American, they look at me as if I am joking, then they continue to speak to me in Chinese. At a Tibetan restaurant in Kanding, the waiter said to me, “I know you.” “What?” “I know you.” He meant to say that he recognized me.
Life is good. Thank you for reading. Soon I will be coming home. Sincerely, Masumi Hayashi-Smith
Chengdu has entered my life again. It is hot and metropolitan. My tent is replaced by a fancy hotel room with Internet access. The stars are replaced by bright lights coming in from the street. The spring is replaced by boiled water. My down sleeping bag is replaced with a square bed. The monks’ chanting is replaced by loud CD stores. Material objects will always be replaced and disappearing, but my memories will stay with me. This is life.
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Masumi Hayashi-Smith ‘10 is working on the present.
Happy in Korea Marie Lee
“G
od,” said Paul, saying it like gaaaawd. “Korean guys are a bunch of homos!” I was about to tell him to pipe down, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Your average Korean probably wouldn’t know what he was talking about any more than we knew what they were talking about. It was true, however, that in the disco we were in (some glassed-in thing that was supposed to look like the inside of an aquarium) guys were dancing together. Not just dancing, each in their own little world, but dancing. Slow dancing together. Arms around each other. Touching. I tried to look disgusted as I knew Paul expected me to, but to tell you the truth, I was fascinated. See, the thing was, the men didn’t act gay; they weren’t all swishy or limp-wristed or whatever. Most of them were dressed in conservative suits, and during the fast numbers, they danced the same way as any drunk guys would do in the States. But no way would guys in the States clinch like that, like those two were doing to the strains of “Beseme Mucho.” The bigger guy had curly hair, whether permed or natural, I don’t know. His face was beet red and he was clutching a smaller guy whose glasses were sitting lopsidedly on his nose. They were both smiling. Around them, the salmoncolored lights beeped on and off, big plastic blades of “seaweed” shimmied. To say I’m surprised that Korea would be like this is the understatement of the year. I think Paul gets a lot of his attitude toward gays from our father, who has always represented Korea to me. With him, it’s always “I’m like this because I’m Korean.” Or “Korean people are like this.” Or “It’s the Korean way.” Mom isn’t like that. She tells us to eat our kimchi, take our shoes off in the house, and study hard not because being Korean
makes her do that, but because she’s Mom. Back to Dad, he is otherwise a kind man, the kind of rescues stray kittens, even wayward ladybugs. But he has no mercy when it comes to gays. I mean, I think he thinks stray kittens and bugs are these entirely innocent little beings, where gays are purposefully evil. He’s said things that have really shocked me, and I can only think it comes from being Korean because I can’t imagine where else it would be coming from. People in Five Oaks never say things like that, I mean, it doesn’t mean they don’t think it, but they would never say them out loud, that’s for sure. One example: when he and I were watching the news, a report on AIDS came on, and how it was spreading fast among gay men. Dad snorted at the TV. “What good is it to have a man who cannot reproduce?” he said. “Useless. An abomination to God and nature. Such freaks would normally be wiped out by Darwinian processes. Maybe it was the word “freaks.” I couldn’t help sticking my neck out on this one, and perhaps because I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to figure out where I was coming from. “Okay, Dad, what about people who are infertile or choose not to have children? Are you saying they should die out, too?” “They’re not unnatural,” he said. “Men are not meant to be with other men. You see, even now God and nature are punishing the gays— through AIDS. Nature abhors a vacuum.” I always wondered what that meant, nature abhors a vacuum. Dad loves to read, everything from Newsweek to Smithsonian to Popular Mechanics, so he always has these phrases to toss out, such as “a calibrated cable tonometer is the best link to use when splicing stereoptic cables.” What I don’t get is that Dad was the one who forced me and Paul to go to church school. Dad himself hardly misses a week of service. So if
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