLOWING IT WITH HIS MOUTH, while it was still dripping with our "unknow liquid". I admit that it was an obstinate rubber ball--it had two bulbs, which were probably supposed to help us inflate and deflate the ball, but they absolutely refused to work (as many other lab equipments do at our budget-strained community college). I also admit that the "unknow liquid" was most likely something harmless (it turned out that it was isopropyl alcohol). But even so, YOU DON'T PUT YOUR LAB EQUIPMENT IN YOUR MOUTH! I was surprised my eyes didn't fall off the sockets. The last blow was just enough to let my tongue loose, which had been held silent with my enormous will power, to (almost) yell "don't do that!"

He is probably in his forties, at least fifteen years my senior. Hence I don't want to humiliate him if I could help it. At the same time, though, I have a low torelance for sloppiness, as a (proud) member of the meticulous crowd of Far East. In the near future, I probably need to come up with a better way to communicate with him... Who would think that a chemistry lab could serve dual purposes--teaching chemistry and teaching interpersonal skills. Or is it already a well-know fact?

people watching at a bakery

2005-06-15T17:10:00.000-05:00

I'm having an early dinner (cheddar broccoli soup) before the chemistry class starts. In front of me there's a guy with thinning hair, probably in his early forties, with a hand-free cell phone kit dangling form his left ear. He's having a heated conversation about some floor. "If you can't get the floor any cleaner, then it's not gonna work. The floor tile won't stick. Do you understand that? No, it doesn't have nothing to do with that." Apparently the person on the other side of the line is quite slow-witted. "Give it a thought over tonight, and call me tomorrow, okay?" He hangs up.

He takes a big bite into his oatmeal raisin cookie, opens up a Dell from Hell laptop, and stands up. He walks past me with long confident strides, to the soda fountain. (I take a sneak peek.) He chooses Diet Pepsi. Putting back the lid to the paper cup, he walks back to his table. The cell phone rings again, well, not rings, but blinks, and he takes it. "Did you go to the tassel place on route 20? No, not that one, the one next to Walgreen or something. Yeah. Okay." His large brown eyes bulge behind his black-rimmed glasses. He is dressed clean, with style, but not in excess--navy blue polo shirt on beige chino pants, black plaine loafers, no sox.

He scrathes his head. "I guess she emailed me a wrong one. It should be 30 inches wide and 16 inches tall. Yeah, that's too wide." His conversation drags on, with several others. He adjusts the yellow rubber band on his left wrist, probably exressing his support for troops, Christ, or some other cause. "Okay. I love you,too. Bye."

It's time to go to class. I was just killing time.

two photos

2005-06-13T14:06:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention that two of my photos were included as winners of the Ariel poetry and graphic art contest held by my college. I was probably too excited about the poetry and oblivious of the pictures... Since the competition rules required black and white images, I converted these two photos into black and white.

As for this one, I prefer it in color, especially the subtle shades of brown of the clothes and the floor. It was taken in Paris, at the entrance of the Pantheon (where some of the big-name French deads are buried, including that disastrous short guy from Corcica.)

But as for the next one, the conversion doesn't make much of a difference, since the image is almost black and white to begin with.

It is a part of the Arc de Defense, a super-modern cousin of Arc de Triumph erected in a futuristic business/residential development outside of Paris. In its entirety, it's a giant square building with a large square hollow in the center (the photo is taken in the hollow, surrounded by cubic offices), where the elevators to the viewing deck and some cloud/sail-shaped tarps are placed.

in the back alley

2005-06-07T11:08:00.000-05:00

Young squirrel's precarious jump
Ignites a shower of cream acacia petals.
Furrowed trunk stands firm, oblivious.

"wildfire" by Shohei Ooka--3. fire in the field

2005-06-04T16:54:00.000-05:00

(This is my translation of "Wildfire" by Shohei Ooka, a survivor of the WWII battles in Philippines. For more information, read this post. The first and second chapters are in the archives.)

3. Fire in the field

I had started walking without knowing it. Walking, I was ruminating the strange notion that had just caught me. I was convinced of its absurdity, but there was something in me that clung to it as a sort of secret pleasure.

The path traced the natural line of a foot of a hill in the woods. The green surface of the hill glittered among the trees. At the edge of the woods, the grass that formed a dreamy curve of the hill descended to the side of the path. On the flat ridgeline, I saw a solitary dwarf tree like a human being.

The woods ended and I was in a field of dry gravel and sand with sparse growth of grass. It was a river bed. Here and there, at elevated areas scattered around like islands, silver ears of pampas grasses shined in the late afternoon light. The river lied beyond, forming a single steel line, and hurriedly slid away, slicing the scenery. Across the river, hills about the height of the Yoko mountains in Tama region also displayed the similar pale green of grasses, and went upstream retreating to the right, to the left. And from below the final precipitous drop of the hills, a single stream of black smoke ascended.

The smoke, in this season on the Philippines Islands, should be one from the corn husks being burned after the harvest. Since the landing, it had always decorated our horizon, indicating the existence of the invisible Filipinos surrounding us.

All the guards had to pay attention to the condition of the smoke rising in the horizon. It could be a primitive guerilla signal. It was the difficult task assigned to the guards to determine whether it was indeed a smoke rising from the necessity to burn unwanted materials or a smoke to communicate with a distant accomplice.

The smoke across the river that I saw was broad and abundant, making me imagine the large amount of what was being burnt below it. At its black bottom, I recognized occasional invasions of the tip of orange flame.

But given the guard habit I had acquired, the smoke was enough to make me hesitate to expose myself in the open river bed. Whether or not it was a mere wild fire, it was obvious that there were Filipinos with the burning material under the smoke. And as a matter of fact, Filipinos were all enemies for us.

Now I regretted that I chose the unfamiliar route. Having started for the death already, however, I didn't want to go back. I decided to take a circuitous route in the pathless woods with hills along its rim on the right, to reach the point ahead where the path in the river bed went into another woods.

I cut my way through hanging branches and vines that clung to my legs. Stepping on damp undergrowth, the combat boots were slippery. Lest I lose sense of direction, I maintained the distance between the ferns illuminated emerald by the bright reflection of the river bed and the edge of the woods. There was a path as well. Following it into the depth of the woods, I found a hut and there was a man. A Filipino stood there, with his eyes wide open.

I stopped, had my rifle at the ready, and glanced around quickly.

"Good day, master," he said in a flattering voice. About thirty, a pale-faced Filipino. From the faded blue half pants showed his skinny, dirty legs. His sheer existence here, where all the residents had supposedly fled, was already suspicious.

"Hello," I automatically replied in faltering Visayan, still examining the surrounding. It was quiet. The hut was elevated only by a foot, and the front and the rear was open, allowing the view of the back. Pungent odor floated in the air.

"You are welcom." Looking at the rifle in my hand, the Filipino smiled an obsequious smile. What jumped out of my mouth at the time was something I had never thought of. It was the following.

"Are there any corn?"

The man's face clouded, but he went round to the back of the hut, as if to lead me, still repeating his "you are welcome." There, in a hole dug in the ground, a large iron pot was on the fire. In it, thick yellow liquid was bubbling. Judging from yellow yams scattered on the soil nearby, he must be simmering those yams. The odor rose from the liquid.

In a separate, smaller pot, kernels of corn were being boiled. He scooped it onto a filthy enameled plate and offered it to me with large grains of black salt. Then I realized that I didn't have appetite at all.

"Is this your house?"

"No, my house is across the river," he said, and pointed to the river through the trees. It is unclear what he boils the stinking mountain yams for, but he seemed to come here primarily for this task. The yams must be found around here. I asked him what the use of the yams was, but his answer in Visayan was beyond my comprehension.

With the plate in front of me, I absentmindedly sat on the floor. The man watched my face intently, with an unchanging smile as if plastered to his face.

"You don't eat it?"

I shook my head. As I poured the corn into the haversack on my waist, I hated myself for demanding food when I didn't have any appetite.

By then, I had loosened my guard against the man. Though in general we didn't have the experience of observation nor the patience for it to distinguish the characters of Filipinos, it seemed that the man's face, which continuously intended to welcome my gaze and smile, expressed nothing but a simple impulse of the people to earn favor of their oppressors. Furthermore, this would be one of the few human beings that I would encounter at the end of my life.

"Do you want some yams?" He asked, as if it suddenly occurred to him.

"These aren't edible, are they?"

"No, I have others. Wait for me," he stood up and walked into the woods. I vacantly watched him go. He walked quickly away, without looking back even once, descended to a basin to the side, then disappeared.

I looked afresh around the ruinous inside of the hut. Dirty floor boards had came off here and there, bamboo columns were askew. On an exposed wall board crawled a gecko. The empty interior of the hut showed the slovenly life of the Filipino farmers who didn't care to ornate their lives more than necessary.

"I might be able to live on among these men," I thought.

The man was yet to come back. I grew anxious. His swift movement when he stood up came back to my mind. I went into the woods around where he disappeared. Only the trees stood silently. Fury rose inside of me at the thought of his flight. I hurried to the edge of the woods and no doubt I could see his back running toward the distant river, almost falling over.

When he looked back to recognize my figure, he waved his fists above his head as a gesture of threat and resumed running. The distance was far more than the reach of the bullets, and even if he had been within the bullets' reach, there would have been no way they would hit him. Before long his figure was obliterated by shining pampas grasses.

A wry smile came to me. Since I saw the eyes of impotent hatred of Filipinos in Manila, I should have known very well how futile it was to look for friendship from them. I went back to the hut, kicked over the pot of the simmered mountain yams, and left the spot. With the man fled, it was dangerous to stay there.

In an open river bed, I exposed myself boldly. Given his flight to the other side of the river, this position was safe for now. It meant that there was nobody he could go for help nearby. At the latest, I could leave here by the time he came back with his gang across the river.

I walked on the gravel hastily to cross the river bed and went back on the previous path at the beginning of the woods ahead. The trees in the woods were small and their trunks thin. Anthills piled up high beside the path from which ants flooded out like a fountain. I proceeded with caution, staying on the watch for the front. Even though I was certain of the security from my deduction, the fleeing man was, for my fear, a possibility of the existence of Filipinos on this path. Caution robbed me of meditation.

The woods came to an end. Across the river the fire was still visible in the field. There were two without my knowledge. Further, on the top of a lone hill shaped like a squatting man facing the other direction, another line of smoke was rising.

The fire at the foot of the hill rose thick and straight, but the one on the hill bent after reaching a certain height, indicating the wind that only blows high in the sky, and its tip became faint like a bloom. In contrast to the smoke at the bottom, which rose quickly with momentum as if to fight the weight of the air, the one on the hill rose high, thin, and proud, then swayed, trailed, and floated as if playing with the wind in the sky. This coexistence of two different shapes of smoke in one scenery, contrary to the meteorological rules, gave me a strange sensation.

The smoke on the hill was probably from a fire burning pasture, but it was fairly similar to what we call a beacon. But what signal did it send?

I grew impatient. The hill on the right went further away. Before I knew it, its graceful side like a back of a woman had changed to an unexpected, steep, and narrow facade, which threw two smaller ridges to the right and left from the triangular top, as if to stand firm with both feet. A basalt rock in the shape of an armchair was suspended in a small hollow between the two ridges. If I went round the ridge ahead, it might lead to the valley where the hospital was. I hastened my steps.

I was among the woods again. In the woods, the path branched into two. The left seemed to go upstream along the river, the right seemed to go along the hill. Shortly after I chose the right, the woods came to an end in a vast grass field. And there, I saw another fire.

The woods continued and diverged to the left along the river. In the front, beyond the dune-like undulations of the grass field, another hill of exposed rocks blocked the way like a folding screen. And halfway between me and the hill, the grass was burning about ten yards in width. There was no one.

I kept standing for a long time, looking at the smoke.

It was impossible that a fire occurred wherever I went, just because I went there. It was obvious if I compared my position as a mere soldier and the sociality of the task of building a fire. I was seeing them in sequence only because of the fortuity of the course I chose as a solitary walker.

My anxiety also belonged to the strange confusion of the senses ever since I had left the mainland. The only actual basis of the anxiety was the speculation that there were people where there was a fire, but this general causal relationship was not enough to justify the anxiety that I felt at the time. In actuality there was nobody at the fire in the grass field. The source of the anxiety lied in the sequence of the incidents that had occurred to me as an individual. It lied in the XXXnumberXXX of the fire I had seen.

These personal sensations bothered me probably because I was absorbed in myself too much.

Seeking a releaser from the magic, I looked in the horizon for the village where the hospital should be located. For, judging from the size of the grass field, it could be assumed that the field was more ore less a part of the valley of my destination. And I was able to find the few familiar houses that congregated as if to snuggle up to each other, at the foot of a rocky mountain to the far right.

There, at all events, there are my countrymen. At this time I didn't have no other idea than that.

The path cut through the fire still ablaze, but I couldn't go beyond it. Off the path, I proceeded straight to the village, shoving various gramineous grasses that reached up to my shoulder.

But my eyes didn't wander off the smoke. The sun was sinking low and it had started to be windy. The smoke crept on the ground to envelope the grasses, at times flying toward the woods along the river, cut off in the sky like a cotton ball.

There was not a shadow of human being in the grassy field as far as eye could see. Who set this fire, it was a question that I still couldn't solve from the facts in front of my eyes.

"Hi, nice to meet you. I want to kill myself, too." a thought on internet-based group suicides in Japan

2005-06-03T11:20:00.000-05:00

Lately in Japan, the internet is attracting some negative attention: there is a ostensibly widespread fear that the internet is becoming a convenient place for the suicidals. But "convenient" might not mean what might come to the mind of an American. Japanese suicidals aren't obtaining guns to blow their brains out through the internet, nor are they buying a lethal dose of strong medicine without prescription. Nor they aren't contacting a merciful Dr. Kevorkian with Asian complexion. Then what are they doing on the internet?

"As the number of suicides stays high around 32,000 in 2004, group suicides of people who acquainted with each other through the internet are on a sharp rise," an article (Japanese link) on Yomiuri Newspaper states. It seems that the suicidals who can't summon enough courage to actually commit suicide by themselves go to "suicide-inclined" chat rooms, find fellow hesitant suicidals, get together in some isolated places, and commit suicides together, with the help of the (distorted form of) group support. Despite their seeming contradiction, assumed annonymity of the internet in fact encourages instant intimacy between people who share the same interest (in this case the same inclination to suicide). These suicidals must have found the last "push in the back" in the mortal comradery which they couldn't find in their "real" relationship, in which they can't just say "I want to commit suicide" to someone whom they just met.

According to the article, the phenomenon first caught attention in 2003. The number has steadily increased since then: 34 people committed group suicides with people whom they got to know through the internet in 2003, 55 people in 2004, and 54 by the end of April in 2005. The demogrtaphic is heavily slanted toward the people in their 20s, but some are in their teens, 30s, 40s, and 50s.

The police of Yamanashi prefecture, where four people successfully committed a internet-initiated group suicide late last year, decided to prosecute all four for aiding and abetting suicides of the other three. All four were already dead at the point of the police's action, so its purpose was to clarify their stance on group suicide as illegal. In April this year, another police force also arrested two men who survived an attempted group suicide for the same ground. A committee of the Metropolitan Police Department released a report in which they proposed mandatory disclosures of personal information of people who posted announcement of their suicide attempts on the internet in advance, to make it easier to prevent these attempts.

What is odd is that, even though there are so many chat-and-bulletin-board-based web sites which are enormously helpful to the depressed/suicidal people, they are never talked about in the mainstream media. On these web sites, people do talk about their wishes of suicide, and some of them do post announcement of the actual attempts. I don't know what percentage of the users ends up committing suicide and what percentage finds relief in talking about it and doesn't actually kill themselves, but the number of posts and that of actual suicides suggest that a majority finds comfort and in some cases even healing in the annonymous yet intimate community of the internet.

Accusing these web sites for encouraging suicides is, therefore, quite off-the-point. Similarly, the ever-growing parental concern over their kids visiting these suicide-inclined chat rooms and having the evil idea of suicide planted in their innocent heads is absurd. There is, for sure, an element of fantasy in imagining one's own suicide, and some of the grop suicide bulleting boards can ferment the fantasy, but even in such cases, blaming the web sites doesn't solve any problem. When it comes to the police prosecuting the dead for aiding and abetting the other participants of group suicide, it is nothing but outrageous. If they thought that it would be a good deterrent, I wouldn't know what to say. What might or might not happen to themselves after their death is the last concern the people comtemplating suicide could have.

At any event, the article awakened my long-lasting curiosity of suicide in the context of culture. That'll be the theme of my reading for a while--hopefully it won't further delay the translation of "Wildfire." (The third chapter is almost done.)

educating the ignorant adults on autism: review of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by Mark Haddon

2005-06-01T09:29:00.000-05:00

I just finished ploughing through "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time," a fad book of a few months ago, which my boyfriend had picked up. Written by a British author Mark Haddon, who worked with autistic people in his younger days and has written numerous children's books, the book is narrated from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old autistic boy. I wasn't aware of any of this background information, however, when I started reading it. Despite my ignorance, within the first page, I couldn't help noticing a strange feel of the sentences. The sentences sounded oddly redundant and fixated, almost obsessive to precise details, even though the subject of each sentences are slightly different from the one before. The lack of narrator's emotional response to the subject or descriptions to evoke readers' emotional attachment to the subject also added to the strange feel.

It was seven minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I must have made some noise, like "hmm" or "hah" at this, for my boyfriend asked me from across the room (where he was watching a show on his laptop) what was wrong. I told him that the sentences were strange, that the narrator seemed to be overly meticulous about the tiniese precision. Then he gave me the above mentioned information, which was readily available in one of the first pages of the book.

The author keeps the tone throughout the novel. The boy's obsession with precision and the emotional barrenness remains constant, letting the readers (at least partially) experience the psyche of an autistic. The rational explanations the narrator gives for his "socially unacceptable" behaviors, such as groaning loudly when a subway's roar fills the station (he groans so as not to hear anything else that feels threatening to him) and fighting ferociously against any attempt of bodily contact (he really hates to be touched, even by his parents), provides clues to the readers to understand other autistics.

As the story unfolds, the detective work of the boy to find out who killed the dog with the garden fork slips into the painful disclosure about his own family. It is very much like a novel an author of children's books might write: it's informative (about autism and the autistics), its main subject is the issue of a family with an autistic, its climax is his conventional kids-lit journey to London, which is a huge adventure for him as an autistic boy who hates anything new, and it ends in a quite hackneyed yet annoyingly moving way, suggesting a bit of realistic hope of reconciliation. In that sense, it is very formulaic.

Indeed, one can probably say that it IS a children's literature. Only that in this case, children refer to adults, who, like children, are quite ignorant of autism. The author skillfully and observantly recreate the psyche of the autistic narrator, and presernt it in a readable, even enjoyable manner. There's the mystery of the dog-murderer, which first drives the story and then it serves as an introduction to the difficulty of being an autistic and being with an autistic. What happenes in the story is only secondary to the author's intention to spread the correct understanding of autism, just like an adventure of an orphaned child, however exciting it might be, might be intended to serve the purpose of advocating the importance of friendship and trust, in any other chldren's literature.

To his credit, it works quite beautifully. The read is compelling, and is full of practical knowledge about autism. (For instance, after reading the book, I'll probably give it a hair more thought before I give hairy eyeballs to a parent of a screaming child in a department store.) It is also thought-provoking, as to how hard it must be to be and to be with an autistic all the time. I, as a reader, have a priviledge to skip all the draining details the narrator gives in the book, which a family of an autistic doesn't have. Similarly, when the narrator says "then I screamed for about half an hour," I don't hear him scream for about half an hour. I just read that sentence in about two seconds. And it still is tiresome in accumulation. "Just imagine if it is real," I thought to myself more than once.

It's not a great literature or anything, and it probably doesn't intend to be one. It is a clever endeavor to benefit the autistics and their family. And in the light of its commercial success, which means a large readership, it is a triumph. All I hope is that the information provided in the book is correct, and that it will cultivate some understanding and acceptance in our society.

artist town of North Adams, Mass MoCa, and the Vermont Country Store

2005-05-30T18:12:00.000-05:00

The first few days of our New England trip was nice--with occasional light showers and temperature in the upper 50s, the area was at the height of the spring. Everything was in bloom. As we drove along hilly, winding roads of New England, we cleansed our zoot-permeated lungs with the sweet floral air.

We took MA2 from the crazy rotary hell (a.k.a. Boston) to North Adams in the northwestern corner of Massachussetts. The trees along the route had just started to open their tiny young leaves, and their extensive color range, from everyday lime green to less common yellow to unusual orange brown, made it look like autumn foliage. Slight haze in the air softened the contours of everything, adding to the typical lethargic feel of the area.

North Adams is an artist town, which used to be a lumber mill town along a small river. Many of the mills have been converted to artist residences, studios, and above all, the excellent museum of Mass MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), preserving the aging red blick walls and sturdy industrial structures inside.

The largest studio complex is located on the northern edge of the town. Around the old factory building, there are several huts and barns that have been prey to the residents artists' whims. One gutted hut was painted dark blue and dark green inside and outside, another barn was entirely painted with all sorts of pink hues (cf. the photo above).

In the center of the small town, along the river, is the Mass MoCA, also a converted large-scale lumber mill. Much of the "mill" feel, such as layers of paints left on exposed brick walls and girders that run across the high ceilings, is well preserved, giving it a delightful difference from many of the buildings designed principally for museums. The rooms are spacious, at times even huge (enough to fit eight exploding Ford Tauruses hung from the ceiling at various angles), and natural light generously stream through the numerous large glass windows (when it is appropriate, of course). The picture is one of the signs in the parking lot.

Its exhibits of contemporary art are playful and evocative, including this tiger exhibit by Cai Guo Cian. An entire room is dedicated to the single work, for it consists of about half a dozen fake, arrow-striken tigers flying all over the place in all sorts of poses--they definitely takes up some space. Reminiscent of both that nightmarish painting of Dali's and some of the traditional Chinese sumi painting of the emperors' tiger hunting, it is an exhibit fun to walk around. One of the tiger even attacked me as I took this one above. Another exhibit of note is the creepy silicone creatures by Patricia Piccinini. Of the two on the exhibit, "The Young Family" is particularly stunning and unsettling. Featuring a family of a hybrid chimera of pig and human, the sadness and exhaustion on the face of the strangely male-and-old-looking mother and the texture of their skin (meticulously recreated down to the tiniest pore) are beyond comprehension. The piece by itself could very well be worth the visit to the museum. (These two photos are taken by my boyfriend.)

From there on, we drove up to the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, on the way to which we couldn't resist to allow us to be touristic and dropped by at a Vermont contry store. Run by some large-scale corporation, but nicely disguised as a locally-owned store, it is obliterating the real, community-owned counterpart across a street, which seems to have its own reasons to be doing not terriblly well. The country store is a fun place to wander around, especially the colorful sections of all sorts of candy jars. If I were a kid, I would not leave the place until I got some in my pocket!

real smoky BBQ in Maine, YWCA Boston, three sons' homage to their Italian mom

2005-05-28T20:19:00.000-05:00

Here are some more great inns and restaurants in New England. Hopefully my fridnds won't get too jealous upon reading these... My mother did. Hah.

>Beale Street Barbeque and Grill
We dropped by this Memphis BBQ place in Bath, Maine, on our way to Acadia National Park from New Hampshire. It wasn't planned, but the wonderful smell of their smoke house in the back of the restaurant, which happened to be next to a public parking, was just irresistible. And it was a telltale sign of good Southern BBQ. The shredded pork literally melts in your mouth. The cornbread isn't one of those chokingly dry, pasty, yellow sponge, but a moist and flavorful delight. The excellent spicy smoked sausage has a perfect accompaniment of home made baked beans, rice, and refreshing cole slaw. Especially the taste-bud-caressing harmony of the spicy sausage and tomato-flavored rice, which is far from the usual overcooked, soggy, bursting-around-the-edges fare. With many choices under $10, it's a great lunch stop, especially when you've driven for too long without proper supply of food (like we did).

>Boston YWCA's Berkeley Residence
It's a YWCA, so there's no frill. And it costs you $90 for a double room. Then why bother?

Well, because $90 is an impossible deal in the heart of Boston. We did several searches for hotels under $100 in Boston, and all we got were two hotels in some unheard-of suburbs where the nearest public transportation is two miles away, if at all. On the other hand, the YWCA is on the edge of the South End residential neighborhood, and less than five T stops away from everything. Such hip streets as Newbury and Boyleston, which are studded with restaurants and boutiques and are fun to roam around, if a bit too overpriced to actually participate in their commercial buzz, are within walking distance. We enjoyed all the amusement of the city which should have been out of reach if we had stayed at one of the suburban hotels for twenty dollars more.

The rooms are bare. But it is cleaner than many hotels. It is also well-equipped for longer-staying guests (such as abundant towel racks and more-than-enough storage space), which cannot be a bad thing for a brief stay. Our room had two single beds, but it wasn't a problem--we could haul one next to the other all right. :-P For the public shower, flip-flops would be a wise idea. They would have made me much happier. Not that the shower room was filthy, but it just doesn't feel good to step in a little puddle with someone else's hair floating in it.

Full breakfast (extensive choices of cereals, breads and juices, coffee, cooked-at-the-order eggs, fruits) is included. With its minimalist and thrifty interior, dim lights, and several solitary, tired, older residents who seemed to have been there for decades, it is probably a very dipressing place to stay alone for an extended period of time. But if you have a company, male or female, a short stay will be just all right. (Yup, they now accept male guests.)

>Monica's Trattoria
We wandered into the North End neighborhood during our stay in Boston. It's been an authentic Italian neighborhood with probably the most European city scape. Unfortunately we didn't come across any "Italian grandmas chatting in the street" as our guide book stated it, due to the extremely cold and soggy weather, but the real deal of the neighborhood is its great Italian food. Ranging from cheap slices of pizza (probably excellent) to sophisticated modern Italian cuisine, with some bakeries and grocery stores, there's plenty to choose from when it comes to food. We chose the Monica's Trattoria on Prince St. Its red/green/yellow design of the wall looked promising. The menu features home made fresh pasta (such as musuroom-stuffed ravioli in herb cream broth) and brick-oven-baked pizza (roasted eggplant, plum tomatoes, and mozzarella is one of the choices). We had their daily specials--Sauteed Clam with Tomato Fettuccine and Homemade Italian Sausage with Mushed Potato Ravioli. Both were excellent--the flavors were robust, and all the ingredients were in a perfect, mouthwatering harmony. Even though it is only a decade old, it is rated as one of the best in the country. To know that the owners/chefs are three brothers, whose mom (the namesake, of course) has an import grocery store just across the street is a nice Italian touch.

survivor of the stormy Atlantic chill

2005-05-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

It was probably the suckiest vacation in my life. Well, in terms of weather, that is.

New England was under a thick cover of clouds for the last five days of our trip. In fact, the clouds were something of a winter storm that brought us gusting wind and incessant rain. On top of the Cadillac Mountain in the Acadia National Park, the wind was so strong that for a split second it lifted our car from the ground. (We were very relieved to see that our car was still where we parked it when we came back from the restroom.) In Boston, we ended up spending some five hours of quality time in the airport before we finally set off to the slightly bumpy flight to Chicago late last night. The last two days, with the highs barely above 45, even set the record of the coldest May 24th and 25th in the history of Boston. The gray, windy, bone-chilling sogginess of the last five days were more than enough to make me temporarily forget the first half of the trip--during which we managed to enjoy the early spring air streaming over our head as we drove our convertible. (We were lucky to be assigned a convertible for the price of a compact car at the rental car place. They must have been seriously out of cars.)

But anyway, I'm back in Chicago, readier than ever to enjoy the warm, dry, and sunny weather...

Below are some places of note from our trip.

>Polly's Pancake Parlor
Nestled in the rolling hills that eventually lead to the rugged terrain of the White Mountains National Forest, this log-cabin pancake house is a wonderful place to start the day of serious hiking. The three-inch pancakes are small enough to try more than one flour-and-addition combination, such as whole wheat blueberry (FILLED with plump blueberries) and cornmeal chocolate chip. Be daring and add some sides--especially the bacons, home-smoked at the location, are the best I've ever had. The rich smokiness, comparable to the smokiest of the smoked salmons, perfectly counters the intense flavor of the pork. It is on your way to the mountains, if you stay in Franconia, Littleton, or other nearby towns.

>Hearthside Bed & Breakfast
Located in the center of Bar Harbor, the largest town on the Mt. Desert Island, this B&B is an excellent place to stay. It has everything you would expect from a B&B, from cutely decorated rooms with lots of quaint character to fun conversation with other guests over a satisfyingly hearty breakfast. They even treat you with home-baked brownies and hot drinks at 4-5 every day. But what makes this B&B the place to stay is the owners Susan and Barry. Though extremely friendly (almost like a family), they are professionals. Our room was miraculously cleaned while we were downstairs at the breakfast table. The cleaning cart full of mops and cleansers, an unfortunate norm of most hotels, was nowhere to be seen. I would avoid the "crazy" season of late July to mid August (when almost everyone on the island is unhappy, may he be a tourist or an innkeeper), but other than that, I would definitely go back to Hearthside B&B.

(list of places to be continued)

closed for vacation

2005-05-17T10:36:00.000-05:00

I'll be traveling in New England for a week. Am I travelling too much? Probably. :P

Hoperully I'll come back with some good photos to post and good stories to tell.

death of a son

2005-05-17T10:00:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday, a death of one of our classmates' son shook our class. The mother told us that her son was attacked and died on previous Tuesday, and as planned ahead, she recited Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son," as tears run down her cheeks. After she left the classroom, none of us felt like continuing the recital of the poems we selected--it felt hollow and fake to do so after such an explosion of genuine emotion. The only thing that felt appropriate for the class (it was a creative writing class) and the occasion was to write. And so we did.

Trying to follow the instructor's suggestion to write a note to the mother who lost the son, I found myself troubled not by the death of her son but by my apparent incapacity of compassion. My eyes became slightly teary, but I couldn't tell if it was a genuine concern for her loss or a mere reflex at her tears. I was probably shocked and shaken by the force of erupting emotion, but at the same time it felt like a scene from a film or a book. A greater part of me was observing the scene like a curious spectator.

The first thing that came to my mind to write to Denise was my admiration at her strength, but such a comment would be no help to her, nor it would be significant. She doesn't need any interpretation or analysis of what she does or what she feels--whereas that is about the only thing I can do at this point. Thus I, so selfishly, reflect upon my own response to what shouldn't have happened but happened, questioning for the hundredth time if I am incapable of compassion. My thoughts just don't extend to her, who appears to be behind a hard, cold shell of grief that no one can rightfully penetrate. My words hesitate to reach to her. My cold intellect ponders the tragic irony of her selection of the poem ("Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes), as if I were a spectator, omniscient and detached. I do not have the courage to say anything meaningless to her, nor anything too meaningful. As a poet once said, writers steal. It is true, but it is repulsive to find myself looking at Denise break into tears and thinking how I would describe the charged air of the room, her distorted face, the tears on her chocolate cheek, and as merely a perfunctory second thought, what she might be feeling.

And here I am, writing about the "tragedy" (o, how hollow it sounds!), using it as a material to reflect upon. Or even as a trigger to think about MYSELF.

Through her last name, I managed to find a few articles on what happened to her son. He was shot in the head while he hanged out at a parking lot of an apartment in a suburb of Chicago. After a day, he died at the hospital he was taken to, where another victim of the shooting is recovering. He was twenty-one. One article linked his death to drug/gun problems of the neighborhood, without solid evidence that suggests his involvement.

Wildfire by Shohei Ooka--2. Path

2005-05-14T22:55:00.000-05:00

This is my translation of the second chapter of "Wildfire" by Shohei Ooka (大岡昇平『野火』). Why I started this project and what the book is like overall, check out this post.

2. Path

Large acacia trees towered over the village, covering with their shadows the roots that invaded and blocked the streets. The doors, to the houses where the residents evacuated, were closed, and the streets were vacant. Volcanic gravels glared in grayish brown, straying out the village to mingle with the green wilds, bursting with sunshine.

Along with the disemboweling desperation, I felt a negative happiness of a sort filled my body. Granted it was an ephemeral freedom of not having a place to go, but I could use the last few days of my life as I would please, not at the will of the officers.

The destination, had been in my mind. As I told the guardsmen, I would go to the hospital. Not to repeat the futile entreaty. But to see the people who "squatted" there. I didn't know what to do once I saw them, but I wanted to see the people again, who, just like me, had no place to go.

A field opened itself. Straight ahead it was limited by woods in about a kilometer, but to the right, behind a tree-less expanse of a marsh field into the distance, the volcanic mountains of the central mountain range that constituted the spine of the island heaped on top of each other, with a ridge of a frontal mountain stretching toward the back of the woods ahead. Where its undulation like a back of a lying woman gradually lowered toward the left, next to a nose-like protrusion, a rapid stream about eighteen meters in width appeared. The hills again rose across the stream, and sank along it, then curved to the left in the scenery. The sea should be behind it.

The hospital was about six kilometers beyond the hills ahead.

The afternoon sun was ablaze. The sunlit sky, so radiant that one would suspect a storm conceived in it, was filled with the roar of enemy aircrafts incessantly flying in one section. Among their monotonous buzz of honeybees, sounds of sporadic mortars exploding somewhere in the nearby mountains were occasionally mixed. To expose myself in the open field put me in the danger of being targeted by an enemy aircraft, but at this point I had no reason to fear.

I placed a hand towel under the helmet to prevent the sweat from running, slung the rifle to my shoulder with the leather strap, and continued on with spirit. I still seemed to have fever, but I was used to this fever since my younger age. Just as it once was an obstacle I had to handle with craft in order to fulfill the desire of the youth, now it was nothing more than a condition naturally to be ignored in order to live the time of my life at my disposal. Disease is nothing when there is no reason to hope for its cure.

I walked on, spitting the phlegm on roadside grasses as it welled up from the throat. I imagined with pleasure the Japanese tuberculosis germs contained in the phlegm die out one by one, scorched by the tropical sun.

At the edge of the woods the path diverged into two. Ahead was a path crossing over the hills straight to the hospital, to the left was one that went around the protruding nose in the woods, then went into the same valley. The path over the hills was undisputedly shorter, but I was already fed up with the route after the two round trips since yesterday. From an aimless whim, I decided to take the unfamiliar woodland path.

It was dark in the woods, the path narrow. Among the towering jungle of the tall trees similar to oak and maple, low shrubs of unknown names spread without leaving a space, stretching the vines and tendrils around. Tropical leaves, which kept falling irrespective of the season, were decomposing on the path, transmitting soft feel to the sole of my shoes. In silence, new fallen leaves rustled at my feet, as if in Musashino woods back home. I walked on, my head drooping.

A strange notion passed my mind: this path is a path I take for the first time in my life, and nevertheless I will never take this path again. I stopped, looked around.

Nothing was unusual. There, broad-leaved trees similar in many aspects to the ones in my homeland (with straight trunks, spreading branches, and hanging leaves), stood in silence, only that I did not know the names. Far before I came across here, they must have been standing thus, regardless of whether I came or not, and they will stay thus for good.

Nothing was more natural than this. And that I, who would die before long, would not pass in this hidden woods on the Philippine Island again, was also natural. What was strange was that I conceived this known fate and the fact that I pass through here for the first time as a contradictory relation of a sort.

Yet, since I left the mainland, I had been used to these irrational conception and feelings. For example, when the transport ship advanced the southern sea of June, as I gazed at the ocean, lost in thought, I suddenly found myself in a trim scenery as if in a dream.

The absolute navy ocean stretched, with the horizon surrounding it with a perfect circle, as if to raise the volume of the water. Not far away from the surface, rice-cake-like clouds were afloat with their bottoms lined up at a definite height, probably keeping a regular distance from each other. And as the ship proceeded at a fixed speed, they moved like a fan being turned around a certain viewpoint. Accompanied by the regular sound of the waves that passed by the side and the monotonous sound of diesel engine, this very regular scene seemed then to me utterly strange.

Given that, under an accidentally stable air pressure, the sun pours heat evenly on the sea surface, incessantly creating the same amount of vapor, it is no mystery that there emerged the clouds of the exact same shape at a regular position. And since I watched them from a ship which was propelled by a machinery at a regular speed, it was natural that the scenery transformed itself in a fixed manner. Although I immediately reflected thus, my excitement was slow to leave. There was a nuance of pleasant pain of some sort.

If I had been a tourist at the time, I would have fancied telling, upon coming home, my miserable friends chained to the land of Japan about this wonder of the ocean. My excitement and pain were, perhaps, based on the fact that I, having infected with the premonition of a defeat and death, could not expect to relate the strange experience to others.

It was also probably because I felt a foreboding of death at the time, that it felt strange not to walk the narrow path in the woods on Philippine Islands ever again. Such notion never strikes us whatever remote area we might wander in Japan. It might be because the possibility of coming back when we please is assumed unconsciously. Then, our so-called sense of vitality might lie in the expectation of being able to infinitely repeat what we currently do.

The tropical scenery of the Philippine Islands pleasantly rocked my senses. Softness of the lawn outside of the city of Manila, striking treetops of flame trees washed by a sudden shower, out-of-the-paint-tube sunrise and sunset, volcanoes with purple shade, coral reef surrounded by white surf, thickets swallowing the shadows at the water's edge, everything took my mind to the delight, near ecstasy. The ever-growing delight in the nature seemed to be the sure sign of my approaching death.

I thanked the coincidence that allowed me such sight of the abundance of life before I die. My life so far had been far from satisfactory, but I actually might have been blessed with good luck; the thought flashed. The word "destiny" that visited me at that time, if I didn't resist, could easily be exchanged with "God."

Apparently, such notion and confusion of senses were the result of the broken balance of my consciousness and the outside world, due to my complete lack of will to fight despite having been transported overseas in order to fight. Infantry is a profession that requires one to see nature only from the standpoint of necessity. For him, slight unevenness of the ground means a refuge to protect himself from bullets, and a beautiful green plain represents merely a dangerous distance to be crossed quickly. All sorts of natural aspects that appears to his eyes, who is dragged from one place to the other as operational plans demand, are inherently meaningless for him. This meaninglessness is his support for existence and his source of courage.

When, from cowardice or from reflection, the meaningless unity is broken, what is exposed in the crevice would be something even more meaningless for a living human being, which is to say the premonition of death.

mother to son

2005-05-12T22:28:00.000-05:00

Our final for the creative writing class was a recital of acclaimed poems of our choice. I had chosen "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" by A. E. Houseman. It is rhymed, and thus easier to memorize, I thought. I was also interested in the use of cherry blossoms as a symbol of both celebration of youth and premonition of death, seemingly common to Japanese and American literature. I went to the classroom, muttering the verse to myself.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about woodlands ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

A girl sitting in front of me turned back and asked if all we had to do was to recite a poem. I told her yes.
"I wouldn't come to the final if I didn't like this class. It's only worth 25 points," she said. "But I do, so..."

"Yeah, this is probably the most fun class I've ever taken in this college. I thought about skipping the final, but you know, I just want to be nice to the teacher," I said. Then I dropped my gaze onto the poem. There were several lines that my tongue never seemed to twitter.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

Ms. Brandet, our teacher, came in, smiled to all of us, and handed back our last assignment--the drama. As everyone went up in turn to the desk to fetch their script, I continued to rehearse the lines. The language of the poem, as I go over it time and again, seemed to grow dull. I half regretted my choice.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Chasing the back of the last student going back to her seat, Ms. Brandet asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to go first. Several hands went up, but Denise was the first to go. An African American woman in her early forties with a history of writing that extended longer than the lives of many of us, her solid presence had always been an anchor to the world. Her polite, if old-fashioned, "yes, ma'am" to our instructor had been a delight to hear, soothing me into a different America. Vivid colors and bold patterns on her shirts always intensified against her dark, tanned skin.

"My poem is 'Mother to Son' by Langston Hughes. I chose this one because it has always been my favorite poem of his since when I was a young girl. It speaks so much..." she posed, and continued. "I lost my son. He was killed." Her perfect composure, complete with even a hint of smile at the corner of her lips, made me think that she was referring to a distant past. Then, suddenly a strange warp appeared on her face, as if a trememdous force gripped it, shook it, and ripped it. I saw a drop of tear run down her cheek. "On Monday I was with him in the hospital. He died on Tuesday. That was why I came in late," she said it in a breath. We were silent, not knowing if we should be looking into her eyes, as if intently listening to a well-made story. "He was my only son. I wanted to come here today because he was proud of my getting an education. He wanted me to go on."

"I'm sorry, I'm crying," she said, and recited the poem, trying to fight back the emotion that threatened to overwhelm her with sweet vigor.

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor--
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.

Tears welled up behind her black-rimmed glasses, ran down her chocolate cheeks, but she didn't stop. Surpressed by her physical, violent attempt to stay composed, her voice became at times inaudible, but she didn't stop. With her eyes tight shut, she wrung out the last lines.

For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

Calls to the boy in the poem became her calls to her son. Her fiercely shaking whisper filled the air, tore our eardrums. When she finished, everybody was hesitant to applaude, for despite its genuine power to move us, it was not a performance in its ordinary sence. Not knowing what else to do or say, however, we applauded at last.

"I'm going on. I have to go on," she repeated, then apologized again, and said she would leave the class if we wouldn't mind. Nobody answered. Nobody could answer. She briefly went back to her chair in the front row, still fighting to be calm. Ms. Brandet put her arm around Denise's shoulder, whispering something in her ears. "I had really enjoyed all you guys in this class. Hope to see you next semester, too." She was courageously polite until the end. All we could do was to give her hands. She picked up her library tote bag and left.

We couldn't continue the final after she left. Reciting poems we had chosen on a whim seemed utterly hollow and meaningless after we had witnessed such a divastating force of reality.

"I don't think anybody wants to follow that," said Jane, a beautiful mass-communication major of Italian descent said it for all of us. Many of our eyes were opaque with the threat of spontaneous tears. Some nose were rosier than usual. We blankly stared at our desks, unable to meet the eyes of the others. The only appropriate thing for me to do was to write about it. Most of us shared the feeling, and we wrote, some to be handed to Denise, others to be read only by Ms. Brandet. For a long time, I waited for the fact to sink in. The whole scene seemed unreal, from the very death of her son to the tragic irony of her poem selection, which had been made months before the incident.

I finally wrote, but I didn't hand it in. "I want to keep this to myself," I said. I was the last to leave the classroom. "It's not pretty."

"That's okay. That's not the point. All that matters now is that the writing makes you feel better," said Ms. Brandet. I thanked her, for her apt and compassionate handling of the sudden explosion of the final exam, and for her concise advise throughout the semester, smiled, and left the classroom. The parking lot felt further than ever. I hastened my steps, hoping that my liquid eyes wouldn't be too noticeable, with a reawakened suspicion unsettling my stomach again.

new love found--portrait!

2005-05-11T14:22:00.000-05:00

Here are two more of the photos from the Cinco de Mayo parade held in Pilsen last Sunday.

He is one of the charros (Mexican cowboys) on horseback, waiting for the parade to start at the Amoco station (of all places!). His stern expression and the flickring shadow his straw sombrelo casted on his face fascintated me. At first I kept a "safe distance" from them, using the maximum zoom of my camera, due to my poor social skills. (I am SO envious of people who know how to get friendly with their photographic subject, or anybody, on that matter.) But gradually I was drawn closer to get more intimate shots. Finally I found myself squatting on the ground about a yard from the hooves of their beautiful horses. Thankfully, they let me take thier pictures as much as I wanted, and this is my favorite among the charro shots. The focus on the embroidered sleeve, rather than the man's face is bothersome, however. There's nearly too much to pay attention to when taking pictures!

There was a "float" full of traditionally dressed children with dark skin and serene expression like he has. From behind the fence of their (massive) mothers, I took half a dozen pictures of them, also as they waited for the parade to start. It turned out that before the parade offered so much more to photograph than during the parade, mostly because the participants aren't self-conscious until it starts. Once it starts, all they do is put on artificial smile on their faces and to wave perfunctorily at the spectators.

I usually do not take portraits. Part of the reason is the above-memtioned less-than-satisfactory interpersonal skill of mine, but it didn't bother me too much. I didn't have much interest in people anyway. The Cinco de Mayo parade, however, might have changed it a hair. I'm still a same old anti-social hermit, but on that day I discovered the potential power of a portrait to strike people (as if I hadn't seen the National Geographic photo of a weeping Peruvian boy). To try to capture the elusive expressions on people's faces was so much fun, to top it all. I wouldn't be surprised to find myself sneakily pointing my camera at participants of other festivals and parades around Chicago this summer... (Plus, people aren't copyrighted, so tehre's no need to worry about security guards walking up to me furiously.)

Wildfire by Shohei Ooka--1. departure

2005-05-10T11:42:00.000-05:00

This is my translation of the first chapter of "Wildfire" by Shohei Ooka. As to why I started this and the general overview of the book and the author, check this post.

1. Departure

He hit me on the cheek. The squad leader rapidly told me as follows.

"You fool. Who in the world comes back here just because they tell you so. Tell them there's no place to go back and stick around there. Then the hospital people do something. The company can't afford to keep a tubecular like you. Look, all our boys are out looking for food. We're on the defensive. No room to feed a useless soldier. Go back to the hospital. If they refuse, squat there for however long. They can't leave you like that. If they wouldn't accept you... you die. You've received your grenade for nothing. Now that's the only service you have left."

I kept looking at his lips that became wetter as he spoke. It is unclear why he had to be so enraged when I was the one who were receiving the fatal sentence, but probably it is because of the military habit of growing excited as his voice become louder. Ever since the situation deteriorated, the anxiety they had to conceal under the mask of the officer repeatedly exploded on us servicemen. That our squad leader talked solely of food was obviously because it was his biggest worry.

There was no way the hospital would accept a patient without food, however persistently I "squatted." The provisions were scarece, and the army surgeons and the medical orderlies lived on the provisions they received for their patients. In front of the hospital had been several idle "squatters." They also had been told from their squad to "die."

Shortly after the landing on the western shore of the Leyte Island in late November, I had had a little hemoptysis. After the shoreline operation against the air force and the difficult march inland, the preexisting condition, which I had had concern about during our station on the Luzon Island, worsened. I was given five-days worth of provision, and sent to the medical camp in the mountains. At first, in front of the blood-covered injured soldiers lie on the floor of civilian houses without any decent care, the military surgeon yelled at me for my weakness to have come to the hospital just for tubeculosis. Seeing that I had provisions, however, he allowed me to stay.

Three days later, I was told that I was cured and sent back. But at the squad, I was told that they wouldn't take me as cured, that they should keep me for five days because I had taken given five-days worth of provision. I went back to the hospital. They refused me, saying that my provision couldn't be for five days, it had been spent already. Then this morning I came back again to the squad like a ball thrown back, but it is only because I wanted to see if the squad would tell me to "die."

"I understood. Private Tamura will immediately head to the hospital, and if they do not accept me, I will end it."

We generally were not allowed to show off our individual judgement as "understand," but he let me slide this time.

"Good, go strong. Everything is for the country. Behave as an imperial soldier until the very end."

"Yessir!"

In the room, a sergeant responsible for the salary was making some document at a dirty wooden box by the window. He was silent, pretending to be unable to hear our conversation at his back, but when I reported to him, he stood up, and said to me, squinting his narrow eyes even narrower.

"Good. I'm sorry it is as if we were kicking you out, but you have to consider the squad leader's position, too. Don't die in vain like a dog. Here's your provision."

From the small heap of the yams in the corner of the room, he carelessly scooped some and handed them to me. They were called Camote, a Philippine yam similar to our sweet potatoes. As I thanked him, received the yams and put them in the sack, my hands trembled. The sustainance of my life, that is guaranteed by the nation which I belonged to and which I offer my life to, is limited to these six yams. This number six had a terrifying mathematical accuracy.

I saluted and about-faced. The voice of the squad leader chased me.

"No need to report to the company commander."

For a moment, I thought it might save me if I went to the company commander, but it was XXXX. At the front, officers succumbed to the collective will of the noncommissioned officers. The room of the company commander was a step away from the room, in the annex connected by a breezeway, but the straw mat that covered the entrance was nothing but still.

"No need to report" meant that it had been settled when I was sent back to the hospital the day before. My return today, was completely unnecessary. This was purely the matter of the squad leader.

Down the half-rotten wooden stairs, the sunlight through the trees was on the ground like fallen petals. To the side continued a shrub with flowers of faded crimson, similar to cluster-amaryllis, and in the woods beyond the shrub a few more than ten soldiers were digging air-raid shelters.

Due to the shortage of shovels, they digged them utilizing broken pots and sticks that they found in civilian houses. We were hiding in the mountainous village, as nothing more than stragglers, whom the Americans did not come to air-raid any more, but the shelters were necessary for our sense of security. Plus, we had nothing else to do.

In the shade of the woods, the faces of the soldiers were dark, devoid of expression. Some, who looked up toward me, soon diverted their eyes and resumed their task, looking down.

Most of them were the supplement soldiers who came from the main land with me. Although during the boredom of the transport ship we united in the slave's sentiment, the cotidian necessities of three-month-long station life with the KOSANHEI returned us to the same egoists as we had been in the normal society. And it inevitably became more serious as the situation worsened after our landing on this island.

When I became sick and it became clear that I only receive their favor, without being able to return them, something clearly cold flowed between us. Where the premonition of danger persists, without materializing, the retrocessive instinct of self-preservation turns human beings more egotistic than necessary. I did not feel like going to tell them my fate, which they already knew. To stimulate their cornered humanity was rather cruel.

At the foot of a tree ahead, about half a dozen guradsmen loitered. And it was all the military force left to the position of our company.

Our combined brigade, which was a part of the army corpses landed on the western coast to supplement the losing situation in Tacloban area, had lost more than half of its men to the aerial attack at the beach. Heavy firearms sank with the ships before we could unload them. Nonetheless we marched on a narrow path across the central mountains to the Browen Airfield, following the initial plan of operations, but were pushed back by remnants of a preceding army corps at the foot of the mountains. They told us that it is impossible to advance at the head, in a chaos due to the activity of the enemy commando unit with a mortar. We could not but take the south-bound course into the mountains, cutting open our passes, but at the mortar attacks from three sides on the way, came back down to the bottom again to disperse in the valleys of the area to bivouac, without anything to do. Rumor had it that the communication officer sent to Ormoc came back with an order to advance, which the commanding officer was ignoring.

The provision for twelve days we carried from Ormoc had been depleted. The corn and other grains, which the local residents left behind in the nearby villages, were consumed almost instantly. A third of the forces of the company, which was now effectively reduced to the size of a platoon, took turns to go out to the surrounding field to collect yams and bananas from the natives' farms. Or rather, to go out to feed themselves. After four or five days of eating that way, they came back with food enough to meet the demand of the remaining company while the next third went out in turn. Other companies, scattered around the nearby villages, were scavenging food in the same manner, resulting in frequent dispute over the prior right to the fields. The distance and duration of the missions grew longer.

Unable to bear the burden due to the hemoptysis, I could not join this food collection. This was why I was told to die.

I approached the guardsmen through the woods. They sat down on the ground, watching me welcomingly. It was annoying to repeat to the leader of the guardsmen that I had been abandoned by the company, but what was more torturous was to expose my misery to their indifferent sympathy. It took long to reach where they were, walking in the expectant gazes.

The lance corporal in charge of the guardsmen, however, changed his expression when he heard my formal report. This pale civil engineer, who was transferred from a construction troop in Mahchuria, was reminded of his own anxiety.

"There's no telling who are better off, you the leaving or us the remaining. We'll end up in suicide attack anyway," he muttered.

"They won't let you in at the hospital," one of the soldiers said.

I laughed and said, "if they won't, I'll just insist until they will," an exact repetition of what the squad leader had told me. All I thought was to end this scene as quickly as possible.

When we saluted good-bye, the face of the soldier who happened to exchange glances with me, was distorted. My own distorted face could have infected him like a yawn. I departed.

vivid display, blasting music, and silent crowd--Cinco de Mayo parade in Chicago

2005-05-09T19:04:00.000-05:00

Here are several pictures I took at the annual Cinco de Mayo parade yesterday. I found a different kind of joy in photographing people, and made a vow to visit more festivals to explore this field.

These girls fascinated me with the totally opposite facial expressions.

He was one of the charros (Mexican cowboys) on horseback. His stern gaze was complimented with his elaborate attire of traditional charros.

It was the first day of summer this year in Chicago. I felt the sun reddening the back of my neck as I stood up from the crouching position I assumed to enhance the height of the Mexican horsemen whom I was photographing. One of them had a parrot of Caribbean blue and bright yellow on his arm. Another took generous gobbles from a tequila bottle, adding to his merry mood. From time to time, some made their horses do a playful dance with a tag at the braided leather rein, clinking its silver fittings. Their traditional charro attire, which consisted of a straw sombrelo with its back defiantly bent upward, a cowboy suit with elaborate embroidery of organic motifs, a matching bow tie, and a pair of similarly embroidered boots with pointed toes, absolutely fascinated me. Partly because of the squinted eyes under the bursting sunshine, some of them had stern expressions on their faces, as if they had been on horseback in the arid desert of northern Mexico, not in the Amoco gas station in Chicago, waiting for the belated Cinco de Mayo parade to start.

From the starting point of the parade, a subtle waves of restlessness was transmitted through the air. The engines of the cars and motorcycles started to be heard, and so did the blasting boom boxes mounted on the "floats," some hauled by a gasping passenger car, others by trucks shamelessly displaying the sponsors' names from Insurance One to Miller Genuine Draft (which boasted two mestizo babes in gold-trimmed black sombrelos). With increasing dust in the air, the parade arrived. Several different kinds of military marching bands (and their high-school imitators) led the way, their perfunctory steps slightly betraying the spotless helmets and perfect creases. On the following floats, teenage girls in vivid traditional dresses waved hands, with occasional flips and flaps of their skirts, leaving momentary curved traces in the back of our eyes. Children in straw hats and thick woven capes waved hands on another.

A Tribune reporter approached me and asked several questions. As I gave her answers, almost automatically geared for a "good appearance on paper," a bad habit of a perpetual student, I noted her Gucci sunglasses. (She actually used my comment in her article the following day, starting it by this passage: "By many accounts, Chicago's Cinco de Mayo parade can't touch festivities in Mexico. But celebrators say Chicago is tops in one aspect: the diversity of the crowd.")

Several more floats passed by, followed by a team of Latin American motorcyclists all dressed in embroidered black leather jackets, and two dozen classic cars and lowered, tilted, bouncing cars of all sorts, and the parade came to an abrupt end. A few police officers and two street-cleaning car concluded the parade. The crowd, which seemed to be quite composed throughout the 15-minutes procession of the parade, started to disperse. With all its blasting Latin tunes and vibrant colors of their traditional outfits, there was a sense of falseness, or hollowness to the parade, as is (too) often the case with the traditional ceremony anywhere in a "developed" countries. With a few tequila-induced exceptions, people were far from the top of excitement. Cries of mandatory "Viva Mexico!" from the floats were not matched by the replies from the crowd. It is probably only natural, that the Mexican Americans, uprooted from their native land and culture, even if voluntarily, feel detached from the celebration of the independence of their native country. The tradition and the culture celebrated on the occasion were no longer truly a part of their lives. Still, the non-responsiveness of the spectators, ironically accentuated by the lively displays of the marchers, was somewhat saddening as yet another sign of our alienation from our own cultural heritages.

"Wildfire" by Shohei Ooka--coming soon!

2005-05-05T21:58:00.000-05:00

I'm reading John Dower's "War without Mercy," which deals with the propaganda before and during the Pacific War, both in the U.S. and Japan. It's an interesting read, though the basic idea, that both sides employed racist propaganda in engaging the citizens/subjects in the war effort, has become somewhat a common knowledge since its publication in the late '80s. (Unfortunately, the wartime propaganda and the willful neglect of certain facts on the part of the Allied forces have also become a basis of the neo-nationalistic "re-evaluation of the Great East Asia War" in Japan in the recent years.) I haven't reached the third section where the author examines the Japanese propaganda, but it'll probably be a stimulating read as well.

Reading the factual research, I thought of a book that I read years ago: "Wildfire" by Shohei Ooka. Ooka was enlisted in 1944, at the age of 35 and with tuberculosis (which shows how desperate Japan was), sent to Philippines, became a PoW at the defeat, and wrote the novel based on his wartime experience in 1951. He wrote several other novels based on his experience during the Pacific War, and is regarded as one of the earliest and finest of the "post-war" authors. The novel was controversial in several ways, including cannibalism. Cannibalism, however, is only a part of the atrocity and insanity of war. With his crisp style, his lucid thoughts, and most importantly with sincerity, Ooka takes us to the maddening tropical jungle permeated with the odor of rotting wounds and desperation of the losing and starving army.

I've started to translate the novel. With the final exams coming up, I'm not sure when I can post the first chapter, but it's been a delightful effort to translate his concise sentences, which are so different from meandering sentences of authors in the Meiji era (around 1860-1910).

audible illusion

2005-05-02T10:07:00.000-05:00

Sinece P and I are an international couple with some language issues (mainly my Japanese-influenced pronunciation and slightly-better-than-an-eighty-year-old-grandma listening ability), our daily life is full of entertaining linguistic mishaps. One earlier incident is here.

Yesterday in the morning, when we were contemplating on what to do, I suggested that there was an antique fair going on in the Merchandise Mart, a monstrous building along the Chicago River. "What!?" His response seemed to be oddly agitated, disproportionate to only an antique fair. "An antique fair," I repeated. "Ahhh," he said in a muffled voice. (His head was behind a pillow.) "I thought you said an armpit hair was going on there."

...An enormous building, 25 floors high and two city blocks long, all full of armpit hair. That would be the thing to see!

have you ever dreamed

2005-04-28T15:13:00.000-05:00

...a dream in which the ground liquidify? I have. It was one of my staple dream when I was a child, along with the one I swim in the air. It usually is a part of a larger-scale dream, equipped with occasional "evils" and all sorts of weird thing. Without warning, I realize the firm ground I was standing until a moment ago is now soft and squishy. I know that something ominous is happening. The softness increases second by secone, as I try to balance myself. I know that the faceless people whom I love are in a grave danger imposed by the liquidifying ground, but also know that there is nothing I can do. Then I realize that my ankles are submerged in the liquid ground. I continue sinking, unable to budge. The ground is extremely clear and translucent, but it only reflects the sky, concealing the evil inside.

Well, there's a reason to this dream annecdote, which no one would appreciate in today's society where everybody is fed up with cheap Freudian interpretations of dreams. I came across an image exactly the same as what I used to see in my dreams. I was wandering in one of the forest preserves on my way back from school one day. There were several kinds of spring flowers in bloom--spring beauties, buttercups, violets, etc. Hoping that there might be one or two rare ones away from the main path, I followed one of the side pathes, which seemed to be used by both humans and their four-legged, antlered neighbors.

There was a creek further down. Apparently a branch of the larger Des Plaines River, the creek was almost still--typically middle western. Trees leans over, casting a clear reflection on the surface under the bright sky. Then something caught my eyes, something that didn't fit in the scenery. Something sharp and orange. I approached it to find out that it was an abandoned bike with an orange frame. The water suface surrounding the bike was perfectly still, and so was the reflection, creating the illusion that the bike was floating in the air. But there was an undeniable fluidness to the water surface, erasing the possibility of the bike floating in the air. It looked just like the ground has liquidified, mingled together with the sky, and the boy (in my imagination, the bike belonged to a boy in a baseball cap) was swallowed deep into the fluid ground. What was left behind was his bike, off which he tripped when he lost his balance.

This is the proof:

ridiculing the post-modern: Donald Barthelme "The balloon"

2005-04-27T17:33:00.000-05:00

Donald Barthelme's "The balloon" is a playful satire of post-modernism. The point was made clear to me by a coincidence. I happened to read the lovable short story (which made me smile all over) right after Sontag's "Against Interpretation."

Sontag's point is that interpretation is suffocating the art. She swims up the torrent of history, looking for the origin of our compulsion to interpret. Before Plato, there was no need to justify the existence of art, she says. When he divorced the world and the idea, the former as mere representation of the latter, he also gave birth to the necessity to defend art. If art is a representation of the world, which in itself a mere representation of the idea, is it worth anything? The necessity to justify the existence of art entailed interpretation. Until recently, it was better justified when its representation of the world was closer to reality. In the modern world, as the art is increasingly being seen as a personal statement, rather than an objective photocopy of the world, the judging criteria shifted from its closeness to the reality to its closeness to the artist.

The problem is, she contests, that all the justification/interpretation of art are concerned only with the content, not the form. We have so much vocabulary to talk about what it could mean, but so little to describe how it looks, how it sounds, how it feels, and how it reads. The forcible attribution of meaning to the content of art is, in today's society, a device to tame the art, which is inherently dangerous in its ability to disrupt the lukewarm convention of the world. Good art disturbs us. It often disturbs us more when we don't know what it means, nor why we feel disturbed. This, Sontag argues, is the true value of art, and attempts to interpret a piece of art within an easy, ready-made, comfortable framework is a destruction of this valuable force. What we need now is the vocabulary to talk about the form, and less selfish decyfering of the content, she concludes.

Until the very end, "The balloon" seems to be an homage to this post-modern idea of defying interpretation. The narrator mocks the people's awkward attempts to "interpret" the giant gray balloon, which, one day, suddenly appeared above the city of New York, covering the sky from the fourteen street to the Central Park.

There were reactions. Some people found the balloon "interesting." As a response this seemed inadequate to the immensity of the balloon, the suddenness of its appearance over the city [...]. There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

Thus, people stopped inquiring the balloon's meaning and started to have fun with it. They "hung green and blue paper lanterns," "seized the occasion to write messages on the surface," and "daring children jumped" on it. The objective, scientific descriptions of the balloon and its construction process (yes, it was constructed), along with this sarcastically journalistic portrayal of people's reactions, seem to be in harmony with Sontag's call for the precise vocabulary to describe the form of art. All point to his ostensible experiment with the possibility of post-modern appreciation of art. Then comes the big flip.

"The balloon [...] is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at [his lover's] absence, and with sexual deprivation," the narrator reveals at the end, as he embrace his love back in his arms. The balloon was nothing but a (strange) embodiment of his longing for his lover, who happened to be on trip in Bergen, of all the places. At this, all the full-blown, pseudo-scientific, big-worded descriptions of the balloon deflates. Now the artist (the narrator, who erected the giant balloon) gives away its meaning. And it is so miniscule and insignificant, compared to the speculations made about its possible meaning, yet it is so human, lovable, and convincing.

Instead of denying the meaning to the object, Barthelme gives it an indisputable meaning, which is so "insignificant" in the business of the world (Just one man's sexual frustration and longing for his love! What could be more insignificant?). We are inclined to, or even bound to, meaning and interpretation, however miniscule it may be. Thus, the story becomes a satire of the post-modern attempts to escape the meaning. As a pleasing sidenote, the narrator concludes the story: "removal of the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness" with yet another excessive specificity. (Why West Virginia? Why?)

Symptoms of "Symptoms of Literature (Bungaku no Choko)" by Tamaki Saito 書評：斎藤環『文学の徴候』

2005-04-26T20:46:00.000-05:00

This is an English version of a review I posted on Amazon.co.jp (not .com, mind you!).

Starved of Japanese novels and essays, I couldn't help checking out the Kinokuniya Japanese bookstore when I was in San Francisco. Located in a large mall of Japan-related stores called Japan Town, the bookstore was surprisingly large and boasted a decent selection of recent and classic titles. I was jealous--the Asahiya Japanese bookstore we have in Chicago is okay, but fades in the light of Kinokuniya, which is understandable, considering the scarce Japanese population here in Chicago. Anyway, I walked along the shelves after shelves of books, almost drooling, and jotted down some of the titles that caught my attention (so that I can ask my father to bring back some when he takes a business trip to Japan). One of the titles was "Symptoms of Literature." Written by a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of social withdrawal (psychological disorder related to the difficulty with human relationship, found mostly among young Japanese male, which makes the patients impossible to leave the confinement of their own house/room), it seems to be an interesting analysis and critique of Japanese society through the channel of contemporary literature. Some of the authors mentioned in the book were my current favorite. My expectation soared.

When my father did go back to and came back from Japan, I naturally chose the book from the pile. A few chapters into the book, however, my expectation turned into burning frustration and bitter dissapointment. The most apparent symptom of the book is the arrogance of Tamaki Saito, the author, resulting in his laziness. The astronomical number of allusions to psychology, philosophy, criticism, and subculture (including criticism on subculture) were nothing more than confusing without Saito's effort to explain them, nor at least incorporating them into the context of his argument. Such arrogant dismissals as "I won't explain this here" and "I won't waste time pointing out its examples. So, only if you know what I'm talking about, read on" must have turned off most of the readers (well, I was). The fact that the essays were originally written for a literary magazine, whose readers can be expected to know a little more than the general public, does not excuse this extreme laziness on the Saito's part (and probably on the editor's part, as well). Not many people know as much as he does, and a good critic can educate the ignorant mass through his criticism, while engaging in a complicated manipulation of philosophical ideas.

The essays also suffer from the huge canon of themes disproportionate to their relatively short length. Saito attempts to show that the pathology of a given society is funneled into its literature through a device called author. In his argument, even when the author himself isn't psychologically ill, the psychological distortion and suffering of the society can materialize through the author in his works. The interaction of the society, the author, and the literary works is intrigueing. Yet, there is simply not enough room to fully explore the implications of Saito's view. (The frequent omissions of explanation mentioned above is also a result of this problem.) The limitation of the length of the essays also seems to have placed a cap on the thoroughness of the author's thought. Sometimes attacking his opponents' argument (without letting readers know exactly what was the point of controversy), other times wasting his ink and paper on some sidenotes, he never fully construct and explicate his thoughts. Enticing overview lacking in depth and elaboration is all that this book offers.

Readers are demanding. They are ignorant. They think they deserve a free, quick, concise summary of terms and ideas necessary to understand the whole essay. And they are, to some extent, entitled to it. Any author who fails to reach out for his readers, ignorant yet eager to know, is not a great author. And in this sense, Saito has a long way to go.

silence of the vaginas (oops)

2005-04-25T21:23:00.000-05:00

Quite belatedly, I read "Vagina Monologues" by Eve Ensler. I wasn't too impressed, though--at least not as much as I thought I would be, according to the limited yet enthusiastic hail when it was translated and published in Japan.

(If you have read the book, you can skip this section. Hooray!) Ensler starts the book (thus her monologue performance) from the beginning of her interest in the word "vagina". She says that the word is burdened with so much attribution, from which "penis" is free. Most of us feel uncomfortable with the word. Yet, there is no appropriate alternative. So, she tries to free herself and the vagina from all the social and cultural attachment by simply saying the word out loud, repeatedly, obstinately. She interviews hundreds of women of all the stripes, morphs it into a monologue, and performs it in the mixture of anger and fervent welcome. There are two pieces made of one interview for each, a composite piece of several interviews, and several pieces of list of answers to a particular question she asked to many interviewees.

In general, the composite pieces are less effective than the non-composite ones. The lists of questions and answers do not seem to have any function beyond providing comic relief. (I mean, how am I supposed to answer such questions as "what would your vagina say if it could talk?" and "what would you dress your vagina with?") The two non-composite interview pieces, however, have a genuine power, less distorted by the interpretation by the author/performer. The first piece, about an elderly woman's 60-year-long sexual alienation ever since her accidental "flooding" in a brand-new Chevrolet of her date, vividly converys the image of the lady, letting us intimately connect with her sexual experience (or sexual non-experience) beyond the wall of individual experience. The second piece, a testimony of a young Bosnian woman who was brutally (very, very brutally) raped during the conflict, is striking in a different way. It lets us almost feel the physical existence of the rapist/rapists on/in our bodies, along with the visceral fear and disgust it invokes, possibly in a very similar way in which many rape victims suffers flashbacks of the victimization. The authenticity glows in these two pieces, and it trully enables us to connect with other women's sexual (vaginal, as the author might want to put it) experiences.

The pieces created by blending the accounts of the interviewees, which, according to the author, had enough in common to be simmered down to one generalized account, fade in the light of the non-composite ones. The resonance created by the voices of women is surely interesting. Nevertheless, by reducing their stories into a few lines that she found interesting or in harmony with other excerpts, the author stripped away the depth, complication, and authenticity from the sexual identity of the women interviewed. Taken out of context of each woman's life and mingled together with those of other women's to form what the author thinks is a collective voice of women, their stories became a vehicle to express the author's opinion on the matter, not the individual woman's.

The violence of generalizaition is most evident in a piece in which several women (again as one) speak of their liberating experiences in a vagina workshop. Their exhilaration at the liberation, joy of self-discovery, and the unlimited gratitude to the woman who leads the workshop are probably legitimate. Yet, the excited ferver is alienating to anyone who does not already share the almost cultish praise of the vagina as the ultimate "source of the self, spirituarity, and inspiration," which the author seems to agree to. Attaching new (and rather heated) meaning to the female sexual organs only replaces their negative connotations, and therefore doesn't grant them the freedom from any meanings, which most of the other parts of our body enjoy. (Hey, it's only an organ. Did you remember that?) Moreover, zealous march toward a single good to everyone is obsolete in principle and ineffective in practice in a society where diversity is embraced.

I probably should have seen her perform the monologue, rather than just read the script/book, to do her work justice. However, the trumpetting of the spirituality of the vagina as something universal definitely turned me off. For all its good intentions, "Vagina Monologues" functions as yet another cultural device to incarcerate the vagina in an entangled prison of meanings. Even though it is probably a valuable attempt as a compiled testimonies to counter the neglect and denial of the vaginas, its gesture of quasi-religious collectiveness of women through their vaginas (!) subjects it to suspicion and alianation.

lack of pink-headed boys in Japanese schools

2005-04-20T18:06:00.000-05:00

You have a disability that really shows. But you don't want your disability to be your label. What would you do?

"Dye your hair neon-pink!" was the solution an eleven-year-old boy came up with. He has some sort of born defect that keeps him in and out of hospital all the time. He didn't want his schoolmates to be refering to him as "that kid with the bone disease," so he decided to dye his hair neon-pink, so that he'll be "the kid with pink hair." When I heard this story on the Tribune radio 720 a few days ago, I couldn't help exclaiming Wow! to myself. He's so cool! And what a mature idea he has about labeling people... Apparently the radio hosts also felt the same way; one of them even said to the mother of the boy, who called in "I like him! He's cool!"

My thought then floated across time and distance, to my school days in Japan. In my middle school, there was a boy who lost all his hair to some medication he needed to take for his bad ear disease. On our first day in the middle school, after the stupid entrance ceremony, a teacher solemnly went up to the podium and said she had a special announcement to make. Then she motioned to someone who was apparently hiding behind the stage curtain. Seeing that someone not come out, she took confident strides to the slightly vacillating curtain, and almost dragged out a pudgy boy with a white cap. It was obvious that he was crying. We wondered what was wrong. She went back to the podium with the sobbing boy, let them stand beside her, made the boy take off his cap to expose his bald head, and started to explain why he didn’t have hair, which, up until then, none of us noticed. She made him turn sideways to show a big white patch plastered onto his left ear, illustrating her point. She told us to be “friendly” with him. Then she tried to make the boy talk, in front of the entire class of us. With the sight of 400 heads, black with abundant supply of healthy hair, he couldn’t help choking.

I imagine his concerned parents asked the school to introduce him to his peer students, to reduce his initial difficulty. But obviously it was not his wish. Moreover, the “introduction” eternally stigmatized him as “the hairless kid who wept on the stage” until we graduated from the middle school, if not for longer. The teacher’s benevolent, slightly histrionic performance on the stage, as if telling the boy this was a trial he needed to stand up against, further emphasized his label as a poor kid who courageously fights his scary disease and resulting discrimination, thus building a high wall of ready-made interpretation between him and his potential friends at the middle school.

His white cap was, though nobody else wore one, a part of our school uniform. It was nothing but an awkward cap with no decoration, which nobody would imagine wearing as a fashion statement. That too, added to his misery.

In most Japanese schools, especially in middle schools, expressions of personality through external appearance are very limited, in order to “create the environment most appropriate for the age group to concentrate on what they need to concentrate on,” according to the school officials. Students wear uniforms (there are uniform for physical education as well), colors of shoes and outer coats are limited to one or two, there are designated book bags, and dyed hair is strictly prohibited along with piercing, make-up, and so forth. In fact, until about a decade ago, even the length of hair was determined by the schools. In such an environment, the solution of the eleven-year-old boy that I cited at the beginning is denied from the start. The more the schools enforce the uniform appearance of their students, the more the (unavoidable, often unwanted) difference stands out, like a parsnip in a thousand carrots. (My hometown was known for its carrot production.)

I personally do not want all the thirteen-year-olds to wear make-up, have three pierce holes on their ears and one in their belly button. But these stiff regulations of expressions could be suffocating. They could crush the sprouting buds of identity and creative self-presentation. There must be problems inherent in the American-style education. But, isn’t it fun to have some cool boys like that in schools?

spring stroll

2005-04-18T16:05:00.000-05:00

I'm not writing as much as I would like, or rather, I should be... For one thing, now that spring is here, after a long gray winter, it is hard not to go outside and wander around among the sprouting buds of the forest and through the colorful displays of stores in the city. Plus, I have a boyfriend who is very adept at finding interesting events to go and addictive sci-fi/anime shows to watch. It is quite disastrous. Yes, it is.

So here are some harvests from my stroll along the abandoned railroad behind my house and a small forest next to it.

It is certainly strange to start a topic of spring with a picture of a dead, dried-up hemlock from last summer. A shadow of it, to make matters worse. Yet, I was totally fascinated by the symmetrical image it casted on the rusty rail. So, so be it.

I didn't realize that the forest next to the railroad was literally covered with wild flowers of all sorts until I walked into it the other day. Last spring, my mother was in a hospital and I was too busy to do anything other than absolute necessity. The spring before, and all the springs before, on that matter, I was not even here. So, this spring is virtually the first one I enjoy to the full in Chicago.

Probably a child picked this blue squill, lost interest (just the way a child is supposed to be), and discarded it carelessly on the decaying crossbeam in the woods. The fading blue of the flowers and the pale yellow green of the stem and the fruits created an inadvertent beauty against the rugged, dry brown of the log.

A part of the ground was thickly covered with this plant, which I haven't been able to correctly identify. The yellow petals had strangely plasticky shine to them, making them look like fake flowers often found in rural bathrooms.

editor's agony (hah)

2005-04-12T10:22:00.000-05:00

In my creative writing class, we are attacking our third assignment--creative nonfiction. For those who aren't familiar with the term, creative nonfiction refers to the genre that includes memoir, personal essays, nature writing, biography, historic nonfiction, and so forth. We have completed our first draft, and are currently critiqueing our peers' drafts. And, oh, boy, they're bad. Their memoirs/personal essays are all worse than their poetry or their fiction: even the girl whose short story was quite a delight to read, wrote a memoir of a significantly lower quality. Many others are sheer torture to read through, much less to come up with what is called a "constructive criticism," which I didn't find too difficult (or boring) in the cases of poetry and fiction. I'm wondering why--why are the creative nonfictions by the same people are considerably lower in quality, compared to their fictious writings?

Tentatively, they seem to be suffering from two opposite problems.

a) Lack of coherence.
Some essays just meander through their authors' lives, without allocating much attention to the details or the significance of each event. Hence, they end up being a lengthy, boring resume of their lives, not a vivid snapshot of a specific period. When I discuss their works in a peer workshop today, I'll have to watch my mouth lest it say "I'm not a psychiatrist or a recruiter. I have no interest in your life unless you present it in an engaging fashion."

b) "Now I know better. I've grown up" syndrome.
The ones that have coherence tend to have too much of it, or to state it too explicitly. One essay ponders on whether a horrible accident that happened to the author's little sister was a will of God or not. The thought, however legitimate it might be, is not well integrated into the entire essay. It is as if the author felt the necessity to label her experience with an easy-to-understand meaning, and hastily attached the God question to it. Another essay reflects upon the auhor's awkward high school days. Aside from the meandering problem, her essay suffers from the author's contempt on her "older self," making her sound preachy. "I was weird and had hard time blending in, for such and such reasons, but looking back, I should have known better" keeps coming back again and again, banning the readers to sympathize with the personality described in the essay. To make matters worse, the more the writer tries to distinguish who she is now from who she used to be, the moer it becomes clear that she still is the same, at the root, as what she likes to think she has gotten over with. It is sad.

It seems that the American essay education is taking its toll here. Because of the emphasis they place on the clear and identifiable thesis statement in (non-creative) essays in high schools and colleges, student writers are feeling compelled to bluntly present one in their creative essays. Their essays are like an unfortunate chimera of a formal essay and a personal journal. I'm sorry for our teacher, who has to read about twenty of them, and has to find ways to salvage the unsalvageables.

After writing this, though, I'm still not convinced as to why the essays were so much worse. Lack of perspective, nonexistent unifying idea, excessive explication... they seem to be only a part of a larger problem. What could that be...

somewhere in Oregon, close to the Ocean

2005-04-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

...there is a tarn where the entire universe is reproduced and preserved...

A minute after I took this photo, thick gray cloud started to pour the severe rain, momentarily disturbing the tranquility of the surface. We ran to the car and drove off.

treasure hunting in tidal pools

2005-04-05T21:52:00.000-05:00

While I was in Oregon two weeks ago, I fell in love with tidal pools. It's such a fun to look for small creatures with strange shape and wonderfully psychedelic colors in them! At first you might not see anything at all in tidal pools, but after a while, when your eyes know what to look for, you realize that the pools are literally filled with tiny creatures, busily moving around and dreamily bubbling. And the hunt is always rewarding. This feather, barely submerged in the retreating sea water, is my favorite finding at Yaquina Head State Park.

myth of literature--what the fugitive poet Jacob Jameson reveals to us

2005-04-04T20:13:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago (of course, before the dying pope started to dominate all the newsmedias, that is), there was an intriguing article on Chicago Tribune about a murderer-fugitive-poet who was recently found out and arrested. Norman Porter Jr. was involved in an armed robbery in the '60s, and was serving a life in Massachusettes when he successfully escaped after killing one of the prison guards in the '80s. He headed for Chicago, with which he had familiarized himself through the works of Nelson Algren while still in jail. He picked his pseudonym Jacob "J. J." Jameson from a random page of a phonebook. Once settled, he wrote poetry between his numerous odd jobs, and gradually became a "fixture of the city's poetry scene" (quote from the Tribune). He even had a collection of poetry published in 1999. Until his arrest some 20 years later, none of his friends, including the publisher of the aforementioned book, suspected him. David Gecic, the publisher and his close friend, expressed his shock and disbelief to the reporter. "I just need reassurance that he [Jameson/Porter] is in some way the guy I knew."

I haven't had the chance to read his works so far, which quite frustrates me, but judging from the article, his petry seemed to have been genuine in that it had the power to connect with his readers and eventually move them in some way. It casts an interesting light on the often simplified relationship between truthfulness in literature and truthfulness in life. In creative writing classes, it is often emphasized that one of the best and easiest way to bring authenticity to one's literary work is to drow from one's own experience. It is probably true, to a large extent, with notable exceptions of great writers of imagination. After all, our own life is what's closest to us, waiting for examination. It is true that the internal urge to clarify the meaning of what happened to us and what we did is quite often the strongest drive to write.

The case of Jacob Jameson gives a twist to this notion. Being a fugitive, he was deprived of the possibility to write about what probably was one of the most defining event of his life. Concealing the past inherently leads to concealing the certain aspects of the present--for instance, he couldn't write about leading a life half made of lies, except for in a very figurative or euphemistic manner. Not that it is impoossible to transform the robbery, the murder, and the fugitive life behind a false persona into something similar and still keep the authentic essence of the experience and emotion. But a mere hint could always lead to questions from his literary friends and readers, which I would imagine he wanted to avoid at all cost. It is true that these incidents shouldn't be The Only subject of his poetry, but being unable to write about them must have substantially crippled his literary exploration. Yet, he managed to produce poetry with genuine power to connect with people--or was he just a verbal entertainer?

We all hide some things when we write. But how can one be a genuine poet when practical considerations make it unable for them to draw from the most significant, most profound experience of one's life? I know how it feels to be vacillating between the urge to spit it out and the disabling sense of fear and shame that harnesses the urge. Still, I write. I write about things I can write about and share, feeling that, in a sense, these are a mere extention of my life with deception and cover-ups. I wonder if Jacob Jameson felt the same urge, if he ever wrote about his "real" past and kept it for himself, if he secretly despised his publicly appreciated works.

The only way for me to fathom is to read his poetry. I hope I will find them one of these days.

pictures that makes me all jealous

2005-03-31T11:56:00.000-06:00

I came across pictures by Sara Heinrich on Flickr, and immediately fell in love with them. The sharp yet affectionate photos of landscapes, people, and other creatures have a power and beauty to let one see the world in a slightly different way. It is as if seeing things with a clearer pair of eyes. It is a sheer delight. They are so good that they make me jealous, but she is one of those rare people who can demonstrate that there's a lot more to photography, and to this world. Wow.

imagination on being gay and on being heroin-addicted

2005-03-29T12:00:00.000-06:00

I'm just back from a trip to the West coast. It was an 850-mile long, breathtakingly beautiful drive along the coast from Portland down to San Francisco, studded with lots of pleasant surprises--excellent crab cakes in a tiny restaurant in the middle of nowhere (sorry, folks), big chunks of happy flesh sunbathing on rocks off the coast (seals and sea lions, that is), and cities with trees in full bloom. Continuous hairpin curves and steep downhill were also impressive ( to tell the truth, scary enough to make me grip the handle on the door even when I wasn't driving), but the two most vivid impressions were about people.

In San Francisco, we took an aimless stroll in the Castro neighborhood, among many others. It is a gay/lesbian/transgender neighborhood with so many cute little shops and fancy-looking restaurants, many of which proudly display the rainbow flags and banners. Same sex couples were everywhere--happily holding hands as they walk along the charming streets. Their free and natural expressions of affection was very heartwarming, just like those of heterosexual couples. But with so many homosexual couples around, being there with my heterosexual boyfriend almost seemed wrong. Not that I felt totally alienated, nor that they cast mean/hostile glances at us, which could be their everyday experience in the heterosexual world, but I felt a slight unease about the fact that I'm "different." Flipside of which is, of course, the sense of alienation that same sex couples might feel in the predominantly heterosexual neighborhood, which is about 99% of the neighborhoods. I had never been in an area as openly homosexual as Castro was before. Until I was there, I didn't realize how it would feel to be homosexual in this sometimes hostile world of heterosexuals. That was a fresh experience.

Another one was a horrifying one. When we were on one of those old-fashioned trollies, equipped with jolly drivers, a woman got on. I couldn't help noticing her strange proportion--a big face with a double chin, a quite chunky torso, and anolexically thin, almost twiggy limbs that stuck out of the heabily bosomed torso. As she took a seat several empty rows in front of us, I noticed the deep lines on her skin around her upper arms as well, obviously indicating that she had lost a huge amount of weight in a blink. I wondered if she had had the scary liposucction (I believe that is what it is called--the plastic surgery in which your fat is literaly vacuumed out through small incisions). Whatever she paid for the surgery, that isn't doing her any good. She looks just scary, not at all beautiful, I thought. She was one of tose cases of strange proportion resulting in the grotesque. I shook my imaginary head. My boyfriend told me, after we got off the bus, that she must have been a heroine addict and that heroine has that weird effect on human body. Either way, she scared me in the same pitiful way the gorems in Lord of the Rings did, something that is very much human with only a few very wrong features...

I'm a "published poet"! Or soon I'll be.

2005-03-28T20:33:00.000-06:00

With a push on my back from my creative writing teacher, I entered this poem, along with three photographs to a poetry and graphics competition held by the English department of my college. When I came back home from the West coast last night, there was a letter on the dining table which said that the poem in question was selected a winner! What a surprise!

The poem at first had a first stanza, which described the crisp coolness against my soles, of the wooden corridor, polished to jet-black by generations of young monks over centuries. The tactile feel of the corridor in the cool shade of the temple was the starting point of the poem, which drifted to a completely different direction. The idea of vivid tactile feel came to me as a form of an existing Japanese haiku, which captures a moment of startle and deep mourning of a widower who accidentally stepped on his late wife's calm, which felt sharply cold on his bare foot.

Once I set my mind on the scene of the temple with a stark contrast between the brazing summer outside and the refreshing coolness inside, the rest almost naturally flowed out of my keyboard-tapping fingertips. As is always case with my imaginative writing, however, I couldn't determine what the theme was. All I had was the heap of images. I needed a conclusion of some sort, to give the poem a sense of closure. First I tried to end the poem by suggesting the my own mortality as parallel to that of the cicadas and the monks, but it made the poem seem stereotypically oriental and overtly religious, which I am not. After a few tickerings, I abandoned the idea altogether.

What I found in the poem instead was my own longing of what is essentially Japanese--loud cicadas, scorching summer sun, lingering fume of incense, etc. The images themselves were what the poem needed to convey, not what they might or might not imply. I decided to follow that line, and the last stanza materialized.

The poem went under constructive scrutiny of a peer group in my creative writing class. It was a stimulating and fascinating experience to listen to what they had read in my poetry. A girl pointed out an alliteration effect which I hadn't been aware of. A boy said the lack of punctuation and the fluid flow of the poem got associated within him with the Buddhist idea of infinite reincarnation, which, again, was completely unintentional yet defendable. To see my own creation be blown different lives into it by readers was a reaffirmation of the idea that a literary text is not merely the sequence of words but a dynamic process of destruction and reconstruction of what was written in the minds of the readers.

All that said, the poem will be included in the annual publication of the college "Ariel" a few months later. Then I can say I am a published poet, with a brush of red on my cheeks...

Closed for Vacation

2005-03-22T12:04:00.000-06:00

Next five days I'll be driving down the highway 101 along the coast of Oregon and California. I'm all excited! Woohoo!

how to relate a summer shirt to a sea anemone

2005-03-21T20:07:00.000-06:00

I can't believe I've deserted this blog for more than ten days! Obviously I need more decipline...

Anyway, I was at the Shedd Aquarium yesterday, the first day of my spring break. The entrance fee was eyeball-popping-out expensive (a silly Japanese expression), but after having seen all the exhibitions, I have to say that it is reasonablly expensive. Especially the big reef exhibit downstairs is just amazing. Fluorescent fish of different sizes and designs gracisously swam in several large tanks filled with tentacled creatures. Fun sculptures of corals and sea anemones adorned the entire wall, giving us the feel of actuallly being in a reef. Touch-panel computers were everywhere to inform you of the names and habits of the oceanic creatures. (Not that the fish solo cannot impress you.) We were lucky enough to be in front of the largest reef tank when two divers started to feed the fish. As they moved around, sqeezing out the powdery food (planctons?) from special bottles, golden fish of different sizes followed them like a thousand dart, with amazing swiftness, leaving only blurry impression of their motion and existence.

Small tanks upstairs were also fun. There was a sea anemone that looked exactly like tiny serpents dancing in a red-and-white gingham check sack. (In Japanese, we so appropriately call sea anemones "draw-string sack of the beach.")

A pack of crafty grandmas passed us as we stared at this sea anemone. Dressed in hand-knit sweaters and macrame bags, they were apparently having a heated discussion about whether this gingham check would make a nice summer shirt or not. It was the most endearing moment of the day...

audible illusion

2005-03-11T23:22:00.000-06:00

Wailings of Snowman.

That is what I heard when my boyfriend said "Williams of Sonoma." Hah.

first & second signs of spring (woohoo!)

2005-03-10T15:34:00.000-06:00

The temperature is bearly crowling up to one or two degrees above freezing. It has been snowing all day. The streets, branches of naked trees, fire hydrants, everything is covered with fluffy whiteness. Yet, spring is nearing.

I found these crocus in the courtyard of the apartment where my boyfriend lives, as I walked to the front door last evening. I thought of taking pictures, but for one thing, I was overloaded with grocery bags, and for another, it was getting too dark for a macro photography. Instead, I decided to take some shots next morning. What I woke up to find this morning was a blastery snowy day, as if the General Winter had come back to ransack us. To my delight, though, the hardy crocus were intact.

do French women really not get fat?

2005-03-09T09:57:00.000-06:00

A few days ago on Chicago Tribune, there was a column on the latest diet fad "French Women Don't Get Fat," with extremely unreadable phonetic spellings imitating what seemed to be English with French accent. (I'd be happy to place a link to the article if the Tribune Company weren't that anal about subscription and archiving. From a week after an article's first publication, the article gets stored in their archive, where one has to pay to get in.) Anyway, the writer should have learned in school that phonetic spelling isn't a good way to engage her readers in what she writes, and that it requires skill to employ phonetic spelling effectively without turning readers off. Even after I read the article to the end, I didn't get what she meant at all. And I'm sure it was not because I'm bad at English.

As for the diet book, I can tell what its recomendations are, even though I haven't read it: eat a small amount of high-quality food. While I was in France this winter, with the exception of Strasbourg, all the restaurants served a pinky amount of food in American standard, but they were satisfying. One simply doesn't want more. The reason is simple: they were extremely tasty. The complexity and richness of taste compensate the amount. The ingredients (epecially produce and seafood) were nowhere near the rotting (oops, sorry) heap found in most American supermarkets, their treatment inventive and exquisite. Same is true with French pastries and cakes. Their chocolate cakes are so rich and full in taste that you actually CAN'T eat the amount you might eat of its pathetic American cousin. There, healthy diet isn't a stoic self-torture as it is in the U.S. It's a natural part of delightful life. No need to console oneself, saying "I'll be slim and gorgeous some day, so this meager amount of balnd food is not for nothing!" All that sounds impossible here, doesn't it?

When it comes to the validity of the bold statement that no French woman gets fat, it contains some seeds for doubt. When we entered the German-influenced part of France, namely Alsace, the percentage of large people skyrocketed. They aren't thin as stylish Parisians in tasteful clothings strolling Cartie Latin (in our imagination). They look... well, like Americans. We wondered at the sudden change of the people's body shape, whose mystery was instantly solved when we went into a restaurant for lunch. The food mainly consisted of a huge chunk of meat, either boiled or broiled, with a similarly huge heap of potatoes. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that's the way we eat here! No frivolous frills, just the plain blessings of the mother nature! Haha, you could put it that way, if you want. The causal relationship between the types of food French people in different regions consume and their body shapes was so clear that it was almost scary. There are lessons to be learned, folks, (including me). *As a little side note, I am obliged to add that Alsacian knackle ham, pot au fue, sausages and saurkraut, and crude ham were all very tasty, if not as exquisite as the food in the other parts of France. And they're such a perfect companion for a mug of beer! Uh-oh, now we understand why that's not the right kind of food...

first day of spring adorned with stunning mannequins

2005-03-07T09:57:00.000-06:00

On Sunday, the temperature seemed to go up to the 70s. Tempted by the sunny sky and joyous warm weather, we decided to take a crazy six-hour hike to downtown via Clark St. Without out heavy winter coat, to make things even better.

Close to where my boyfriend lives, there is a small, rundown bridal store which comes to life every night under the purple fluorescent lights. Despite its nocturnal self-assertion, it seamlessly blends in with other stores around it by day, so it becomes unnoticeable during the day. Thus, I had never paid much attention to the bridal store, until Sunday. (Another contributing factor is our American way of life--too much reliance on motorized vehicles, robbing ourselves of slow-paced enjoyment of details, mainly reserved for pedestrians.)

What I found in the storefront was an assortment of hand-painted, crumbling mannequins, (sort of) dressed up in bridal attires. In broad daylight, they were plain scary. It mannequins are supposed to help grow the business, they are an antithesis of mannequins. Cracked paint on their skin, hollow expressions on their hand-painted faces with a slight touch of sorrow, broken hands with missing fingers, some barely held together with pieces of scotch tape--there was something among these devastated featues of them that struck me as, dare I say, beautiful.

There were several adult female ones dressed in white bride's gown and one girl dressed in ring bearer's dress, which were pretty scary, but this one in red dress was somehow gripping. Her untidy hair made her look as if she just had a devastating experience, which confirms the impression from her facial expression.

Whoever created/redid her (most likely the untrained hands of the store owner), the creator definitely achieved an inadvertent effect. The air of sheer devastation on her face was so gripping that several dozens of other pictures I took on Sunday just faded in her light, though the flourless chocolate cake we had about halfway to downtown in Lincoln Park neighborhood was still another pinacle of the day. :P

two different kinds of detachment--Toshiyuki Horie's affection and Haruki Murakami's indifference

2005-03-05T17:42:00.000-06:00

I recently visited the Amazon.co.jp page for “In and around Yukinuma,” a collection of short stories that I pondered upon before, by a wonderful Japanese prose writer Toshiyuki Horie. It surprised me, and inspired me to some extent as well, to find more than one reviewers there who associate the mood of Horie’s writing to that of Haruki Murakami’s. I hadn’t thought of Murakami’s prose when I read Horie’s writing, but there is some sort of similarity in the way the two prose styles feel, especially in this particular short story collection. Yet, another part of me vehemently disagrees. The two writers’ (or more accurately, their narrators’) approaches to the subject of their writing are fundamentally different, and the difference is reflected on their prose styles. Here I try to verbalize the similarity and difference that I vaguely feel.

As some of the Amazon reviewers point out, there is definitely a similar feel to Horie’s prose and that of Murakami’s. Put bluntly, it is the sense of detachment. My mother always says that reading Murakami’s works is like walking an inch above the ground. In my words, there is always the feel of watching what goes on in Murakami’s works from behind a thin, but unbreachable membrane, even in their most emotionally charged scenes. It is a double-edged sward; this sense of detachment that Murakami’s prose elicit insulates readers in a safe and comfortable distance from the potentially destructive power of the story, which in turn means alienating readers from the narrative reality.

There is a similar sense of detachment to “In and around Yukinuma” as well. I as a reader felt as if I’d been floating in the narrative space, freely entering and exiting the minds of the characters. In that sense, readers are “detached” from the events and characters in the stories. However, there is another underlying current in Horie’s narrative, which seems to be absent in Murakami’s: affection. Whereas Murakami’s detached feel seems to originate in the deliberate alienation of readers from what goes on in the fictional world, achieved through the narrator’s dry, nonchalant attitude toward what they narrate, Horie’s detached feel derives from his use of fluid narrator who sometimes takes shape and sometimes dissolves into consciousness of a character. In Horie’s prose, the sense of detachment is not the narrator’s “cool” indifference to the fate of characters, but it is the free and fluid way in which the narrator moves around in the minds of characters. Here is an excerpt (my tentative translation and original Japanese version) from the beginning of “Stance Dot,” the first short story in the collection.

Not a single customer came in since the opening at 11 am. It wasn’t especially surprising, for Thursdays are always slow. [He] gave up when the clock turned past 9 in the night, and turned off all the wall lighting. The sound of the cooling motor, unnoticeable at all when games are going on, of a vending machine of bottled coke, the rareness of which even the maintenance mechanics marvel at, sounded unusually loud. The ears, which usually worsen at night, still seemed fine. It doesn’t make sense, really, that heat is necessary to cool beer and juice. The more we cool them, the more it generates heat, heating up the room. The air conditioner turned on to cool down the heated room, then, blows heated air outside. Heat only changes location, never disappears. Continuing on the job, my life could end up generating unnecessary heat in order to cool something else—the thought used to trouble him in his thirties to the extent that his stomach hurt, but he could not clearly remember himself in the agony any more.

午前十一時から営業を始めているのに，客はひとりもあらわれなかった。木曜日はいつもこんな調子だからべつに驚きはしなかったが，夜の九時をまわったところで見切りをつけて、壁面証明の電源をすべて落とした。メンテナンスにやってくる担当者さえめずらしがるコーラの瓶の自販機の，ゲームが行われているときにはきにもならない冷却モーターの音がずいぶん大きく聞こえる。夜になるといつもおかしくなる耳の調子は，まだ大丈夫らしい。それにしても，ビールやジュースを冷やすために熱が必要だなんて滅茶苦茶な理屈だ。冷やせば冷やすほど放熱し，部屋が熱くなる。それを冷やすためにエアコンを入れると，今度は室外機が熱風を外に吹き出す。熱さは場所を移すだけで消えはしないのだ。このまま仕事を続けていたら、俺の人生も何かを冷やすためによけいな熱を出すだけで終わりかねないぞと胃が痛むほど悩んでいた三十代の自分の姿を，しかし彼はもうはっきりと思い出すことができなかった。

As some of you can see in the original Japanese text, the narrator does not take shape until the very last sentence, partly thanks to the Japanese grammar that allows the absence of the grammatical subject. (The bracketed “he” in the third sentence is not explicitly there in the Japanese version, blurring the fact that the narrator is a separate entity from the narrated—the “he.”) Up until the last sentence, therefore, it appears that the narrator is switching back and force between internal thoughts (all the mumbling about heat/ ears are still ok), observation of external facts (no customer came in/ louder-than-usual noise), and descriptions of his own action (turning off the lights).

However, in the last sentence, where the grammatical subject is clearly presented with a third-person pronoun, it becomes obvious that the narrator and the narrated are separate, and that the narrator has been fluidly speaking from both inside and outside of the narrated “he.” What appeared to be the thoughts of the narrator himself turn out to be the thoughts of the narrated “he,” expressed through the narrator seamlessly dissolved into the self of the narrated. (External observations are tricky—they could be the observations by the narrated “he” expressed in the same way as his thoughts, or they could be the observations by the narrator, but this isn’t a big difference here.) The entering and exiting of the narrator into the characters, unencumbered by the physicality, create the illusion of shifting perspective, even though the narrator remains the same. The floating sense of detachment in Horie’s prose lies in this illusory shift of perspective.

In fact, one of the distinctive characteristics of Horie’s prose, especially in comparison with that of Murakami’s, is the quiet yet consistent undercurrent of intimate affection. The narrator’s tone is gentle, warm, and very much attached to the characters, unlike the dry, indifferent narration of Murakami’s works. Though the narrator is not physically attached to any of the characters, entering in and exiting freely from their minds, there is a sense that the narrator does care about the characters—even the tiniest detail about them, adding to the intimacy of the close-tied human relationship in the rural small town of Yukinuma.

(This insight, if I dare to call it in such a pompous way, came to me through a wonderful work of Tomiko Yoda on the modern perception of Heian literature, in which she questions the widespread assumption that “Kagero Niki,” a diary-style narrative of the 10th century, is written in first-person. It is a fascinating read, but I will discuss it later—I have rambled for long enough.)

my english poem debut (yikes, do you dare to read?)

2005-03-04T01:54:00.000-06:00

Summer

Outside, on trunks of ancient cedars
Cicadas generate heat
Incessant throbs, saps converted
Stir the August air

In thinning fume of incense
Burnt for prayer at dawn, hours ago
Buddha listens
For the last drop of elixir
Travel through the tiny veins of an insect
On the Sixty-third cedar from the temple

Silence
To mourn the first death of the afternoon
A beat of my heart
Then resume the cicadas
Buddha smiles, unfathomable
After centuries of summers and winters

Radiator rattle in stairwell
Awakens me
To the subzero night of Chicago
A life away

sudden trip to D.C.-Smithsonian attack!

2005-02-28T19:16:00.000-06:00

I took a compulsive and surreal trip to Washington D.C. this weekend. I didn't know I would until Wednesday, and I was flying there on Friday evening. (ATA has an awesome fare to the East coast right now. $59 for each trip!) With the cheap air fare, cheap B&B ($60 per night for a double room with shared bath), excellent seafood and Trinidadian cuisine (hmmmmm....), and several pictures of cool amphibians, it was a great, impulsive weekend.

This is one of them... Taken in a reptile house (an insult on all the amphibians there!) of the National Zoo, he looks as if he just had a religious epiphany, looking skyward, with light shining on his face. I fell in love with the mint green body and the golden eyes, and took about ten pictures of him, so kindly blocking the view of a couple of small children. :P

I did what a first-time visitor is supposed to do. At the White House, I saw a squirrel bleach the strict security, which included at least two snipers on the roof, watching through binoculars an anti-nuclear protest in the plaza across the street. At the Washington Memorial, they were doing a complete overhaul of the lawn around it, currently showing a vast muddy field studded with heavy construction equipments. It was quite suggestive--a phallus symbol of America towering over a lifeless devastation--hmmmm. The historic Georgetown seemed to be under attack of corporatization. With Urban Outfitters, Berns & Noble, GAP, Banana Republic, (and don't forget the Starbucks), sadly, the area had started to look like a pseudo-historic shopping mall in any sprawling suburbia.

All these aside, there were Smithsonians after Smithsonians. Temporarily overwhelmed by the Freer and Sackler Galleries (Asian art) and Hirshhorn Museum (contemporary) that we did on Saturday, we decided to inhale some fresh air at the National Zoo. I thought it was an escape from anything Smithsonian, but it turned out that it was still a part of the Smithsonian federation! It was an exciting zoo, though--we ended up spending more than four hours there, mainly gazing at and taking picture of spiffy creatures, such as this. The cage was poorly lit with several fluorescent lights, but the light filtered through the big bird's beak was absolutely gorgeous.

how a woman can walk into an office like a centipede

2005-02-24T15:50:00.000-06:00

I'm taking a creative writing class in college. It is very stimulating, and is a good way to understand some reasons why contemporary American fictions are the way it is now, but it is another matter. (Hopefully I'll come back to that topic sometime soon.) The matter here is the unintentional humor that can kill. In class, we had fun ridiculing some of the winning entries in a Washington Post competition for inadvertently funny metaphors written by high-schoolers.

"John & Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met." Okay, which is a metaphor of which here?

"He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells..." wow, this one's going fine! "...as if she were a garbage truck backing up." Well, maybe not. He doesn't love her, and you don't love your writing, either, Ms. Author!

This one actually works. "The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work." Ouch. Sorry, Phil...

Someone went too deep into details. "The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton." Okay, I understand you follow the news... I actually didn't know Clinton's middle name until now. But, sorry, what were you talking about?

"She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs." That's real creativity you've got there, man. I actually like it, though I have no idea about how "she" looked like other than she had two legs and very long, scaled body. Poor thing.

But my favorite so far is this one: "Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever." It tells soooo much in soooooo short a sentence!

My thanks to the adolescent providers of entertainment, and my only hope is that they won't be too traumatized by the fact that their (probably) serious writings have won a space in such a degrading contest...

two random things of the day--one bothersome, another funny

2005-02-21T20:02:00.000-06:00

1)
With a gallon of milk and a family-pack of chicken legs, I was in a cashier line at Jewel Osco, one of the two major supermarket chain in the city earlier today. A woman probably in her early forties was in front of me. The cashier, another woman in her forties, prompted her for a Jewel preferred Customer Card, with which we get discount on merchandise in exchange for our intimate consumer information--from our favorite bland of crappy chips (and how long it takes for us to devour the entire bag) to the date of our last purchase of sanitary napkins. The customer fumbled in her purse, and said to the cashier.
"Can you use your Dominick's Card?"
Uh-oh. She made a mistake. Dominick's is another of the two major supermarket chain in the city, similarly trying to keep us loyal to them with their version of discount/information-surrender card. The already-grumpy looking cashier looked up, and coldly said,
"I don't have any Dominick's Card."
Ouch. The customer apologized (how nice of her!), to which the cashier did not show any sign of recognition. She apparently had a great employee loyalty to the chain. The unfortunate customer turned to me for emotional help, and smiled a meek smile. I smiled back, feeling sorry for her. With the presence of the Ms. Cashier, I couldn't do more than to sneakily stick out my tongue in complicity. But oh, boy, what an unpleasant woman the cashier was! Everybody knows that more than 80% of the customers of the two chains have those stupid cards from both stores. They can name their cards whatever way they want to, but let's not pretend that anyone with a "preferred card" or "fresh value card" is a loyal customer to the specific chain who never goes to the other store, for it is an illusion that cannot be more obvious.

2)
I had lunch at a Corner Bakery today. (A combination of cesar salad and half a South Western roast beef sandwich on Poblano cheese batard... hmmm, yum!) With the sandwich in a hand, I was reading "Illness as Metaphor" that I picked up on Saturday after the car show at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park. The place was packed with lunch crowd. So it was not surprising that the mom of a family (mom, grandma, three teenage boys of about ten to thirteen years old) sent the kids to get the food while she held on to the table next to me. When their food came, the forty-something mom exclaimed in astonishment.
"Oh my god, you guys are having cesar salad!? What happened to you boys?"
I looked up, and here they were, two of the boys were receiving cesar salad. Not even with a strip of roasted chicken. Just plain ol' lettuce with croutons and dressing. Wow. AND they are drinking water! What happened to them boys? Aren't they supposed to be gulping down hamburgers and fries, along with a 24-ounce coke? Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe it's in fashion for adolescent boys to be lettuce-eating crickets. It's a weird world. It certainly is.

thawing on a warm February day

2005-02-20T21:30:00.000-06:00

Behind my house, there is an abandoned railroad, which, with all the flowers, reeds, pebbles, birds, and occasional rabbits, is a wonderful treasure box for any photographer with an inclination to nature and miniscule things. Several days ago, when the formerly-frozen temperature rose up close to the teens (in celcius), the seemingly perpetual snow and ice started to melt quickly. With the advent of afternoon sun after an overcast morning, the thaw sped up. I grabed my camera and went out to this my favorite field, in search of cool things to photograph. Soon I found pieces of remaining ice, oddly shaped along the contours of the pebbles they had been sitting on. This particular piece caught my eyes with its animal-like shape and its contrast against the fresh, vibrant, alomst appetizing (think of plump berries...) colors of pebbles that had come to life with moisture and light.

word of the day: prostrate

2005-02-19T22:22:00.000-06:00

lying face downward, esp. in submission

*Nothing to do with prostitute, nor with prostate.

She fell down the stairs and found herself lying prostrate on the floor.

review: "Sky Blue" quite promising and approaching sophistication, but could use much more originality

2005-02-16T21:04:00.000-06:00

Recently I watched my first South Korean animation. There is a large room for improvement, but it seems to be worth keeping an eye on the creators--there appears to be a potential in future. (Here is the link to reviews on rottentomatoes.com.)

"Sky Blue" is set in a post-apocalyptic world where incessant poisonous rain soaks the earth. The story arc is quite hackneyed. There is a ruling class and the oppressed. The former lives in an allegedly organic city (which looks nothing but mechanical) that protects the residents from the hostile environment, exploiting the latter in contaminated mines to extract from the thinning reservoir of carbonite necessary to maintain the huge city. There is a secret plot of rebellion against the ruling city among the oppressed people, and (of course) one of the most important member of the secret group is originally from the city, has been expelled from it after an incident, and has been in love with a girl from the city who is now a member of the city's merciless army. But (of course) she hasn't lost her humane side. She suffers at the suffering of the oppressed. Although she is emotionally involved with her commander (the rebellious young man's childhood rival, of course), she still keeps the image of her childhood love in her heart.

There is an easy solution to the soggy poisonous environment of the earth--the "energy release" from the city, whatever it means. It will not kill the people of the city. In fact, it will not even destroy the city. Hmm. Then why they haven't done that yet? But anyway, that is what the rebellion group plans and succeeds to do with the amazing contribution of the young man, flying into the heart of the city on his red old-fashioned airplane reminiscent of Porco Rosso's. It is so easily done despite a battalion of city's army that one cannot help wondering why it took so long for them to do it. The reunited childhood lovers get shot in the flower-looking glass dome, but seem to be resurrected from death by the mysterious side effect of the "energy release." The evil is defeated and the sun shines on the earth for the first time in God knows how long. Everybody's happy.

Bunch of predictable stock characters, a predictable and sweet-ever-after style plot, and bad English dabbing really hamper the occasional charm of the visual imagery. There are some memorable scenes, especially a scene in the museum when a bullet of the young man shatters a staind glass to reveal Krimt's "The Kiss" behind it, as he crouches on the floor with his childhood sweetherat now as enemies, a shot from underwater of the young man's red airplane being shot at by the army and a sequence close to the end where the sunshine pushes back the perpetual shadow from decaying buildings and rusting ships. The incorporation of traditional Korean culture is also stimulating to see: the intricate patterns on the floating cubes in the heart of the building, the curved mask the young man wears when sneaking in the city, and some traditional attire worn in a strangely blue-saturated festive procession. With (a lot) more originality and thoughts in plot and characters, the film could be much more enjoyable. I hope to see the creators' future works acquire distinct style and voice in the world of animation.

odd sense of affectionate detachment--on the viewpoint of "In and Around Yukinuma" by Toshiyuki Horie

2005-02-15T11:39:00.000-06:00

When my mother visited Japan in last October, I asked her to bring back some Japanese books that I had longed to read. One of them were "In and Around Yukinuma" by one of my favorite writers called Toshiyuki Horie. I finihed reading it after almost four months--not because it was a boring read, but because it was such a beautiful piece of literature that I didn't dare rush. It was the kind of books that one would love to read very slowly, allowing enough time for the words to sink into one's heart, almost carressing them. I am still floating in the clean, crisp but gentle air of the stories, but I will try here to verbalize what I felt was unique about this work.

"In and Around Yukinuma" is a series of short stories depicting loosely interconnecting lives of people in a remote Japanese town called Yukinuma (which directly translates into "snow lagoon"). A last day of a bowling center run by a widowed man, still listening for the sound he once heard old-fashioned bowling pins make, a funeral service for a owner/chef of a small French restaurant whose mysterious herbs and urban sophistication was an object of admiration of the townspeople--the ordinary is portrayed with a quiet affection to the smallest details and subtlest emotion. Unlike his other works, which trod along the thin line between essay and fiction, mainly drawing from his own experience in Paris as a foreign student, these stories are distinctly fiction, and are more successful. The almost stoic focus on the quiet lives of ordinary people living in an unexciting rural town, without his habitual indulgence in bibliophiliac tidbits and unconvincing chain of coincidences as a single driving force of the stories (abundant in his other works), makes the stories in "In and Around Yukinuma" a true gem.

The oddity of the stories told in an omniscient third-person narrative is the fact that all the characters are referred to with "san," a Japanese counterpart of "Mr." and "Ms," but with a little more affection than rigid reverence. In the opening page of the first story, readers are challenged by the question of determining the narrator. As is permissible in Japanese language, there is no explicit subject in the sentences in the first few paragraphs. It makes the narration appear to be a dramatic monologue of one of the characters, reflecting upon his own feeling and referring to those around him with "san." Then, a reader would be puzzled to find the narrator referring to who seems to be himself with "san," as if talking about someone else. And in fact, the narrator IS talking about someone other than himself, for the narrator is NOT the protagonist, despite the initial appearance. It is a separate narrator who cautiously but seamlessly enters into the psyche of the characters and speaks as if the protagonist himself were telling his intimate feelings.

What makes this strange obscurity of perspective possible is the absence of the (grammatical) subject in many of the sentences. Thanks to the characteristics of Japanese language that allows the absence of grammatical subject in a sentence, the omniscient narrator can dissolve into the intimate consciousness of the protagonist at times, and can reappear as a visible, somewhat detached narrator at others. Combined with the affectionate use of "san," the frequent absence of the subject enable the disappearing and reappearing narrator to achieve a unique voice that is at one time intimate and detached.

"Dolls" by Takeshi Kitano: a promising imagery and fabulous costume spoiled by a heavy-handed treatment

2005-02-11T17:11:00.000-06:00

When "Dolls" (a 2002 movie directed by Takeshi Kitano) came out in Japan, I was still there and wanted to see it, but never did. It was quite odd, therefore, to finally get to see the Japanese film in a foreign country, with an English subtitle (which really helped me understand the highly stylized and elongated, thus unintelligible Bunraku narration). However, the film itself was a bit of a disappointment. Here are the reasons.

Three stories of tragic lovers, though connected with each other with common space and characters, do not form a single, unifying story arch. The main story, in which a young man roams around the country, tied with a crimson rope to his fiancée, whom he once abandoned to marry the daughter of the president of his company, only to leave her imbecile as a result of her failed suicidal attempt, is utterly sad and quit compelling. Unfortunately, though, the two side stories, one of a rekindled old love of a Yakuza boss and the other of an extreme act of love of a pop idol fan, interfere with and undermine the effect of the main story, rather than reinforcing it. There is a thematic coherence to some extent, for all of the stories somehow deal with a crazed lover and a lover who chooses to love the crazed, as Roger Evert points out. But the paralell is not presented in a convincing way.

Another, possibly a larger and deeper problem of the film is the fact that the three stories are considerably detached from the Johruri presented at the beginning of the film, to the disappointment of the audience who expect to see a stronger relationship between the traditional Japanese marionette show and the film. The Johruri seems to be "Sonezaki Shinju" or "Double Suicide of Sonezaki," probably the most famous work of Monzaemon Chikamatsu, a renowned Johruri playwright from the Edo period. If my speculation is correct, it is a play in which a beautiful prostitute and a poor store clerk who cannot afford to bail her out commit double suicide to be together in the other world, to transcend the limitation of this world. Kitano sticks to the original Johruri to some extent, for he obviously follows the format of the Johruri--an important and tear-duct-stimulating sequence called "Michiyuki," the elongated, beautified journey of the lovers with only their death in mind.

However, the discrepancy between the relationships of lovers in Johruri and the play is more than distracting. The film's apparent theme, the conscious choice of lovers to be or be with the crazed, risking their own death, does not fit with the somewhat beautified tragic suicides in the Johruri. The double suicide in the Johruri could also be interpreted as the lover's conscious choice to live out of the reason of the world, so that it resonates with the theme of the film, but nonetheless, (again) the parallel is not presented in a convincing way.

Furthermore, the cinematography was not as "stunningly beautiful" as some critics have described it. There are some memorable moments--such as the shot of the crimson rope, which the young man uses to tie his crazed girl to himself, being dragged on the ground drawing a beautiful curve, collecting fallen leaves of various reddish hue. But there are far more awkward shots than excellent ones. Some, such as the scene in which the young lover of the main story momentarily sees an illusion of Johruri marionettes hanging from a pole, are beyond the realm of awkward, plunging into the realm of painful first film of a high school film club. Editing is not satisfactory, either, with so many shots floating in the air without any connection to the previous and following sequences. The costume, designed by Yoji Yamamoto, is absolutely fabulous, especially his use of bright colors reminiscent of the Johruri costume. It is a shame, for the wonderful costume is not well incorporated into the scenes, thus losing much of its appeal.

What salvages the entire film is the superb acting of Miho Kanno, who played the crazed fiancée in the main story. She has been noticeably good in roles of insanity, but in this film, she surpasses herself. She succeeds in appearing to be a woman with a brain damage, whose emotion is paralyzed except for only a few trivial things that catches her attention (like a cheap plastic toy that fascinates her). But what is more striking is the fact that she really looks like a spiritless doll. Her entire body moves like a marionette being awkwardly manipulated by a puppet master, with jerks and jolts, her arms inanimately dangling from the shoulder, her eyes fixed on something nonexistent (just as the marionettes' eyes do not move). When she is first shown to us, sitting on an outside unit of an air conditioner in the psychiatric hospital, she doesn't look alive. She IS a doll, propped up against the wall behind her, her neck barely supporting the lifeless weight of her head. Her best moment is when she briefly sees through the cloud of her insanity and recognizes her lover who once deserted her. She expresses the sudden burst of complex emotion—surprise and joy of finally recognizing her beloved again, then profound hatred and distrust at the (second) realization of his betrayal—only by the movement of her eyes. It is stunningly revealing performance worth waiting for during the slow-paced film.

It’s a shame such an interesting idea to combine a modern fantasy of tragic love and a traditional tragedy of love was wasted by the heavy-handed treatment. With a more sophisticated presentation, the film could have been much much better. The beautiful imagery of the Johruri and the gorgeous kimono-inspired costumes deserve a more careful and aesthetic production.

the best way to fail drivers' license exams

2005-02-09T09:44:00.000-06:00

"Be a legal alien and try to get one" is the answer--you might not even allowed to take the exam.

The so-called Real ID Act that is going to be presented to the House floor tomorrow caught my attention as yet another hindrance to my ever-furthering goal to get a drivers' license. The little known fact is, it is neigh impossible to obtain one if you do not have a social security number, even if you are residing in the U.S. perfectly legally. The matter concerns the kind of visa you are issued. If you are on a student visa, with which you are not authorized to work off campus, you are not eligible for a social security number. That is not too hard to understand--social security is based on workers' financial contribution to the system. The problem arises, though, from the fact that the functions of social security number is not solely limited to the administration of social security, but also extend far into the everyday life as the ultimate ID number. Without a SSN, one cannot open a bank account. Nor can one obtain a drivers' license. Or at least one could not.

With the introduction of Temporary Visitor's Drivers License by the State of Illinois this year, now lawful residents without a SSN can get a drivers' license and feel like a human being. If everything goes fine, that is. You might be turned away by an ignorant drivers license administrator who refuses to believe your (absolutely correct) explanation on how one of the hundred immigration documents you present to him function. Or your immigration record might not show up on their computer for some mysterious reason or the other, in which case you have to go home and wait for an obscure verification letter supposedly sent from Springfield. When you go back to the facility with the letter in hand, what would happen I do not know, for those were what happened to me and I have not received that (optimistically) omnipotent letter from the State Capital yet.

I do not understand why so many people oppose the idea of nation-wide ID numbers, when it aleready virtually exists as a SSN. The problem of using the SSN as a universal ID is the fact that the issuance of the numbers is not universal(!). Its original purpose of providing contribution-based benefits blocks quite a few legal aliens from obtaining one, thus in effect greatly hindering their ability to function in the society they legally reside. It probably will not materialize, but I am eager to see the widespread use of SSN as an ID someday reconsidered.

keep the art in our hand

2005-02-08T20:46:00.000-06:00

Chicago has joined the bandwagon of copyright frenzy--now the entire Millennium Park is copyrighted, so anyone who wishes to photograph any part of the Park for commercial purposes has to buy a permit to do so. Near the end of last year, my better half witnessed a couple of people with cameras mounted on tripods being harassed by a police officer on one of those segways at the Park, and had been wondering about the incident, but the mystery is finally solved--in a somber way. Apparently the officer took the existence of the tripods to be an evidence of the people taking professional pictures for commercial purposes, the negation of which none of us is capable of proving (No one can prove a negation).

It is certainly understandable if an artist gets infuriated to find someone else complying a big book of photos of his/her work without permission (and making money on that). And so far the ban of unauthorized photographing of the Millennium park is limited to the ones for commercial usage, which excludes most of us casual snapshot-takers. However, with copyright, they could block us from taking ANY kind of pictures at the park, for as far as the copyright law is concerned, the purpose of reproduction does not matter. It is simply not fun to see an inspiring "public" art and not be able to take pictures of it. But the problem is not that simple.

The city is definitely not sending a positive message to tourists from all over the world, which it desperately wants--the very purpose of building the shiny object was to attract tourists. There are considerable number of amateur photographers who care the quality of their photos enough to use tripods and conspicuous semi-professional cameras, who will probably fall victim of suspicious look and possibly annoying questions from security guards and police officers. What they would tell back home about Chicago's hospitality, I would not want to imagine. Surely neither would the tourism bureau of the city.

There are more grey areas to the entire copyright protection, concerning the nature of art and culture. They say one cannot take a picture of the copyrighted bean. Then what if I oil-painted an extremely true-to-life rendition of it? Isn't it a reproduction? What if the shiny thing inspired me to write a greatly visual poem about the bean? Is it a reproduction? They might say that those are interpretations of the bean, not mere reproductions (which is very true). Then what if I came up with a sharply original compositional photography in which a part of the bean plays an important role? Isn't it an interpretation of an existing piece of art?

These questions lead us to the very nature of any form of art, be it photography, painting, sculpture, music, fiction, poetry, film, and all the other forms that currently fail to come to my mind. A large and important part of art is the fact that it is a digestion, interpretation, and (when successful) sublimation of the preceding pool of all the human culture. No artist is free from debt to predecessors, which is not a curse but a blessing. The basic idea of copyright, which is to keep a piece of art (one might say that the "cloud gate" of the Millennium Park does not fall into this privileged category, but that is another matter), from going into the public pool of references from where other pieces of art sprout, not only discourages artists but also seriously undermines the accumulation of human heritage, a tremendous resource open to everyone. Without that open resource, our civilization must eventually come to a halt. The civilization, or our culture, has been a cumulative process in which newer generations absorb and then advance (or sometimes defy) the accomplishment of the former generations. The greed to privately possess not only the physical piece of art but also all the possibility it could open up for the humanity (which is what the current copyright frenzy is all about) is a grave harm to the cumulative process.

A world where a photographer cannot have an artistic dialogue with a sculptor by responding to the latter's work with an origial new take on the work in question is not the world where art thrives. That world is not an exciting world to live in--inspiring maybe, but the inspiration only entails frustration, for it does not allow to have an outlet in that world. I do not want this world to be turned into that world by a few.
drop of mercury
Originally uploaded by uBookworm.

dark force of evil

2005-01-25T18:09:00.000-06:00

At the inauguration, the president was, or, to be more precise, his script writers were, exceedingly eloquent in describing what they think is the dark force of evil. That they hide in the darkest corner of the world. That they are hatching their bloody plan in their shadowy hideout. That they have not mercy nor compassion. Nobody would feel odd if the descriprions were actually taken from numerous fantasy novels that involves a struggle against the dark, the hedious, the cold, the evil. I wish I could reproduce the exact wording of the first five minutes of the inauguration speech, for it was, if taken out of context, almost worth listening for the indulgent pleasure it brought to me just as a well-written fantasy novel can let you submerge in its fictious world.

His eloquence in describing the evil seems somewhat pararel to our common tendency to produce an impressive and memorable curse than a compliment of the same quality. Are we, after all, a wrethed species who are only good at describing the negative, if not being the negative?

neglect

2005-01-12T16:40:00.000-06:00

This blog has been neglected for more than a month and will be neglected for some additional while due to my trip to France from 12/23/2004 to 01/10/2005, of which I am rambling at Invalid in Paris along with some painfully touristic photos from the trip.

word of the day: bellow

2004-12-08T08:17:00.000-06:00

1) to shout loudly, especially in a deep voice
2) to make the deep sound that a bull makes

Bob was a fellow
Who loved Jell-O
That definitely had to be yellow
And Mellow
To make him bellow